Prefect prose

As usual, the great Worstall says it as well as it is possible to say it:

"Oh fuck off you miserable little wankers."

If I might add... whoever signed this off, and yes I am looking at you, Andrew Robathan, Minister for Defence Personnel, is an incredibly insensitive utter, utter bastard who deserves to lose his seat at the earliest possible date, regardless of his mighty achievements. This sets it all at nought.

Bastard.

Sort it out, Fox.

Silly Season starts early

I blame global warming.

WTF is so horrendously embarrassing about the Shale memo? Seems like business as usual in any - I mean the average - I mean our - local constituency Conservative Association. Except for the amount of moolah the late Mr Shale (RIP) thought he could wring out of his neighbours, of course. (Our chairman would faint from pleasure...) Apart from that, nothing to see here. Move along. Really. Our political journos really do need a break.

Mass party memberships are a thing of the past. The two per cent of the electorate who are politics-heavy [mostly] already belong to or volunteer as foot soldiers at election time for one party or another. Round our way, anyhow. Waste of time chasing after the other 98 per cent. In present circs, at least. Hold an In-or-Out referendum, though...

The main difference between Labour and Conservative local party organisations is that with the Tories no-one can ever find the rule book... 'You mean there is one?' ... and there are just two kinds of business: getting elected and social/fund-raising events. By contrast, local Labour activists are obsessed with their own organisational processes: The Rule Book. When they are not suppressing and anathematising each other (it's a Left thing) they also have Earnest Political Discussion, unlike local Tories who merely share a number of non-doctrinaire tacit assumptions. What? Oh, the LibDems? God alone knows. Ah, yes - potholes! And fair-trade coffee. And wind farms... which got them wiped out hereabouts. Mwahahaha...

Both lots need campaigning funds, of course. Mr Shale merely stated the bleedin' obvious, larding it with a bit of big-time 'Why Not?' for fun. Can't see what the fuss is about, myself. As for the stately homes, well, some constituencies are stiff with them, and even the SH set are entitled to parliamentary representation in this great democracy of ours so why not rifle their pockets? It worked for Mr Tony.

Poor old Ed. Only the union bosses to fall back on, and now Mad Frankie's coming for them. What a hoot. More Pimm's, dahling?

Sent from my iPad

I despair

 Seriously.

Stop the bloody wailing

Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times (£) seems to be accusing Mark Pritchard MP of inconsistency at best or hypocrisy at worst. I have not read Lawson’s article but here’s ConHome’s Lawson quote:

"I quote from The Sunday Telegraph of May 8, 2005: “The Tory MP who unseated Peter Bradley, the anti-hunting campaigner, in the Wrekin led tributes last night to the silent army of hunt supporters whose efforts helped the Conservatives ... Mr Pritchard said yesterday ... ‘I am very grateful ... the pro-hunting campaigners certainly assisted me.’” Mr Pritchard, then, appears to believe it is fine to kill wild animals for sport, but wicked to keep them alive for the circus. Only in the House of Commons."

There are hypocrites aplenty in the HoC – it purports to be representative of the nation, after all – but I see no reason to include Mr Pritchard among them for I see no conflict between his support for hunting and his disapproval of the use of animals in circuses. The former is defensible while the latter is not.

Homo sapiens is a predatory omnivore, a hunter before he was a gather and both before he thought of animal husbandry or vegetarianism. We may, licitly and in keeping with the nature of our species and the natural order, hunt and kill prey animals for food and kill species whose activities threaten our own species by, for example, making us ill or interrupting (directly or indirectly) our food supply and so threatening our survival. In so doing we neither abuse the prey animal nor alter its position in the natural order. It and we are in competition – to the death if necessary – and hunting offers no offence to nature which is a permanently competitive struggle between species for advantages which will promote their own survival.

That humans have developed alternative food sources to predation is irrelevant because it is fortuitous. If some apocalyptic circumstance should ever rule out either or both of these practices, the most assiduous of sabs would immediately revert to humanity’s earliest behaviour: hunting. The philosophical justification of hunting stands.

Sentimental objections to hunting are understandable but sleb hand-wringing and saddo squee-ing over funneh pics of kittehs (themselves ferocious predators) do not alter the fact that non-human predators kill without regard for the suffering of their prey and that's that. In fact, Nature is such an animal lover’s nightmare that most animal lovers dare not examine the facts too closely. Saint David Attenborough says he has witnessed predation of terrible, sick-making ferocity which could never been shown on TV. A a big cat will claw down a large, gentle, doe-eyed prey animal and immediately start eating it whether the victim is conscious or unconscious, alive or dead, oblivious of its victim's screams. The unpalatable fact is that the suffering of the lion’s victim would occur which ever predator attacked it. That the predator may occasionally be Homo sapiens is either irrelevant or ipso facto a bonus, given that squeamishness generally prevents us from causing the kind of pain inflicted blindly by less sensitive – or cerebral –predators.

A propos, hunting with dogs is the least merciless way of dealing with that particular competitive-with-humans predator. Yes, it is. Whether or not the hunter enjoys the hunt is risibly irrelevant both philosophically and in moral terms, and hunting abolitionists who rely on the 'for fun' objection are nothing more than class warriors in sheeps' clothing.

Utilitarian objections to hunting a species to extinction are legitimate where to do so would deprive Homo sapiens of a food source, because it is against our species' interest. (Over biological time, though, species have come and gone and always will. Homo sapiens has had nothing to do with 99.999999... per cent of it and anyway, extinction qua extinction has no moral dimension.) Control of excessive hunting, including over-fishing, is legitimate. Whining that whales, a prey animal, are passive and beautiful and therefore must not be killed is jejune and insufficient to the case. Whenever such protestations are heard, one should expect to find the grossly ignorant, sentimental nutjobs or watermelons. Sometimes they're the same people.

Opposition to hunting usually arises (there are a very few honourable exceptions) from ignorance, sentimentality, publicity-seeking or political rabble-rousing based on one of the above. The hunter is not wicked, no matter how wittily Oscar Wilde fancied-up his own distaste for this  particular example of humanity’s natural inclinations.

As for circus animals, while the philosophical justification of hunting is robust, human behaviour is illegitimate which insults animals by disregarding their nature, by exploiting them to no high moral end or treating them in such a way as to disregard their innate dignity and their place in the natural order. Imprisoning animals for the primary purpose of exhibiting them solely for entertainment (as opposed to scientific work intended ultimately to benefit their species and/or ours) and to that trivial end both depriving them of a natural life and forcing unnatural behaviour upon them, falls into this category. It should attract opprobrium, as it does from Mark Pritchard MP.

So Mr Pritchard is right. Mr Lawson is an ass, although that is no reason to abuse him. On the other hand…

The author of this post (which may also appear at Orphans of Liberty over coming days) is an animal lover, cat owner and fan of icanhasheezburger. 

Secret of eternal life announced by Daily Mail

Women who sit for more than six hours daily are around 40 per cent more likely to die than those sitting for less than three hours a day, a study said.

So... lemme see... women who sit for less than three hours a day are more likely to, erm, live for ever?

Hat tip to Leg-Iron (by comparison with whose commenters all known professional comics pale to nothingness)  for this link.

'Green dream needs full government support'

Says the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England of which I am a member although maybe not for much longer. They may go the way of Christian Aid in being crossed off my charity list. The faintest hint of hypocritical greenfaking, let alone a whiff of watermelon, tends to alienate my support faster than the advocacy of eating children.

On its website and in its recent mailer, there is much fulmination from the CPRE about the despoiling of the most beautiful areas of the countryside by pylons - these things:

 

... and there is praise for Huhne's undertaking to look at the possibility of much smaller ones, like those in Denmark (apparently). Good old green-economy Huhne, eh? Sound fellah, what? Last thing old Chris wants is to set up bloody ggreat monsters all over our hills and valleys. What? Whaddya saying there? Wind turbines? Eh?

The CPRE is also much exercised about the proliferation in the greener and more pleasant districts of, er, this sort of nonsense:

The Chancellor seems to be opening the way for a planning free-for-all at any cost

Tsk. How could he? And as for this sort of thing (insert snort here):



... well, really. I mean. I ask you.

Hands off our green fields, Mr Cameron! Or we'll... we'll... yes, well. Just watch it, that's all.

But wait - there is more praise:

The government is showing some sensitivity about the siting of wind turbines.    

Oh, jolly good show! It'll be that chap Huhne again. Sound fellah. But look, wind turbines simply aren't as ugly as pylons, are they, so let's not make too much fuss about them. They are the future, after all. Well, all the farmers and landowners round here see them as their future, anyhow. Small fortunes to be made if only you can see off the damned protesters. Ain't that right, St John? More ice in that, Charles? Well, here's to England's green and pleasant land, eh? Mud in yer eyes, chaps!

‘Apocalypse ASAP.’ Really? And then what?

A cause for pause, is James Higham's post about the Frankfurt (Marxism) School, over at Orphans of Liberty.

It is salutary to recognise the source, breadth and depth of the encroaching darkness and to see so clearly delineated the anti-human foulness of those who have brought it about. To grasp the enormity of the destruction they have wrought out of their arrogant belief in the overriding, ineluctable truth of their theory. To survey the effect on us all of their concerted will to force us by lies, brainwashing and subversion to conform our lives, our behaviour and imagination, our very selves, to their corrupting dystopia.

The brutality inherent in their project to eliminate millennia of human development and growth, to destroy cultures, minds and lives and to create anomie, suffering, bewilderment and anarchy on a scale which even two world wars, two nuclear bombs, a Tojo, Hitler and Stalin together could not achieve, is appalling. They seriously wanted, and their disciples fervently intend, to reduce the totality of society to Year Zero, and then to start again under their beneficent leadership.

And yet these mutually masturbatory men (men? but look, there's Caroline Lucas, hiding in the Green Corner) are saints to many of today's politicians and educationists. They are lauded in Academe where any who name their wickedness for what it is are excluded from conversation in its groves: swivel-eyed moral untermenschen, outcast from the university. The Marxists, meanwhile, name scholarly institutes in each others' honour and filch their funding out of the pockets of the poor, deluded, taxpaying lumpenproletariat, and are spoken of in awed tones in the intellectual salons.

It is the demoralising daily realisation of the absolute reality of this nihilistic wickedness which increasingly renders me unable to blog. Day after day I find myself thinking, 'What is the point? Of this - or of any form of protest? Their Final Solution is coming, it seems, but will not reach its apotheosis in my lifetime so why do I not just close my eyes and enjoy the scent of the roses?'

I am getting older, and the dreadful truth of the destruction of our society, its history, its values, its people, is making me feel older than I am. So maybe they are defeating me. As they always said they would.

The cultural Marxists are ascendant. Gramsci in particular is proving triumphant. Marxist anti-culture has an iron grip on all aspects of life in Western society, and most of all on education. Subtle Marxist fifth columnists and their useful (intelligent-seeming) idiots, in all sorts of motley, are working determinedly to prohibit and then eliminate those last resistant tendencies if the human subject which they cannot control. The innate human religious impulse comes to mind as an example. I wonder to observe myself thinking, 'Thank God for American Christian fundamentalists. If they ever fall to the Frankfurt School, they will at least have the honour of having fought the good fight, of having run the race to its finish, and they did better than I.'

And then the Marxists will have their wish: society will have been destroyed.

And then what will they do? Obviously the Marxist elite (for it will be they who govern) will deploy arms and terror in order, as a sine qua non, to ensure minimally sufficient order (let us not speak of law or justice) in the wasteland to provide them, if no-one else, with food and water.

Will there be killing fields? Maybe. Surely not. The driven-snow Marxist scholars, Critical Theory-ists and New Left-ists - the Georg Lukacses, Willhelm Reichs and Adolphe Milibands of our day, are too squeamish for such brutal honesty, too dainty to dirty their hands. Perhaps they are, rather, the progeny of Fotherington-Thomas and Madeleine Bassett, believing that their nihilism will achieve its ends bloodlessly, painlessly, over the Primrose Hill (fair trade) tea table, or over Kaffee und Kuchen in the Römerplatz. They never look out of the double-glazed, soundproof windows in their ivory towers, clubs and thinktanks, to see the suffering their works have already caused.  

And after they have won, and all is reduced to the wasteland of their dreams, to Year One or Year Zero, what then?

Will they introduce their own mad post-civilisation calendar? How serviceable will dialetical materialism look when  dialetics are banished in favour of mute submission to the Peoples' Commissars and the only material known to the People is the cold ashes of their homes and some of their former occupants, of their contemptible 'cathedrals' and schools, of their despicable false-consciousness 'writings', 'paintings' and 'music' manuscripts. Still. The Commissars will no doubt have a Five Year Plan handy so it'll all work out as well as... Uncle Joe's Five Year Plans. Or Gordon Brown's. (Couldn't resist, sorry.)

How will they prevent the masses from singing counter-revolutionary songs around the shitfire (© Stanislav)?  From weaving their dreams of liberty into new poems? From weaving their dreams of liberty into new poems and compiling the poems into samizdat books to be passed down the generations? How will they stop the lumpenkinder from hearing their parents' whispered tales of old legends of liberty, and dreaming heroic dreams of breaking free from control of their every thought and movement by the Commissars?

What will historical inevitability look like, after the Marxists have won?

--------------

A post more or less like this one has been submitted to Orphans of Liberty and may appear there over the next few days.

In which we laugh a hollow laugh

 At 'caring' Marxists (seriously, follow the link) who claim moral superiority (FFS) over the rest of us. And their heirs and successors, proud sons of the prophets of the Critical Theory/New Left Movement.



Bastards. All of 'em.

What she said

"All the people in the EU are victims of this mad dirigiste super-state. All of us are seeing our national expression suppressed, our legislatures made redundant, our courts overruled, our civil liberties eroded, our freedom of speech put at risk.

All of us are being enveloped in an undemocratic tyranny which is replacing democracy with oligarchy. 

We should leave the EU because we want to live in a democracy and the EU is an undemocratic tyranny. We should leave because we want to be free."

Dawn Carpenter at ConHome.

Hellas, hélas.

The European Central Bank.

The Greeks taught Europeans how to think when their greatest minds, some of the noblest pedagogues ever, gave us their Philosophy ('love of wisdom'), the bedrock of the Western Hemisphere's intellectual and political progress over subsequent millennia. Until our own time.

The rulers of modern Europe, thinking themselves more enlightened than Socrates, Plato and the 'father of politics', Aristotle, reject the old Greeks' clarity of thought, choosing instead to impose, through a vast and programmatic system of Big Lies, their own corrupt and inhuman ideology of empire.

So now, as Europe and the world begin to suffer the catastrophic consequences of the hubris of these evil oligarchs, Greece must resume her time-honoured role as continental didact and teach us some fundamentals once again. This time, it's Political Economy for Dummies. Think of it as PPE with the Philosophy component replaced by suffering and mob violence.

It is not a course for the fainthearted student. It is taught in environs quite unlike the gracious groves of Plato's Academy. Not to mention l'École Nationale and our own dear Oxford where once strolled and privily spake together the lofty and dispassionate criminals who insist on the enforcement of their rule contra populum, contra rationem, contra mundum, as they calmly watch fire begin to consume their project... and the entire continent.

George - don't do that (Part 573)

Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Cut out the faux-refusenikery, Mr Osborne.

Britain's taxpayers will be forced by Merkel, Sarkozy and the gang to take on more billions of debt in order to ransom Greece - or, rather, to ransom their precious ECB which is saddled with Greece's worthless debt which of course means that we all are, under the Lisbon Treaty. You will hand over our money WHATEVER the cost - and sod the people. It is written. There is bugger all you can do about it, George, so please stop wasting your time and annoying us.

Look. It was decided decades ago that 'the people' are not to be told the truth because we are simply not equipped to handle it. We 'the people' are an anachronistic annoyance with our constant whining about 'democracy'. We 'the people' cannot accept that we need the smack o' firm gummint by benign elders like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Herman Rumpy von Pumpy (and those named below) in order to prevent us killing and eating each other. We're barely civilised, quite frankly.

Sigh. You are lying to us about Greece and the Euro, Mr Osborne. You know it and we know it and you know we know it and we know you know we know it. We recognise your blustering and tutting and arm-waving as the standard operating Europrocedure. It's a pantomime of meaningless gestures, a bit like the Ryanair lady's safety demo which bores her and the captive (sic) audience who know it word for word, gesture for gesture so that we neither listen nor watch but carry on reading our papers and listening to our iPods or just lying back with our eyes closed. Fact is, if the plane crashes, we will all die. Fair enough. Can the plane leave now?

Your pouting and gesticulating are just part of the Big Lie. It's a Venerable Tradition. It is what we have come to expect. We know that we are utterly powerless so don't bother your head about us. But I suppose you have to go through the motions, so just get on with it and don't mind if we take no notice.

Can we leave now?

___________________________


Courtesy of the Bruges Group: 

 "One must never forget that monetary union, which the two of us were the first to propose more than a decade ago is ultimately a political project. It aims to give a new impulse to the historic movement towards union of the European states. Monetary union is a federative project that needs to be accompanied and followed by other steps." — Giscard d'Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, former French & German leaders, quoted in International Herald Tribune, 14.10.97

"The process of monetary union goes hand in hand, must go hand in hand, with political integration and ultimately political union. EMU is, and was meant to be, a stepping stone on the way to a united Europe." — Wim Duisenberg, President, European Central Bank

"The single currency is the greatest abandonment of sovereignty since the foundation of the European Community. It is a decision of an essentially political nature. We need this United Europe. We must never forget that the euro is an instrument for this project." — Felipe Gonzales, former Prime Minister of Spain, May 1998.

"The time for individual nations [in Europe] having its own tax, employment and social policies is definitely over. We must finally bury the erroneous ideas of nations having sovereignty over foreign and defence policies. National sovereignty will soon prove itself to be a product of the imagination." — Gerhard Schröder, Chancellor of Germany, January 1999.

"European government is a clear expression I still use, you need time, but step by step, as in the Austrian case, the European Commission takes a political decision and behaves like a growing government." — EU Commission President Romano Prodi, The Independent, 4th February 2000

"Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimension of empire." — José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, EUobserver, 10 July 2007

Hiatus.

 Duty calls. Back soon.

Um, square peg?

Dawkins, a telegenic former academic of modest scientific achievement who went to the bad, will be teaching what, I wonder, in this exciting new science-free humanities college?

Grayling's a passably good professional philosopher and a class act. Presumably he won't countenance damage to the credibility of his shiny new philosophy department by a notoriously risible philosopher-manqué like Dawkins.

So what can Dawkins teach? Theology? Hardly. Even if the NCH were to include the Queen of Sciences (sic) among its curricula (yeah, right) you have to be a halfway-competent philosopher before a theology don will let you over his study threshold, so that rules Dawkins out. Oh yes, before I forget: cue revealingly ignorant sky-fairy jibe. Sigh.

No, wait, I have it. Media Studies. A meeja supah-star like the Prof ought to know from personal experience at least enough to stay one chapter ahead of the students and with his charisma...

Presumably the eminent founding fathers of the NCH are all helping to drum up the moolah to cover their emoluments (grand academics don't have 'salaries', they have 'emoluments') from well-heeled sympathetic billionaires. That'll need to be an ongoing operation and... hey! There it is! Dawkins can be Master of the Begging Bowl! TV studios here he comes!

But no, surely not. The good Prof's far too modest to spend his days whoring around broadcasters and troughing and sluicing among the plutocracy just to get his hands on their wallets. How dare I even think it?

Oratory: the heirs of GBS, Nye and Foot

Labour shadow cabinet minister John Denham said Eric Pickles' social housing policies were like those of the Stasi.

Labour MP Tristram Hunt spoke of gruel, rotten bones and putrid horseflesh and of Cameron’s 'Victorian workhouse ethos'.

Labour 's candidate for the Mayoralty of London (srsly?) Livingstone likened a local government cost-cutter to a man currently on trial for war crimes including genocide.

Way to go, lads. What a terrific government in waiting Labour-in-Opposition is turning out to be!

And The Wrong Brother's doing a great job as PM-in-waiting, isn't he?

Bread and circuses: Latest

The fate of the small but apparently fantastically important power called Feefa has dominated the news over the past couple of weeks. The ruler of Feefa goes by the name of Blather. Strange name for a tyrant, but there you go. It seems there were some suitably fashionable outbreaks of rebellion in Feefa but they were half-hearted affairs led by some overmighty barons whose hearts weren't in it because they had more to lose than to gain from a coup de champ so the status quo ante was restored quickly and without much bloodshed. Trebles all round.

A professional Northerner (no, not Lee Mack - a woman) has either succeeded or failed to get a highly paid job and either broken up with or remains devoted to her Svengali. These exciting events took place either in the USA or here but I have not yet zzzzzz...

Sorry about that. In other news,

This past week, it has been suggested that the national assets of one former sovereign state be disposed of by an outside body of foreigners, and that even the tax receipts of that nation be gathered by another outside foreign authority. The media have chosen to keep the British people in almost complete ignorance of such proposals

Rly? Pass the Twiglets. Anyway, d'you reckon wossisname is gonna win the talent show? Personally, I can't wait! We're getting one of those M&S special offer dinners in specially.

Save the children

Bastards. Utter fucking fascist bastards.
How the fuck, fuck, fucking DARE they!
Can we leave now?
I mean - NOW.

UPDATE - BY REQUEST

QOTD

Menzies Campbell, who is by no means as nice a man as he appears

How very true. About time someone said it and now Oborne has.

Our masters think a little learning is a dangerous thing - and they are right

A version of this post first appeared at Orphans of Liberty on 18th May 2011.

The following is a statement by an exceedingly annoying man whom one should never cite as an example of anything, except in extreme circumstances, because it only encourages him.

"The idea that classical music is the province of white-wigged old farts shows a failure of imagination and rank snobbery,"

Thus sayeth, rightly, the nation’s favourite prep school master, Stephen Fry, who I admit can be quite interesting in small doses. This week, the omnipresent omnididact was on his hind legs in the Cambridge Union to oppose the motion,

'This House believes classical music is irrelevant to today's youth',

... proposed by a radio DJ whose professional life centres on yoof culcha. Let us forgive Fry’s non-accidental, leftie-luvvie omission of the word ‘inverse’ in his accusation of snobbery since the motion was heavily defeated.

The audience, of course, comprised the mainly middle-class members of an elite English university which has contributed massively and arguably more than any other to the classical music scene in the United Kingdom and the wider world, so one may assume that the audience would include several young classical musicians.

(Think of a British classical singer or conductor and it’s about evens that he or she is a Cantab alumnus and/or don whose career began in a Cambridge college chapel.) Cambridge musicians have enriched and continue to enrich the musical life of this country, Europe and the wider western world to an extraordinary degree.

They perform in all the great concert halls of the world’s cultural centres where – and here we approach the burden of this post – they lay before each generation the vast treasure trove of western society’s priceless musical heritage. They were never going to support the motion. But in a different forum… the BBC Question Time studio, perhaps… would the vote have gone the same way? I would dearly love to think so but I do not.

Classical music expresses the ineffable and, as it does so, elicits an immemorial recognition, the Ah! response, in the depths of the hearer’s soul providing the hearer knows how to hear it. It both feeds and empowers the imagination. No poem or painting can express exquisite erotic ecstasy as well as Wagner’s Liebestod. Nowhere in all art is a human cry of remorse more starkly heartbreaking than in Bach’s Erbarme dich.

Triumph over adversity has never been roared more joyfully than in the finale of Handel’s Saul. As for the human instinct for transcendence, ‘He who sings, prays twice’, and ‘When the angels play for God, they play Mozart, but when they play for pure joy, for themselves, they play Schubert.’

Gather a group of people, any group of people (if such there be) who have never, ever heard any classical music. Bring before them an orchestra and a chorus of singers and give them the Hallelujah chorus from Messiah. I use the word ‘give’ deliberately for hearing this music live, right there, right in front of you, blotting out all other sound and banishing all other thoughts, is to be aware of receiving a priceless gift, as indeed Handel, the great classical music showman, well knew. It makes the hearer grateful as well as joyful.

Not all great and, in the context of this post, important music is as instantly accessible as the Hallelujah chorus. Some, perhaps most, classical music is tricky to ‘get’ without a run-up of some sort on the part of the audience. One needs to train the ear, the sensibility.

Music is a language and the would-be traveller in music-land needs a phrase-book, at the very least, in order to begin to understand it. But imagine for a moment that phrase-books are banned, that the authorities forbid you to even hear, let alone learn, the language of a place you are curious to visit. ‘Oi, you. Switch that Linguaphone CD off. Plain English is all your sort needs.

You’d never understand those foreigners, not that it matters because you’re staying right here and not going anywhere. We have taught you everything you need to know in order to live as we instruct you. Where we keep you. Foreign language my arse. We decide what you will hear and how you will think. But we have your interests at heart, my dear. We have laid on loads of easy-to-understand entertainment for you. Your sort of thing. Sit back and enjoy it and don’t make trouble, now.’

Tony Blair rose to power on a promise to liberate the people from such servitude, chanting Education, Education, Education which was not exactly what Lenin meant when he said Learning, Learning, Learning but, passing over that can of worms for the moment, one must admit that, mistaken and amoral imperialist as he was, Lenin genuinely wanted people to learn in order to be able to throw off their chains (as he defined them).

That is why the Soviet Union made a point of giving everyone a thorough musical education. (Irony, thy name is Communism.) When Peter Donohoe and Vladimir Ovchinnikov took joint second prize at Moscow’s International Tchaikovsky Competition they were mobbed like rock stars by crowds of thousands who partied outside the musicians' hotel all night long. How different from the cultural life of our own dear nation.

Even if Blair thought he meant what he said, he ceded total control of all domestic UK policy to an utterly cynical professional iconoclast. Gordon Brown’s philistine single-issue agenda was not, in contrast with Lenin’s, the liberation of his people by the empowerment of their minds through learning but the construction of an ignorant, fearful, grovellingly grateful client-underclass of welfare and immigration ballot-box fodder who, if they were capable of voting (best not, actually) would vote solidly, overwhelmingly and in perpetuity for his party, led by himself, and be taught to fear and therefore hate all who opposed him. Brown is an evil, destructive, seditious bastard. But I digress.

To achieve their oppressive Gramscian objective, Brown and his ilk have made it their business to detach the masses from their cultural roots, which means from their history. By stealth. While ostentatiously hosing other people's money over 'education'. A smokescreen from a bonfire of banknotes. (Mixing metaphors is fun.)

The first step is to create a climate of fear about the language one uses, so that those who have gone beyond the state school system, i.e., adults, learn to speak only in newspeak modes with exceptions being punished. This cultivates the essential group-think. (None of this is new, of course.)

The next step is to detach children from parents, dismantling the traditional family by abolishing and disparaging marriage, pontificating the while: ‘We care equally for all family types because all are equally good’, thus removing from society its greatest bastion of liberty, for when the members of a nuclear family support and defend each other against all comers, the state is powerless to intimidate the adult partners or to alienate or indoctrinate the children. But, split the parents, cast the child-rearer into dependency upon the state ('we are the caring party and only we will look after you - the others want you to rot in poverty'), remove the children – psychologically – from their parents’ baleful influence, and there’s your slave class, your socialist ballot-fodder.

Next, alienate detached-from-family children from their parents' and their country's history. It's Year Zero, every year. Apart from the old chestnut about the nation which forgets its history being condemned to repeat it, an understanding of one’s national historical narrative (which conveys 'we', as opposed to isolated anecdotes which convey 'they') implants a sense of identity.

Of course, this is absolutely inimical to The Project, in which you are to be given your identity by those who control you, cf. Gordon Brown defining ‘Britishness’ using his personal, p.c., socialist lexicon (ed. H Harman). To learn history, to become aware of one’s individual identity and place in the tribe, and to begin to appreciate the historical development and treasures of one’s culture, enables the individual to learn about and appreciate humanity’s constant and urgent striving for liberty and to see how human beings have become progressively enlightened and so increasingly able to strive for the fulfilment of the fathomless emotional-intellectual hunger which defines us as human.

Finally, the most all-encompassing element of the Gramscian, i.e., Marxist, project is the management of Culture (capital C) itself of which the two most malleable elements are education and entertainment.

Deprive the young of high culture at all costs. It is dangerous. It is a fundamental threat to the Project. It must be available only to the nomenklatura who alone are capable of setting it in its true historical-political context. Blot out its very existence from the imagination of hoi polloi by flooding their perception-world with easy-to-grasp,  noisy, energy-consuming bread and circuses. These will be supplied by the nomenklatura and opportunist capitalist useful-idiots.

Give the slaves a bloody good time. Stress repeatedly that the pop culture they enjoy so much is just as ‘culturally valid’ as their boring-old progenitors’ boring-old classical music an’ ‘at. TOWIE, Kissy Sell Out, wha’evah – Yoof Culcha, innit? Old farts don’t get it? And I should care, why? They’ll be dead soon anyway. Dance on, bro’. Classical music? You wha’?

All that sitting in silence, listening to somebody else making music – which is so fundamentally alien to youth's desire to get up and dance, or get up and make music for themselves. – Ivan Hewitt, Telegraph

And thus it is, in too many – but not yet all – state schools in the grip of teachers drilled by Marxist union leaders and academics (avid concert goers all) who offer pupils – sorry, students - steel pans rather than pianos (‘it’s the cuts’) and preach that DM-booted but politically acceptable, 'radical', 'street' Stomp-ing is more ‘relevant’ than Promming.

Keep the peasants ignorant and their emotional and intellectual development stunted. Restrict violins and Vivaldi to toff-spawn in private schools, at least until they are taxed out of existence and bankers’ kids have to learn to rap like state sector kids. 'Kee-eep dancin'!'  Fire live ammo at their feet if necessary.

And thus universities like Cambridge fill up with the violin-playing, Latin-singing progeny of middle-class parents who struggled to give their children a real education which teaches them to value the work of history’s geniuses, the giants on whose shoulders even pop musicians stand.

If we want our children to grow up to be free persons who value liberty and hate slavery, we must teach them to think about how they have arrived at this point in their history.  European political history? Play them the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves and tell them it was the anthem of a whole bloody revolution, and that this is classical music written by a classical composer called Verdi and that the people, the everyday people, carried him shoulder-high through the streets because he was theirs. They owned him and his music.

We must show growing children the masterpieces of Titian, and Europe’s soaring cathedrals, explaining why they are there, at all. We must teach them how to hear Beethoven and Bartok, Palestrina and Mozart, Biber and Bach, Strauss and Shostakovich. The beautiful creations of these geniuses are as critical to our children’s historical understanding and as central to their cultural inheritance, and as fundamental to the flowering of their own innate gifts as Cologne and Durham, Botticelli and Monet and the ideas of Ptolemy, Einstein, Aristotle and Hume.

All children are entitled to be acquainted with these things because they own them. They are theirs. Their history. Their culture. To blind them to it, or to allow others to do so, is premeditated theft of their potential and therefore of their innate liberty, condemning them to imprisonment of mind and soul. To make them slaves.

Learning is the door of liberty.

Geert Wilders' final remarks to the court

A good read

No, a very, very good read. Cheered me up no end.

Oo, look! Sun... yardarm... Cheers!

Aaahahahaha....


Hat tip Fawkes.