An entry for the 2003 Turner Prize was a sculpture depicting bodies being picked at by maggots. Entitled Sex, it was by Jake and Dinos Chapman who made the headlines as the most shocking nominees. Maggots feeding off a body is a fitting out picture of contemporary artists. They are corrupt, degraded, unimaginative and parasitic as they feed off our great artistic traditions and try to destroy them. Their aim is to destroy our values and something that gives meaning to our lives. Is a urinal, say, an artistic subject? No, it is intrinsically unartistic, even though it might have pleasing curves, and to write about it as such does not make it artistic but conceptually separates artistic form from subject. Contemporary art is not really art at all and should be called something else. But it is a financial asset for the global elites who buy and sell it and run the Arts Councils that manage artistic creativity.
Sotheby's contemporary art auction in July 2008 raised more than $1 billion which shows how the Global elites are investing in art regardless of economic predictions. Their evening contemporary art sale raised 95 million pounds ($189 million), the highest total for a summer contemporary auction held in Europe and just below the overall regional record set in February. Francis Bacon's "Study for Head of George Dyer", the artist's lover, fetched $27.4 million, including commission; Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Untitled ", was sold by rock band U2 for $10.1 million. Competitors Christie's sold art worth $172 million at its sale. Only the less important Sotheby's contemporary day sale is left and the two main auctioneers have sold works worth just over $1 billion during the summer season, which includes impressionist, modern, post-war and contemporary art. Christie's raised around $552 million and Sotheby's about $449 million so far. Senior executives are confidant that the art market will sustain soaring values in spite of falling stocks and house prices with rising oil costs. Russian elites have been a big factor in booming art sales, there is worry they may inflate impressionist prices in the same way Japanese money did around 20 years ago then disappeared causing the market to crash.
Contemporary art is the preserve of an elite, a large clique, that finance their interests through grants from the arts council, local authorities and sponsorship from global corporations. It is exhibited by commercial art galleries, private collectors, corporations, publicly funded arts organizations, contemporary art museums or by the artists themselves who are supported by grants, awards and prizes as well as by selling work. These are interlocking and exclusive relationships. Individual members of the elite are highly influential - Charles Saatchi has dominated the market in British contemporary art for twenty years and is a major sponsor and collector.
A major sponsor and collector when our civilisation was developing was King Athelstan. His attitude and intentions show how different are the motives of sponsors at each end of this arc of culture. He used his collection in service of God and to develop something spiritual. Like his gifts, to Chester-le-Street, a tenth-century West Saxon codex, containing Bede's eighth-century prose and verse Lives of the sixth-century St. Cuthbert, with a frontispiece illustrating the king presenting the book to St.Cuthbert. There were episcopal and royal records in this book, including a list of popes, with the Cuthbert material. There is evidence that Athelstan also supported the shrines of St. John of Beverley and St. Wilfrid at Ripon. A ring preserved at Bury St. Edmunds in East Anglia bears as its inscription the names of St. John of Beverley and Athelstan (see Rollason 1989). Traditions of several churches traditions such as Malmesbury attributed their collections to his religious benevolence. The prologue to an Old English relic-list from Exeter (Rollason.), tells how royal agents purchased "with the king's earthly treasure the most valuable treasures of all - holy relics". A letter from the prior at St. Samson's at Dol in Brittany is evidence of Athelstan's interest in
relics outside England. These qualities give a clue to what creates civilisation - confidence in one’s own people and the sense of the civilisation’s permanence. Traditional masterpieces have such individual detail one is enrapt for the entire day after first looking at the work as a whole. They are so deep. We need belief in our inherited values from our ancestors and to transmit them to our descendants. We know that what gives life meaning is our emotional lives, our relationships, our beliefs and values. Our values come from a sense of continuity: that we have endured for long and will continue to do so and we receive these values from our forbears.
The arts Council privileges some ethic groups as expressed in their customary Doublespeak:” It (the Arts Council) aims to encourage an environment where the arts reflect the full range and diversity of society. The Council wants everyone to have access to excellent arts activity. To make this happen, it is focussing on race and ethnicity, disability and social inclusion. More than 10 per cent of regularly funded organisations are run by Black and minority ethnic artists and organisations that take a lead role in supporting BME artists. By 2007/2008, 25 per cent of the London’s regularly funded organisations will be Black and minority ethnic arts organisations. In what sense are these not “inclusive”? However, ventures representative of our culture, like the English Music Festival, are discriminated against on the grounds they are “Exclusive.” This ideology is disseminated through the channels of communication the cultural elites control. Ethnic arts are treated with reverence - ours are degraded.
The current chairman of Arts Council England, is Sir Christopher John Frayling an educationalist and writer, known for his study of popular culture. He read history at Churchill College, Cambridge and gained a PhD in the study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He taught history at the University of Bath and in 1979 was appointed Professor of Cultural History at London's post-graduate art and design school, the Royal College of Art. Since 1996 he has been Rector in charge of the College. He is also Chairman of the Design Council, Chairman of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, and a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a governor of the British Film Institute in the 1980s. He was knighted in 2001 for "Services to Art and Design Education"
Chairwoman of the London Arts Board is Lady Sue Woodford Hollick, a businesswoman and consultant with extensive interests in broadcasting and the arts. She is a former producer and director of World in Action for Granada Television and founding Commissioning Editor of multicultural programmes at Channel 4 television. She has been Chairwoman of Arts Council England, London since September 2000 and is currently a member of the Tate Modern Advisory Council. She is founder and Co-Director of Bringing Up Baby, a childcare company and Chair of the UK board of the African Medical & Research Foundation, Africa’s leading health development organization. Her husband, Lord Hollick, is Chair of the South Bank Centre, which is funded by Arts Council England.
The usual chairman of the Turner Prize Committee is Sir Nicholas Serota who grew up in Hampstead. His mother was a Labour Minister for Health in Harold Wilson's government, who was made a life peer and governor of the BBC. He was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's School and then read Economics at Christ's Cambridge before switching to History of Art. He completed a Masters degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art under the supervision of Anthony Blunt and Anita Brookner.
In the 1990s contemporary art merged with popular culture and artists are promoted as stars. In June 2008 The Evening Standard told of the Millions that Damien Hirst is spending on the mansion once owned by Lord Sudeley's family. Hirst is supposedly worth £135 million. Death is a central theme in Hirst's works like a series in which dead animals like a shark, a
sheep and a cow are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is a 14-foot tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine. In June 2007, his Lullaby Spring sold for £9.65
million at Sotheby's in London then in 2007, For The Love of God sold for £50 million to an anonymous investment group. Arts Council England is the national development agency for encouraging the maggots. It distributes public money from the Government and the National Lottery to the arts organisations who share their ideology and refuse those that do not. Individuals and organisations can apply to the Arts Council for funding from its own budget or from the Lottery.
Contemporary art is negative and the practitioners use it to destroy the Art they feed off like maggots while they parasitically take what they can. They not only try to destroy art they kill their babies. Lynn Barber wrote of Tracey Emin in The Observer of 22April 2008 :” The first abortion, in 1990, was horrendously bodged because no one realised she was carrying twins: the second abortion, she says, was 'revenge' for the first. Contemporary art is a sort of show to shock which is a petty, destructive motive and meant to hurt innocent people. What they really enjoy is shocking elderly people and children. Of Grayson Perry’s “Barbaric Splendour” the Satchi Gallery wrote: “His form and content is always incongruous: classic Grecian-like urns bearing friezes of car-wrecks, cell-phones, supermodels, as well as more dark and literary scenes often incorporating auto-biographical references.” They need traditional art as a background for if the old standards were truly swept away, no one would be able to say: "What a provocative statement, Tracy."
Tracey Emin was made Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts On 29 March 2007. Emin became a member of the Royal Academy joining an elite group of artists including David Hockney, Sir Peter Blake, Anthony Caro and Alison Wilding. This entitles Emin to exhibit up to six works in the annual summer exhibition. At the 2007 Venice Biennale she hosted celebrity guests, including Sir Elton John and his partner David Furnish, Viscount Linley and the model Naomi Campbell. When Jake Chapman married model Rosemary Ferguson in Christ Church, Spitalfields, among the guests were Kate Moss, Sadie Frost, Noel Gallagher’s ex-wife Meg Matthews and society photographer Sam Taylor-Wood. Emin will give a public talk interviewed by art critic and broadcaster Matthew Collings, about her curatorship at the Royal Academy, the Academy’s relationship to the contemporary art world, and her perspective, as an artist, on hanging and curating a gallery in the Summer Exhibition. Her sex-themed works on show include a Zebra with an erection - a crankshaft that operates a model of a zebra, which in turn is copulating with a model of woman in Victorian dress, as the hackneyed image of prudery. It is pretentious and has no intrinsic merit only what the elites who buy and sell it give it. It is propaganda for Cultural Marxism: replacing the Victorian woman with, say, Cherie Blair or Diane Abbott would shock hysterical prejudice from these pseuds.
A main feature of contemporary art is paedophila and popular entertainment partakes of this It is very much part of the establishment. David Bowie promoted an androgynous image in with the concept album on the career of an extraterrestrial rock singer Ziggy Stardust which basis for his 1972 tour, which was sponsored by The Sun newspaper and the gigs filmed by BBC television. When Bill Haley first arrived in Britain in 1957 at the beginning of the Rock era he travelled in a Daily Mirror train. Bowie’s 1975 concept album “1.Outside” has a tale about the dismemberment of a teenage girl
Grayson Perry, dressed as his alter ego Claire, is known for vases depicting child abuse, told the Tate Exhibition 2003: "Well, it's about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize. I think the art world had more trouble coming to terms with me being a potter than my choice of frocks.” Tate director and award judge, Serota said: "I don't think the choice is a strategic choice, I think the jury felt strongly that these were the works of a very strong artist who happens to be using ceramics and drawing," he said. These institutions of art manage and regulate what used to be individual inspiration within a traditional culture. Crafts like textile design, are “excluded” from contemporary art despite having large audiences at exhibitions unless they adopt the right values. The elites motives were expressed by Charles Satchi: "A ceramic object that is intended as a subversive comment on the nature of beauty is more likely to fit the definition of contemporary art than one that is simply beautiful."
Perry’s Golden Ghosts were described by the Satchi Gallery:” Unhappy expressions on the little girls’ faces in Golden Ghosts contrast sharply with the idyllic country cottages stenciled in the background. Perry often uses found images to create a mood or a tension – the exceptionally sad image of the seated girl is that of a child affected by the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station disaster. This evocative work hints at a familiarity with psychotherapy, made at a time when Perry was coming to terms with his own unhappy past. Perry’s transvestite alter ego, Claire, appears outlined in gold as the ghost in the title, dressed in the elaborate embroidered Coming Out Dress, made for a performance in 2000.” As we see with Emin they do not transcend their unhappiness but spread it to others.
The Chapman brothers are conceptual artists who work together. They were part of the Young British Artists movement that was promoted by Charles Saatchi who also sponsored Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Jake Chapman has published a number of catalogue essays and pieces of art criticism in his own right, as well as a book, Meatphysics in 2003. The brothers have also designed a label for Becks beer as part of a series of limited edition labels produced by contemporary artists.
Their Turner Prize exhibit for 2003 featured two new works Sex and Death. Sex referred their previous work Great Deeds against the Dead. The original work shows three dismembered corpses hanging from a tree, Sex shows the same scene, but in a further state of decay. Clown's noses have been added to the skulls of the corpses while snakes, rats and insects, similar to ones in joke shops, cover the piece. Death is two sex dolls, placed on top of each other, head-to-toe in the 69 sex position.
The next step is cruelty to animals and bestiality. In a declining civilisation art becomes corrupted and is a measure of the health of a civilisation. The Romans sank into a debased barbarism by slaughter in the amphitheatre. Our deterioration into barbarism is moving from images to the reality. In popular entertainment like "I'm a Celebrity Get Me out of Here", simple people, described as Celebrities, are so degraded as to be led into eating live worms and stick insects. There are several levels to this: there is cruelty to lesser animals; encouraging children to eat insects and slugs in the garden ;and the move towards ever more degradation of our people and culture.
This is a world-wide decadence: In 2007, a Costa Rican 'artist' Guillermo Vargas Habacuc caught a stray dog on the street and tied it by a short leash to the wall of an art gallery and left it to die of hunger and thirst while cultural elites watched. The Central American Biennial of Art has decided that this was art and has asked Vargas Habacuc to repeat this “installation” at the Biennial of 2008. This was sanctioned by a public body run by the country’s elites. It is not clear that they really did starve the dog and it might be just to shock or get publicity to sell something. But it shows how disgusting these people are as they promote cruelty to animals. The 'artist ' explained: "I knew the dog died on the following day from lack of food. During the inauguration, I knew that the dog was persecuted in the evening between the houses of aluminum and cardboard in a district of Managua. Five children who helped to capture the dog received 10 bonds of córdobas for their assistance. The name of the dog was Natividad, and I let him die of hunger in the sight of everyone, as if the death of a poor dog was a shameless media show in which nobody does anything but to applaud or to watch disturbed. In the place that the dog was exposed remain a metal cable and a cord. The dog was extremely ill and did not want to eat, so in natural surroundings it would have died anyway; thus they are all poor stray dogs: sooner or later they die or are killed." A couple of decades ago an artist castrated himself in an exhibition in London which was presumably funded by the Arts Council.
One would wonder how this is art! The setting does not make it art. It makes it cruelty taking place in an art gallery. The artistic subject has to be intrinsically artistic in that it it is something that produces an affect on our emotions ranging from pleasing to spiritual. It triggers something aspirational or transcendent as the subject is transformed by human imagination and skill. Art begins as wholesome and aspiring to the spiritual but in a declining civilisation becomes corrupted. The Romans sank into a debased barbarism by slaughter in the amphitheatre, our deterioration into barbarism is degeneracy and cruelty and the emotional impact created can lead to the reality.
To combat the anti-art movement a talented young artist would need not only great talent but also independence of mind and an imagination developed through respectful study of tradition and a sense of reverence for God and his creation. They would also need the courage to stand alone against the artists and elites who have a stranglehold on artistic productions and the colleges that pass the fashionable methods on. The brave one would need to study the great masterpieces and find an appropriate tradition to link to and begin reviving our civilisation.
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
‘Too English to be true…’ - Stuart Millson
Rediscovering G.K. Chesterton – journalist, poet, polemicist and prophet.
Famously named by George Bernard Shaw as "the Chesterbelloc" (or, at least, one half of that lumbering literary monster!), yet known by some of his young friends and admirers as "Uncle Chestnut", G.K. Chesterton was undoubtedly one of the greatest personalities of early 20th-century English literature and verse.
The lasting image of Chesterton (together with his old friend, Hilaire Belloc) is of a man who set forth in a billowing cloak to do battle with the scientific atheism of the Fabians; to state the case against Socialism, and for tradition, spirituality and the ancient Catholic Church; to write reams of verse, combative newspaper articles; and surreal, sometimes almost comical novels and stories which concealed fables and morality tales. Part-priest (but always laughing), a modern-day Dr. Johnson (and just as physically imposing), a Sir John Falstaff (but never a tragic figure), ‘G.K’ delighted – and continues to delight – readers throughout the world. Yet having said that, his presence today – ever so slightly – has faded.
Perhaps this eccentric gentleman in great tweeds, with his fantasies of self-governing London city-states (The Napoleon of Notting Hill), "flying inns", ruddy-faced publicans, sleuth-priests and suburban anarchists, is a little out-of-step with our bland, technological times. And yet, ‘G.K.’ is a man for our times – his messages, his prophecies, and his faith being entirely relevant to the immense problems of life, and the complexities of contemporary living.
This literary hero to so many traditionalists was born in the Kensington district of London, Campden Hill to be precise, on the 29th May 1874. Educated at St. Paul’s School, he was, as a young man, a vigorous participant in debates – even espousing what seemed like a prototype Communism! However, his unsettling rather leftish ideas as expressed at one schoolboys’ debate, and the notion that the state should govern economic life in the interests of all, was – perhaps – not as Marxist as one would think, as in later life he developed the idea of "distributism" – now, a rather esoteric, forgotten theory which aimed to transcend the materialism of both Socialist uniformity and rapacious, unrestrained global capitalism.
A distributist nation
According to Chesterton’s vision of Albion, the country would become a largely co-operative nation of smaller-scale enterprises; with skilled craftsmen making, trading or distributing goods; with property distributed as widely as possible, to encourage freedom and dignity – but with economic life not as an end in itself, but as a means to keep body and soul together. A country of suffiency, not greed – a country of skilled workers and worthy traders – a nation which had the church and tradition at its core: this is the bedrock of G.K’s England.
But the young Gilbert was by no means the certain, convinced, ready-made Catholic and philosopher. Joseph Pearce, in his detailed and lively 1996 biography of Chesterton, gives us a very different portrait of the great writer-in-waiting:
"He was asking the questions but, as yet, had not received the answers. Catholicism, Protestantism, paganism, agnosticism, socialism and spiritualism were all influences to varying degrees at varying times. During these formative years he caught these influences for short periods, much as a man catches influenza… He didn’t accept them as facts but fed on them as fads."
Literature and writing, however, were not his only enthusiasms. Chesterton (a keen doodler and cartoonist) was drawn toward the world of art, and enrolled at the renowned Slade School – although in time drifted away, partly disenchanted by the prevailing fashion of "the moderns", and partly having realised that his talents lay elsewhere. He also enlisted at University College London (1893), where his Latin teacher was the great A.E. Housman, although again, he departed prematurely from his studies. He later reflected:
"It was at the Slade School that I discovered that I should never be an artist; it was at the lectures of Professor A.E. Housman that I discovered
I should never be a scholar; and it was at the lectures of Professor W.P. Ker that I discovered I should never be a literary man."
A brush with the occult
By 1895, and with no degree, G.K. found himself confronted by the dilemma which affects so many aspiring writers – how to live from day-to-day, but still be able to build one’s experience and reputation. Chesterton supported himself by taking employment as a reader of manuscripts at Redway’s, a curious publishing house which specialised in occult texts. But the nature of some of the contributions which landed upon the reader’s desk surprised and shocked him, and he felt compelled to comment upon "the private asylums" from which the manuscripts must have emerged!
This bizarre backwater soon gave way to a more lucrative and mainstream world, that of the publisher T. Fisher Unwin – although Chesterton was still very much the "reader by day, and writer by night". This employment was to last until 1902, but a year after leaving academia, in the autumn of 1896, our literary hero was to find himself at a social gathering which changed his life. Accompanying his old friend from schooldays, Lucien Oldershaw, to the home of the Blogg family in London’s Bedford Park, Gilbert met "the elvish-faced" Miss Frances Blogg – and immediately fell in love.
For Chesterton, Frances corresponded to a romantic, even a religious ideal, and he gave expression to his love in a poem entitled, To My Lady. He wrote:
"God made you very carefully,
He set a star apart for it,
He stained it green and gold with fields
And aureoled it with sunshine;
He people it with kings, peoples, republics,
And so made you, very carefully.
All nature is God’s book, filled with his rough sketches
for you."
The poet proposed to his idealised love two years after their first meeting, in the green surroundings – not of the English countryside – but among the woods and trees of St. James’s Park, one of the great lungs of London. His deeply romantic and chivalrous disposition found its complete expression in Frances, and throughout their life together, Gilbert doted on his wife.
Their first home together was in another London setting, south of the Thames at Battersea.
A striking literary landscape
The solid, quiet inspiration provided by Frances was hugely important to G.K. and in the very early years of the 20th-century, he emerged as one of Fleet Street’s great columnists, principally for The Daily News – and later, for that once-great title, The Illustrated London News. Home was no longer amid the Victorian gloom of London’s Battersea, but in the leafy Home County of Buckinghamshire, where the writer and his wife would live for the rest of their days. But one of the most striking of Chesterton’s literary landscapes was in Berkshire – the chalk downland where the English army of King Alfred met the Danes in mortal combat, and from which Wessex and a true English nation emerged triumphantly.
The Ballad of The White Horse from 1911 is a stirring and romantic epic – full of the wonder of history and the past – the very magic and essence of England. One can almost imagine G.K. as a veteran of Alfred’s army – a great bulk of a man, a chieftain, elder or earl perhaps – drinking a tankard of ale before re-telling the story of heroic exploits on the high, green hills.
Stiff, strange, and quaintly coloured
As the broidery of Bayeux
The England of that dawn remains,
And this of Alfred and the Danes
Seems like the tales a whole tribe feigns
Too English to be true.
Yet Alfred is no fairy tale;
His days as our days ran,
He also looked forth for an hour
On peopled plains and skies that lower,
From those few windows in the tower
That is the head of a man.
In these lines from the Ballad, the reader is shown both the romance, the "fairytale" side to our history – and the sense that despite the drama and mythology, Alfred and his men saw the very contours of the hills which we can see today. For Chesterton, the past and the present are indissolubly linked through landscape and legend.
England under Islam
Two years later, the author entered a world of pure make-believe in his novel, The Flying Inn. The book begins in the perfect English seaside landscape of Pebbleswick – a completely fictional place – but perhaps a compound of Eastbourne, Deal, Selsey, or a dozen other towns or villages by the sea. But it is the political and religious landscape of The Flying Inn which is so remarkable – a strange England in which the ruling class has fallen under the spell of Islam – the traditional pub and the practice of beer-drinking having been outlawed by the imperious Lord Ivywood, ruler of this new unhappy land. An outraged and defiant publican, Humphrey Pump, and his friend, the Irish mariner, Patrick Dalroy, decide that they will not be crushed by the unnatural and alien diktat of the regime, and so take to the open road as fugitives – their barrel of ale and pub sign the last symbols of defiance of the downtrodden English.
Despite the serious purpose of the tale, there are moments of great mirth, and Chesterton unleashes one of his most famous "drinking songs" upon us – The Rolling English Road. Just as The Ballad of the White Horse, unites past and present, so this beery verse creates a similar sense of English unity over the centuries.
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
By the time the revellers have come to the end of their rolling journey, they have passed to
"paradise, by way of Kensal Green" – a line that seems to symbolise an important ideal of Chesterton – that heaven itself is an overlooked suburb or an English town that is thought to be commonplace.
Sadly, but perhaps not too surprisingly, The Flying Inn (at least to my knowledge) exists in no modern edition. Modern sensitivities being what they are, the swashbuckling story of plucky natives fighting a foreign regime – with a climactic battle between alien overlords and the people – might be considered too controversial. However, if you ferret through any old bookshop, there is a chance that – beneath the dust – you will chance upon an old copy of this prophetic work.
The unhappy lords
Finally, let us leave Chesterton not in any one place, but in another mood of grave prophecy – a landscape of the mind, if you will. Of all his poems, The Secret People seems to speak out to true, traditionalist Englishmen and women the world over – especially in these anxious and disturbing times when so many of our institutions have been changed, or have disappeared altogether – where nothing seems right. Never harsh, never strident – the emotions which Chesterton evokes might yet inspire the people of the land he loved…
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.
We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God's scorn for all men governing.
It may be beer is best.But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.
Chesterton died at his Buckinghamshire home in the June of 1936. With the exception of his close friend, Belloc, there was no-one remotely like him – and his place has yet to be filled. Journalist, novelist, poet, polemicist, visionary, thinker, crusader – ‘G.K.’ surprised, startled, educated and won over readers and audiences throughout the world to his unique wisdom and philosophy. There were giants in the land in those days…
Famously named by George Bernard Shaw as "the Chesterbelloc" (or, at least, one half of that lumbering literary monster!), yet known by some of his young friends and admirers as "Uncle Chestnut", G.K. Chesterton was undoubtedly one of the greatest personalities of early 20th-century English literature and verse.
The lasting image of Chesterton (together with his old friend, Hilaire Belloc) is of a man who set forth in a billowing cloak to do battle with the scientific atheism of the Fabians; to state the case against Socialism, and for tradition, spirituality and the ancient Catholic Church; to write reams of verse, combative newspaper articles; and surreal, sometimes almost comical novels and stories which concealed fables and morality tales. Part-priest (but always laughing), a modern-day Dr. Johnson (and just as physically imposing), a Sir John Falstaff (but never a tragic figure), ‘G.K’ delighted – and continues to delight – readers throughout the world. Yet having said that, his presence today – ever so slightly – has faded.
Perhaps this eccentric gentleman in great tweeds, with his fantasies of self-governing London city-states (The Napoleon of Notting Hill), "flying inns", ruddy-faced publicans, sleuth-priests and suburban anarchists, is a little out-of-step with our bland, technological times. And yet, ‘G.K.’ is a man for our times – his messages, his prophecies, and his faith being entirely relevant to the immense problems of life, and the complexities of contemporary living.
This literary hero to so many traditionalists was born in the Kensington district of London, Campden Hill to be precise, on the 29th May 1874. Educated at St. Paul’s School, he was, as a young man, a vigorous participant in debates – even espousing what seemed like a prototype Communism! However, his unsettling rather leftish ideas as expressed at one schoolboys’ debate, and the notion that the state should govern economic life in the interests of all, was – perhaps – not as Marxist as one would think, as in later life he developed the idea of "distributism" – now, a rather esoteric, forgotten theory which aimed to transcend the materialism of both Socialist uniformity and rapacious, unrestrained global capitalism.
A distributist nation
According to Chesterton’s vision of Albion, the country would become a largely co-operative nation of smaller-scale enterprises; with skilled craftsmen making, trading or distributing goods; with property distributed as widely as possible, to encourage freedom and dignity – but with economic life not as an end in itself, but as a means to keep body and soul together. A country of suffiency, not greed – a country of skilled workers and worthy traders – a nation which had the church and tradition at its core: this is the bedrock of G.K’s England.
But the young Gilbert was by no means the certain, convinced, ready-made Catholic and philosopher. Joseph Pearce, in his detailed and lively 1996 biography of Chesterton, gives us a very different portrait of the great writer-in-waiting:
"He was asking the questions but, as yet, had not received the answers. Catholicism, Protestantism, paganism, agnosticism, socialism and spiritualism were all influences to varying degrees at varying times. During these formative years he caught these influences for short periods, much as a man catches influenza… He didn’t accept them as facts but fed on them as fads."
Literature and writing, however, were not his only enthusiasms. Chesterton (a keen doodler and cartoonist) was drawn toward the world of art, and enrolled at the renowned Slade School – although in time drifted away, partly disenchanted by the prevailing fashion of "the moderns", and partly having realised that his talents lay elsewhere. He also enlisted at University College London (1893), where his Latin teacher was the great A.E. Housman, although again, he departed prematurely from his studies. He later reflected:
"It was at the Slade School that I discovered that I should never be an artist; it was at the lectures of Professor A.E. Housman that I discovered
I should never be a scholar; and it was at the lectures of Professor W.P. Ker that I discovered I should never be a literary man."
A brush with the occult
By 1895, and with no degree, G.K. found himself confronted by the dilemma which affects so many aspiring writers – how to live from day-to-day, but still be able to build one’s experience and reputation. Chesterton supported himself by taking employment as a reader of manuscripts at Redway’s, a curious publishing house which specialised in occult texts. But the nature of some of the contributions which landed upon the reader’s desk surprised and shocked him, and he felt compelled to comment upon "the private asylums" from which the manuscripts must have emerged!
This bizarre backwater soon gave way to a more lucrative and mainstream world, that of the publisher T. Fisher Unwin – although Chesterton was still very much the "reader by day, and writer by night". This employment was to last until 1902, but a year after leaving academia, in the autumn of 1896, our literary hero was to find himself at a social gathering which changed his life. Accompanying his old friend from schooldays, Lucien Oldershaw, to the home of the Blogg family in London’s Bedford Park, Gilbert met "the elvish-faced" Miss Frances Blogg – and immediately fell in love.
For Chesterton, Frances corresponded to a romantic, even a religious ideal, and he gave expression to his love in a poem entitled, To My Lady. He wrote:
"God made you very carefully,
He set a star apart for it,
He stained it green and gold with fields
And aureoled it with sunshine;
He people it with kings, peoples, republics,
And so made you, very carefully.
All nature is God’s book, filled with his rough sketches
for you."
The poet proposed to his idealised love two years after their first meeting, in the green surroundings – not of the English countryside – but among the woods and trees of St. James’s Park, one of the great lungs of London. His deeply romantic and chivalrous disposition found its complete expression in Frances, and throughout their life together, Gilbert doted on his wife.
Their first home together was in another London setting, south of the Thames at Battersea.
A striking literary landscape
The solid, quiet inspiration provided by Frances was hugely important to G.K. and in the very early years of the 20th-century, he emerged as one of Fleet Street’s great columnists, principally for The Daily News – and later, for that once-great title, The Illustrated London News. Home was no longer amid the Victorian gloom of London’s Battersea, but in the leafy Home County of Buckinghamshire, where the writer and his wife would live for the rest of their days. But one of the most striking of Chesterton’s literary landscapes was in Berkshire – the chalk downland where the English army of King Alfred met the Danes in mortal combat, and from which Wessex and a true English nation emerged triumphantly.
The Ballad of The White Horse from 1911 is a stirring and romantic epic – full of the wonder of history and the past – the very magic and essence of England. One can almost imagine G.K. as a veteran of Alfred’s army – a great bulk of a man, a chieftain, elder or earl perhaps – drinking a tankard of ale before re-telling the story of heroic exploits on the high, green hills.
Stiff, strange, and quaintly coloured
As the broidery of Bayeux
The England of that dawn remains,
And this of Alfred and the Danes
Seems like the tales a whole tribe feigns
Too English to be true.
Yet Alfred is no fairy tale;
His days as our days ran,
He also looked forth for an hour
On peopled plains and skies that lower,
From those few windows in the tower
That is the head of a man.
In these lines from the Ballad, the reader is shown both the romance, the "fairytale" side to our history – and the sense that despite the drama and mythology, Alfred and his men saw the very contours of the hills which we can see today. For Chesterton, the past and the present are indissolubly linked through landscape and legend.
England under Islam
Two years later, the author entered a world of pure make-believe in his novel, The Flying Inn. The book begins in the perfect English seaside landscape of Pebbleswick – a completely fictional place – but perhaps a compound of Eastbourne, Deal, Selsey, or a dozen other towns or villages by the sea. But it is the political and religious landscape of The Flying Inn which is so remarkable – a strange England in which the ruling class has fallen under the spell of Islam – the traditional pub and the practice of beer-drinking having been outlawed by the imperious Lord Ivywood, ruler of this new unhappy land. An outraged and defiant publican, Humphrey Pump, and his friend, the Irish mariner, Patrick Dalroy, decide that they will not be crushed by the unnatural and alien diktat of the regime, and so take to the open road as fugitives – their barrel of ale and pub sign the last symbols of defiance of the downtrodden English.
Despite the serious purpose of the tale, there are moments of great mirth, and Chesterton unleashes one of his most famous "drinking songs" upon us – The Rolling English Road. Just as The Ballad of the White Horse, unites past and present, so this beery verse creates a similar sense of English unity over the centuries.
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
By the time the revellers have come to the end of their rolling journey, they have passed to
"paradise, by way of Kensal Green" – a line that seems to symbolise an important ideal of Chesterton – that heaven itself is an overlooked suburb or an English town that is thought to be commonplace.
Sadly, but perhaps not too surprisingly, The Flying Inn (at least to my knowledge) exists in no modern edition. Modern sensitivities being what they are, the swashbuckling story of plucky natives fighting a foreign regime – with a climactic battle between alien overlords and the people – might be considered too controversial. However, if you ferret through any old bookshop, there is a chance that – beneath the dust – you will chance upon an old copy of this prophetic work.
The unhappy lords
Finally, let us leave Chesterton not in any one place, but in another mood of grave prophecy – a landscape of the mind, if you will. Of all his poems, The Secret People seems to speak out to true, traditionalist Englishmen and women the world over – especially in these anxious and disturbing times when so many of our institutions have been changed, or have disappeared altogether – where nothing seems right. Never harsh, never strident – the emotions which Chesterton evokes might yet inspire the people of the land he loved…
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.
We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God's scorn for all men governing.
It may be beer is best.But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.
Chesterton died at his Buckinghamshire home in the June of 1936. With the exception of his close friend, Belloc, there was no-one remotely like him – and his place has yet to be filled. Journalist, novelist, poet, polemicist, visionary, thinker, crusader – ‘G.K.’ surprised, startled, educated and won over readers and audiences throughout the world to his unique wisdom and philosophy. There were giants in the land in those days…
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Children of the State by David Hamilton
Slowly, and the elites hope imperceptibly, we are being brought under a totalitarian control. It goes largely unnoticed because the moves seem unconnected and journalists and opposition politicians are part of the same ruling caste. But if you think about the new laws as a movement rather than individual Acts the trend becomes clear. “Your papers please” is a phrase associated with Hitler’s Gestapo when people without papers were taken to detention centres but it is starting here. “British citizens will be quizzed on up to 200 different pieces of personal information in a 30 minute grilling when they apply for a passport. Those who fail to convince the bureaucrats they are who they say will be denied a travel document or face a full investigation by anti-fraud experts. There is no formal appeal process.” (Daily Mail, 21 March 2007)
Peter Mandelson, the European Trade Commissioner says “We are now entering the post-democratic age." To put it more directly, an era of the totalitarian control of people by the state. We are in the grip of a narrow ruling elite, an “Ideological Caste,” that admits only those into power with the same views and expels after disgracing, any who dissent as in the public humiliation and sacking of Dr.James Watson.
The “Ideological Caste” is made up of Cultural Marxists who earn vast sums of money and live in the best areas, send their children to the best schools but impose equality on the rest of us. They are thought police but claim to be trying to correct centuries of unfairness while in practice oppressing those with different views; they masquerade as tolerant. They label their targets - If one opposes racially- based, privilege policies, one is racist; if one has religious convictions on sexuality, one is homophobic. They blame Western people for all evil in the world - the writers and heroes they promote are Marxist, Feminist, and homosexual. They believe if people can be moulded in a pre-ordained way they can make the world better and they have the rigid conviction that they know what is best for us.
In 2006 nine members of Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service were disciplined for refusing to hand out leaflets at Pride Scotia in Glasgow. The Cowcaddens fire-fighters had been asked to hand out leaflets at the rally in a publicity exercise but refused on moral grounds. Fire chiefs in Strathclyde gave them diversity training. Then at the 2007 event Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue staff joined the Gay Pride march with fire engine, promotional 'fire hats' and public information leaflets on fire safety were handed out. They had been converted into “new people.”
The watchword of the Cultural Marxists grew up in the 1960s: “Everything is Political.” Cultural Marxism is a total ideological system, supplying opinions for every aspect of life. It is a less brutal but more manipulative technological version of Stalin's Russia. The plan is ideological: to create a new kind of society and a new human personality like Homo Sovieticus; Nazi ideology in Germany was similar with the utopia as a thousand year Reich of “pure Aryans” as was Pol Pot’s ideology to build civilization anew by wiping out the existing people. These were not merely forms of government but a Weltanschauung, the German word for the phrase a "world-perspective." In the west it is the masses with their traditional values who must be changed.
Begin with those who can not object. People who apply for crisis loans from Income Support are told “The Department of Works and Pensions retain personal details on computer.” These people are being classified. Britain has more than a fifth of the world's CCTV cameras. NHS records are to be put on a national computer accessible to thousands of health workers. Ministers want every British subject to have their DNA kept on a national database.
The state takes over our children by social indoctrination and the school leaving age is being raised to 18. Education will not improve but there will be more time for state parenting as in school holiday clubs and breakfast clubs. This is Totalitarianism and our children are being taken over by the state. It is to condition them for being monitored 24 hours a day.
The State has the DNA records of nearly a million children, some as young as five, and have been secretly taking their fingerprints since 2001 and nearly 6,000 pupils have had their prints taken. Each week 20 schools introduce fingerprinting. Ostensibly this electronic mapping system allows children to borrow books from the library is exciting for the children and helps them develop a love of books and reading? It replaces library cards by the child's fingerprint and placing the print on a scanner opens their computer file with records of the books they have borrowed. They say this would greatly simplify record-keeping. The biometric data could be stolen by identity thieves.
The Minister for Schools and Learning, Jim Knight, said that when working on a crime police have access to the children’s fingerprints but parents are not notified of this treatment of their children. To remove the prints takes professional cleansing. The schools, education authorities and the Government say it is difficult to convert this code back though not impossible and a computer whizz-kid could re-create the original fingerprints for illicit purposes. To save our children we must set up Home Schooling networks and when the authorities try to impose restrictions, refuse them.
Identity theft is a common reason given for increasing regulation. Biometric information such as fingerprints cannot be changed like a PIN number and will be used to authenticate passports or bank accounts. People confuse I.D. like drivers' licences with these totalitarian devices. Alarmingly, some of the companies supplying the finger mapping systems to schools have connections with the American intelligence services and military operating at Guantanamo Bay.
I looked at the Identity & Passport Service Website: "ID cards will link your basic personal information to something uniquely yours - like the pattern of your iris, your face shape or your fingerprint. It will protect your identity from people fraudulently claiming to be you and make it easier for you to prove your identity when you need to - like opening a bank account, moving house, applying for benefits or starting a job."
The Home Office website states ” 21 of the 25 E.U. Member States have already introduced ID cards.” Officials from Government to Council Officers will have powers to investigate every phone call in Britain. Laws are being introduced to compel phone companies to keep all landline and mobile calls however private and allow 795 public bodies and Quangos to eavesdrop, tax authorities, 475 local councils, and a many other organisations, including the Food Standards Agency, the Department of Health, the Immigration Service, the Gaming Board and the Charity Commission. The initiative, formulated after the Madrid and London terrorist attacks of 2004 and 2005, was presented as a major weapon in the fight against terrorism. This is being introduced across Europe and originates with the bureaucrats who run the E.U.
The records will detail the calls made, their time, duration, and the name and address of the registered user of the phone. The files will show where people are at the time they make mobile phone calls and by knowing which mast transmitted the signal officials can pinpoint the source of a call to within a few feet. If you make a call from a moving car it can track your route and also allows police and security services to investigate with or without cause the phone records of British subjects and businesses.
Files will also be kept of all sent and received text messages. By 2009 the Government plans to extend the rules to cover internet use: the websites we have visited, the people we have emailed and phone calls made over the net. This was introduced by the decree of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. The new laws will make it a legal requirement for phone companies to keep records for at least a year, and to make them available to the authorities. The measures were implemented after Smith signed a 'statutory instrument' on July 26 2007 which allows the Government to alter laws without a full act of Parliament.
The move was waved through the House of Lords two days earlier without a debate. It puts into UK law a European Directive aimed at the ‘investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime'. Other organizations with access to the data include - the Royal Navy Regulating Branch, the Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary, the Department of Trade and Industry, NHS Trusts, ambulance and fire services, the Department of Transport and the Department for the Environment.
The Home Office claims there are safeguards as every authority had a nominated senior member of staff who was legally responsible for the use the phone data was put to, 'the integrity of the process' and for 'reporting errors'. A spokesman said: 'The most detailed level of data can be accessed only by law enforcement agencies such as the police. More basic access is available to local authority bodies such as trading standards and environmental health who can only use these powers to prevent and detect crime.' It is said that Councils would only use these powers in circumstances such as benefit fraud. They say the powers would only be used against non-payers of council tax or for parking fines as the sums involved are not enough to justify the use of this information or the costs of applying it.
In July 2006 The Observer reported that British children, possibly as young as six, will be subjected to compulsory fingerprinting under European Union rules being drawn up in secret. The prints will be stored on a database which could be shared with countries around the world. Under proposed laws being drawn up secretly by the European Commission’s ‘Article Six’ committee, which is composed of representatives of the European Union’s 25 member states, all children will have to attend a finger-printing centre to obtain an EU passport by June 2009 at the latest.
The Home Office wants to include children in its biometric passport scheme in three years' time, and automatically transfer their details and fingerprints to the new national identity database when they are 16. Millions of children as young as 11 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a Government database, according to leaked Whitehall plans. As it is more than one million people's genetic fingerprints have been added to the police DNA database. It is biggest in the world and stores details of over 4.5million people and covers one in 13 of the population - around 7.5 per cent. The rapid growth indicates the Government is underhandedly building a universal genetic database. 6.5m people are on the police fingerprint database and a third of 3,000 matches a month with samples taken from crime scenes.
Around a third of all the DNA stored is taken from individuals who were not charged with any offence, and have no criminal record. There has been a massive rise in the number of children on the database which includes 150,000 under-16. The DNA records are taken whether a youngster has committed a crime or not and held on file until they die. Data has been used for genetic research without consent, including attempts to predict "ethnic appearance" from DNA profiles.
Government agencies could use the database to track political activists, find out who they are related to, or to refuse jobs to any classified "undesirable" or just business people or the unemployed. The Government built this database in their own interests and without public or Parliamentary debate. In the past, police could take a DNA sample only from suspects who were charged with a criminal offence, and it was destroyed if they were subsequently cleared or a prosecution dropped. But under reforms introduced in 2000 officers no longer have to erase innocent people's entries. In 2004 police were given the power to take DNA swabs from anyone placed under arrest.
War criminal Tony Blair insisted there should be "no limit" to the number on the database even innocent people not accused of an offence should be listed. The Government will eventually link the database to its plans for ID cards, and then make DNA sampling universal. The latest published figures show 4,523,154 entries are held. A third are from those with no convictions or criminal record, suggesting that 1.5 million innocent people have their DNA stored. At this rate the database will have nearly 10 million profiles by 2011. There are 150,000 children aged 16 or under stored, 334,000 between 16 and 18 and about 50 under-tens on the database. The DNA of a seven-month-old girl was added.
Police can take DNA samples from anyone who is arrested. Regardless of whether the suspect is accused of a serious offence or a trivial one like dropping litter. They use a swab to scrape a few cells from the inside of the suspect's cheek, and lab workers extract the unique DNA gene sequence which is then uploaded to the database. Even if the case is dropped, the samples are kept on file. Police also take DNA from arrested children without parent’s permission. One can write to a chief constable asking for an entry to be deleted if they can prove they are an "exceptional case". But this is very difficult.
A proposed law giving unelected bureaucrats powers to punish people for offences instead of going to court will give civil servants the power to issue fines, was unjust and oppressive and could cause untold misery for businesses. Anyone affected would have to appeal to a tribunal to challenge a ruling “ and pay their own legal bills. The legislation returns to the House of Lords today for a final day of debate before it moves to the Commons.
In typical political jargon, ministers say the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill is designed to take further important steps towards modern and effective regulatory enforcement. It will enable bureaucrats to issue fixed penalties to businesses of any size, as well as to individuals. The fines will range up to £3,500 “ but could also include so-called unlimited variable penalties running into millions for big businesses and will harm businesses already struggling from 178 different Acts of Parliament. Like the other totalitarian states I have mentioned bureaucrats will be operating the law. Such regimes already exist with police cautions, (any crime which is thought possible to issue a caution for), on the spot fines for drunkenness; the Inland Revenue (penalties); Customs and Excise (now part of the combined Revenue and Customs department, HMRC ) penalties; penalties for speeding, parking, littering etc.
Laws to protect people are being removed. A consequence of the Macpherson report is the reduction in legal protection for those under suspicion.
Ostensibly, the repeal of Double Jeopardy in 2005 followed a marathon campaign by Ann Ming, after her daughter was murdered in 1989. Her killer, a violent alcoholic and acquitted in 1991, but later admitted his guilt, believing he would get away with the crime because of the traditional safeguard against tyrants charging people several times. Mrs. Ming lobbied several Home Secretaries and won because the Macpherson report suggested double jeopardy should be abolished where there was "fresh and viable" new evidence. That happened in 2005, and in 2006 Dunlop was convicted. This was a convenient case to use because the removal of Double Jeopardy was a recommendation of the Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence and would enable the state to repeatedly try “racists” until they get a conviction.
The Pulborough Parish Council magazine reported that police were asking residents to report other residents for 'tailgating' or driving too close to another vehicle. What type of society calls on friends and neighbours to watch each other and report each other to the police apart from ours?- Mao’s China, Stalinist Russia, the Eastern bloc 'Stasi' societies, and Nazi Germany. Have the police not got something better to do than to make notes of people who are alleged to have 'tailgated'? The police are being used to control people not to protect the public by stopping burglars, thieves, muggers, vandals, street beggars and drunkenness in public. They have given up on fighting crime to police our thoughts.
In Orwellian Doublethink, inequality is called equality; state control, freedom; persecution of the politically incorrect, tolerance; gender quotas equal opportunity and bigoted anti-racism that persecutes one race, whites! Language is the medium for transmitting thought and an embryonic totalitarian state gives words new meanings to shape thought for the new state.
They believe reality is a social construct and if we can only think in the correct way reality will change. It is like the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis in linguistics which holds that without the word we cannot have the idea. But what about feelings? Without a wide and adequate grammar people become frustrated and angry as intelligent but inarticulate people do. We must do all in our power to expand our vocabularies and make sure our children are not denied the fullest English lexicon.
In an article “They also change the language “the Daily Express of July 3, 2007 reported on moves towards totalitarian control of what we think through language.”Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in connection with Muslim terrorism. The Prime Minister has told his ministers that the phrase “war on -terror” is to be dropped. This is part of an attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims by adopting a more “consensual” tone than Blair. It is to mould our thinking.
Home Secretary Smith is trying the old con of pretending political terrorists are criminals, “Let us be clear – terrorists are criminals, whose victims come from all walks of life, communities and religions. Terrorists attack the values shared by all law-abiding citizens. As a Government, as communities, as individuals, we need to ensure that the message of the terrorists is rejected.” How, by changing their descriptions?
The Television companies are a vehicle of subtle tyranny and employees follow the movement or be put out of work. Vacancies in television were only ever advertised in the Guardian to make sure they only employed liberals and socialists. It helps ensure the right attitude in employees. Teaching posts were also advertised there.
Following on the Religious Hatred Law which carries a 7 year penalty the totalitarian “Ideological Caste” is introducing anti homophobic laws that also has a 7 year penalty. If this is not tyranny I do not know what is. This is the counter culture of the 1960s making its moral values the basis of our law and oppressing the members of the public who are individual or think for themselves. As Christians once shaped society when sodomy was a crime, not a “lifestyle,” the “lifestyle” view is now being enshrined in law and replacing the traditional view. As a judge put it “The Truth is no Defence.”
Just keep repeating the lie and prevent others from expressing opposition and soon there is a new reality supported by invented British history. Trevor Phillips openly called for British history to be rewritten at the 2007 Labour Party conference. The Commission for Equality and Human Rights has powers to impose their policies and the justification is upholding European Union laws on xenophobia and hate. To assert our identity is xenophobia – a criminal offence!
The Daily telegraph of 17 march 2008 reported that Harriet Harman, the Minister for Women, is considering scrapping current laws that stop employers from taking race or sex into consideration when interviewing candidates for jobs. White men could be stopped from getting jobs under government plans to allow employers to give ethnic minority and female candidates preferential treatment. The “doublespeak” is “positive action" and prevents applicants with better job credentials getting the job if they are the wrong sex or race. They are changing our morality from Traditional to a universal one based on equality but imposing Equality of Outcome. Their aim is the eradication of racism, sexism, class elitism the nation and the creation of pools of global cheap labour in a one-world or global state to be created in stages like the E.U.
Spin doctoring is to manipulate people into accepting what the elites are introducing. One of the origins of Cultural Marxism was Anthony Crosland who destroyed Grammar Schools to turn the Working Classes into a Lumpenproletariat or Underclass. Comprehensive schooling, by depriving people in the middle levels, of a proper historical and political education, has made manipulation easier as has teaching only small areas of history. Children are taught to equate nationalism with Nazism.
Our ancestors fought against tyranny and we must too! John Hampden’s stand against King Charles I was heroic and he died in battle for his beliefs. The struggle for trial by jury and Habeas Corpus, for the Right to Bear Arms for protection against the billeting of soldiers or searches of our houses must not be lost now to deception. Macaulay's history tells of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which a courageous jury saved us from despotism - is inspirational. The politicians then were cowardly and deceitful like the present lot but the core of the English people opposed tyranny as English men and women and defended national independence.
Sites of groups opposed to the new tyranny:
Statewatch : http://www.statewatch.org/
Civitas http://www.civitas.org.uk/
Peter Mandelson, the European Trade Commissioner says “We are now entering the post-democratic age." To put it more directly, an era of the totalitarian control of people by the state. We are in the grip of a narrow ruling elite, an “Ideological Caste,” that admits only those into power with the same views and expels after disgracing, any who dissent as in the public humiliation and sacking of Dr.James Watson.
The “Ideological Caste” is made up of Cultural Marxists who earn vast sums of money and live in the best areas, send their children to the best schools but impose equality on the rest of us. They are thought police but claim to be trying to correct centuries of unfairness while in practice oppressing those with different views; they masquerade as tolerant. They label their targets - If one opposes racially- based, privilege policies, one is racist; if one has religious convictions on sexuality, one is homophobic. They blame Western people for all evil in the world - the writers and heroes they promote are Marxist, Feminist, and homosexual. They believe if people can be moulded in a pre-ordained way they can make the world better and they have the rigid conviction that they know what is best for us.
In 2006 nine members of Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service were disciplined for refusing to hand out leaflets at Pride Scotia in Glasgow. The Cowcaddens fire-fighters had been asked to hand out leaflets at the rally in a publicity exercise but refused on moral grounds. Fire chiefs in Strathclyde gave them diversity training. Then at the 2007 event Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue staff joined the Gay Pride march with fire engine, promotional 'fire hats' and public information leaflets on fire safety were handed out. They had been converted into “new people.”
The watchword of the Cultural Marxists grew up in the 1960s: “Everything is Political.” Cultural Marxism is a total ideological system, supplying opinions for every aspect of life. It is a less brutal but more manipulative technological version of Stalin's Russia. The plan is ideological: to create a new kind of society and a new human personality like Homo Sovieticus; Nazi ideology in Germany was similar with the utopia as a thousand year Reich of “pure Aryans” as was Pol Pot’s ideology to build civilization anew by wiping out the existing people. These were not merely forms of government but a Weltanschauung, the German word for the phrase a "world-perspective." In the west it is the masses with their traditional values who must be changed.
Begin with those who can not object. People who apply for crisis loans from Income Support are told “The Department of Works and Pensions retain personal details on computer.” These people are being classified. Britain has more than a fifth of the world's CCTV cameras. NHS records are to be put on a national computer accessible to thousands of health workers. Ministers want every British subject to have their DNA kept on a national database.
The state takes over our children by social indoctrination and the school leaving age is being raised to 18. Education will not improve but there will be more time for state parenting as in school holiday clubs and breakfast clubs. This is Totalitarianism and our children are being taken over by the state. It is to condition them for being monitored 24 hours a day.
The State has the DNA records of nearly a million children, some as young as five, and have been secretly taking their fingerprints since 2001 and nearly 6,000 pupils have had their prints taken. Each week 20 schools introduce fingerprinting. Ostensibly this electronic mapping system allows children to borrow books from the library is exciting for the children and helps them develop a love of books and reading? It replaces library cards by the child's fingerprint and placing the print on a scanner opens their computer file with records of the books they have borrowed. They say this would greatly simplify record-keeping. The biometric data could be stolen by identity thieves.
The Minister for Schools and Learning, Jim Knight, said that when working on a crime police have access to the children’s fingerprints but parents are not notified of this treatment of their children. To remove the prints takes professional cleansing. The schools, education authorities and the Government say it is difficult to convert this code back though not impossible and a computer whizz-kid could re-create the original fingerprints for illicit purposes. To save our children we must set up Home Schooling networks and when the authorities try to impose restrictions, refuse them.
Identity theft is a common reason given for increasing regulation. Biometric information such as fingerprints cannot be changed like a PIN number and will be used to authenticate passports or bank accounts. People confuse I.D. like drivers' licences with these totalitarian devices. Alarmingly, some of the companies supplying the finger mapping systems to schools have connections with the American intelligence services and military operating at Guantanamo Bay.
I looked at the Identity & Passport Service Website: "ID cards will link your basic personal information to something uniquely yours - like the pattern of your iris, your face shape or your fingerprint. It will protect your identity from people fraudulently claiming to be you and make it easier for you to prove your identity when you need to - like opening a bank account, moving house, applying for benefits or starting a job."
The Home Office website states ” 21 of the 25 E.U. Member States have already introduced ID cards.” Officials from Government to Council Officers will have powers to investigate every phone call in Britain. Laws are being introduced to compel phone companies to keep all landline and mobile calls however private and allow 795 public bodies and Quangos to eavesdrop, tax authorities, 475 local councils, and a many other organisations, including the Food Standards Agency, the Department of Health, the Immigration Service, the Gaming Board and the Charity Commission. The initiative, formulated after the Madrid and London terrorist attacks of 2004 and 2005, was presented as a major weapon in the fight against terrorism. This is being introduced across Europe and originates with the bureaucrats who run the E.U.
The records will detail the calls made, their time, duration, and the name and address of the registered user of the phone. The files will show where people are at the time they make mobile phone calls and by knowing which mast transmitted the signal officials can pinpoint the source of a call to within a few feet. If you make a call from a moving car it can track your route and also allows police and security services to investigate with or without cause the phone records of British subjects and businesses.
Files will also be kept of all sent and received text messages. By 2009 the Government plans to extend the rules to cover internet use: the websites we have visited, the people we have emailed and phone calls made over the net. This was introduced by the decree of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. The new laws will make it a legal requirement for phone companies to keep records for at least a year, and to make them available to the authorities. The measures were implemented after Smith signed a 'statutory instrument' on July 26 2007 which allows the Government to alter laws without a full act of Parliament.
The move was waved through the House of Lords two days earlier without a debate. It puts into UK law a European Directive aimed at the ‘investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime'. Other organizations with access to the data include - the Royal Navy Regulating Branch, the Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary, the Department of Trade and Industry, NHS Trusts, ambulance and fire services, the Department of Transport and the Department for the Environment.
The Home Office claims there are safeguards as every authority had a nominated senior member of staff who was legally responsible for the use the phone data was put to, 'the integrity of the process' and for 'reporting errors'. A spokesman said: 'The most detailed level of data can be accessed only by law enforcement agencies such as the police. More basic access is available to local authority bodies such as trading standards and environmental health who can only use these powers to prevent and detect crime.' It is said that Councils would only use these powers in circumstances such as benefit fraud. They say the powers would only be used against non-payers of council tax or for parking fines as the sums involved are not enough to justify the use of this information or the costs of applying it.
In July 2006 The Observer reported that British children, possibly as young as six, will be subjected to compulsory fingerprinting under European Union rules being drawn up in secret. The prints will be stored on a database which could be shared with countries around the world. Under proposed laws being drawn up secretly by the European Commission’s ‘Article Six’ committee, which is composed of representatives of the European Union’s 25 member states, all children will have to attend a finger-printing centre to obtain an EU passport by June 2009 at the latest.
The Home Office wants to include children in its biometric passport scheme in three years' time, and automatically transfer their details and fingerprints to the new national identity database when they are 16. Millions of children as young as 11 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a Government database, according to leaked Whitehall plans. As it is more than one million people's genetic fingerprints have been added to the police DNA database. It is biggest in the world and stores details of over 4.5million people and covers one in 13 of the population - around 7.5 per cent. The rapid growth indicates the Government is underhandedly building a universal genetic database. 6.5m people are on the police fingerprint database and a third of 3,000 matches a month with samples taken from crime scenes.
Around a third of all the DNA stored is taken from individuals who were not charged with any offence, and have no criminal record. There has been a massive rise in the number of children on the database which includes 150,000 under-16. The DNA records are taken whether a youngster has committed a crime or not and held on file until they die. Data has been used for genetic research without consent, including attempts to predict "ethnic appearance" from DNA profiles.
Government agencies could use the database to track political activists, find out who they are related to, or to refuse jobs to any classified "undesirable" or just business people or the unemployed. The Government built this database in their own interests and without public or Parliamentary debate. In the past, police could take a DNA sample only from suspects who were charged with a criminal offence, and it was destroyed if they were subsequently cleared or a prosecution dropped. But under reforms introduced in 2000 officers no longer have to erase innocent people's entries. In 2004 police were given the power to take DNA swabs from anyone placed under arrest.
War criminal Tony Blair insisted there should be "no limit" to the number on the database even innocent people not accused of an offence should be listed. The Government will eventually link the database to its plans for ID cards, and then make DNA sampling universal. The latest published figures show 4,523,154 entries are held. A third are from those with no convictions or criminal record, suggesting that 1.5 million innocent people have their DNA stored. At this rate the database will have nearly 10 million profiles by 2011. There are 150,000 children aged 16 or under stored, 334,000 between 16 and 18 and about 50 under-tens on the database. The DNA of a seven-month-old girl was added.
Police can take DNA samples from anyone who is arrested. Regardless of whether the suspect is accused of a serious offence or a trivial one like dropping litter. They use a swab to scrape a few cells from the inside of the suspect's cheek, and lab workers extract the unique DNA gene sequence which is then uploaded to the database. Even if the case is dropped, the samples are kept on file. Police also take DNA from arrested children without parent’s permission. One can write to a chief constable asking for an entry to be deleted if they can prove they are an "exceptional case". But this is very difficult.
A proposed law giving unelected bureaucrats powers to punish people for offences instead of going to court will give civil servants the power to issue fines, was unjust and oppressive and could cause untold misery for businesses. Anyone affected would have to appeal to a tribunal to challenge a ruling “ and pay their own legal bills. The legislation returns to the House of Lords today for a final day of debate before it moves to the Commons.
In typical political jargon, ministers say the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill is designed to take further important steps towards modern and effective regulatory enforcement. It will enable bureaucrats to issue fixed penalties to businesses of any size, as well as to individuals. The fines will range up to £3,500 “ but could also include so-called unlimited variable penalties running into millions for big businesses and will harm businesses already struggling from 178 different Acts of Parliament. Like the other totalitarian states I have mentioned bureaucrats will be operating the law. Such regimes already exist with police cautions, (any crime which is thought possible to issue a caution for), on the spot fines for drunkenness; the Inland Revenue (penalties); Customs and Excise (now part of the combined Revenue and Customs department, HMRC ) penalties; penalties for speeding, parking, littering etc.
Laws to protect people are being removed. A consequence of the Macpherson report is the reduction in legal protection for those under suspicion.
Ostensibly, the repeal of Double Jeopardy in 2005 followed a marathon campaign by Ann Ming, after her daughter was murdered in 1989. Her killer, a violent alcoholic and acquitted in 1991, but later admitted his guilt, believing he would get away with the crime because of the traditional safeguard against tyrants charging people several times. Mrs. Ming lobbied several Home Secretaries and won because the Macpherson report suggested double jeopardy should be abolished where there was "fresh and viable" new evidence. That happened in 2005, and in 2006 Dunlop was convicted. This was a convenient case to use because the removal of Double Jeopardy was a recommendation of the Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence and would enable the state to repeatedly try “racists” until they get a conviction.
The Pulborough Parish Council magazine reported that police were asking residents to report other residents for 'tailgating' or driving too close to another vehicle. What type of society calls on friends and neighbours to watch each other and report each other to the police apart from ours?- Mao’s China, Stalinist Russia, the Eastern bloc 'Stasi' societies, and Nazi Germany. Have the police not got something better to do than to make notes of people who are alleged to have 'tailgated'? The police are being used to control people not to protect the public by stopping burglars, thieves, muggers, vandals, street beggars and drunkenness in public. They have given up on fighting crime to police our thoughts.
In Orwellian Doublethink, inequality is called equality; state control, freedom; persecution of the politically incorrect, tolerance; gender quotas equal opportunity and bigoted anti-racism that persecutes one race, whites! Language is the medium for transmitting thought and an embryonic totalitarian state gives words new meanings to shape thought for the new state.
They believe reality is a social construct and if we can only think in the correct way reality will change. It is like the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis in linguistics which holds that without the word we cannot have the idea. But what about feelings? Without a wide and adequate grammar people become frustrated and angry as intelligent but inarticulate people do. We must do all in our power to expand our vocabularies and make sure our children are not denied the fullest English lexicon.
In an article “They also change the language “the Daily Express of July 3, 2007 reported on moves towards totalitarian control of what we think through language.”Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in connection with Muslim terrorism. The Prime Minister has told his ministers that the phrase “war on -terror” is to be dropped. This is part of an attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims by adopting a more “consensual” tone than Blair. It is to mould our thinking.
Home Secretary Smith is trying the old con of pretending political terrorists are criminals, “Let us be clear – terrorists are criminals, whose victims come from all walks of life, communities and religions. Terrorists attack the values shared by all law-abiding citizens. As a Government, as communities, as individuals, we need to ensure that the message of the terrorists is rejected.” How, by changing their descriptions?
The Television companies are a vehicle of subtle tyranny and employees follow the movement or be put out of work. Vacancies in television were only ever advertised in the Guardian to make sure they only employed liberals and socialists. It helps ensure the right attitude in employees. Teaching posts were also advertised there.
Following on the Religious Hatred Law which carries a 7 year penalty the totalitarian “Ideological Caste” is introducing anti homophobic laws that also has a 7 year penalty. If this is not tyranny I do not know what is. This is the counter culture of the 1960s making its moral values the basis of our law and oppressing the members of the public who are individual or think for themselves. As Christians once shaped society when sodomy was a crime, not a “lifestyle,” the “lifestyle” view is now being enshrined in law and replacing the traditional view. As a judge put it “The Truth is no Defence.”
Just keep repeating the lie and prevent others from expressing opposition and soon there is a new reality supported by invented British history. Trevor Phillips openly called for British history to be rewritten at the 2007 Labour Party conference. The Commission for Equality and Human Rights has powers to impose their policies and the justification is upholding European Union laws on xenophobia and hate. To assert our identity is xenophobia – a criminal offence!
The Daily telegraph of 17 march 2008 reported that Harriet Harman, the Minister for Women, is considering scrapping current laws that stop employers from taking race or sex into consideration when interviewing candidates for jobs. White men could be stopped from getting jobs under government plans to allow employers to give ethnic minority and female candidates preferential treatment. The “doublespeak” is “positive action" and prevents applicants with better job credentials getting the job if they are the wrong sex or race. They are changing our morality from Traditional to a universal one based on equality but imposing Equality of Outcome. Their aim is the eradication of racism, sexism, class elitism the nation and the creation of pools of global cheap labour in a one-world or global state to be created in stages like the E.U.
Spin doctoring is to manipulate people into accepting what the elites are introducing. One of the origins of Cultural Marxism was Anthony Crosland who destroyed Grammar Schools to turn the Working Classes into a Lumpenproletariat or Underclass. Comprehensive schooling, by depriving people in the middle levels, of a proper historical and political education, has made manipulation easier as has teaching only small areas of history. Children are taught to equate nationalism with Nazism.
Our ancestors fought against tyranny and we must too! John Hampden’s stand against King Charles I was heroic and he died in battle for his beliefs. The struggle for trial by jury and Habeas Corpus, for the Right to Bear Arms for protection against the billeting of soldiers or searches of our houses must not be lost now to deception. Macaulay's history tells of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which a courageous jury saved us from despotism - is inspirational. The politicians then were cowardly and deceitful like the present lot but the core of the English people opposed tyranny as English men and women and defended national independence.
Sites of groups opposed to the new tyranny:
Statewatch : http://www.statewatch.org/
Civitas http://www.civitas.org.uk/
Monday, 21 April 2008
OPERA WARS by Mike Smith
A few years ago, some inclusively-minded ‘cultural’ oracle proclaimed ‘All operas are left-wing’. Well, I suppose many works written from the Enlightenment onwards might be described as conveying a ‘liberal’ message, Beethoven’s Fidelio and Verdi’s Don Carlos being obvious examples. In Brussels, Auber’s La Muette de Portici, inspired by the Neapolitan revolt against the Spaniards, touched off a real-life revolution against the House of Orange.
But the truth is that none of this can be said of early opera, once a closed book, but now an important part of the modern repertoire. From the philosophical and historical researches of the Florentine Camerata, to the dawn of the Enlightenment and beyond, opera manifested itself as an art form which, with its casts of heroes, gods and wise princes, tended to glorify absolute monarchy. Absolute monarchs, after all, more often than not paid the piper. True, opera prospered in republican Hamburg and for a meteoric but glittering period in constitutional England under Handel, Bononcini and other composers of the first rate. In London, however, the art remained very much an exotic import, and it is perhaps significant that the Dutch Republic, for all its wealth and love of novelty, remained an operatic desert.
Yet a revolution lay on the horizon. Naples was very far from being a rechtsstaat, let alone a democracy, but in the streets of the most musical of European capitals the common people sang from morning to night, finding a freedom in music they were denied in the field of politics. It was in Naples in 1733 that a brilliant young composer, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, produced a simple one-act comic opera La Serva Padrona, which employed folk-song like arias to tell a charming burlesque story of a cunning maid who tricks her elderly master into marrying her.
The piece was originally no more than an intermezzo inserted between the acts of Pergolesi’s opera seria Il Prigioniero Superbo, a work that rapidly disappeared from view. La Serva Patrona, however, was an immediate hit. Three years later Pergolesi lay dead at the age of 26, but his musical offspring survived to conquer Europe.
In 1752, La Serva Padrona was given in Paris by an itinerant Italian troupe of comic actors, who needed little singing talent to perform the simple work. Immediately the cause of this new form of opera was taken up by men of letters who, needless to say, had ulterior motives for their partisanship. The resultant controversy, conduced in the columns of newspapers and in pamphlets was celebrated as the "Querelle des Bouffons" (War of the Comedians) and may to some extent be seen as a proxy for the largely suppressed political arguments of the day.
The debate highlighted the differences between what was characterised as the vibrant and progressive character of Italian opera and the stultified traditions of French Tragédie-lyrique. Now this is an interpretation which may be strongly challenged, but what is without doubt is that in France, under the patronage of the absolute monarchy, an art-form had developed which had become exclusively French, for all its Italian roots.
In the operas of Monteverdi and Cavalli we find continuous streams of harmony with an absence of discrete songs or arias. This was the tradition that Jean-Baptiste Lully, himself an Italian by birth, had brought to the court of Louis XIV and which, after his death had continued as if preserved in aspic. Operas by Lully remained in the repertoire for decade after decade, and were joined by the imitative works of lesser talents such as Delalande and Destouches.
Certainly, with his début opera Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 Jean-Phillipe Rameau had brought about a much-needed revolution in Tragédie-lyrique, but it remained still Tragédie-lyrique; sung in French, relying upon semi-declamatory vocal harmonies rather than melody, and eschewing the services of the talented and glamorous castrati who had taken the rest of Europe by storm.
As it happened, the 1752 performance of La Serva Padrona coincided with a revival of Destouche’s Omphale, a work which was now 51 years old. This was the catalyst for the philosophe Grimm, who launched a stinging attack upon the creaking work and upon the Opera itself. "The composer is dead" wrote Grimm, "and his work had little enough life in the first place".
Grimm’s Lettre sur Omphale whipped up an immediate storm, with men and women of fashion and learning taking up the cudgels either for the cause of cultured French opera or for the demotic, easy-going manners of the Italian interloper. Now came to the fray Grimm’s friend, the expatriate Swiss Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on this occasion motivated less by political ideology than by motives of revenge.
When Rousseau came to Paris in 1743, he had done so as a would-be composer and musical theorist, and his idol was the greatest living French composer, Rameau. The austere and cerebral Rameau, as famous for his works of musical theory and philosophy, as for his keyboard publications, had won new laurels when he started to compose opera at the relatively advanced age of 50. This giant, who had absurdly proclaimed music to be first among the sciences, was widely hailed in France as ‘The Newton of Music’.
The newcomer had brought with him a plan for a revolutionary new system of musical notation, which rapidly sank without trace. Rousseau brought also the sketches for an opéra-ballet entitled Les Muses galantes in blatant imitation of Rameau’s highly successful work Les Indes Galantes. The intended tribute was brusquely rebuffed by the notoriously rude Rameau, and Rousseau now conceived in his heart an implacable hatred for his former hero.
By 1752, however, Rousseau had himself found fame with Le Devin du Village, a miniature French comic opera of peasant life which was performed before Louis XV and the court at Fontainebleau to enormous acclaim. The king’s unmelodious voice was heard around the palace singing Rousseau’s hit aria J'ai perdu mon serviteur and Rousseau, had his daemon not led him in a different direction, could have claimed a freely-offered place as a favoured and cosseted court composer.
Now, with his place in the operatic pantheon apparently assured, Rousseau turned with relish to uphold the cause of Italian Opera buffa against the aristocratic grandeur of the Paris Opera and, therefore against the living symbol of that grandeur, Jean-Philippe Rameau.
Rameau, who himself had years before been denounced as an anti-traditionalist, remained aloof throughout the controversy, but it must have pained him deeply to see his wealthy patron, the fermier-général Le Riche de La Pouplinière, drawn to the side of the ‘Italians’.
Meanwhile Rousseau’s assault upon French opera in particular and French music in general became ever shriller. Finally in Lettre sur la musique Françoise, published the following year, he overstepped the mark completely.
"I think that I have shown that there is neither measure nor melody in French music, because the language is not capable of them; that French singing is a continual squalling, insupportable to an unprejudiced ear; that its harmony is crude and devoid of expression and suggests only the padding of a pupil; that French ‘airs’ are not airs; that French recitative is not recitative. From this I conclude that the French have no music and cannot have any; or that if they ever have, it will be so much the worse for them."
Paris reacted with outrage. Rousseau’s free pass at the Opéra was summarily withdrawn, he was allegedly abused and kicked when he attempted to enter the building and the members of the orchestra burned him in effigy. With characteristic paranoia, Jean-Jacques decided that there must be a plot to murder him and in 1754, he decamped to his Genevan birthplace. This was to be the first leg of that tormented yet productive journey through an unsympathetic Switzerland which led him, catastrophically, to England before his final return to France,
Now Rameau, who had carefully avoided being drawn into the opera controversy, could not resist taking a swipe at his stricken tormentor, and he launched an attack on Rousseau's contributions to the musical entries in the Encyclopédie. To Rameau’s chagrin he now became the personal object of counter-attacks from d'Alembert and Diderot. The lasting legacy of this quarrel was Diderot’s brilliant satirical dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau.
Wounded by the criticism from his fellow-intellectuals, Rameau retreated into a crabbed and disillusioned old age and died in 1764 at the then considerable age of eighty-one. The daring and dazzling effects of his last, unperformed, stage work Les Boréades proved that for all his disenchantment he remained the unchallenged king of French opera.
In 1767 Rousseau fled to France from England in panic, his head whirling with fantasies of planned kidnap and assassination. He relocated to Paris in 1770 and lived in quiet seclusion, a shadow of his former self.
Now to Paris came Christoph Willibald Gluck, the ennobled scion of Bohemian foresters. In Vienna Gluck had been music tutor to the Hapsburg princess Marie Antoinette, who in 1770 his pupil married the Dauphin, the future Louis XVI . In 1774, the same year that Marie Antoinette became Queen of France, Gluck obtained a contract to write for the Paris Opéra.
Years before, Gluck had declared himself a disciple of Rousseau. Orfeo ed Euridice, received its premiere at Vienna in 1762, and with its tiny cast and pure melodies stripped of superfluous ornament, Gluck seemed to have realised the apotheosis of the type of opera exemplified by La Serva Padrona and Le Devin du Village.
Yet Orfeo had been this and much more. Gluck’s little masterpiece consciously integrated drama, music and dance in a manner more reminiscent of the stage works of Rameau. His first work for Paris Iphigénie en Aulide (1774) took the process a stage further, in effect synthesising the French tradition of Tragédie-lyrique with that of Italian opera.
Yet the premiere of Gluck’s superb work gave rise to a storm of controversy. Unlike the Querelle des Bouffons, which had deep intellectual roots, the inspiration of this row seemed to owe more to a general chauvinistic resentment of a clever foreigner who had set out to teach the French their business. So, with a breathtaking absence of logic the patriotic party chose as their champion an Italian Niccolò Piccinni, whose light-hearted if somewhat lightweight opere buffe had amused the Parisian public for years. In her memoirs the celebrated portraitist Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun gives a vivid picture of the new battleground.
‘The love of music was so general that it occasioned a serious quarrel between those who were called Gluckists and Piccinists. All amateurs were divided into two opposing factions. The usual field of battle was the garden of the Palais Royal. There the partisans of Gluck and the partisans of Piccini went at each other with such violence that there was more than one duel to record.’
1774 saw the premiere of a recast and extended version of Orfeo, translated into French with the former castrato title role now given to a tenor, in accordance with Parisian taste. The production was generally well received, and in that year a poignant meeting took place between the ailing and reclusive Jean-Jacques and his admirer, the glamorous Chevalier. The two men got on remarkably well. Rousseau died four years later, one of his last published writings being an enthusiastic review of Gluck's opera Alceste, a reinterpretation of the very same story which had inspired one of Lully’s greatest masterpieces.
So, in a sense, the story had come full circle, with little more than a decade to run before the world-shattering events of 1789. In 1779 Gluck suffered a stroke and returned to Vienna, leaving the Paris Opera in the capable hands of his protégé Antonio Salieri,
In 1787, the year of Gluck’s death, Salieri scored a huge triumph with Tarare, to the libretto of Beaumarchais. In the tradition of Gluck’s reforms Salieri’s music served the drama, and what a drama! The death of a royal tyrant and his replacement by a patriotic and popular commander uncannily reflected the unstoppable march of French history. As the people crown Tarare, the final chorus proclaims ‘Your greatness comes not from your rank, but from your character.’
The politics of opera had been replaced by the opera of politics.
But the truth is that none of this can be said of early opera, once a closed book, but now an important part of the modern repertoire. From the philosophical and historical researches of the Florentine Camerata, to the dawn of the Enlightenment and beyond, opera manifested itself as an art form which, with its casts of heroes, gods and wise princes, tended to glorify absolute monarchy. Absolute monarchs, after all, more often than not paid the piper. True, opera prospered in republican Hamburg and for a meteoric but glittering period in constitutional England under Handel, Bononcini and other composers of the first rate. In London, however, the art remained very much an exotic import, and it is perhaps significant that the Dutch Republic, for all its wealth and love of novelty, remained an operatic desert.
Yet a revolution lay on the horizon. Naples was very far from being a rechtsstaat, let alone a democracy, but in the streets of the most musical of European capitals the common people sang from morning to night, finding a freedom in music they were denied in the field of politics. It was in Naples in 1733 that a brilliant young composer, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, produced a simple one-act comic opera La Serva Padrona, which employed folk-song like arias to tell a charming burlesque story of a cunning maid who tricks her elderly master into marrying her.
The piece was originally no more than an intermezzo inserted between the acts of Pergolesi’s opera seria Il Prigioniero Superbo, a work that rapidly disappeared from view. La Serva Patrona, however, was an immediate hit. Three years later Pergolesi lay dead at the age of 26, but his musical offspring survived to conquer Europe.
In 1752, La Serva Padrona was given in Paris by an itinerant Italian troupe of comic actors, who needed little singing talent to perform the simple work. Immediately the cause of this new form of opera was taken up by men of letters who, needless to say, had ulterior motives for their partisanship. The resultant controversy, conduced in the columns of newspapers and in pamphlets was celebrated as the "Querelle des Bouffons" (War of the Comedians) and may to some extent be seen as a proxy for the largely suppressed political arguments of the day.
The debate highlighted the differences between what was characterised as the vibrant and progressive character of Italian opera and the stultified traditions of French Tragédie-lyrique. Now this is an interpretation which may be strongly challenged, but what is without doubt is that in France, under the patronage of the absolute monarchy, an art-form had developed which had become exclusively French, for all its Italian roots.
In the operas of Monteverdi and Cavalli we find continuous streams of harmony with an absence of discrete songs or arias. This was the tradition that Jean-Baptiste Lully, himself an Italian by birth, had brought to the court of Louis XIV and which, after his death had continued as if preserved in aspic. Operas by Lully remained in the repertoire for decade after decade, and were joined by the imitative works of lesser talents such as Delalande and Destouches.
Certainly, with his début opera Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 Jean-Phillipe Rameau had brought about a much-needed revolution in Tragédie-lyrique, but it remained still Tragédie-lyrique; sung in French, relying upon semi-declamatory vocal harmonies rather than melody, and eschewing the services of the talented and glamorous castrati who had taken the rest of Europe by storm.
As it happened, the 1752 performance of La Serva Padrona coincided with a revival of Destouche’s Omphale, a work which was now 51 years old. This was the catalyst for the philosophe Grimm, who launched a stinging attack upon the creaking work and upon the Opera itself. "The composer is dead" wrote Grimm, "and his work had little enough life in the first place".
Grimm’s Lettre sur Omphale whipped up an immediate storm, with men and women of fashion and learning taking up the cudgels either for the cause of cultured French opera or for the demotic, easy-going manners of the Italian interloper. Now came to the fray Grimm’s friend, the expatriate Swiss Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on this occasion motivated less by political ideology than by motives of revenge.
When Rousseau came to Paris in 1743, he had done so as a would-be composer and musical theorist, and his idol was the greatest living French composer, Rameau. The austere and cerebral Rameau, as famous for his works of musical theory and philosophy, as for his keyboard publications, had won new laurels when he started to compose opera at the relatively advanced age of 50. This giant, who had absurdly proclaimed music to be first among the sciences, was widely hailed in France as ‘The Newton of Music’.
The newcomer had brought with him a plan for a revolutionary new system of musical notation, which rapidly sank without trace. Rousseau brought also the sketches for an opéra-ballet entitled Les Muses galantes in blatant imitation of Rameau’s highly successful work Les Indes Galantes. The intended tribute was brusquely rebuffed by the notoriously rude Rameau, and Rousseau now conceived in his heart an implacable hatred for his former hero.
By 1752, however, Rousseau had himself found fame with Le Devin du Village, a miniature French comic opera of peasant life which was performed before Louis XV and the court at Fontainebleau to enormous acclaim. The king’s unmelodious voice was heard around the palace singing Rousseau’s hit aria J'ai perdu mon serviteur and Rousseau, had his daemon not led him in a different direction, could have claimed a freely-offered place as a favoured and cosseted court composer.
Now, with his place in the operatic pantheon apparently assured, Rousseau turned with relish to uphold the cause of Italian Opera buffa against the aristocratic grandeur of the Paris Opera and, therefore against the living symbol of that grandeur, Jean-Philippe Rameau.
Rameau, who himself had years before been denounced as an anti-traditionalist, remained aloof throughout the controversy, but it must have pained him deeply to see his wealthy patron, the fermier-général Le Riche de La Pouplinière, drawn to the side of the ‘Italians’.
Meanwhile Rousseau’s assault upon French opera in particular and French music in general became ever shriller. Finally in Lettre sur la musique Françoise, published the following year, he overstepped the mark completely.
"I think that I have shown that there is neither measure nor melody in French music, because the language is not capable of them; that French singing is a continual squalling, insupportable to an unprejudiced ear; that its harmony is crude and devoid of expression and suggests only the padding of a pupil; that French ‘airs’ are not airs; that French recitative is not recitative. From this I conclude that the French have no music and cannot have any; or that if they ever have, it will be so much the worse for them."
Paris reacted with outrage. Rousseau’s free pass at the Opéra was summarily withdrawn, he was allegedly abused and kicked when he attempted to enter the building and the members of the orchestra burned him in effigy. With characteristic paranoia, Jean-Jacques decided that there must be a plot to murder him and in 1754, he decamped to his Genevan birthplace. This was to be the first leg of that tormented yet productive journey through an unsympathetic Switzerland which led him, catastrophically, to England before his final return to France,
Now Rameau, who had carefully avoided being drawn into the opera controversy, could not resist taking a swipe at his stricken tormentor, and he launched an attack on Rousseau's contributions to the musical entries in the Encyclopédie. To Rameau’s chagrin he now became the personal object of counter-attacks from d'Alembert and Diderot. The lasting legacy of this quarrel was Diderot’s brilliant satirical dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau.
Wounded by the criticism from his fellow-intellectuals, Rameau retreated into a crabbed and disillusioned old age and died in 1764 at the then considerable age of eighty-one. The daring and dazzling effects of his last, unperformed, stage work Les Boréades proved that for all his disenchantment he remained the unchallenged king of French opera.
In 1767 Rousseau fled to France from England in panic, his head whirling with fantasies of planned kidnap and assassination. He relocated to Paris in 1770 and lived in quiet seclusion, a shadow of his former self.
Now to Paris came Christoph Willibald Gluck, the ennobled scion of Bohemian foresters. In Vienna Gluck had been music tutor to the Hapsburg princess Marie Antoinette, who in 1770 his pupil married the Dauphin, the future Louis XVI . In 1774, the same year that Marie Antoinette became Queen of France, Gluck obtained a contract to write for the Paris Opéra.
Years before, Gluck had declared himself a disciple of Rousseau. Orfeo ed Euridice, received its premiere at Vienna in 1762, and with its tiny cast and pure melodies stripped of superfluous ornament, Gluck seemed to have realised the apotheosis of the type of opera exemplified by La Serva Padrona and Le Devin du Village.
Yet Orfeo had been this and much more. Gluck’s little masterpiece consciously integrated drama, music and dance in a manner more reminiscent of the stage works of Rameau. His first work for Paris Iphigénie en Aulide (1774) took the process a stage further, in effect synthesising the French tradition of Tragédie-lyrique with that of Italian opera.
Yet the premiere of Gluck’s superb work gave rise to a storm of controversy. Unlike the Querelle des Bouffons, which had deep intellectual roots, the inspiration of this row seemed to owe more to a general chauvinistic resentment of a clever foreigner who had set out to teach the French their business. So, with a breathtaking absence of logic the patriotic party chose as their champion an Italian Niccolò Piccinni, whose light-hearted if somewhat lightweight opere buffe had amused the Parisian public for years. In her memoirs the celebrated portraitist Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun gives a vivid picture of the new battleground.
‘The love of music was so general that it occasioned a serious quarrel between those who were called Gluckists and Piccinists. All amateurs were divided into two opposing factions. The usual field of battle was the garden of the Palais Royal. There the partisans of Gluck and the partisans of Piccini went at each other with such violence that there was more than one duel to record.’
1774 saw the premiere of a recast and extended version of Orfeo, translated into French with the former castrato title role now given to a tenor, in accordance with Parisian taste. The production was generally well received, and in that year a poignant meeting took place between the ailing and reclusive Jean-Jacques and his admirer, the glamorous Chevalier. The two men got on remarkably well. Rousseau died four years later, one of his last published writings being an enthusiastic review of Gluck's opera Alceste, a reinterpretation of the very same story which had inspired one of Lully’s greatest masterpieces.
So, in a sense, the story had come full circle, with little more than a decade to run before the world-shattering events of 1789. In 1779 Gluck suffered a stroke and returned to Vienna, leaving the Paris Opera in the capable hands of his protégé Antonio Salieri,
In 1787, the year of Gluck’s death, Salieri scored a huge triumph with Tarare, to the libretto of Beaumarchais. In the tradition of Gluck’s reforms Salieri’s music served the drama, and what a drama! The death of a royal tyrant and his replacement by a patriotic and popular commander uncannily reflected the unstoppable march of French history. As the people crown Tarare, the final chorus proclaims ‘Your greatness comes not from your rank, but from your character.’
The politics of opera had been replaced by the opera of politics.
Friday, 14 March 2008
The English Music Festival and the Cultural Wars - by David Hamilton
In a speech to the Institution for Public Policy Research (IPPR) on Britishness, Heritage and the Arts, Margaret Hodge, Minister of State for Culture, Media & Sport is a former Chair of the Fabian Executive Committee said “a shared sense of common cultural identity” was a key part of social integration and cohesion.
She added: “This is not about making every audience completely representative but if we claim great things for our [cultural] sectors in terms of their power to bring people together, then we have a right to expect they will do that wherever they can.” She also praised other institutions for “creating the icons of a common culture that everybody can feel a part of” — such as The Angel of the North, the British Museum, the Eden Project in Cornwall and TV and radio shows “from Coronation Street to The Archers”. But she acknowledged that culture could also be divisive, citing the examples of Jerry Springer: the Opera, which Christians said was blasphemous. She also suggested that British citizenship ceremonies be held in historic buildings such as castles to help people to “associate their new citizenship with key cultural icons”. This is Cultural Marxism. It is culture as social engineering. The use of grants leads promoters and artists in a pre-planned official direction.
While our traditional culture is attacked Em Marshall is staging the second English Music Festival from the 23rd to the 27th of May 2008. People enjoy this music when they get the chance to see it performed and she is regularly approached about a work not heard live. Gustav Holst’s Walt Whitman had never been performed at a professional concert, only at amateur productions, before the first English Music Festival staged it.
The Festival is a cornucopia of English Classical music from Medieval to Contemporary. The main evening concerts will be at the medieval Abbey at Dorchester-on-Thames, several at Radley College Chapel, and All Saints Church, Sutton Courtenay. There will also be a concert at the Chapel of Keble College, Oxford University. Over the five days there will be fourteen concerts and recitals that give the audience the almost mystical experience of listening to performances of exquisite English music from the arc of the centuries, yet the focus is on the twentieth century and many overlooked pieces will be performed. It is reviving an important part of our culture.
The series opens with a major concert by the BBC Concert Orchestra of works including Holbrook’s Birds of Rhiannon, Rawsthorne’s Practical Cats and Mackenzie’s Benedictus and featuring music by Parry and Bantock. They will also bring many unjustly neglected pieces back to life. Other artists booked to appear include the Carducci Quartet, performing Vaughan Williams and Moeran String Quartets; Vox Musica, the Amaretti Orchestra, including Ifni’s Clarinet Concerto, Ireland and Elgar; Keble College Choir performing Sullivan’s Sacred Music; and Hilary Davan Wetton with the Milton Keynes City Orchestra and City of London Chorus doing Holst and Howells. There will be Elgar’s Banner of St.George and Dyson’s Agincourt, a concert of organ music, a concert of Arne and Linley. Early Music Solo Song and, for a lighter period, Mayerl with David Owen Norris give a broad look at the variety of our national musical inheritance. The conclusion is to be a “Grand Finale.” Philip Lane will be a composer featured, along with David Owen Norris, Paul Carr, and maybe Ron Corp and Matthew Curtis.
Yehudi Menhuin wrote to the Times in 1995, “English composers will not slavishly follow some arbitrary theory or construction, whether political or musical. They have kept their Englishness intact, whilst the mercantilistic world has gone all-American.”
Why is it neglected? Like other aspects of English culture it is the victim of a negative ideology that devalues it with pejorative labels like “elitist” or “narrow” but the labels do not fit reality. English music is not imitation but innovative and has developed significantly from the early twentieth century but is still rooted in the English tradition - it is tuneful, melodic, tonal and recognisably English. English Classical Music is hidden by a cloud of prejudice and ignorance from its rightful audience by being characterised as “elitist” or “quaint” when in fact it has the tonal qualities that people enjoyed before modernism set out to destroy them. It is a living, but obscured, tradition and often requested on Classic FM, whose “The Hall of Fame”, is the world's biggest annual survey of classical music tastes; The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams is the nation's favourite English work. It is one of the pieces which listeners ask to hear most and epitomises the English pastoral tradition.
Margaret Hodge’s statements are part of the Cultural Marxists cultural hegemony. It is based on Gramsci’s ideas to undermine the traditional nation through changing the culture. The function of Cultural Marxist ideological hegemony is to legitimise the power and status of the ruling “ideological caste” to which Ms.Hodge belongs, and to pathologise dissent and the traditional culture. It is an aspect of the developing totalitarian state which interferes in all aspects of our lives trying to mould us for the new utopia.. The old left aimed for utopia and used subversion but mainly economic and by attacking our industries through strikes. Cultural Marxists use the culture to subvert and deceive us by utilising Liberal concepts of justice, peace, rights and good will between all people to destroy our traditional ways, standards and laws, our history and heroes; every autonomous institution, set of historical associations - the new utopia will emerge from the ruins as if by magic. They see English culture as a major stumbling block and want to eradicate it.
In 2005 the Proms had a number of all-English programmes and all but one sold-out, whereas other non-English music programmes did not. The Gloucester 3 Choirs Festival in 2001 did a special Festival of only English music and sold out swiftly. The BBC Music Magazine has a Top 20 Best sellers list and there is some really interesting English music discs there, often by obscure composers.
Yet despite this noble heritage, much of this glorious music is overlooked. “English Music” festivals tend to either fail at the outset for lack of funds or become internationalised and absorbed into the Social Engineering Culture. The Cheltenham Festival was founded as “The Cheltenham Festival of British Music”, but went “international” and now stages the same as everywhere else.
Without renewal our culture would die and the Festival renews by commissioning works. An oratorio “Prayerbook”, written and performed specially for the first Festival by David Owen Norris was acclaimed by the audience. The Clarinet and viola heralding Vaughan Williams's Norfolk Rhapsody No 1 was a beautiful performance. (1906). A bracing work was ”Oration” by Britten's mentor, Frank Bridge. The haunting, cello concerto, is a passionate cry against the barbarity of the Great War and expresses the miseries of the Front. Julian Lloyd Webber was sympathetic to the solo line, as the cello strives to extricate a poignant lyricism from the tensions of the orchestral background. He returned for Holst’s seldom performed Invocation (1911).
It is usual to get a series of say Mahler, Brahms but rarely English Classical composers. Frederick Cliffe’s First Symphony of 1889, was only revived after 83 years' neglect. The Daily Telegraph of 22 April 1889, had published a review: “It may be doubted whether musical history can show on any of its pages the record of such an Opus. The symphony is a masterpiece, and the composer, one might think, feels terrified at his own success. For our own part, noting the imaginative power displayed in the work, the easy command of all resources, the beauty and freshness of the themes, and their brilliant development, we feel inclined to ask a question, propounded concerning another phenomenon "Whence has this man these things?” Mr Cliffe has by one effort passed from obscurity to fame, and must be regarded as a bright and shining star on the horizon of our English art.”'
Over a century later The Daily Telegraph of 26 April 2004 had a feature on John Foulds as the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra released their recording of “Dynamic Tryptich.” Conductor Sakari Oramo explained, Foulds composed "some of the most original music ever conceived". Malcolm MacDonald, editor of music magazine Tempo, believes: "There's no question he was a genius and one of the most significant English composers of the last century. MacDonald, found some scores in the British Library: "I got out a dozen pieces, and the first thing I opened was the Dynamic Triptych. I was blown away by it. This was music unlike any British composer of the time. I was amazed it was lying around, and no one was playing it. ”Foulds's daughter " took me to the garage, where there were two coffin-sized boxes full of sketches and manuscripts she's been left by her mother." Unfortunately, many of the manuscripts were damaged by rats and ants. In his book “Music Today” Foulds's, explained how, by strict diet and meditation, he had developed his clairvoyant and clairaudient abilities. Much of his music, he claimed, was dictated to him by spirits.”
In the Baroque period we produced composers of immense skill like Purcell, Byrd, Arne, Tallis and Blow. The period between Arne and Parry has been dismissed as a “musical Ice-Age” though we had Stainer, Wesley, Potter, Sterndale Bennett, Crotch, who were on a par with foreign contemporaries, but not progressive enough for international attention. In 1769 Englishman Philip Hayes, who built Oxford’s beautiful Holywell Music Room, composed the world’s first piano concerto! Some great composers died young: Edward Bache, composer of exquisite chamber works, died at 25, and Thomas Linley, died aged 22 in a boating accident in 1777, yet produced wonderful anthems, odes and oratorio, about one of which was written “Neither Purcell nor Mozart ever gave stronger proof of original genius than can be traced in this charming ode”.
Even during the ravages of Modernism in the twentieth century there was a renaissance of music in England of works of innovation, power, drama and beauty. Stanford and Parry were at the fount and in a Brahmsian style created English music equal to Brahms himself; Elgar continued the creation of an English style through merging Brahms and Wagner. Richard Strauss described Elgar as “the first Progressivist in English Music”, and Hans Richter told his orchestra of Elgar’s First, “Gentleman, now let us rehearse the greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest modern composer”! Others found inspiration abroad and incorporated the sounds into something uniquely “English”; Delius turned to the continent and Negro spirituals to develop a unique sound with lush, rich harmonies. Vaughan Williams returned to English roots in folk and Tudor to revive an English music, rebelling against the ubiquitous Teutonic schools. English solo song grew from parlour song and folk roots into a beautiful, high-art form; at the other end of the scale, England had answers to Wagner in the music of Bantock and Holbrooke, “the Cockney Wagner”, composers of long, deeply romantic, intense music – to rival Wagner’s Ring, and epic orchestral works. Writing about Holbrooke’s The Raven, Irish composer Hamilton Harty said “there is beautiful and impressive music in that work, and, as I told the orchestra, it is so infinitely superior to the foreign muck with which we are deluged nowadays!” Other composers of this period to listen to include Bridge, Bowen, Moeran, Finzi, Sainton, Bainton, Mackenzie, Gibbs, Berners, Dyson, Bax, Bliss, Ireland, Lambert, Boughton, Coles, Coleridge Taylor, Dunhill, Foulds, Dale, Goossens, William Lloyd Webber, MacCunn, Armstrong, Harty, Friskin, McEwen, Phillips, Scott, Rawsthorne, Rubbra, Hadley and Howells. These, and many more, are known by a small corpus of recorded works which show great individuality, inspiration, and visionary orchestral confidence.
England is a nation whose music and literature are drawn from the landscape, from rolling hills to the desolation of mud flats and moors. Seascapes too: an island nation, we are drawn to the wildness and openness of the sea. We have not the sublimity of the Alps nor the majestic sweeps of the Tabernas desert, the spectacular fjords of Norway nor the thick dense forests of Germany; but, for centuries, artists, poets and composers have been inspired by the picturesque hues and shades in our “blue remembered hills”, the nuances of light-beams in enchanting woods, the changes of seasons , inconstant weather, the dramatic sweeps of the lakes and dales that inspired Wordsworth.
Yehudi Menhuin, wrote: “I am drawn to English music because I love the way it reflects the climate and the vegetation which know no sharp edges, no definitive demarcation, where different hues of green melt into each other and where the line between sea and land is always joined and changing, sometimes gradually, sometime dramatically. The music … is a very human music, not given to shattering utterances, to pronouncements of right or wrong, not to abstract intellectual processes, to human emotion in the abstract, but to a single man’s experience of today as related to a particular place…”
In 1927, Holst wrote incidental music to a mystery play The Coming of Christ which has never been recorded. As I mentioned, Cliffe’s first symphony, an acclaimed masterpiece, has not had a professional public performance for over 90 years. His second symphony has not been published; none of the symphonies by Walford Davies, Coleridge Taylor and Somervell are available, nor is Bowen’s first symphony which was so popular that The Times devoted a whole column to analysing it; Delius’ opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, considered by many the first great modern English opera, has not been performed at either the Royal Opera House or English National Opera for over half a century.
Contemporary artists have similar repertoires and only a small number of works are considered “acceptable.” Concert mangers are not prepared to take risks so programme what they know or popular classics for government funding. A programme of Brahms, Tchaikovsky or Verdi is familiar and safe but to present say, Moeran, Gibbs and Farrar a risk. English music is not fashionable. It is not politically correct and managers hesitate to promote anything English, as if inimical to other cultures. In an era of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” English culture is shunned. It is not the done thing to seem nationalistic by celebrating our traditions: the ending of Elgar’s Caractacus is stigmatised because it points forward to a great British Empire! We are supposed to be ashamed of our culture and ignore it or apologise. Composers of the early twentieth century are dismissed as the “English pastoral composers," lesser musicians whose works are put below the Germanic, Russian, or Scandinavian schools. But the pastoral tradition has always inspired composers and poets.
The term ‘pastoral’ is broad and its meaning of ‘rural’ and ‘innocence’, was used by Classical and Christian artists with its associations of Eden, Arcadia or a ‘Golden Age’, and nostalgia for beauty and sublimity lost through the Fall or the degeneration of Man. Pastoral goes to the roots of our culture: In the ninth century BC, Hesiod contemplated the ages of mankind from a Golden Age to his own ‘Iron Age’. Six centuries later, the pastoral was a literary form in the Idylls of Theocritus, a tradition Virgil built upon in his Eclogues two centuries later. In Christianity the Garden of Eden provided an equivalent to the Arcadia of Classical poets, and the concept of the Fall established the nostalgic pastoral inclination as a natural human impulse. For the Romantic poets, witnessing the beginning of the industrial revolution, the city was a consequence of the Fall and the contrast with nature and a new interest in childhood enabled them to draw a parallel between humankind’s degeneration or Fall from Eden and a child’s loss of innocence as he enters adulthood.
It is often based in a particular location or built from folk song-like melodies - Williams’ three Norfolk Rhapsodies (1905-07), and In the Fen Country (1904); Holst’s A Somerset Rhapsody (1906-7); Butterworth’s Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad (1912), his Two English Idylls (1911) and The Banks of Green Willow (1913); and Finzi’s A Severn Rhapsody (1923). The sleeve notes to a recording of A Severn Rhapsody read: ‘The music gently evokes the mood of the English countryside and the meandering river’. A pastoral characteristic, reflective of rural ‘simplicity’. These works bespeak a retreat from the care, complexity, or harshness of society. English classical music has its roots in the country; is rooted in our landscape but not necessarily a picturesque one. Gustav Holst was walking in the desolate Dorsetshire country between Wool and Bere Regis in 1926 when visited by inspiration and he started Egdon Heath, also prompted by the opening chapter of Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native. The music is stark and austere. As for elitism anyone can go to these concerts without passing a test. They just have to like the music. Furthermore, composers like Holst wrote music for brass bands. “The Moorside Suite” was used in the brass band competition at the Crystal Palace in 1928 which was won by the Black Dyke Mills Band.
Most works in the English pastoral tradition are not large-scale works but representative of the pastoral genre, though degree of intersection with other forms and genres like the ‘rhapsody’ is characteristic. Some English composers are known as a pastoral ‘school,’ the creative background to both composition and reception, and that their music is so closely bound to landscapes to which they regularly returned. The English pastoral style shares aspects of the pastoral topic of European Classical and Romantic music, but is particularly associated with the musical language of folk song. It is for this reason that Elgar,
Parry and Stanford had individual voices yet developed their style from the German musical idiom but are often excluded from the pastoral canon though their importance to the English Musical Renaissance is recognised.
Contemporaries like John Ireland and Gustav Holst, despite varied influences and often different styles, played an important part in the development of a recognisably English pastoral style.
Three aspects of English pastoralism: setting, language and sensibility. ‘Setting’, the specific location in which the composer has chosen to set a piece; ‘language’, the musical idiom, be it derived from English folksong, French impressionism or the German romantic tradition; ‘Sensibility’ is clearly the hardest to pin-down, but within it resides the pastoral ‘outlook’, the mood invoked by the music; what it sets up to desire or reject. Within each category, there seems to be an ideal, in that one can posit a ‘typical’ English pastoral piece of music as one set in the West of England, derived from the musical language of folk song and with a nostalgic, introspective sensibility. However, these categories allow a degree of flexibility in that a piece need not have a specified setting, or, if it does, its idiom need not be folk-song related. Thus Ireland’s piano miniature” Amberley Wild Brooks” and Vaughan Williams’s “Fifth Symphony” though disparate are of the English pastoral tradition.
Ireland’s music belongs to the school of ‘English Impressionism’. Having been steeped in German classics, especially Brahms, he was strongly influenced in his twenties and thirties by the music of Debussy, Ravel, and the early works of Stravinsky and Bartók. Contemporaries such as Vaughan Williams and Holst developed a language strongly characteristic of English folk song, Ireland developed a complex harmonic language like French and Russian. He was very influenced by poetry and his settings of such poets as A E Housman, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Masefield and Rupert Brooke are among the best known of his works. He was susceptible to the spirit of place. “Chelsea Reach” is a depiction in the form of a barcarolle of the great sweep of the Thames as it flows past the Houses of Parliament. He loved the Channel Islands but his main love was Sussex, a landscape of undulating downs and then isolated villages, including Amberley whose ‘Wild Brooks,’ streams coursing through the fields, inspired the most brilliant of his piano pieces.
Many contemporary composers are writing tonal, innovative, exciting and melodic music which spreads from the English tradition which is difficult to hear in concert yet is to good to be ignored. There are record labels releasing this like Naxos, Dutton, Lyritia, Hyperion, Chandos and they sell well. The BBC music magazine has a classified chart and they usually get in. But concerts are not put on because they are thought not to be popular but when they are they are enjoyed. When the BBC put on English music it sold out. The Gloucester Three Choirs in 2001 did an all English programme and it sold out!
This hidden treasure of English music is part of the revival of English culture and is being brought into the light by the English Music festival.
They cannot get funding from the Arts Council. The only political organisation to give support was the Campaign for an English Parliament and their name worried some sponsors who wanted it removed from the programme, for fear of political embarrassment. Several high-profile companies declined as they wanted to be associated with pop and rock. Some firms first pledged their support and then declined. The director would ideally like sponsors with faith in the project. They do have a number of minor sponsors whence they get a third of their income. The other two thirds come from ticket sales and trust funds, with the final portion from their friend’s scheme and donations. The Friends scheme is very important as it brings a regular income to enable her to plan forthcoming events and gives the satisfaction of seeing that they believe in what she is trying to do. The Friends get discounts. What is needed is helpers with stewarding, distributing information and programmes, publicity and fund raising and more sponsors and friends.
http://www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk/welcome.html
http://doughty.gdbtv.com/player.php?h=81cfcd06dcad85886946a2b7e29a891a
For records among others try -
http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/
http://www.chandos.net/
http://www.naxosaudiobooks.com/
www.duttonvocalion.co.uk
http://www.efdss.org/
She added: “This is not about making every audience completely representative but if we claim great things for our [cultural] sectors in terms of their power to bring people together, then we have a right to expect they will do that wherever they can.” She also praised other institutions for “creating the icons of a common culture that everybody can feel a part of” — such as The Angel of the North, the British Museum, the Eden Project in Cornwall and TV and radio shows “from Coronation Street to The Archers”. But she acknowledged that culture could also be divisive, citing the examples of Jerry Springer: the Opera, which Christians said was blasphemous. She also suggested that British citizenship ceremonies be held in historic buildings such as castles to help people to “associate their new citizenship with key cultural icons”. This is Cultural Marxism. It is culture as social engineering. The use of grants leads promoters and artists in a pre-planned official direction.
While our traditional culture is attacked Em Marshall is staging the second English Music Festival from the 23rd to the 27th of May 2008. People enjoy this music when they get the chance to see it performed and she is regularly approached about a work not heard live. Gustav Holst’s Walt Whitman had never been performed at a professional concert, only at amateur productions, before the first English Music Festival staged it.
The Festival is a cornucopia of English Classical music from Medieval to Contemporary. The main evening concerts will be at the medieval Abbey at Dorchester-on-Thames, several at Radley College Chapel, and All Saints Church, Sutton Courtenay. There will also be a concert at the Chapel of Keble College, Oxford University. Over the five days there will be fourteen concerts and recitals that give the audience the almost mystical experience of listening to performances of exquisite English music from the arc of the centuries, yet the focus is on the twentieth century and many overlooked pieces will be performed. It is reviving an important part of our culture.
The series opens with a major concert by the BBC Concert Orchestra of works including Holbrook’s Birds of Rhiannon, Rawsthorne’s Practical Cats and Mackenzie’s Benedictus and featuring music by Parry and Bantock. They will also bring many unjustly neglected pieces back to life. Other artists booked to appear include the Carducci Quartet, performing Vaughan Williams and Moeran String Quartets; Vox Musica, the Amaretti Orchestra, including Ifni’s Clarinet Concerto, Ireland and Elgar; Keble College Choir performing Sullivan’s Sacred Music; and Hilary Davan Wetton with the Milton Keynes City Orchestra and City of London Chorus doing Holst and Howells. There will be Elgar’s Banner of St.George and Dyson’s Agincourt, a concert of organ music, a concert of Arne and Linley. Early Music Solo Song and, for a lighter period, Mayerl with David Owen Norris give a broad look at the variety of our national musical inheritance. The conclusion is to be a “Grand Finale.” Philip Lane will be a composer featured, along with David Owen Norris, Paul Carr, and maybe Ron Corp and Matthew Curtis.
Yehudi Menhuin wrote to the Times in 1995, “English composers will not slavishly follow some arbitrary theory or construction, whether political or musical. They have kept their Englishness intact, whilst the mercantilistic world has gone all-American.”
Why is it neglected? Like other aspects of English culture it is the victim of a negative ideology that devalues it with pejorative labels like “elitist” or “narrow” but the labels do not fit reality. English music is not imitation but innovative and has developed significantly from the early twentieth century but is still rooted in the English tradition - it is tuneful, melodic, tonal and recognisably English. English Classical Music is hidden by a cloud of prejudice and ignorance from its rightful audience by being characterised as “elitist” or “quaint” when in fact it has the tonal qualities that people enjoyed before modernism set out to destroy them. It is a living, but obscured, tradition and often requested on Classic FM, whose “The Hall of Fame”, is the world's biggest annual survey of classical music tastes; The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams is the nation's favourite English work. It is one of the pieces which listeners ask to hear most and epitomises the English pastoral tradition.
Margaret Hodge’s statements are part of the Cultural Marxists cultural hegemony. It is based on Gramsci’s ideas to undermine the traditional nation through changing the culture. The function of Cultural Marxist ideological hegemony is to legitimise the power and status of the ruling “ideological caste” to which Ms.Hodge belongs, and to pathologise dissent and the traditional culture. It is an aspect of the developing totalitarian state which interferes in all aspects of our lives trying to mould us for the new utopia.. The old left aimed for utopia and used subversion but mainly economic and by attacking our industries through strikes. Cultural Marxists use the culture to subvert and deceive us by utilising Liberal concepts of justice, peace, rights and good will between all people to destroy our traditional ways, standards and laws, our history and heroes; every autonomous institution, set of historical associations - the new utopia will emerge from the ruins as if by magic. They see English culture as a major stumbling block and want to eradicate it.
In 2005 the Proms had a number of all-English programmes and all but one sold-out, whereas other non-English music programmes did not. The Gloucester 3 Choirs Festival in 2001 did a special Festival of only English music and sold out swiftly. The BBC Music Magazine has a Top 20 Best sellers list and there is some really interesting English music discs there, often by obscure composers.
Yet despite this noble heritage, much of this glorious music is overlooked. “English Music” festivals tend to either fail at the outset for lack of funds or become internationalised and absorbed into the Social Engineering Culture. The Cheltenham Festival was founded as “The Cheltenham Festival of British Music”, but went “international” and now stages the same as everywhere else.
Without renewal our culture would die and the Festival renews by commissioning works. An oratorio “Prayerbook”, written and performed specially for the first Festival by David Owen Norris was acclaimed by the audience. The Clarinet and viola heralding Vaughan Williams's Norfolk Rhapsody No 1 was a beautiful performance. (1906). A bracing work was ”Oration” by Britten's mentor, Frank Bridge. The haunting, cello concerto, is a passionate cry against the barbarity of the Great War and expresses the miseries of the Front. Julian Lloyd Webber was sympathetic to the solo line, as the cello strives to extricate a poignant lyricism from the tensions of the orchestral background. He returned for Holst’s seldom performed Invocation (1911).
It is usual to get a series of say Mahler, Brahms but rarely English Classical composers. Frederick Cliffe’s First Symphony of 1889, was only revived after 83 years' neglect. The Daily Telegraph of 22 April 1889, had published a review: “It may be doubted whether musical history can show on any of its pages the record of such an Opus. The symphony is a masterpiece, and the composer, one might think, feels terrified at his own success. For our own part, noting the imaginative power displayed in the work, the easy command of all resources, the beauty and freshness of the themes, and their brilliant development, we feel inclined to ask a question, propounded concerning another phenomenon "Whence has this man these things?” Mr Cliffe has by one effort passed from obscurity to fame, and must be regarded as a bright and shining star on the horizon of our English art.”'
Over a century later The Daily Telegraph of 26 April 2004 had a feature on John Foulds as the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra released their recording of “Dynamic Tryptich.” Conductor Sakari Oramo explained, Foulds composed "some of the most original music ever conceived". Malcolm MacDonald, editor of music magazine Tempo, believes: "There's no question he was a genius and one of the most significant English composers of the last century. MacDonald, found some scores in the British Library: "I got out a dozen pieces, and the first thing I opened was the Dynamic Triptych. I was blown away by it. This was music unlike any British composer of the time. I was amazed it was lying around, and no one was playing it. ”Foulds's daughter " took me to the garage, where there were two coffin-sized boxes full of sketches and manuscripts she's been left by her mother." Unfortunately, many of the manuscripts were damaged by rats and ants. In his book “Music Today” Foulds's, explained how, by strict diet and meditation, he had developed his clairvoyant and clairaudient abilities. Much of his music, he claimed, was dictated to him by spirits.”
In the Baroque period we produced composers of immense skill like Purcell, Byrd, Arne, Tallis and Blow. The period between Arne and Parry has been dismissed as a “musical Ice-Age” though we had Stainer, Wesley, Potter, Sterndale Bennett, Crotch, who were on a par with foreign contemporaries, but not progressive enough for international attention. In 1769 Englishman Philip Hayes, who built Oxford’s beautiful Holywell Music Room, composed the world’s first piano concerto! Some great composers died young: Edward Bache, composer of exquisite chamber works, died at 25, and Thomas Linley, died aged 22 in a boating accident in 1777, yet produced wonderful anthems, odes and oratorio, about one of which was written “Neither Purcell nor Mozart ever gave stronger proof of original genius than can be traced in this charming ode”.
Even during the ravages of Modernism in the twentieth century there was a renaissance of music in England of works of innovation, power, drama and beauty. Stanford and Parry were at the fount and in a Brahmsian style created English music equal to Brahms himself; Elgar continued the creation of an English style through merging Brahms and Wagner. Richard Strauss described Elgar as “the first Progressivist in English Music”, and Hans Richter told his orchestra of Elgar’s First, “Gentleman, now let us rehearse the greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest modern composer”! Others found inspiration abroad and incorporated the sounds into something uniquely “English”; Delius turned to the continent and Negro spirituals to develop a unique sound with lush, rich harmonies. Vaughan Williams returned to English roots in folk and Tudor to revive an English music, rebelling against the ubiquitous Teutonic schools. English solo song grew from parlour song and folk roots into a beautiful, high-art form; at the other end of the scale, England had answers to Wagner in the music of Bantock and Holbrooke, “the Cockney Wagner”, composers of long, deeply romantic, intense music – to rival Wagner’s Ring, and epic orchestral works. Writing about Holbrooke’s The Raven, Irish composer Hamilton Harty said “there is beautiful and impressive music in that work, and, as I told the orchestra, it is so infinitely superior to the foreign muck with which we are deluged nowadays!” Other composers of this period to listen to include Bridge, Bowen, Moeran, Finzi, Sainton, Bainton, Mackenzie, Gibbs, Berners, Dyson, Bax, Bliss, Ireland, Lambert, Boughton, Coles, Coleridge Taylor, Dunhill, Foulds, Dale, Goossens, William Lloyd Webber, MacCunn, Armstrong, Harty, Friskin, McEwen, Phillips, Scott, Rawsthorne, Rubbra, Hadley and Howells. These, and many more, are known by a small corpus of recorded works which show great individuality, inspiration, and visionary orchestral confidence.
England is a nation whose music and literature are drawn from the landscape, from rolling hills to the desolation of mud flats and moors. Seascapes too: an island nation, we are drawn to the wildness and openness of the sea. We have not the sublimity of the Alps nor the majestic sweeps of the Tabernas desert, the spectacular fjords of Norway nor the thick dense forests of Germany; but, for centuries, artists, poets and composers have been inspired by the picturesque hues and shades in our “blue remembered hills”, the nuances of light-beams in enchanting woods, the changes of seasons , inconstant weather, the dramatic sweeps of the lakes and dales that inspired Wordsworth.
Yehudi Menhuin, wrote: “I am drawn to English music because I love the way it reflects the climate and the vegetation which know no sharp edges, no definitive demarcation, where different hues of green melt into each other and where the line between sea and land is always joined and changing, sometimes gradually, sometime dramatically. The music … is a very human music, not given to shattering utterances, to pronouncements of right or wrong, not to abstract intellectual processes, to human emotion in the abstract, but to a single man’s experience of today as related to a particular place…”
In 1927, Holst wrote incidental music to a mystery play The Coming of Christ which has never been recorded. As I mentioned, Cliffe’s first symphony, an acclaimed masterpiece, has not had a professional public performance for over 90 years. His second symphony has not been published; none of the symphonies by Walford Davies, Coleridge Taylor and Somervell are available, nor is Bowen’s first symphony which was so popular that The Times devoted a whole column to analysing it; Delius’ opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, considered by many the first great modern English opera, has not been performed at either the Royal Opera House or English National Opera for over half a century.
Contemporary artists have similar repertoires and only a small number of works are considered “acceptable.” Concert mangers are not prepared to take risks so programme what they know or popular classics for government funding. A programme of Brahms, Tchaikovsky or Verdi is familiar and safe but to present say, Moeran, Gibbs and Farrar a risk. English music is not fashionable. It is not politically correct and managers hesitate to promote anything English, as if inimical to other cultures. In an era of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” English culture is shunned. It is not the done thing to seem nationalistic by celebrating our traditions: the ending of Elgar’s Caractacus is stigmatised because it points forward to a great British Empire! We are supposed to be ashamed of our culture and ignore it or apologise. Composers of the early twentieth century are dismissed as the “English pastoral composers," lesser musicians whose works are put below the Germanic, Russian, or Scandinavian schools. But the pastoral tradition has always inspired composers and poets.
The term ‘pastoral’ is broad and its meaning of ‘rural’ and ‘innocence’, was used by Classical and Christian artists with its associations of Eden, Arcadia or a ‘Golden Age’, and nostalgia for beauty and sublimity lost through the Fall or the degeneration of Man. Pastoral goes to the roots of our culture: In the ninth century BC, Hesiod contemplated the ages of mankind from a Golden Age to his own ‘Iron Age’. Six centuries later, the pastoral was a literary form in the Idylls of Theocritus, a tradition Virgil built upon in his Eclogues two centuries later. In Christianity the Garden of Eden provided an equivalent to the Arcadia of Classical poets, and the concept of the Fall established the nostalgic pastoral inclination as a natural human impulse. For the Romantic poets, witnessing the beginning of the industrial revolution, the city was a consequence of the Fall and the contrast with nature and a new interest in childhood enabled them to draw a parallel between humankind’s degeneration or Fall from Eden and a child’s loss of innocence as he enters adulthood.
It is often based in a particular location or built from folk song-like melodies - Williams’ three Norfolk Rhapsodies (1905-07), and In the Fen Country (1904); Holst’s A Somerset Rhapsody (1906-7); Butterworth’s Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad (1912), his Two English Idylls (1911) and The Banks of Green Willow (1913); and Finzi’s A Severn Rhapsody (1923). The sleeve notes to a recording of A Severn Rhapsody read: ‘The music gently evokes the mood of the English countryside and the meandering river’. A pastoral characteristic, reflective of rural ‘simplicity’. These works bespeak a retreat from the care, complexity, or harshness of society. English classical music has its roots in the country; is rooted in our landscape but not necessarily a picturesque one. Gustav Holst was walking in the desolate Dorsetshire country between Wool and Bere Regis in 1926 when visited by inspiration and he started Egdon Heath, also prompted by the opening chapter of Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native. The music is stark and austere. As for elitism anyone can go to these concerts without passing a test. They just have to like the music. Furthermore, composers like Holst wrote music for brass bands. “The Moorside Suite” was used in the brass band competition at the Crystal Palace in 1928 which was won by the Black Dyke Mills Band.
Most works in the English pastoral tradition are not large-scale works but representative of the pastoral genre, though degree of intersection with other forms and genres like the ‘rhapsody’ is characteristic. Some English composers are known as a pastoral ‘school,’ the creative background to both composition and reception, and that their music is so closely bound to landscapes to which they regularly returned. The English pastoral style shares aspects of the pastoral topic of European Classical and Romantic music, but is particularly associated with the musical language of folk song. It is for this reason that Elgar,
Parry and Stanford had individual voices yet developed their style from the German musical idiom but are often excluded from the pastoral canon though their importance to the English Musical Renaissance is recognised.
Contemporaries like John Ireland and Gustav Holst, despite varied influences and often different styles, played an important part in the development of a recognisably English pastoral style.
Three aspects of English pastoralism: setting, language and sensibility. ‘Setting’, the specific location in which the composer has chosen to set a piece; ‘language’, the musical idiom, be it derived from English folksong, French impressionism or the German romantic tradition; ‘Sensibility’ is clearly the hardest to pin-down, but within it resides the pastoral ‘outlook’, the mood invoked by the music; what it sets up to desire or reject. Within each category, there seems to be an ideal, in that one can posit a ‘typical’ English pastoral piece of music as one set in the West of England, derived from the musical language of folk song and with a nostalgic, introspective sensibility. However, these categories allow a degree of flexibility in that a piece need not have a specified setting, or, if it does, its idiom need not be folk-song related. Thus Ireland’s piano miniature” Amberley Wild Brooks” and Vaughan Williams’s “Fifth Symphony” though disparate are of the English pastoral tradition.
Ireland’s music belongs to the school of ‘English Impressionism’. Having been steeped in German classics, especially Brahms, he was strongly influenced in his twenties and thirties by the music of Debussy, Ravel, and the early works of Stravinsky and Bartók. Contemporaries such as Vaughan Williams and Holst developed a language strongly characteristic of English folk song, Ireland developed a complex harmonic language like French and Russian. He was very influenced by poetry and his settings of such poets as A E Housman, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Masefield and Rupert Brooke are among the best known of his works. He was susceptible to the spirit of place. “Chelsea Reach” is a depiction in the form of a barcarolle of the great sweep of the Thames as it flows past the Houses of Parliament. He loved the Channel Islands but his main love was Sussex, a landscape of undulating downs and then isolated villages, including Amberley whose ‘Wild Brooks,’ streams coursing through the fields, inspired the most brilliant of his piano pieces.
Many contemporary composers are writing tonal, innovative, exciting and melodic music which spreads from the English tradition which is difficult to hear in concert yet is to good to be ignored. There are record labels releasing this like Naxos, Dutton, Lyritia, Hyperion, Chandos and they sell well. The BBC music magazine has a classified chart and they usually get in. But concerts are not put on because they are thought not to be popular but when they are they are enjoyed. When the BBC put on English music it sold out. The Gloucester Three Choirs in 2001 did an all English programme and it sold out!
This hidden treasure of English music is part of the revival of English culture and is being brought into the light by the English Music festival.
They cannot get funding from the Arts Council. The only political organisation to give support was the Campaign for an English Parliament and their name worried some sponsors who wanted it removed from the programme, for fear of political embarrassment. Several high-profile companies declined as they wanted to be associated with pop and rock. Some firms first pledged their support and then declined. The director would ideally like sponsors with faith in the project. They do have a number of minor sponsors whence they get a third of their income. The other two thirds come from ticket sales and trust funds, with the final portion from their friend’s scheme and donations. The Friends scheme is very important as it brings a regular income to enable her to plan forthcoming events and gives the satisfaction of seeing that they believe in what she is trying to do. The Friends get discounts. What is needed is helpers with stewarding, distributing information and programmes, publicity and fund raising and more sponsors and friends.
http://www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk/welcome.html
http://doughty.gdbtv.com/player.php?h=81cfcd06dcad85886946a2b7e29a891a
For records among others try -
http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/
http://www.chandos.net/
http://www.naxosaudiobooks.com/
www.duttonvocalion.co.uk
http://www.efdss.org/
Friday, 22 February 2008
The Rustle of Spring…
Stuart Millson enjoys some seasonal stirrings from the world of classical music
After the deprivations and gloom of January and February, the time has now come for the rediscovery of mild breezes (rather than freezing winds!) and the warm rays of the sun. Music can help us along the way, especially with such famous works as the piano piece, The Rustle of Spring – once a popular item in salons and on the wireless. This lyrical impression for the piano was written by the Norwegian composer, Christian Sinding (1856-1941), and to my ears is just as evocative as Vivaldi’s more well-known “Spring” from his evergreen and ever-popular The Four Seasons.
On the downland
As I have just mentioned, Sinding died in 1941 – the same year in which Frank Bridge, an English composer (and teacher of the young Benjamin Britten) left this life. Spring was a particular inspiration to Bridge (as it was to his young protégé), and in the 1920s the senior composer embarked upon a breezy, involved orchestral work whose working title was “On Friston Down”. Bridge later changed the name of his ambitious piece to Enter Spring – and in its 25-minute span, the composer manages to evoke all the sights, sounds and feeling of a day in early March or April, including an exquisite woodwind passage suggestive of birdsong.
Other native composers to have responded to springtime include Ernest Farrar – a man born in the then small town of Lewisham in 1885, but who met a tragic end when serving on the Western Front in 1918. Farrar’s music has only recently been rediscovered and his creation of a May morning in English Pastoral Impressions conjures a radiant daybreak, long before the horrors of mechanised warfare intruded and shattered the idyllic England of those far-off days. Although a non-combatant, Frank Bridge felt the pain of the war very acutely, and dedicated his strange, brooding orchestral work There is a willow grows aslant a brook to Ernest Farrar.
An impression of time and place
Another lesser-known English composer was John Foulds – a truly avant-garde figure in his day – who, after the First World War, composed a huge World Requiem designed in its vastness to transmit a sense of peace and reconciliation to the whole of humanity. Foulds later made his home in India, inspired by Eastern philosophy and attitudes, but he did pay tribute in music to his native country. One of Foulds’s “Impressions of Time and Place” is entitled simply – April, England – a fervent, noble and deeply beautiful work for large orchestra, which seems to contain its own “rustle of spring”.
Spring Symphony
Earlier on, I made reference to Benjamin Britten. This famous musician, founder of the post-war Aldeburgh Festival, and our country’s greatest operatic composer since Henry Purcell in the 17th century, took to the theme of winter’s disappearance with great relish. Britten loved his native Suffolk, and it is said that whilst driving through the county on a particularly fine morning at the beginning of the year – with blossom and country houses coming into their own – the works of the great Elizabethan poets came to mind.
His Spring Symphony of 1949 was the result – a paean to Nature and the sun for three soloists, a boys’ choir, a large symphony chorus, and symphony orchestra – complete with a cow’s horn, which is blown at the work’s conclusion in a spectacular Mayday procession. Originally commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, this cornucopia of operatic-like choruses, yet combined with the more intimate spirit of an English song-cycle, received its first performance before a Dutch audience, under the baton of Eduard van Beinum. One of the poets set by the composer was Richard Barnfield (1574-1627). The tenor soloist (with harp accompaniment) sings:
And when it pleaseth thee to walke abroad
Abroad into the fields to take fresh ayre,
The meades with Flora’s treasure should be strowde,
The mantled meaddowes, and the fields so fayre.
Britten had a remarkable capacity to marry words to music, and his choice here is truly “open-air” and outdoor in its swiftness and sense of freedom.
Violent reaction
Finally, we can turn to Russia for a mighty bear-hug to embrace the new season. Rachmaninov’s cantata Spring seems to rush forward with the strength of a spring torrent; Glazunov’s version of the progress toward summer is balletic and carefree, gentle and carefully painted with delicate orchestral colour; but Stravinsky’s shattering The Rite of Spring brings to life a pagan world – an eruption of nature and of primitive human celebration. Stravinsky claimed that the inspiration for his Rite came from a two-hour period in the Russian countryside in which he actually experienced the very moment of spring’s arrival.
At the work’s first performance in Paris in the May of 1913, a riot ensued – so jagged and relentless was this astonishing composition that it prompted a violent reaction from some sections of the audience. Stravinsky had, at a stroke, moved music into a new era and sound-world, whose motion and gravity would pull art toward an abstract and atonal future – the legacy of men in our own era such as Pierre Boulez and his disciples. But could Stravinsky have sensed the violence that was to engulf Europe a year later; the violence that was to destroy (among many millions of others) the life of his fellow-composer, Ernest Farrar in a blasted war-scape of trenches and hollows from which all Nature had been driven?
Restlessness and rediscovery
Stravinsky, of course, would scarcely (if at all) have known of Farrar or his music, and for most of the 20th-century it seemed that Stravinsky’s “violence” had triumphed over the more remote pastoral visions from the provinces of England. Could it be, though, that the restlessness and anxiety of the old century has given way to a desire for simplicity and nearness to the soil, which is somehow represented by the rediscovery of Farrar and Foulds?
Bridge, Farrar, Stravinsky, Sinding, Britten, Vivaldi – centuries of music and completely different musical voices, but with one thing in common: an emotional response of the deepest kind to Nature, to home-landscapes and the universal regenerative powers of the season.
After the deprivations and gloom of January and February, the time has now come for the rediscovery of mild breezes (rather than freezing winds!) and the warm rays of the sun. Music can help us along the way, especially with such famous works as the piano piece, The Rustle of Spring – once a popular item in salons and on the wireless. This lyrical impression for the piano was written by the Norwegian composer, Christian Sinding (1856-1941), and to my ears is just as evocative as Vivaldi’s more well-known “Spring” from his evergreen and ever-popular The Four Seasons.
On the downland
As I have just mentioned, Sinding died in 1941 – the same year in which Frank Bridge, an English composer (and teacher of the young Benjamin Britten) left this life. Spring was a particular inspiration to Bridge (as it was to his young protégé), and in the 1920s the senior composer embarked upon a breezy, involved orchestral work whose working title was “On Friston Down”. Bridge later changed the name of his ambitious piece to Enter Spring – and in its 25-minute span, the composer manages to evoke all the sights, sounds and feeling of a day in early March or April, including an exquisite woodwind passage suggestive of birdsong.
Other native composers to have responded to springtime include Ernest Farrar – a man born in the then small town of Lewisham in 1885, but who met a tragic end when serving on the Western Front in 1918. Farrar’s music has only recently been rediscovered and his creation of a May morning in English Pastoral Impressions conjures a radiant daybreak, long before the horrors of mechanised warfare intruded and shattered the idyllic England of those far-off days. Although a non-combatant, Frank Bridge felt the pain of the war very acutely, and dedicated his strange, brooding orchestral work There is a willow grows aslant a brook to Ernest Farrar.
An impression of time and place
Another lesser-known English composer was John Foulds – a truly avant-garde figure in his day – who, after the First World War, composed a huge World Requiem designed in its vastness to transmit a sense of peace and reconciliation to the whole of humanity. Foulds later made his home in India, inspired by Eastern philosophy and attitudes, but he did pay tribute in music to his native country. One of Foulds’s “Impressions of Time and Place” is entitled simply – April, England – a fervent, noble and deeply beautiful work for large orchestra, which seems to contain its own “rustle of spring”.
Spring Symphony
Earlier on, I made reference to Benjamin Britten. This famous musician, founder of the post-war Aldeburgh Festival, and our country’s greatest operatic composer since Henry Purcell in the 17th century, took to the theme of winter’s disappearance with great relish. Britten loved his native Suffolk, and it is said that whilst driving through the county on a particularly fine morning at the beginning of the year – with blossom and country houses coming into their own – the works of the great Elizabethan poets came to mind.
His Spring Symphony of 1949 was the result – a paean to Nature and the sun for three soloists, a boys’ choir, a large symphony chorus, and symphony orchestra – complete with a cow’s horn, which is blown at the work’s conclusion in a spectacular Mayday procession. Originally commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, this cornucopia of operatic-like choruses, yet combined with the more intimate spirit of an English song-cycle, received its first performance before a Dutch audience, under the baton of Eduard van Beinum. One of the poets set by the composer was Richard Barnfield (1574-1627). The tenor soloist (with harp accompaniment) sings:
And when it pleaseth thee to walke abroad
Abroad into the fields to take fresh ayre,
The meades with Flora’s treasure should be strowde,
The mantled meaddowes, and the fields so fayre.
Britten had a remarkable capacity to marry words to music, and his choice here is truly “open-air” and outdoor in its swiftness and sense of freedom.
Violent reaction
Finally, we can turn to Russia for a mighty bear-hug to embrace the new season. Rachmaninov’s cantata Spring seems to rush forward with the strength of a spring torrent; Glazunov’s version of the progress toward summer is balletic and carefree, gentle and carefully painted with delicate orchestral colour; but Stravinsky’s shattering The Rite of Spring brings to life a pagan world – an eruption of nature and of primitive human celebration. Stravinsky claimed that the inspiration for his Rite came from a two-hour period in the Russian countryside in which he actually experienced the very moment of spring’s arrival.
At the work’s first performance in Paris in the May of 1913, a riot ensued – so jagged and relentless was this astonishing composition that it prompted a violent reaction from some sections of the audience. Stravinsky had, at a stroke, moved music into a new era and sound-world, whose motion and gravity would pull art toward an abstract and atonal future – the legacy of men in our own era such as Pierre Boulez and his disciples. But could Stravinsky have sensed the violence that was to engulf Europe a year later; the violence that was to destroy (among many millions of others) the life of his fellow-composer, Ernest Farrar in a blasted war-scape of trenches and hollows from which all Nature had been driven?
Restlessness and rediscovery
Stravinsky, of course, would scarcely (if at all) have known of Farrar or his music, and for most of the 20th-century it seemed that Stravinsky’s “violence” had triumphed over the more remote pastoral visions from the provinces of England. Could it be, though, that the restlessness and anxiety of the old century has given way to a desire for simplicity and nearness to the soil, which is somehow represented by the rediscovery of Farrar and Foulds?
Bridge, Farrar, Stravinsky, Sinding, Britten, Vivaldi – centuries of music and completely different musical voices, but with one thing in common: an emotional response of the deepest kind to Nature, to home-landscapes and the universal regenerative powers of the season.
Sunday, 3 February 2008
The State Persecution of Thought Criminals
Robin Page, former presenter of television’s “One Man and His Dog”, a farmer, columnist for The Daily Telegraph, and the chairman of the Countryside Restoration Trust, won £2,000 compensation for being wrongly arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred. He allegedly made a racist remark at a country fair in 2002 which led to him being held in a police cell and fought a five-year, one-man campaign to clear his name. He used the Data Protection Act and obtained official documents which showed that there had been no grounds for prosecution. "I believe I have scored a significant victory over the ludicrous and sinister politically-correct 'hate crime' culture that is currently doing so much to prevent free speech in this country," he said.
His humorous comments at a country fair in September 2002 led to his persecution by the police. To gain the attention of the audience at Frampton-upon-Severn, Gloucestershire, he began in a "light-hearted fashion". "If you are a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you." A complaint was later received by police, and another person wrote to say he disagreed with Mr.Page’s remarks. He was arrested the following month, and then five months later was contacted at his farm in Cambridgeshire and asked by two officers from Gloucestershire to attend an interview at a police station. At the station he declined to answer questions without a lawyer and was arrested. He was put in a cell and told that he would have to stay overnight if he wished to wait for his solicitor, but after 40 minutes agreed to be interviewed without legal representation.
Mr Page said: "I was told I had committed a 'hate crime', interviewed under caution and given police bail." The BBC claimed that he had been arrested for a "race speech" and he felt the incident was potentially damaging to him professionally and as a district councillor for 30 years. He was neither charged nor given an explanation. Under Freedom of Information disclosures he discovered that the Attorney General had given the opinion "no crime committed". His name was secretly put on a "Homo-phobic Incidents Register". He was due to go to on a journalistic trip to Kenya and requested a change of bail renewal date, and in an internal email from the arresting officer the sergeant wrote: "Let's hope he gets eaten by a crocodile."
Mr Page said: "Thank goodness for the Data Protection Act and my advice to anybody who feels that they have been stitched up is to use the Act to get to the real facts. “It is absolutely outrageous. In my view it clearly shows that I was arrested for political reasons simply because my views on the countryside were not appreciated. I was not guilty of any crime."(1)
What has reduced a Liberal Democracy to a police state like Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China without people objecting? Cultural Marxism or Political Correctness is a totalitarian ideology that intimidates people into thinking the correct thing and extends into every aspect of life because every part of life is deemed political. It replaced Liberalism by using a similar vocabulary but with different intentions: individual rights were replaced by group rights and the multi-racial belief in equal treatment for racial groups was replaced by preferential treatment for all ethnic groups over whites. Cultural Marxism took over with the New Left in the 1960.s to 70.s. It was influenced by the Frankfurt School and European thinkers like Foucault; and facilitated in Britain by academics like E.P.Thompson and Raymond Williams and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins who introduced Race Laws and the Soviet style agency of Inquisition, the Commission For Racial Equality. A main intention of Trotskyists and The Anti Nazi League in the 60.s and 70.s was to “change attitudes.” Cultural Marxists seek scapegoats to blame when things do not work to their plan. They de-humanise their scapegoats and present a distorted view of what they said to make the persecution seem like justifiable indignation. The thoughts and meanings of the recalcitrant are slotted into a pre-existing ideology which uses them as examples of wrong thinking. The victims are modern outlaws and have no rights and can be spoken of as the guardians of the new morality see fit. This is political persecution because it is only “white” people who express certain views that are targeted for public vilification, though anti-Semitism is coming back amongst the Cultural Marxists who are trying to form an axis with Muslims in the West.
The Cultural Marxists are an “Ideological Caste” and membership depends not on blood or birth, nor even class, but holding the right opinions; to succeed in life one has to conform to their ideology, keep your views secret or be expelled from the “Caste” as the Conservative Party did the Monday Club to ensure thy did not impede its transformation into a vehicle of Cultural Marxism like the other two parties. The Personal qualities of the persecuted are ignored and the public shown a one-dimensional aspect - Racist, Hater, Zenophobe etc. This justifies the establishment saying and doing anything and feeling morally superior about it.
There is constant social engineering to mould everyone for utopia. A television programme “Gypsy Wars” contrasted a local woman and tinkers who had invaded her land reversing the roles as we experience them. They think our traditional view of the world is pathological until they correct it for us. They show us or a representative, in the role of what they think are our stereotypes - we are cast as the tinkers - to mould our views and change our attitudes. Of the Gypsies there were no young men shown, because they would be aggressive and they do not want to show them as a threat; village life was not shown because that is appealing and viewers would sympathise with the woman. The woman was selected because she is not typical of rural people but a bit eccentric and could be set up as the aggressor when she was the victim. This is Television re-structuring our thoughts in accordance with their ideology. It is Frankfurt School television. For years vacancies in television were only advertised in the Guardian to filter out the applicants with the wrong attitude. (2)
The “Caste” can not meet the arguments so they discredit people. Dr.James Watson 79-year-old geneticist who, with Francis Crick, had discovered the structure of DNA, who is regarded as one of the great scientists of his time, was persecuted for telling the Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade. The British establishments’ agency of Inquistion the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks " in full". Politicians moved in to persecute him: 'It is a shame that a man with a record of scientific distinction should see his work overshadowed by his own irrational prejudices,' said David Lammy, the Skills Minister. London mayor Ken Livingstone: 'Such ignorant comments...are utterly offensive and give succour to the most backward in our society.' The Science Museum cancelled a sell-out meeting it had planned to hold to honour 79-year-old Watson on the grounds that his remarks had gone 'beyond the point of acceptable debate'. Several other centres scheduled to host his talks followed suit. What a scientific argument! His employers, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island suspended him as chancellor. (3) However, prominent scientist Richard Dawkins saw the real issue: “What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant "thought police", of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation.”
Celebrity Jade Goody had the wrong attitude to Indian film star, Shilpa Shetty in “Celebrity Big Brother.” The Daily Telegraph showed the three “Racists” looking common while Shilpa was shown at prayer, elegant in a Sari and looking sidelong. The programme is based on getting an assortment of characters into a house and titillating the viewers to keep the viewing figures up. Bullying and personality clashes are the attraction. But Jade, Daniella and Jo had the wrong sort of personality clash with Shilpa and had to be excoriated to cow down other people. Forcing Jade to keep apologising and to confess publicly that she is disgusted with herself is our cultural Marxist rulers version of a Soviet show trial. She had to be broken in public, made to repent and show abject contrition. Jade has some Afro-Caribbean ancestory and an honest person would look for a cause other than racism like class envy or bad manners, but there is an ideology at work which imposes the same explanation on different situations - white racism. (4)
The law introduced persecution in the case against working class lads from Notting Hill after the race battles of August 1958. In the Commons debate a local Labour M.P. Frank Tomney made one of the most honourable and heroic speeches ever in the House of Commons in defence of his young constituents which shows how the police and lawyers had framed them. They had no rights. Here is a precise: “Nine young men were arrested. No one in the constituency takes the view that what they did was not severely wrong, but the sentences of 4 years imprisonment for boys of 17 - even coloured people are going round organizing petitions on their behalf. I wrote to the Home Secretary asking him to see me about this but he declined as it is sub judice. The case was subject to appeal a week ago and the sentences confirmed. I made sure –none of these boys had a previous conviction. “When people read about comparable cases and find variations in the sentences they come to think that our law does not provide justice. In one case of alleged rioting which concerned coloured people, one man was sentenced to prison for a year and others were fined. The man who was sentenced to a year had a former conviction in 1948 for shooting a policeman which is a crime with intent to kill. Yet these boys with no convictions got 4 years. “I have here a letter from the Union of Post Office workers about a boy from Ellingham Road. It tells of his having just returned from serving in Cyprus yet he was taken from his bed at 2.a.m. and charged with rioting. He only pleaded guilty because he was foolishly advised to. Contrary to the bias of police evidence, he was in possession of no weapon, though he admits to being an occupant in the car that toured the district shouting slogans. A petition to me is in responsible language and from people I have known for nine years” (5)
The 1964 election in Smethwick shows where the persecutions can lead. An offensive slogan had been used during the election campaign and posted on walls “If you want a N***** for a neighbour, vote Labour”. Harold Wilson attributed this to Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths, when being interviewed by Robin Day on Panorama of 9th March 1964. After the Election, now Prime Minister, Wilson broke from his address on the Queens speech to insult the victorious Griffiths by calling him a “Parliamentary Leper”, who would be shunned in the House. This breached the convention that new members be protected until after their Maiden speech. On October the 5th just two weeks before polling Griffiths was denounced in the Birmingham Post, and the Times whose Midland correspondent wrote, ”It is abhorrent to all Conservatives and officials of stature to whom I have talked.” But he did not say to whom he had talked. He headed his column of the 12th, “Vile –its all in Black and White.” As the election result was announced on October the 16th Socialists made Nazi salutes and the Marxist Bishop of Southwark, called the electorate “unchristian”, and the Bishop of Chelmsford attacked local voters. This election was a model of democracy. A local man fighting on a local issue was elected in a fair election by local people but these unelected Bishops who lived far away insulted them on a priori ideological grounds. The state broadcaster the BBC took American Black Power leader Malcolm X to Smethwick in February 1965 for current affairs programme “Tonight”. He told the assembled world’s media,” I have come here because I am disturbed by reports that coloured people in Smethwick are being badly treated. I have heard they are being treated as the Jews under Hitler. I would not wait for the Fascist element in Smethwick to erect gas ovens.” That was what the BBC had told him! They denied having taken him there but Mayor C.V.Williamse investigated: “I was most amazed at the finesse shown by the BBC. I was told the car was not a BBC car but it was owned by one of the directors.” Malcolm X told the Times that the BBC had taken him. This led to a time bomb was planted outside Mr.Griffiths’ home on 26th October 1965. The police thought it the work of experts. (6)
The persecution in 1984 of Ray Honeyford a head teacher at Manningham middle school in Bradford shows the depths of intolerance for those who diverge even slightly from the orthodoxy because Mr.Honeyford supported Multi-Racialism but warned of Multi- Culturalism. The local education authority tried to have him removed from his school, and when he wrote about his efforts in the Salisbury Review he was de-humanised by the media, had a “rent a mob” screaming ‘Racist’ outside the school gates, the local education authority sent a psychiatrist to see him, the Department for Education had Helena Kennedy QC subject him to an Inquisition and school inspectors persecuted him. He had to retire at 52! The dangers of multi-culturalism are now widely accepted even by Trevor Phillips of the Human Rights Commission. (7)
In 1991 Cambridge don Dr.John Casey was picked out for an erudite article in the Salisbury Review which concluded that voluntary repatriation could encourage people to
try to drive immigrants out so the Government should adopt compulsory repatriation. The argument involved quoting Edmund Burke’s definition society as” a partnership not only between those who are living and those who are dead, but between those who are living and those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The address appeared in the first issue of the Salisbury Reviewin 1982 but it was only in 1991 when a student found it by accident that the persecution was unleashed. His English Literature lectures were boycotted by students, Trotskyists demonstrated, Marxist Lecturer Terry Eagleton held rival lectures and the Sunday Times of 1/12/1991 printed a picture which made him look like a wizened crow. These actions are always of a mass of people turned onto one person!(8)
In May 2002 a Tory councillor was persecuted by a Government minister. Professor Geoffrey Samspon's website stated, 'There is overwhelming scientific evidence that races differ to some extent in their average intelligence levels - yellow-skinned Orientals tend to be rather brighter than whites, negroes tend to be rather less bright.” Government minister Peter Hain, a founder member of the Anti Nazi League, raved on Breakfast with Frost, “Sampson is proud to be racist”. Prof. Sampson wasgiven right to reply on Radio 4’s Today programme which is heard less than television. He explained Hain’s statement was untrue and “ as far as I am concerned it would be daft to be proud of racism — what is there to be proud of?” But this was ignored in subsequent TV news broadcasts, which kept repeating Hain’s distortion. Prof. Sampson recalls, “many commentators hostile to me seemed to assume that scientists who explain the roots of racial feelings must be sinister Ku Klux Klan types. That is virtually the reverse of the truth.” Special Branch warned him he was a marked man and advised him on safety precautions to reduce the risk of harm to him or his family. He was advised to look under his car before driving to check that nothing was attached - the result of a Labour government minister publicly persecuting him. (9)
In August 2005 Prof. Andrew Fraser was retired by Macquarrie University, Sydney, Australia, where he was Associate Professor in the Department of Public Law. He responded to a newspaper headline that quoted a 3 year-old Sudanese girl, “Now my mum and Dad are Aussies just like me” by letter, ”Experience practically everywhere in the world tells us that an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a wide-range of other social problems. He added that they are expected to acquiesce in the erosion of Australia’s national identity.” He also warned of the “rising Asian ruling class.” He was invited to submit an article to the Deakin University Law Review. Entitled “Rethinking the White Australia Policy” it was reviewed and accepted for publication until journalists and a lawyer acting for the “Sudanese Community” objected, then the Vice-Chancellor of Deakin University directed them not to publish it. Prof. Fraser makes the point that when he taught at Macquarrie in the 70’s there had been attempts to silence visiting professor Hans Eysenk but that was by the students not the authorities. Sydney Morning Herald columnist Michael Duffy pointed out “That generation of students are now the authorities.”
They suspended Professor Fraser because they thought his views on race would influence his course, American Constitutional History. Usually retired academics who plan to research obtain an Honorary Associate and can use the university library, but Prof.Fraser was refused this, for his book: “Anglophobia: Its Causes and Cure”. He did not deserve consideration now he was de-humanised and labelled ”racist.” That vindictiveness is another spite in a year-long campaign of discrimination by the University against him. (10)
In April 2006, Leeds university authorities subjected Dr.Frank Ellis to an Inquisition after he had an interview published in “Leeds Student.” Dr.Ellis was sought out for the interview with political bias in mind because of his “peculiar and extreme views.” He and his interviewer ranged over many topics but what ignited prejudice against him were his remarks that the average black has a lower IQ than the average white or Asian; that he believed we need to introduce a policy of humane repatriation. There were the usual demonstrations by Unite Against Fascism, or what legendary Daily Telegraph columnist Michael Wharton aka Peter Simple dubbed “Rent a mob.” The Universities decision was purely to persecute a man for holding the wrong opinion: he treated his students fairly and impartially as the interviewer acknowledged Dr.Ellis’s “excellent rapport with his students and colleagues.” Further, Leeds have a system to prevent unfair marking as the candidates paper is anonymous and each is marked by 3 different tutors. He was investigated by the West Yorkshire police for incitement to racial hatred. So what is the problem? Dr.Ellis was not disciplined for his conduct towards his students, which was exemplary, but persecuted for not expressing the right thoughts on ethnicity. In an interview on Talk Sport Ian Collins screamed at Ellis, ”Your’e mad!” (11)
Robert Henderson was persecuted in July 1995, for an article in Wisden Cricket Monthly. He wrote that a reason for the bad performances of England’s cricket team was the mix of foreign and native players. However talented they lack the commitment to their side on which team success depends. He explains: “The common experience of mixed groups makes it immensely difficult to accept that a changing room comprised of say six Englishmen, two West Indians, two Southern Africans and a New Zealander is going to develop the same camaraderie as eleven unequivocal Englishmen.” This was not racism as his example had two blacks and five people who are not English, three of whom are certainly white. The argument seems to have been accepted by other cricket writers like David Firth, Editor of Wisden and Matthew Engel, editor of the associated Wisden Cricketers' Almanac and columnist for The Guardian. The media held an Inquisition. The journalists and public figures who denounced him did not attack what he had actually written but responded out of ideological correctness against what they thought his views were. Two of the black players, Devon Malcolm and Philip De Freitas, sued Wisden for libel but they did not him which is unusual because the author is usually included in the suit. He had made it clear that he would fight any libel action all the way in the courts. Malcolm and De Freitas had sought the advice of the Professional Cricketer's Association who took counsel's opinion which was that no libel existed. The magazine’s proprietor Paul Getty almost definitely ordered the settlement to avoid social embarrassment.
Telegraph newspapers published clues to his home address and refused to print an unedited reply. He was then turned on by Wisden whose following issue had five pages of vitriolic attack on him even though they printed the original article. Editor Mr.Firth would not print a reply.
Mr Henderson contacted his M.P. Frank Dobson to complain of the way the media had treated him, and asked for an intervention on his behalf. Mr Dobson gave a vague promise,
but did not act even though it was his paid duty as his elected representative to raise this in the House of Commons. Later, in his 1997 General Election leaflets Dobson claimed “over the past 17 years I've tried my best to represent our area in Parliament.” On 3rd August 1995, Mr Henderson received a letter from the black Labour politician Diane Abbott, telling him he had "no appreciation of acceptable terminology. As an ex-journalist, and someone who still dabbles, I believe that we have a duty to write on subjects we know about.” Later Ms Abbott objected to "blue-eyed blonde" nurses from Finland tending coloured patients in her East London constituency!
Mr Henderson wrote to Tony Blair about Mr.Dobson and for defence against the media corruption, “You have made a great thing of moral behaviour in politics, Mr Blair. If that means anything you will help me to obtain a fair hearing, both in terms of natural justice and common equity. If you fail to do this, we shall know exactly what a Blair government will be, one based on the primitive idea that justice is for one's political friends and injustice for one's political enemies.”
Mr Henderson wrote to Blair at the Commons and at his home, and Mrs Blair a Human Rights lawyer at Gray's Inn, but was ignored. Mr Henderson wrote thirteen letters to the Blairs between March 1996 and February 1997. Finally, Blair summoned the Police to his Westminster office. The Police considered charging Mr.Henderson with Common Assault and offences under the Malicious Communications and Race Relations Acts. They took the letters for examination by the Crown Prosecution Service. It was decided that the correspondence "fell short" of any criminal offence. But Blair was advised that the "sheer volume" of continued letters could justify criminal prosecution in the future. The Crime Report concluded: “In summary, the allegation of Malicious Communication is 'NO CRIME', however the security of the… (name missing )…has been put in the hands of the right people.” “Sheer volume?” there were only 4 letters to Cherie Blair and nine to Blair over a period of a year. The rest were requests for a meaningful answer to the initial letter - he only got non-replies from their offices.
The media demonised him but refused him right of reply. An interview he gave to the BBC was edited by splicing together different parts of my interview to produce the opposite of what he had said. The interview was 30 minutes of which only 93 seconds was broadcast.
Study this to see how the BBC tries to destroy those who say the wrong things: this is persecution! Mr.Henderson said in the interview: “I take the Mathew Parris line on this. Mathew, says “that part of being an Englishman is being white. Now I think that's reasonable, not just from my own experience, but it seems to me that you don't get someone taking on the whole of a new culture when they come to a country. That doesn't of course mean that they cannot be British and of course if they are representing Britain there may not be the same problem that you've got if they are representing England, but if they are representing England they've got to feel that there isn't anything which spurns them, which thrusts them out from society, which I am absolutely certain that the majority of blacks and Asians do feel. I can sympathise with them because any minority anywhere is going to feel under stress.”
This is what the BBC broadcast after editing:
“...part of being an Englishman is being white. Now I think that's reasonable, not just from my own experience, but it seems to me you don't get someone taking on the whole of a new culture when they come to a country.” (12)
There has been a widening of focus and now there is religous persecution to stop opposition to the creation of Eurabia, as it is throughout the Anglosphere. One who has written about this is Mark Steyn who, as I write, is being persecuted by the Soviet-styled Canadian Human Rights Commission because of two complaints by the Islamic Congress against Maclean's magazine and its editor-in-chief, Kenneth Whyte for printing a chapter from "America Alone” on Oct 20, 2006. The complainents claim “the article subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and contempt.” An Islamic Congress press release decries Steyn's article as “flagrantly Islamophobic.” He wrote, “The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It's the end of the world as we've known it. Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers. This is about the seven-eighths below the surface -- the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.
Let's start with demography, because everything does: If your school has 200 guys and you're playing a school with 2,000 pupils, it doesn't mean your baseball team is definitely going to lose but it certainly gives the other fellows a big starting advantage. Likewise, if you want to launch a revolution, it's not very likely if you've only got seven revolutionaries and they're all over 80. But, if you've got two million and seven revolutionaries and they're all under 30 you're in business.
For example, I wonder how many pontificators on the "Middle East peace process" ever run this number: The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years. Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a "moderate Palestinian" leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation -- or pseudo-nation -- of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the "Palestinian problem" that doesn't take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.” (13)
I have written about the move to anti-Semitism of the Cultural Marxists to defend the axis they have formed with Muslim terrorists. Well,a Jewish man Ezra Levant, is being persecuted in Canada for “hate speech” about Islam. Mr. Levant is fighting back: "Although the United States has a very robust First Amendment, Canada and Britain have a common tradition going back to the Magna Carta that brought about some of the freest presses in the world," Mr. Levant told The Washington Times, "if Canada and the U.K. can be infected, so can America." Mr. Levant was publisher of the Western Standard, a Conservative weekly. He was noticed by Muslim activists on Feb. 13, 2006, when he published the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that had caused protests throughout Europe and the Middle East. Canadian law-enforcement officials investigated the publication but did notbring criminal charges.
But Syed Soharwardy, head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, made a complaint against Mr. Levant with the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The commission summoned Mr. Levant for a hearing and Mr. Levant republished the cartoons on his blog, Ezra Levant.com. He is also is a lawyer and accused the Commission, a government body, of violating due process to impose state censorship. He told The Times that "unlike real courts, the tribunal members are not judges (and often not even lawyers); in Alberta, there are no rules of court or rules of evidence; precedent is not followed; there is no set burden of proof; the taxpayer funds the complaints, but the defendant must pay his own costs (even if he wins); and, most importantly, the commissions and tribunals issue rulings that are clearly not in compliance with our constitutional and common law freedoms of expression." He video’d the hearing and put excerpts on his blog and YouTube.com. "My lawyer and I insisted that we be permitted to record the interrogation, for use when we appeal the commission's decision to a real court," Mr. Levant wrote on his blog.
Marie Riddle, the commission's director, did not return phone calls from The Times and the commission barred journalists, observers and the Western Standard's former editor from the hearing. The persecutions of Mark Steyn and Mr. Levant show the tyranny increasing because "In the past, they've focused on small, powerless bloggers or other loners without any money or legal representation," Mr. Levant told the Times, stating that the commissions are now targeting Canada's mainstream media. Mr. Steyn wrote on his Web, SteynOnline.com, that Mr.Levant’s "magnificent performance ... has raised the bar for the rest of us ensnared by this grotesque system. He's absolutely right not to waste time attempting to mitigate his 'offence,' and he's also correct in rejecting this pseudo-court's jurisdiction over him," he added. (14)
A Catholic priest Father Samuel who fled to Belgium to escape Muslim persecution of Christians in Turkey is now being persecuted for “incitement to racist hatred” by the Belgians: the Government’s Inquisition agency, the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR). It is for a remark he made in a 2002 television interview: “Every thoroughly Islamized Muslim child that is born in Europe is a time bomb for Western children in the future. The latter will be persecuted when they have become a minority.”
The Belgian judiciary decided to try him before the penal court in Charleroi. He repeated his statement and that he would be honoured to go to jail for this. He added that Jesus too had been persecuted! In a sermon he called upon the faithful to accompany him to court. “We will turn this into an excursion, driving there in full buses.” Father Samuel fled to Belgium to escape the persecution of Aramaic Christians in Turkey and is being persecuted by the Belgians! The Aramaics are a Catholic minority in Syria and Turkey and speak an old Semitic language, which Jesus and the apostles used and so are a link with Christ. Mel Gibson used the language in “The Passion of the Christ.”
At Montignies-sur-Sambre he conducts the Mass according to the traditional rites of the Catholic Church. Hundreds attend his Sunday Mass. The congregation includes African immigrants, a large number of young people and many young families with small children. On his web and sermons Father Samuel warns of “the islamic invasion” of the West and that Muslims are invading Europe and we face impending civil war. According to Father Samuel “so-called moderate Muslims do not exist.” This was in 2006 and is been kept very quiet as we move towards secret trials for dissenters in the western world. They do not want the mass of Catholics to realise that Christians are now being persecuted in the Europe on behalf of Muslims because a rebellion of Catholics against the Cultural Marxists of the E.U. could end their tyrannous rule. (15)
An internet ' blogger' is going to be arrested when he returns to England for incitement to racial hatred. Paul Ray, aka 'Lionheart', left for the Middle East two years ago. He claims he was receiving death threats from Muslims which made it too dangerous to stay in his home town of Luton. He is a born again Christian and reformed drug addict who had reported Muslim drug dealers to the police when, he alleges, the police told the dealers and gave them his address.
Paul, a Christian Zionist, went to Israel and met a fellow traveller, who was also looking for a hostel. Together they got a bus to the old city in Jerusalem, and went to the hostel that the other traveller had written down. The International Solidarity Movement were recruiting there. The ISM website mentions Paul by his original name of Paul Cinato, and they deny that he was photographed with them but Paul’s blog has photographs of him and the group brandishing AK47.s! The leader told them to delete the pictures but he kept his. The International Solidarity Group recruit at universities and colleges around the world and are trained to attack Israel by Palestinians. Later, walking around the town he met a member of the security services who advised him to get his stuff, and then drove him to another town.
On January 3, he received an email from Bedfordshire Police. It was from Soviet-style “ Hate Crime officer” Ian Holden: “The offence that I need to arrest you for is 'Stirring up Racial Hatred by displaying written material contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986. You will be arrested on SUSPICION of the offence. You would only be charged following a full investigation based on all the relevant facts and CPS consent. 'Paul I will see you on the 19/02/08 when I will tell you everything that you need to know. 'Due to being out of the office for six weeks I will not have access to my emails as of tomorrow 04/01/08.” Bedfordshire Police said: “We are aware of this particular internet site and we are taking action.” Paul fled the intolerance of the British state to America where he was trying to get asylum but is now planning to return to face the thought police!
Since then a West Indian Christian couple in Luton have also exposed the ethnic cleansing of blacks and whites by Pakistanis by bricks through windows, firebombing synagogues etc to the local newspaper. A very local Christian has had a lot of media coverage about some Asian harassment of west-Indian and white households in Luton. It has been on the radio and the main news as some Muslim thugs have been throwing large objects through the windows of elderly black and white people in an Asian neighbourhood to drive them out. The police have been brushing it under the carpet, but the TV covered a residents meeting with the police and Bishop Blake asking the police what they were going to do about it. (16)
David Hamilton
(5966)
(1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/15/nhate115.xml
(2) http://www.hardcashproductions.com/recent24.html
(3) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Avoid-Boring-People-Lessons-Science/dp/0192802739/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200949250&sr=1-1
http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3067222.ece
(4) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6274881.stm
(5) Commons.Hansard The debate was in October 1958.
(6) http://conservativedemocraticalliance.blogspot.com/2007/07/setting-up-targets-by-david-hamilton.html
A Question of Colour. 1966. Peter Griffiths.(Leslie Frewin).
(7) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/27/nmulticul27.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/14/nhon14.xml
(8) http://www.actioninengland.gb.com/Enoch%20Powell/One%20Nation%20The%20Politics%20of%20Race.htm
Sunday Times 1st December 1991
(9) ) http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,9061,714247,00.html
http://www.grsampson.net/
(10) http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/counterpoint/stories/s1424337.htm
(11) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4785574.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4785574.stm
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/rachelcrofts/entry/dr_frank_ellis/
(12) http://www.geocities.com/ blairscandal/h.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/27/nmulticul27.xml
http://www.anywhere.demon.co.uk
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/polin/polin154.pdf
(13) ) http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/878/128/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/America-Alone-End-World-Know/dp/0895260786/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200948400&sr=1-1
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/11/08/do0802.xml
http://www.rightwingnews.com/category.php?ent=6805
http://conservativedemocraticalliance.blogspot.com/2007/07/realistic-alliance-david-hamilton.html
(14)
Washington Times. ” Putting tribunals on trial” January 17, 2008
Ezra Levant.com.
http://forlifeandfamily.blogspot.com/2008/01/ezra-levant-vs-orwellian-tribunal.html
(15) http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/936
http://www.nonali.com/pere_samuel.php3
(16) See - Bedfordshire on Sunday 13/01/2008
Luton on sunday 16/01/2008
http://www.lutononsunday.com/lutonon....asp?ID=248085
www.lutononsunday.com/lutononsunday/DisplayArticle.asp?id=248100
http://www.lutontoday.co.uk/lut-news...mes.3678903.jp
Bishop Blake is at:
http://www.cogichq.co.uk/Text/bishop_a.htm
There is a tradition of free speech in this country and there are organisations to defend it. NO2ID has been set up to fight the introduction of the I.D.Cards and interrogation centres and opposes the Data Base state.
020-7793-4005 or office@no2id.net
Civitas http://www.civitas.org.uk/
The Libertarian Alliance http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/tactn/tactn001.pdf
The Freedom Association http://www.tfa.net/
His humorous comments at a country fair in September 2002 led to his persecution by the police. To gain the attention of the audience at Frampton-upon-Severn, Gloucestershire, he began in a "light-hearted fashion". "If you are a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you." A complaint was later received by police, and another person wrote to say he disagreed with Mr.Page’s remarks. He was arrested the following month, and then five months later was contacted at his farm in Cambridgeshire and asked by two officers from Gloucestershire to attend an interview at a police station. At the station he declined to answer questions without a lawyer and was arrested. He was put in a cell and told that he would have to stay overnight if he wished to wait for his solicitor, but after 40 minutes agreed to be interviewed without legal representation.
Mr Page said: "I was told I had committed a 'hate crime', interviewed under caution and given police bail." The BBC claimed that he had been arrested for a "race speech" and he felt the incident was potentially damaging to him professionally and as a district councillor for 30 years. He was neither charged nor given an explanation. Under Freedom of Information disclosures he discovered that the Attorney General had given the opinion "no crime committed". His name was secretly put on a "Homo-phobic Incidents Register". He was due to go to on a journalistic trip to Kenya and requested a change of bail renewal date, and in an internal email from the arresting officer the sergeant wrote: "Let's hope he gets eaten by a crocodile."
Mr Page said: "Thank goodness for the Data Protection Act and my advice to anybody who feels that they have been stitched up is to use the Act to get to the real facts. “It is absolutely outrageous. In my view it clearly shows that I was arrested for political reasons simply because my views on the countryside were not appreciated. I was not guilty of any crime."(1)
What has reduced a Liberal Democracy to a police state like Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China without people objecting? Cultural Marxism or Political Correctness is a totalitarian ideology that intimidates people into thinking the correct thing and extends into every aspect of life because every part of life is deemed political. It replaced Liberalism by using a similar vocabulary but with different intentions: individual rights were replaced by group rights and the multi-racial belief in equal treatment for racial groups was replaced by preferential treatment for all ethnic groups over whites. Cultural Marxism took over with the New Left in the 1960.s to 70.s. It was influenced by the Frankfurt School and European thinkers like Foucault; and facilitated in Britain by academics like E.P.Thompson and Raymond Williams and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins who introduced Race Laws and the Soviet style agency of Inquisition, the Commission For Racial Equality. A main intention of Trotskyists and The Anti Nazi League in the 60.s and 70.s was to “change attitudes.” Cultural Marxists seek scapegoats to blame when things do not work to their plan. They de-humanise their scapegoats and present a distorted view of what they said to make the persecution seem like justifiable indignation. The thoughts and meanings of the recalcitrant are slotted into a pre-existing ideology which uses them as examples of wrong thinking. The victims are modern outlaws and have no rights and can be spoken of as the guardians of the new morality see fit. This is political persecution because it is only “white” people who express certain views that are targeted for public vilification, though anti-Semitism is coming back amongst the Cultural Marxists who are trying to form an axis with Muslims in the West.
The Cultural Marxists are an “Ideological Caste” and membership depends not on blood or birth, nor even class, but holding the right opinions; to succeed in life one has to conform to their ideology, keep your views secret or be expelled from the “Caste” as the Conservative Party did the Monday Club to ensure thy did not impede its transformation into a vehicle of Cultural Marxism like the other two parties. The Personal qualities of the persecuted are ignored and the public shown a one-dimensional aspect - Racist, Hater, Zenophobe etc. This justifies the establishment saying and doing anything and feeling morally superior about it.
There is constant social engineering to mould everyone for utopia. A television programme “Gypsy Wars” contrasted a local woman and tinkers who had invaded her land reversing the roles as we experience them. They think our traditional view of the world is pathological until they correct it for us. They show us or a representative, in the role of what they think are our stereotypes - we are cast as the tinkers - to mould our views and change our attitudes. Of the Gypsies there were no young men shown, because they would be aggressive and they do not want to show them as a threat; village life was not shown because that is appealing and viewers would sympathise with the woman. The woman was selected because she is not typical of rural people but a bit eccentric and could be set up as the aggressor when she was the victim. This is Television re-structuring our thoughts in accordance with their ideology. It is Frankfurt School television. For years vacancies in television were only advertised in the Guardian to filter out the applicants with the wrong attitude. (2)
The “Caste” can not meet the arguments so they discredit people. Dr.James Watson 79-year-old geneticist who, with Francis Crick, had discovered the structure of DNA, who is regarded as one of the great scientists of his time, was persecuted for telling the Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade. The British establishments’ agency of Inquistion the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks " in full". Politicians moved in to persecute him: 'It is a shame that a man with a record of scientific distinction should see his work overshadowed by his own irrational prejudices,' said David Lammy, the Skills Minister. London mayor Ken Livingstone: 'Such ignorant comments...are utterly offensive and give succour to the most backward in our society.' The Science Museum cancelled a sell-out meeting it had planned to hold to honour 79-year-old Watson on the grounds that his remarks had gone 'beyond the point of acceptable debate'. Several other centres scheduled to host his talks followed suit. What a scientific argument! His employers, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island suspended him as chancellor. (3) However, prominent scientist Richard Dawkins saw the real issue: “What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant "thought police", of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation.”
Celebrity Jade Goody had the wrong attitude to Indian film star, Shilpa Shetty in “Celebrity Big Brother.” The Daily Telegraph showed the three “Racists” looking common while Shilpa was shown at prayer, elegant in a Sari and looking sidelong. The programme is based on getting an assortment of characters into a house and titillating the viewers to keep the viewing figures up. Bullying and personality clashes are the attraction. But Jade, Daniella and Jo had the wrong sort of personality clash with Shilpa and had to be excoriated to cow down other people. Forcing Jade to keep apologising and to confess publicly that she is disgusted with herself is our cultural Marxist rulers version of a Soviet show trial. She had to be broken in public, made to repent and show abject contrition. Jade has some Afro-Caribbean ancestory and an honest person would look for a cause other than racism like class envy or bad manners, but there is an ideology at work which imposes the same explanation on different situations - white racism. (4)
The law introduced persecution in the case against working class lads from Notting Hill after the race battles of August 1958. In the Commons debate a local Labour M.P. Frank Tomney made one of the most honourable and heroic speeches ever in the House of Commons in defence of his young constituents which shows how the police and lawyers had framed them. They had no rights. Here is a precise: “Nine young men were arrested. No one in the constituency takes the view that what they did was not severely wrong, but the sentences of 4 years imprisonment for boys of 17 - even coloured people are going round organizing petitions on their behalf. I wrote to the Home Secretary asking him to see me about this but he declined as it is sub judice. The case was subject to appeal a week ago and the sentences confirmed. I made sure –none of these boys had a previous conviction. “When people read about comparable cases and find variations in the sentences they come to think that our law does not provide justice. In one case of alleged rioting which concerned coloured people, one man was sentenced to prison for a year and others were fined. The man who was sentenced to a year had a former conviction in 1948 for shooting a policeman which is a crime with intent to kill. Yet these boys with no convictions got 4 years. “I have here a letter from the Union of Post Office workers about a boy from Ellingham Road. It tells of his having just returned from serving in Cyprus yet he was taken from his bed at 2.a.m. and charged with rioting. He only pleaded guilty because he was foolishly advised to. Contrary to the bias of police evidence, he was in possession of no weapon, though he admits to being an occupant in the car that toured the district shouting slogans. A petition to me is in responsible language and from people I have known for nine years” (5)
The 1964 election in Smethwick shows where the persecutions can lead. An offensive slogan had been used during the election campaign and posted on walls “If you want a N***** for a neighbour, vote Labour”. Harold Wilson attributed this to Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths, when being interviewed by Robin Day on Panorama of 9th March 1964. After the Election, now Prime Minister, Wilson broke from his address on the Queens speech to insult the victorious Griffiths by calling him a “Parliamentary Leper”, who would be shunned in the House. This breached the convention that new members be protected until after their Maiden speech. On October the 5th just two weeks before polling Griffiths was denounced in the Birmingham Post, and the Times whose Midland correspondent wrote, ”It is abhorrent to all Conservatives and officials of stature to whom I have talked.” But he did not say to whom he had talked. He headed his column of the 12th, “Vile –its all in Black and White.” As the election result was announced on October the 16th Socialists made Nazi salutes and the Marxist Bishop of Southwark, called the electorate “unchristian”, and the Bishop of Chelmsford attacked local voters. This election was a model of democracy. A local man fighting on a local issue was elected in a fair election by local people but these unelected Bishops who lived far away insulted them on a priori ideological grounds. The state broadcaster the BBC took American Black Power leader Malcolm X to Smethwick in February 1965 for current affairs programme “Tonight”. He told the assembled world’s media,” I have come here because I am disturbed by reports that coloured people in Smethwick are being badly treated. I have heard they are being treated as the Jews under Hitler. I would not wait for the Fascist element in Smethwick to erect gas ovens.” That was what the BBC had told him! They denied having taken him there but Mayor C.V.Williamse investigated: “I was most amazed at the finesse shown by the BBC. I was told the car was not a BBC car but it was owned by one of the directors.” Malcolm X told the Times that the BBC had taken him. This led to a time bomb was planted outside Mr.Griffiths’ home on 26th October 1965. The police thought it the work of experts. (6)
The persecution in 1984 of Ray Honeyford a head teacher at Manningham middle school in Bradford shows the depths of intolerance for those who diverge even slightly from the orthodoxy because Mr.Honeyford supported Multi-Racialism but warned of Multi- Culturalism. The local education authority tried to have him removed from his school, and when he wrote about his efforts in the Salisbury Review he was de-humanised by the media, had a “rent a mob” screaming ‘Racist’ outside the school gates, the local education authority sent a psychiatrist to see him, the Department for Education had Helena Kennedy QC subject him to an Inquisition and school inspectors persecuted him. He had to retire at 52! The dangers of multi-culturalism are now widely accepted even by Trevor Phillips of the Human Rights Commission. (7)
In 1991 Cambridge don Dr.John Casey was picked out for an erudite article in the Salisbury Review which concluded that voluntary repatriation could encourage people to
try to drive immigrants out so the Government should adopt compulsory repatriation. The argument involved quoting Edmund Burke’s definition society as” a partnership not only between those who are living and those who are dead, but between those who are living and those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The address appeared in the first issue of the Salisbury Reviewin 1982 but it was only in 1991 when a student found it by accident that the persecution was unleashed. His English Literature lectures were boycotted by students, Trotskyists demonstrated, Marxist Lecturer Terry Eagleton held rival lectures and the Sunday Times of 1/12/1991 printed a picture which made him look like a wizened crow. These actions are always of a mass of people turned onto one person!(8)
In May 2002 a Tory councillor was persecuted by a Government minister. Professor Geoffrey Samspon's website stated, 'There is overwhelming scientific evidence that races differ to some extent in their average intelligence levels - yellow-skinned Orientals tend to be rather brighter than whites, negroes tend to be rather less bright.” Government minister Peter Hain, a founder member of the Anti Nazi League, raved on Breakfast with Frost, “Sampson is proud to be racist”. Prof. Sampson wasgiven right to reply on Radio 4’s Today programme which is heard less than television. He explained Hain’s statement was untrue and “ as far as I am concerned it would be daft to be proud of racism — what is there to be proud of?” But this was ignored in subsequent TV news broadcasts, which kept repeating Hain’s distortion. Prof. Sampson recalls, “many commentators hostile to me seemed to assume that scientists who explain the roots of racial feelings must be sinister Ku Klux Klan types. That is virtually the reverse of the truth.” Special Branch warned him he was a marked man and advised him on safety precautions to reduce the risk of harm to him or his family. He was advised to look under his car before driving to check that nothing was attached - the result of a Labour government minister publicly persecuting him. (9)
In August 2005 Prof. Andrew Fraser was retired by Macquarrie University, Sydney, Australia, where he was Associate Professor in the Department of Public Law. He responded to a newspaper headline that quoted a 3 year-old Sudanese girl, “Now my mum and Dad are Aussies just like me” by letter, ”Experience practically everywhere in the world tells us that an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a wide-range of other social problems. He added that they are expected to acquiesce in the erosion of Australia’s national identity.” He also warned of the “rising Asian ruling class.” He was invited to submit an article to the Deakin University Law Review. Entitled “Rethinking the White Australia Policy” it was reviewed and accepted for publication until journalists and a lawyer acting for the “Sudanese Community” objected, then the Vice-Chancellor of Deakin University directed them not to publish it. Prof. Fraser makes the point that when he taught at Macquarrie in the 70’s there had been attempts to silence visiting professor Hans Eysenk but that was by the students not the authorities. Sydney Morning Herald columnist Michael Duffy pointed out “That generation of students are now the authorities.”
They suspended Professor Fraser because they thought his views on race would influence his course, American Constitutional History. Usually retired academics who plan to research obtain an Honorary Associate and can use the university library, but Prof.Fraser was refused this, for his book: “Anglophobia: Its Causes and Cure”. He did not deserve consideration now he was de-humanised and labelled ”racist.” That vindictiveness is another spite in a year-long campaign of discrimination by the University against him. (10)
In April 2006, Leeds university authorities subjected Dr.Frank Ellis to an Inquisition after he had an interview published in “Leeds Student.” Dr.Ellis was sought out for the interview with political bias in mind because of his “peculiar and extreme views.” He and his interviewer ranged over many topics but what ignited prejudice against him were his remarks that the average black has a lower IQ than the average white or Asian; that he believed we need to introduce a policy of humane repatriation. There were the usual demonstrations by Unite Against Fascism, or what legendary Daily Telegraph columnist Michael Wharton aka Peter Simple dubbed “Rent a mob.” The Universities decision was purely to persecute a man for holding the wrong opinion: he treated his students fairly and impartially as the interviewer acknowledged Dr.Ellis’s “excellent rapport with his students and colleagues.” Further, Leeds have a system to prevent unfair marking as the candidates paper is anonymous and each is marked by 3 different tutors. He was investigated by the West Yorkshire police for incitement to racial hatred. So what is the problem? Dr.Ellis was not disciplined for his conduct towards his students, which was exemplary, but persecuted for not expressing the right thoughts on ethnicity. In an interview on Talk Sport Ian Collins screamed at Ellis, ”Your’e mad!” (11)
Robert Henderson was persecuted in July 1995, for an article in Wisden Cricket Monthly. He wrote that a reason for the bad performances of England’s cricket team was the mix of foreign and native players. However talented they lack the commitment to their side on which team success depends. He explains: “The common experience of mixed groups makes it immensely difficult to accept that a changing room comprised of say six Englishmen, two West Indians, two Southern Africans and a New Zealander is going to develop the same camaraderie as eleven unequivocal Englishmen.” This was not racism as his example had two blacks and five people who are not English, three of whom are certainly white. The argument seems to have been accepted by other cricket writers like David Firth, Editor of Wisden and Matthew Engel, editor of the associated Wisden Cricketers' Almanac and columnist for The Guardian. The media held an Inquisition. The journalists and public figures who denounced him did not attack what he had actually written but responded out of ideological correctness against what they thought his views were. Two of the black players, Devon Malcolm and Philip De Freitas, sued Wisden for libel but they did not him which is unusual because the author is usually included in the suit. He had made it clear that he would fight any libel action all the way in the courts. Malcolm and De Freitas had sought the advice of the Professional Cricketer's Association who took counsel's opinion which was that no libel existed. The magazine’s proprietor Paul Getty almost definitely ordered the settlement to avoid social embarrassment.
Telegraph newspapers published clues to his home address and refused to print an unedited reply. He was then turned on by Wisden whose following issue had five pages of vitriolic attack on him even though they printed the original article. Editor Mr.Firth would not print a reply.
Mr Henderson contacted his M.P. Frank Dobson to complain of the way the media had treated him, and asked for an intervention on his behalf. Mr Dobson gave a vague promise,
but did not act even though it was his paid duty as his elected representative to raise this in the House of Commons. Later, in his 1997 General Election leaflets Dobson claimed “over the past 17 years I've tried my best to represent our area in Parliament.” On 3rd August 1995, Mr Henderson received a letter from the black Labour politician Diane Abbott, telling him he had "no appreciation of acceptable terminology. As an ex-journalist, and someone who still dabbles, I believe that we have a duty to write on subjects we know about.” Later Ms Abbott objected to "blue-eyed blonde" nurses from Finland tending coloured patients in her East London constituency!
Mr Henderson wrote to Tony Blair about Mr.Dobson and for defence against the media corruption, “You have made a great thing of moral behaviour in politics, Mr Blair. If that means anything you will help me to obtain a fair hearing, both in terms of natural justice and common equity. If you fail to do this, we shall know exactly what a Blair government will be, one based on the primitive idea that justice is for one's political friends and injustice for one's political enemies.”
Mr Henderson wrote to Blair at the Commons and at his home, and Mrs Blair a Human Rights lawyer at Gray's Inn, but was ignored. Mr Henderson wrote thirteen letters to the Blairs between March 1996 and February 1997. Finally, Blair summoned the Police to his Westminster office. The Police considered charging Mr.Henderson with Common Assault and offences under the Malicious Communications and Race Relations Acts. They took the letters for examination by the Crown Prosecution Service. It was decided that the correspondence "fell short" of any criminal offence. But Blair was advised that the "sheer volume" of continued letters could justify criminal prosecution in the future. The Crime Report concluded: “In summary, the allegation of Malicious Communication is 'NO CRIME', however the security of the… (name missing )…has been put in the hands of the right people.” “Sheer volume?” there were only 4 letters to Cherie Blair and nine to Blair over a period of a year. The rest were requests for a meaningful answer to the initial letter - he only got non-replies from their offices.
The media demonised him but refused him right of reply. An interview he gave to the BBC was edited by splicing together different parts of my interview to produce the opposite of what he had said. The interview was 30 minutes of which only 93 seconds was broadcast.
Study this to see how the BBC tries to destroy those who say the wrong things: this is persecution! Mr.Henderson said in the interview: “I take the Mathew Parris line on this. Mathew, says “that part of being an Englishman is being white. Now I think that's reasonable, not just from my own experience, but it seems to me that you don't get someone taking on the whole of a new culture when they come to a country. That doesn't of course mean that they cannot be British and of course if they are representing Britain there may not be the same problem that you've got if they are representing England, but if they are representing England they've got to feel that there isn't anything which spurns them, which thrusts them out from society, which I am absolutely certain that the majority of blacks and Asians do feel. I can sympathise with them because any minority anywhere is going to feel under stress.”
This is what the BBC broadcast after editing:
“...part of being an Englishman is being white. Now I think that's reasonable, not just from my own experience, but it seems to me you don't get someone taking on the whole of a new culture when they come to a country.” (12)
There has been a widening of focus and now there is religous persecution to stop opposition to the creation of Eurabia, as it is throughout the Anglosphere. One who has written about this is Mark Steyn who, as I write, is being persecuted by the Soviet-styled Canadian Human Rights Commission because of two complaints by the Islamic Congress against Maclean's magazine and its editor-in-chief, Kenneth Whyte for printing a chapter from "America Alone” on Oct 20, 2006. The complainents claim “the article subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and contempt.” An Islamic Congress press release decries Steyn's article as “flagrantly Islamophobic.” He wrote, “The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It's the end of the world as we've known it. Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers. This is about the seven-eighths below the surface -- the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are: demographic decline; the unsustainability of the social democratic state; and civilizational exhaustion.
Let's start with demography, because everything does: If your school has 200 guys and you're playing a school with 2,000 pupils, it doesn't mean your baseball team is definitely going to lose but it certainly gives the other fellows a big starting advantage. Likewise, if you want to launch a revolution, it's not very likely if you've only got seven revolutionaries and they're all over 80. But, if you've got two million and seven revolutionaries and they're all under 30 you're in business.
For example, I wonder how many pontificators on the "Middle East peace process" ever run this number: The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years. Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a "moderate Palestinian" leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation -- or pseudo-nation -- of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the "Palestinian problem" that doesn't take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.” (13)
I have written about the move to anti-Semitism of the Cultural Marxists to defend the axis they have formed with Muslim terrorists. Well,a Jewish man Ezra Levant, is being persecuted in Canada for “hate speech” about Islam. Mr. Levant is fighting back: "Although the United States has a very robust First Amendment, Canada and Britain have a common tradition going back to the Magna Carta that brought about some of the freest presses in the world," Mr. Levant told The Washington Times, "if Canada and the U.K. can be infected, so can America." Mr. Levant was publisher of the Western Standard, a Conservative weekly. He was noticed by Muslim activists on Feb. 13, 2006, when he published the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that had caused protests throughout Europe and the Middle East. Canadian law-enforcement officials investigated the publication but did notbring criminal charges.
But Syed Soharwardy, head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, made a complaint against Mr. Levant with the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The commission summoned Mr. Levant for a hearing and Mr. Levant republished the cartoons on his blog, Ezra Levant.com. He is also is a lawyer and accused the Commission, a government body, of violating due process to impose state censorship. He told The Times that "unlike real courts, the tribunal members are not judges (and often not even lawyers); in Alberta, there are no rules of court or rules of evidence; precedent is not followed; there is no set burden of proof; the taxpayer funds the complaints, but the defendant must pay his own costs (even if he wins); and, most importantly, the commissions and tribunals issue rulings that are clearly not in compliance with our constitutional and common law freedoms of expression." He video’d the hearing and put excerpts on his blog and YouTube.com. "My lawyer and I insisted that we be permitted to record the interrogation, for use when we appeal the commission's decision to a real court," Mr. Levant wrote on his blog.
Marie Riddle, the commission's director, did not return phone calls from The Times and the commission barred journalists, observers and the Western Standard's former editor from the hearing. The persecutions of Mark Steyn and Mr. Levant show the tyranny increasing because "In the past, they've focused on small, powerless bloggers or other loners without any money or legal representation," Mr. Levant told the Times, stating that the commissions are now targeting Canada's mainstream media. Mr. Steyn wrote on his Web, SteynOnline.com, that Mr.Levant’s "magnificent performance ... has raised the bar for the rest of us ensnared by this grotesque system. He's absolutely right not to waste time attempting to mitigate his 'offence,' and he's also correct in rejecting this pseudo-court's jurisdiction over him," he added. (14)
A Catholic priest Father Samuel who fled to Belgium to escape Muslim persecution of Christians in Turkey is now being persecuted for “incitement to racist hatred” by the Belgians: the Government’s Inquisition agency, the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR). It is for a remark he made in a 2002 television interview: “Every thoroughly Islamized Muslim child that is born in Europe is a time bomb for Western children in the future. The latter will be persecuted when they have become a minority.”
The Belgian judiciary decided to try him before the penal court in Charleroi. He repeated his statement and that he would be honoured to go to jail for this. He added that Jesus too had been persecuted! In a sermon he called upon the faithful to accompany him to court. “We will turn this into an excursion, driving there in full buses.” Father Samuel fled to Belgium to escape the persecution of Aramaic Christians in Turkey and is being persecuted by the Belgians! The Aramaics are a Catholic minority in Syria and Turkey and speak an old Semitic language, which Jesus and the apostles used and so are a link with Christ. Mel Gibson used the language in “The Passion of the Christ.”
At Montignies-sur-Sambre he conducts the Mass according to the traditional rites of the Catholic Church. Hundreds attend his Sunday Mass. The congregation includes African immigrants, a large number of young people and many young families with small children. On his web and sermons Father Samuel warns of “the islamic invasion” of the West and that Muslims are invading Europe and we face impending civil war. According to Father Samuel “so-called moderate Muslims do not exist.” This was in 2006 and is been kept very quiet as we move towards secret trials for dissenters in the western world. They do not want the mass of Catholics to realise that Christians are now being persecuted in the Europe on behalf of Muslims because a rebellion of Catholics against the Cultural Marxists of the E.U. could end their tyrannous rule. (15)
An internet ' blogger' is going to be arrested when he returns to England for incitement to racial hatred. Paul Ray, aka 'Lionheart', left for the Middle East two years ago. He claims he was receiving death threats from Muslims which made it too dangerous to stay in his home town of Luton. He is a born again Christian and reformed drug addict who had reported Muslim drug dealers to the police when, he alleges, the police told the dealers and gave them his address.
Paul, a Christian Zionist, went to Israel and met a fellow traveller, who was also looking for a hostel. Together they got a bus to the old city in Jerusalem, and went to the hostel that the other traveller had written down. The International Solidarity Movement were recruiting there. The ISM website mentions Paul by his original name of Paul Cinato, and they deny that he was photographed with them but Paul’s blog has photographs of him and the group brandishing AK47.s! The leader told them to delete the pictures but he kept his. The International Solidarity Group recruit at universities and colleges around the world and are trained to attack Israel by Palestinians. Later, walking around the town he met a member of the security services who advised him to get his stuff, and then drove him to another town.
On January 3, he received an email from Bedfordshire Police. It was from Soviet-style “ Hate Crime officer” Ian Holden: “The offence that I need to arrest you for is 'Stirring up Racial Hatred by displaying written material contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986. You will be arrested on SUSPICION of the offence. You would only be charged following a full investigation based on all the relevant facts and CPS consent. 'Paul I will see you on the 19/02/08 when I will tell you everything that you need to know. 'Due to being out of the office for six weeks I will not have access to my emails as of tomorrow 04/01/08.” Bedfordshire Police said: “We are aware of this particular internet site and we are taking action.” Paul fled the intolerance of the British state to America where he was trying to get asylum but is now planning to return to face the thought police!
Since then a West Indian Christian couple in Luton have also exposed the ethnic cleansing of blacks and whites by Pakistanis by bricks through windows, firebombing synagogues etc to the local newspaper. A very local Christian has had a lot of media coverage about some Asian harassment of west-Indian and white households in Luton. It has been on the radio and the main news as some Muslim thugs have been throwing large objects through the windows of elderly black and white people in an Asian neighbourhood to drive them out. The police have been brushing it under the carpet, but the TV covered a residents meeting with the police and Bishop Blake asking the police what they were going to do about it. (16)
David Hamilton
(5966)
(1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/15/nhate115.xml
(2) http://www.hardcashproductions.com/recent24.html
(3) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Avoid-Boring-People-Lessons-Science/dp/0192802739/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200949250&sr=1-1
http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3067222.ece
(4) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6274881.stm
(5) Commons.Hansard The debate was in October 1958.
(6) http://conservativedemocraticalliance.blogspot.com/2007/07/setting-up-targets-by-david-hamilton.html
A Question of Colour. 1966. Peter Griffiths.(Leslie Frewin).
(7) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/27/nmulticul27.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/14/nhon14.xml
(8) http://www.actioninengland.gb.com/Enoch%20Powell/One%20Nation%20The%20Politics%20of%20Race.htm
Sunday Times 1st December 1991
(9) ) http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,9061,714247,00.html
http://www.grsampson.net/
(10) http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/counterpoint/stories/s1424337.htm
(11) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4785574.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4785574.stm
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/rachelcrofts/entry/dr_frank_ellis/
(12) http://www.geocities.com/ blairscandal/h.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/27/nmulticul27.xml
http://www.anywhere.demon.co.uk
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/polin/polin154.pdf
(13) ) http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/878/128/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/America-Alone-End-World-Know/dp/0895260786/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200948400&sr=1-1
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/11/08/do0802.xml
http://www.rightwingnews.com/category.php?ent=6805
http://conservativedemocraticalliance.blogspot.com/2007/07/realistic-alliance-david-hamilton.html
(14)
Washington Times. ” Putting tribunals on trial” January 17, 2008
Ezra Levant.com.
http://forlifeandfamily.blogspot.com/2008/01/ezra-levant-vs-orwellian-tribunal.html
(15) http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/936
http://www.nonali.com/pere_samuel.php3
(16) See - Bedfordshire on Sunday 13/01/2008
Luton on sunday 16/01/2008
http://www.lutononsunday.com/lutonon....asp?ID=248085
www.lutononsunday.com/lutononsunday/DisplayArticle.asp?id=248100
http://www.lutontoday.co.uk/lut-news...mes.3678903.jp
Bishop Blake is at:
http://www.cogichq.co.uk/Text/bishop_a.htm
There is a tradition of free speech in this country and there are organisations to defend it. NO2ID has been set up to fight the introduction of the I.D.Cards and interrogation centres and opposes the Data Base state.
020-7793-4005 or office@no2id.net
Civitas http://www.civitas.org.uk/
The Libertarian Alliance http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/tactn/tactn001.pdf
The Freedom Association http://www.tfa.net/
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