The Radio 4 programme Analysis, “Who’s Afraid of the BNP”, which was presented on 28 September 2009, started from the biased position– How can we stop them? Presented by Kenan Malik, there was no objective examination of the party. Rather, labels were used to dehumanise — which is what they accuse the BNP of doing to people of other races.
The people interviewed were all against the BNP apart from two brief contributions from Nick Griffin. The representatives of the elites constantly dehumanised their victims with the fashionable negative labels “racism” and “far-right.” The only concession was to “let them have their say and they will make fools of themselves.” The question was should they tolerate the BNP or not? Despite speaking with apparent certainty they never asked what the BNP actually stands for!
To avoid being smeared or persecuted, whites have to be passive (tolerant) and allow themselves to be dispossessed and their children disinherited. The attacks on anyone who says the wrong thing or points out a truth are always hysterical as if the truth must be kept out of mind at all costs. This has always been the reaction — panic and hysteria — to silence truth. Enoch Powell was treated in the same way — no attempt to disprove his arguments or show where he was wrong — just accusations of “racism,” and sacking him from the Shadow Cabinet. They ignored his arguments but attacked the language he used and because they were too frightened to talk about it they blamed him. Why did they not want to discuss it? Why did they close ranks on him? They must have known what was happening the same as he did. He was too clever for them so they said he was mad!
In October, wildlife experts condemned a cull of parakeets on the ludicrous grounds that parakeets are “as British as curry” and shooting them would be racist. This shows how meaningless the word “racism” is.
The dehumanising attacks on us takes peoples’ attention from the elite’s hidden agenda. As far back as 11 December 2007 it was revealed that more than a million of the new jobs created in the previous decade were taken by foreign workers. A specific example was in the Daily Telegraph of 26 January 2008 when Avon Fire Service excluded white men from a recruitment drive.
Even a social-Conservative view is now taboo; a decent traditional patriotism is demonised as “far-right.” They slot any one who does not submit into the negative role in their pre-existing ideology.
Conservative leader David Cameron slandered BNP members as “Nazi thugs” dressed up in suits. What is his hidden agenda? This is it: “We have a responsibility to change to accommodate immigrants so they fit in.” This is why the Conservative Muslim Forum and the Muslim Council of Britain are emboldened to demand that Britain change to take account of their ways. Furthermore, deceitful Cameron now tells us we will be refused a referendum on the submission to the EU in the Lisbon Treaty. The biggest stitch-up in European history and he calls other people fascists?
Those who call for control and common sense in open-door immigration are demonised as “Nazis” and “Racists by the dominant crypto-Communists, and the New Left which took over in the 70s. This is highly offensive as many lost family fighting Nazism and we have a long and noble tradition of conserving our homogeneity from centuries before Hitler was born.
I looked in The Spectator of 26th September and was embarrassed at the humdrum thinking of political editor Fraser Nelson. It was a copy book example of the how the opinion formers are living in the past:”When Hitler started National Socialism in Germany it started off with 2 percent of the vote. So I don’t think you can write the BNP off on account of its small support. And these sinister theories of racial purity or segregation are not uncommon.”
He used the obligatory mindless clichés:” …Britain is the most tolerant country on earth and the BNP’s racist agenda repels people. It is, fundamentally, un-British. We are, through empire, the original multi-ethnic state and today’s young people judge racist arguments as being more bizarre than repugnant.”
He makes assumptions which show his own narrow minded prejudices: “… To look at a person’s skin, and think ‘you don’t belong here’ — even if they are third generation British — is abhorrent to me. The BNP has cleverly learned to bury these racist sentiments beneath legitimate concerns about immigration.” When the opinion formers look at a person’s skin they see cheap labour and costs of eating in restaurants kept down!
He talks as if everything is going well but that is not supported by the majority of the evidence such as the separate development in areas like Brixton and Bradford. The widespread building of mosques shows immigrants are not integrating but developing apart from the host communities.
The great paradox is that these faux liberals slot everything into their old-fashioned “Nazi” stereotype while they are acting like intolerant totalitarians. Throughout history, certain groups have been excluded from jobs. Once it was Catholics, then in France it was the Huguenots; in the last century, first the Kulaks in Russia, the Jews in Germany, and in Pol Pot’s Cambodia it was academics and the middle class who were excluded because they were despised by the ruling elites.
In contemporary Britain it is BNP members who are persecuted — they are already banned from joining the police, and soon possibly from becoming teachers. The victims change and the oppressors change but it is the same principle. The sickening thing is the writers like Fraser Nelson, who justify the persecution and pretend they are tolerant but that the group they victimise are intolerant. A woman on the above-mentioned Analysis radio programme berated the BNP for their lack of tolerance then said they should be banned!
Harriet Harman, a man hater, is in a time warp. She told the recent Labour conference: “The BNP pretend they’ve changed, pretend they’re respectable… They’re still the same party that wanted the Nazis to win the war. They’re still the same party whose constitution excludes from membership anyone who is not ‘indigenous Caucasian’. It’s right that the new Equality Bill will ban that clause. There can be no place in our democracy for an apartheid party.”
But her Equality law gives preferential treatment in law to women and ethnics over white males! These are the most racist laws since Hitler’s Nuremburg Laws. Don’t these people know that Sir Winston Churchill tried to introduce a bill to control immigration in 1955? He wanted the Conservatives to adopt the slogan “Keep England White” as Harold Macmillan noted in his diary entry for 20th February 1955. It is recorded in his biography At the End of the Day. The Establishment pretend that those who want common sense in immigration follow Hitler when we actually follow Churchill. It is only since the elites began breaking the native British down to impose their ideology of “anti-racism” on us to legitimise their replacing our communities with immigrants and importing cheap labour that the natural way of thinking has been persecuted.
Home Secretary Alan Johnson has stated that he would not debate with someone he considers to be a racist. What does Johnson’s false morality hide? In July Johnson said: “I do not lie awake at night worrying about a population of 70 million.” He said he is “happy” living in a multicultural society and called for more foreign workers to come to Britain. What is behind the false morality — importing cheap labour for corporations and for people like himself to employ? When Frank Field MP appeared on The Moral Maze a couple of years ago he told the panel, who support immigration straight, they are the types who benefit from cheap labour!
They hide their real intentions behind the accusations against others of “racism” and “intolerance” but are themselves “racist” and “intolerant” but of whites not the ethnics with which they are replacing us. Jack Straw described the English as not worth saving. On 16 November 2004 he wrote to the Independent stating that to call him a Trotskyist was “a malicious libel.” He indicated that his political sympathies and training could be traced back to Stalinism. Trevor Phillips of the Stalinist English Human Rights Commission shares this view and has a bust of Lenin on his desk to prove it!
It is an all-party prejudice as William Hague said: “English nationalism is the most dangerous of all forms of nationalism that can arise within the United Kingdom, because England is five-sixths of the population of the UK.”
Universities are cutting back on indigenous students and replacing them with overseas students and also teaching Iranians nuclear physics. The Foreign Office allows “dozens” of Iranians to enter Britain to study advanced nuclear physics, electrical and chemical engineering and microbiology. These subjects could be applied to developing weapons of mass destruction. Many scientists from hostile countries have studied here. An Iraqi, Rihab Taha, studied at the University of East Anglia and later became a microbiologist involved in Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons programme.
Strangely, after the horrors of the last war, anti-Semitism is returning but with multi-racialists. In a November 2001interview in The Telegraph, Ken Livingstone called on the police to be lenient to those immigrants who fought against British troops: “We’ve got to accept that these people went off because of a deep sense of injustice about what’s happening in Israel and the West Bank.” The West should understand that they and the al-Qaeda network feed off a genuine injustice in the Middle East. Mayor Livingstone invited back cleric Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi who described Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel as martyrs. The Crown Prosecution Service said there was not enough evidence to prosecute him on the grounds of his speeches.
Commenting on Israel, Cherie Blair stated that she “…understands how people are driven to suicide bombing.” Her half-sister Lauren denounced Jewish people to a Muslim audience in Blackburn in January. In “The Muslim March the BBC didn’t want you to see”, she was filmed by intrepid BNP members denouncing first Israel then Jewish people in general.
For making general comments on Arabs, the BBC sacked Robert Kilroy-Silk, yet, signed on the former editor-in-chief of Al-Jazeera.
In an openly anti-Semitic plea to the Muslim community to support Labour, Government minister Mike O’Brien wrote in Muslim World, in early 2005, that “The government has obediently introduced controversial legislation (The law against religious hatred) at the behest of Muslim leaders.” The article also implied that Muslims should not vote for Michael Howard because he is Jewish.
O’Brien boasted, “When the Americans and Israelis refused to negotiate with Yasser Arafat, Tony Blair promptly sent myself as the Foreign Office Minister, to visit Yasser Arafat in the Muquata in Ramallah to convey the message that we had not abandoned him. Tony Blair’s message was clear: we will work with the elected leader of the Palestinians, even if the Americans will not. On the issue of the assassination of the leaders of Hamas, Jack Straw as the Foreign Secretary was the first Western politician to condemn Israel’s actions.”
In November 2003, the European Union’s “Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia” suppressed a report on the rise of anti-Semitism. The survey had found “many anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups,” and so a “political decision” was taken not to publish it because of “fears that it would increase hostility towards Muslims.”
Over 3000 Al-Qaeda terrorists trained in Afghanistan are living here and more enter every day. There are terror cells right across Britain as shown by the locations of police raids following the bombings. The 7th July terrorist attacks and the failed suicide bombings two weeks later; the riots in Sweden, France and here, are part of a religious war against Europe and Jewish people. It has been reported that at least eight al-Qaeda members are serving in the British police.
The prospect of widespread Holocausts becomes very real with Turkey joining the EU and the 12 million North African Muslims Sarkozy and David Milliband are bringing in under the Barcelona Agreement. That is without the 50 million Africans the EU want to bring here as cheap labour.
As for Turkey, their prime minister encourages hatred of Israel in speeches which becomes anti-Semitic abuse or even actions among the public. The Israeli consulate in Istanbul is constantly besieged by crowds shouting against Israel and Jewish people. In the streets people shout “Kill Jews,” “Kill Israel,” “Israel should no longer exist in the Middle East,” and “Stop Israeli Massacre.” The elites are importing this anti-Semitism into Britain and the rest of Europe. No wonder they accuse others of “Nazism” and “Holocaust denial” when they are importing new Holocausts! The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a bestseller in Turkey, and Palestine was once part of the Ottoman Empire. It is clear that Western elites want to see Israel destroyed because with Turkey and North Africa in Europe the anti-Israeli movement in the EU will be very powerful.
As it is whites and European Jewish communities under attack from the nexus of western elites and Muslim extremists, we must set up committees to liaise with our Jewish communities for mutual defence against this imported Jihad.
Thursday, 12 November 2009
EU - Committing Ethnocide?
Now that we have two members of the EU Parliament, the possibility of saving Europe and her peoples has become a reality. One of the situations they face is the media torn between their duty of informing the public and their wanting to keep sensitive information quiet so they can present other ethnic groups as better than us.
However, information does come out in bits and we can piece it together to build up an accurate picture of what is really going on. What I say to people is don’t believe the media and don’t take my word for something. Look for yourselves — there is much information on the Internet.
The central issue of the dominant ideology is identity — what we are. This encompasses race, followed by gender and orientation. News is managed and EU schemes to discriminate against whites are kept quiet or presented in idealistic language. People can not revolt against something if they do not know it is happening.
What is really happening?
Throughout Europe there is a developing war on the streets for possession of the Continent. This is mainly against European people but anti-Semitism is being introduced too. There are almost continuous riots in France and vicious attacks on white and Jewish people which the controlled media tries to hide. In Sweden young white women are hunted down and raped by Muslims. It is also not safe for Jewish people to go out in identifying clothes, but the authorities try to suppress knowledge of this. The Express of 26 February 2009 reported that “British Muslims” were snipers and bomb-makers killing our troops in Afghanistan. Army eavesdropping operations have heard British accents among Taliban forces. These are the first stirrings of a British racial civil war. EU rulers know this but still encourage immigration.
In Luton some local Muslims protested against the parade of local regiment The Royal Anglians, or “The Poachers”, on their return from Iraq. English people fought back but the police protected the Muslims and arrested a young Englishman, although the CPS later dropped the charges. These warning signs are ignored.
During the Muslim-Socialist protests against Israel’s raids on Gaza last January, protesters throughout Europe and in London openly chanted “Jews to the gas” while the police looked on. And still the rulers import more Muslim terrorists and anti-Semites.
To prevent Geert Wilders speaking at the House of Lords, Muslim peer Lord Ahmed threatened to bring 10,000 Muslim protesters outside the Lords.
The elites submitted to Saudi when they abandoned the bribery investigation into the arms deal between Saudi Arabia and BAE systems because of an explicit threat made by the Saudi authorities. Britain’s former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, explained that if the case continued, “British lives on British streets” would be at risk.
What is behind the surrender? Well, decadence and, of course, oil and money!
Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson visited Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states in November 2008. They asked for billions to be put into the International Monetary Fund and, as Mandelson later admitted, offered Saudis some influence over Britain and the West. The Saudi regime is the motor behind the Islamisation of the West as their Wahhabi form of Islam is making Islam dominant in the world by spreading Wahhabi mosques, preachers and educational institutions to promote holy war and convert thousands of British Muslims.
Barclays Bank has had almost £6 billion invested from Abu Dhabi and Qatar. Brown is to make London the global centre of Islamic banking and Britain’s major banks are accepting Sharia finance. Sharia is a project for Islamicising society. Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer, advocates Sharia finance.
Islamist ideas are spread through Islamic study centres attached to our universities. Professor Anthony Glees revealed that eight universities — including Oxford and Cambridge — have received over £233.5 million from Saudi sources since 1995.
The EU uses social engineering techniques they studied in Russia in 2005 when the Audio Visual Observatory of the European Council held a symposium in Moscow.
Benita Ferrero Waldner, European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighborhood Policy, in her speech entitled “Intercultural dialogue: the media’s role”, told selected media representatives from across Europe: “Freedom of expression is central to the values and traditions of Europe. But its preservation depends on responsible behaviours by individuals. By extension, we do not believe the media should be regulated from outside, but rather that you find ways to regulate yourselves.
“In considering the question of self-regulation, I would also ask you to think about the need for monitoring from within your own professional bodies. I am convinced that will have a significant impact… We will identify a nucleus of journalists and analysts around which to develop a structured, sustainable system of information exchange and publication focused on North–South understanding.”
She said, “Europeans know from bitter experience the gravity of the threat racism and xenophobia represent. Indeed, the European Union was born out of the cataclysm of intolerance that engulfed twentieth-century Europe. Our task has been … minimising hatred and maximising reason. And today the European Union stands as a testimony to Europe’s religious, linguistic and cultural diversity. We are a community of values, united by our diversity and our determination to prevent such a threat from overwhelming us again.
“That is not to deny there are problems in Europe. Racism and xenophobia stem from fear of the unknown, of the different, and in uncertain times they are never far from the surface. That is why we have set up the Monitoring Centre and why we are continually fighting for equality and tolerance.”
Waldner and her kind are using the last war to justify surrendering Europe to Islam.
People using politically correct “isms”, devised by those who seek to destroy us, show they do not think for themselves and have been programmed by the media. They talk like robots using the totalitarian words: “racism”, “fascist”, “hate speech”, now “Islamophobia” — which are meant to stop people thinking about what is happening in a rational way.
The destruction of Western Europe is taking place through mass immigration and the imposition of totalitarian laws and bureaucratic Human Rights Commissions to oppress dissident patriots. Only a small minority of the Muslim community is involved in street fighting, but the entire community wishes to see Islamic ways dominate the capital cities of Europe.
The World Culture Forum Alliance, founded by the Ford Foundation, is linked to the US Council on Foreign Relations and the CIA, as well as the EU, the European Council and UNESCO. They have admitted they are using propaganda and withholding certain news to manage and control us.
The Anna Lindh Foundation was founded by the Arab League, the EU, the European Council and UNESCO. Traugott Schoefthaler, head of the Anna Lindh Foundation, said: “We will arrange giant Muslim Youth Festivals — like the ‘Images of the Middle East’, which lasted six weeks in 2006 in Denmark.
“We will tackle stereotypes and prejudices and ignorance and change the daily ‘news journalism’ to portray every-day life of ordinary people, which can create identification and fascination — and intercultural understanding. We will tackle our stereotypic images of people from foreign cultures and make new experiments with pictures in public places, in the media and advertising.
“And we will have common projects with people from other cultures. We will develop the intercultural skills of journalists, school pupils and artists and exchange people from these groups with (Muslim) colleagues. We will manage art and cultural productions. We will train the school teachers and influence their education to be multicultural.
“And we will influence the curricula of the schools to become multicultural by means of revision of existing textbooks and educational materials.”
In 1995, EU leaders made a contract, known as the Barcelona Agreement, with the leaders of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean. Its purpose is to ensure mass immigration from North Africa into the EU that will destroy our civilisations in Western Europe. This has been kept from the people even though it will become effective in 2010. Some excerpts will show what we are not being told.
The EU intends to force its subject peoples to respect Islam which means persecuting any who oppose EU sponsored invasion. We are to obey the dictates of multiculturalism to promote tolerance between different ethnic groups in Europe. This targets Europeans, while other groups are allowed their own separate development. There is to be a one-sided campaign against ‘racism’, ‘xenophobia’ and ‘intolerance’. It is meant to be applicable to whites but not other ethnic groups.
There is to be more Muslim influence on radio, television, newspapers and magazines. A youth exchange programme is to bring about cooperation between future Euro-Mediterranean generations as stipulated in the Barcelona Declaration adopted at the Euro-Mediterranean Conference.
Our respective European religions and cultures are devalued ready for the implementation of Islamic mores. The populations of the nine Muslim countries will be given free movement of goods, services, capital and people into Europe in return for political and economic changes. Association agreements have been made with all partner countries except Syria (Euro-Mediterranean Foreign Minister Conference in Naples held on 2–3.12.2003). Negotiations for Turkish EU entrance began in 2005.
Less than a month after 9/11 the EU rulers again surrendered to Islam: “The ministers declined as both dangerous and unfounded any connection between terror and the Arab and Muslim world. In this context the importance of the Barcelona Process was emphasised by everybody as a suitable and recognised instrument to promote a dialogue between equal partners and civilisations. The ministers agreed to work on deepening the ongoing dialogue between the cultures and civilisations, especially wanting to direct attention towards youth, education, and the media.”
Also read the speech by the head of the “Danish Centre for Culture and Development” (CKD) — run by the Danish Foreign Ministry — Olaf Gerlach Hansen, in Rabat, Morocco, 13 June 2005.
The European Union and the European Council plan to destroy our identity: “Cultural policy must avoid the popular distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’, even mentioning ‘the other’ , as this opens the gate for imposing collective identity on the individual.”
Yet they impose the collective identity “European” on all the diverse nations of Europe! It is a change to a new collective that they plan.
The EU have made cooperation agreements with the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, which aims — according to article 5a of its charter — to spread Muslim ways of thinking and living in the entire world (Charter of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization— ISESCO).
Our politicians cannot face the reality of widespread war with Islam throughout Europe so they pretend we have shared goals. Margaret Beckett, when Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, told Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on the 7July 2006: “Our obligation to the values that mean most to us — freedom, tolerance and justice — has grown even stronger and deeper since the London bombs. So has our relationship with the Islamic world, which also shares our common ideals, today.”
The UN is no longer what it was set up to be. The Durban conference of 2005 lifted the veil on reality. The Conference against Racism was meant to pillory whites for crimes of slavery and colonialism but became a fest of anti- Jewishness from Muslim countries.
Kofi Annan, UN secretary general, showed his hatred of whites: “The pain and anger are still felt. The dead, through their descendants, cry out for justice.” The delegates at the conference from the Arab–Muslim states ignored their own involvement in slavery and united with the African group in demanding anti-colonialist revenge: “The West, which is genocidal by nature, should recognise its crimes, beg for forgiveness and pay symbolic and financial reparations to the victims of its oppression.” This is effectively a declaration of war against white and Jewish communities!
Zionism was portrayed as the new Nazism and apartheid was “white viciousness”, which they claimed had caused “one Holocaust after the other in Africa” through human trafficking, slavery and colonialism. According to them, Israel should disappear and its politicians tried at an international tribunal like Nuremberg. There were anti-Semitic cartoons circulated, copies of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence. Beneath a photo of Hitler was a lament that had he lived, Israel wouldn’t have existed and the Palestinians would not have been harmed. Several delegates were threatened; there were shouts of “Death to Jews.” Sudanese Minister of Justice, Ali Mohamed Osman Yasin, demanded reparations for historical slavery, although in his own country, people are being used as slaves as I write. This is what the EU is importing into Europe and our MEPs are trying to combat these evils.
However, information does come out in bits and we can piece it together to build up an accurate picture of what is really going on. What I say to people is don’t believe the media and don’t take my word for something. Look for yourselves — there is much information on the Internet.
The central issue of the dominant ideology is identity — what we are. This encompasses race, followed by gender and orientation. News is managed and EU schemes to discriminate against whites are kept quiet or presented in idealistic language. People can not revolt against something if they do not know it is happening.
What is really happening?
Throughout Europe there is a developing war on the streets for possession of the Continent. This is mainly against European people but anti-Semitism is being introduced too. There are almost continuous riots in France and vicious attacks on white and Jewish people which the controlled media tries to hide. In Sweden young white women are hunted down and raped by Muslims. It is also not safe for Jewish people to go out in identifying clothes, but the authorities try to suppress knowledge of this. The Express of 26 February 2009 reported that “British Muslims” were snipers and bomb-makers killing our troops in Afghanistan. Army eavesdropping operations have heard British accents among Taliban forces. These are the first stirrings of a British racial civil war. EU rulers know this but still encourage immigration.
In Luton some local Muslims protested against the parade of local regiment The Royal Anglians, or “The Poachers”, on their return from Iraq. English people fought back but the police protected the Muslims and arrested a young Englishman, although the CPS later dropped the charges. These warning signs are ignored.
During the Muslim-Socialist protests against Israel’s raids on Gaza last January, protesters throughout Europe and in London openly chanted “Jews to the gas” while the police looked on. And still the rulers import more Muslim terrorists and anti-Semites.
To prevent Geert Wilders speaking at the House of Lords, Muslim peer Lord Ahmed threatened to bring 10,000 Muslim protesters outside the Lords.
The elites submitted to Saudi when they abandoned the bribery investigation into the arms deal between Saudi Arabia and BAE systems because of an explicit threat made by the Saudi authorities. Britain’s former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, explained that if the case continued, “British lives on British streets” would be at risk.
What is behind the surrender? Well, decadence and, of course, oil and money!
Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson visited Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states in November 2008. They asked for billions to be put into the International Monetary Fund and, as Mandelson later admitted, offered Saudis some influence over Britain and the West. The Saudi regime is the motor behind the Islamisation of the West as their Wahhabi form of Islam is making Islam dominant in the world by spreading Wahhabi mosques, preachers and educational institutions to promote holy war and convert thousands of British Muslims.
Barclays Bank has had almost £6 billion invested from Abu Dhabi and Qatar. Brown is to make London the global centre of Islamic banking and Britain’s major banks are accepting Sharia finance. Sharia is a project for Islamicising society. Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer, advocates Sharia finance.
Islamist ideas are spread through Islamic study centres attached to our universities. Professor Anthony Glees revealed that eight universities — including Oxford and Cambridge — have received over £233.5 million from Saudi sources since 1995.
The EU uses social engineering techniques they studied in Russia in 2005 when the Audio Visual Observatory of the European Council held a symposium in Moscow.
Benita Ferrero Waldner, European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighborhood Policy, in her speech entitled “Intercultural dialogue: the media’s role”, told selected media representatives from across Europe: “Freedom of expression is central to the values and traditions of Europe. But its preservation depends on responsible behaviours by individuals. By extension, we do not believe the media should be regulated from outside, but rather that you find ways to regulate yourselves.
“In considering the question of self-regulation, I would also ask you to think about the need for monitoring from within your own professional bodies. I am convinced that will have a significant impact… We will identify a nucleus of journalists and analysts around which to develop a structured, sustainable system of information exchange and publication focused on North–South understanding.”
She said, “Europeans know from bitter experience the gravity of the threat racism and xenophobia represent. Indeed, the European Union was born out of the cataclysm of intolerance that engulfed twentieth-century Europe. Our task has been … minimising hatred and maximising reason. And today the European Union stands as a testimony to Europe’s religious, linguistic and cultural diversity. We are a community of values, united by our diversity and our determination to prevent such a threat from overwhelming us again.
“That is not to deny there are problems in Europe. Racism and xenophobia stem from fear of the unknown, of the different, and in uncertain times they are never far from the surface. That is why we have set up the Monitoring Centre and why we are continually fighting for equality and tolerance.”
Waldner and her kind are using the last war to justify surrendering Europe to Islam.
People using politically correct “isms”, devised by those who seek to destroy us, show they do not think for themselves and have been programmed by the media. They talk like robots using the totalitarian words: “racism”, “fascist”, “hate speech”, now “Islamophobia” — which are meant to stop people thinking about what is happening in a rational way.
The destruction of Western Europe is taking place through mass immigration and the imposition of totalitarian laws and bureaucratic Human Rights Commissions to oppress dissident patriots. Only a small minority of the Muslim community is involved in street fighting, but the entire community wishes to see Islamic ways dominate the capital cities of Europe.
The World Culture Forum Alliance, founded by the Ford Foundation, is linked to the US Council on Foreign Relations and the CIA, as well as the EU, the European Council and UNESCO. They have admitted they are using propaganda and withholding certain news to manage and control us.
The Anna Lindh Foundation was founded by the Arab League, the EU, the European Council and UNESCO. Traugott Schoefthaler, head of the Anna Lindh Foundation, said: “We will arrange giant Muslim Youth Festivals — like the ‘Images of the Middle East’, which lasted six weeks in 2006 in Denmark.
“We will tackle stereotypes and prejudices and ignorance and change the daily ‘news journalism’ to portray every-day life of ordinary people, which can create identification and fascination — and intercultural understanding. We will tackle our stereotypic images of people from foreign cultures and make new experiments with pictures in public places, in the media and advertising.
“And we will have common projects with people from other cultures. We will develop the intercultural skills of journalists, school pupils and artists and exchange people from these groups with (Muslim) colleagues. We will manage art and cultural productions. We will train the school teachers and influence their education to be multicultural.
“And we will influence the curricula of the schools to become multicultural by means of revision of existing textbooks and educational materials.”
In 1995, EU leaders made a contract, known as the Barcelona Agreement, with the leaders of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean. Its purpose is to ensure mass immigration from North Africa into the EU that will destroy our civilisations in Western Europe. This has been kept from the people even though it will become effective in 2010. Some excerpts will show what we are not being told.
The EU intends to force its subject peoples to respect Islam which means persecuting any who oppose EU sponsored invasion. We are to obey the dictates of multiculturalism to promote tolerance between different ethnic groups in Europe. This targets Europeans, while other groups are allowed their own separate development. There is to be a one-sided campaign against ‘racism’, ‘xenophobia’ and ‘intolerance’. It is meant to be applicable to whites but not other ethnic groups.
There is to be more Muslim influence on radio, television, newspapers and magazines. A youth exchange programme is to bring about cooperation between future Euro-Mediterranean generations as stipulated in the Barcelona Declaration adopted at the Euro-Mediterranean Conference.
Our respective European religions and cultures are devalued ready for the implementation of Islamic mores. The populations of the nine Muslim countries will be given free movement of goods, services, capital and people into Europe in return for political and economic changes. Association agreements have been made with all partner countries except Syria (Euro-Mediterranean Foreign Minister Conference in Naples held on 2–3.12.2003). Negotiations for Turkish EU entrance began in 2005.
Less than a month after 9/11 the EU rulers again surrendered to Islam: “The ministers declined as both dangerous and unfounded any connection between terror and the Arab and Muslim world. In this context the importance of the Barcelona Process was emphasised by everybody as a suitable and recognised instrument to promote a dialogue between equal partners and civilisations. The ministers agreed to work on deepening the ongoing dialogue between the cultures and civilisations, especially wanting to direct attention towards youth, education, and the media.”
Also read the speech by the head of the “Danish Centre for Culture and Development” (CKD) — run by the Danish Foreign Ministry — Olaf Gerlach Hansen, in Rabat, Morocco, 13 June 2005.
The European Union and the European Council plan to destroy our identity: “Cultural policy must avoid the popular distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’, even mentioning ‘the other’ , as this opens the gate for imposing collective identity on the individual.”
Yet they impose the collective identity “European” on all the diverse nations of Europe! It is a change to a new collective that they plan.
The EU have made cooperation agreements with the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, which aims — according to article 5a of its charter — to spread Muslim ways of thinking and living in the entire world (Charter of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization— ISESCO).
Our politicians cannot face the reality of widespread war with Islam throughout Europe so they pretend we have shared goals. Margaret Beckett, when Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, told Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on the 7July 2006: “Our obligation to the values that mean most to us — freedom, tolerance and justice — has grown even stronger and deeper since the London bombs. So has our relationship with the Islamic world, which also shares our common ideals, today.”
The UN is no longer what it was set up to be. The Durban conference of 2005 lifted the veil on reality. The Conference against Racism was meant to pillory whites for crimes of slavery and colonialism but became a fest of anti- Jewishness from Muslim countries.
Kofi Annan, UN secretary general, showed his hatred of whites: “The pain and anger are still felt. The dead, through their descendants, cry out for justice.” The delegates at the conference from the Arab–Muslim states ignored their own involvement in slavery and united with the African group in demanding anti-colonialist revenge: “The West, which is genocidal by nature, should recognise its crimes, beg for forgiveness and pay symbolic and financial reparations to the victims of its oppression.” This is effectively a declaration of war against white and Jewish communities!
Zionism was portrayed as the new Nazism and apartheid was “white viciousness”, which they claimed had caused “one Holocaust after the other in Africa” through human trafficking, slavery and colonialism. According to them, Israel should disappear and its politicians tried at an international tribunal like Nuremberg. There were anti-Semitic cartoons circulated, copies of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence. Beneath a photo of Hitler was a lament that had he lived, Israel wouldn’t have existed and the Palestinians would not have been harmed. Several delegates were threatened; there were shouts of “Death to Jews.” Sudanese Minister of Justice, Ali Mohamed Osman Yasin, demanded reparations for historical slavery, although in his own country, people are being used as slaves as I write. This is what the EU is importing into Europe and our MEPs are trying to combat these evils.
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Identity and Town Planning
The collective hatred of our nation’s past by the leftist ruling elite takes practical form in their drive to erase all aspects of our culture, traditions and physical history — and is best illustrated by their physical erasure of our traditional architectural forms and its replacement with drab soviet-style ‘accommodation’.
This destruction of all forms of our national identity is engendered by a sense of shame which has been developed and perfected by the ruling elite during the course of the last century. They view all our previous cultural achievements as ‘bad’ or gained immorally at some other nation’s expense. As a result, they wish to eradicate our collective identity and deculturalise us from our roots.
A classic example was taking London Bridge to Lake Havasu, Arizona. It now crosses the Bridgewater Channel from the mainland to a small island on the Colorado River, is world-famous and draws visitors from all over the world. The bridge was sinking into the River Thames and should have been corrected but instead was sold to America. Robert P. McCulloch had the bridge dismantled and sent by barge to the California coast where it was loaded and taken by lorry to Lake Havasu and rebuilt ‘brick’ by ‘brick’. The bridge is a focal point for the city.
Near the bridge is an ‘English Village’ which pays respect to our culture. It has Tudor style architecture, and the shops and restaurants create the atmosphere of old England, with tree-lined walkways and local breweries for hand-brewed ale. There is an English pub in San Francisco — but in England they are being replaced by continental café bars!
For more than 140 years, London Bridge served as a crossing over the River Thames. It survived both world wars and a terrorist attack in 1884. If an American entrepreneur could do all that, then why could London council not conserve it? Because Americans have more respect for our traditions than our local authorities. American tourists constantly ask locals, “Why are you ruining your culture?” We are not — local authorities are imposing this on us.
There is also the eradication of our culture and its replacement by almost any other culture. We have seen the destruction of the traditional British pub, a centre of community and so much admired by tourists, for continental café bars. We see ‘Social Engineering’ by design, in schemes throughout the country whereby our towns and cities are having European style piazzas built to make us feel more European and thus less British. There was an attempt by the council to turn famous London landmark Sloane Square into a European piazza but a strong local opposition stopped it. People are born with an emotional need for community with their own kind and are not units to be re-organised to suit inorganic plans.
It is impossible to love cold, unnatural tower blocks or office buildings built along these lines, or places dominated by such buildings. But this is not just aesthetics; it is about our very identity, which is reinforced by the reciprocal relationship between people and the places in which they live. Building on what we have in a similar scale and style maintains continuity and helps to focus culture and identity. National and local governments alike are destroying places that are sanctioned by time and use, where communities have grown up and grown together instinctively. People’s natural bonding instincts are thwarted by high-rise buildings that separate them from one another and are not physically conducive to developing community spirit — the sense of belonging and of knowing with whom you belong.
Social engineering was to change the physical and mental environment, and thereby change people, who were seen as malleable. But people are not malleable — human nature needs familiar surroundings to develop and be happy. People react aggressively and destructively if this is denied.
Canadian Plains Indians, the Innu, were moved by the Canadian government into specially built estates. They were effectively forcibly transformed into Canadians, just as Britons are being forcibly transformed into ‘citizens of the world’. Like us, the Innu are having their past erased and are being offered nothing for the future — despair has set in, as it is setting in on Britain’s sink estates. A superficial difference is that the Innu were dispossessed by a different ethnic group (Canadian globalists), whereas we are being dispossessed by our own elected representatives (British globalists). But it is the same global movement. In the young Innu, deculturalisation manifests in drug and alcohol abuse and petty crime.
A parallel process is imposed here. In the same deculturalising vein, John Prescott issued a Government directive to destroy 40,000 terrace houses in England by dictat. Twenty thousand habitable homes in Liverpool were to be demolished and replaced by homes outside the range of the dispossessed locals. This is not the first time that ‘Scousers’ have been moved without thought for where they belong and uprooted and forced onto estates modelled on schemes in the Soviet Union.
A parallel with the Innu in England was moving ‘Scousers’ from their root in Liverpool to new towns like Skelmersdale. They should have followed on from traditional estates. Instead they were designed to separate vehicles from pedestrians with a system of courtyard layouts and cul-de-sacs emerging off spine streets, which led to disproportionate costs in street cleaning, refuse collection, ground and street furniture maintenance and, particularly, policing. Skelmersdale was built on an old coalfield and around a series of deep clefts in the moor side that go down into the middle of the town, which meant that extensive ground remediation and stabilisation was required for any construction.
It was built using innovative and experimental techniques — but these were deeply flawed, requiring expensive remedies. Many houses had central heating outlets in the ceiling. The fact that heat rises was ignored, so the bedrooms were heated moderately well but not the downstairs rooms. And one can punch a hand through walls because the houses’ metal frames are corroded and the concrete slabs have collapsed.
More and more of Britain’s young people are aimless, lacking in self-respect, without tradition or a sense of being part of something significant. They are being denied the inheritance of their forbears. There have always been people at the bottom of the pile, but they used to develop within a cultural tradition to which they belonged. Most young people do not misbehave out of endemic wickedness, but because they have been deculturalised. Thanks to a combination of social, cultural, political and environmental pressures, many young people in this country have been estranged from Britishness and severed from structures that helped civilise their ancestors. Buildings need to develop from traditions. We must renew those familiar traditions to civilise young people and minimise the vicious crimes we now have. These are often caused by unnatural and inorganic developments.
Walk along Eccleshall Road ‘Golden Mile’ and through St. Mary’s Gate subway, in Sheffield, and you will see pedestrians averting their eyes in fear, too frightened to look at anyone approaching. I went through recently and was appalled when a young Chinese woman who was walking towards me averted her eyes with terror on her face. “Well,” you might say, “Why not run over the dual carriageway as people in Birmingham do to avoid being mugged in subways?” Because the council put railings inside the hedge along the strip between the two roads to force people through the underpass.
We must restore our town and city centres and historical buildings to the way they were before councillors and developers began destroying them.
A plethora of radical new municipal building swept across the country from the 1950s onwards — schools, hospitals, offices, civic centres, entertainment and sports venues, shopping parades, shopping malls, new road schemes and street furniture, and apartment tower blocks to house tenants whose “slums” had been bombed or condemned as unfit for habitation.
Historic towns such as Peterborough were changed by vast, bland new housing estates for ex-slum-dwellers. These schemes looked exciting in the plans but in practice were ugly, expensive and inefficient.
You only have to look at pictures of old Birmingham, which show a fine Victorian city with buildings like Snow Hill station, which was like a cathedral in its proportions; the Woodman, a glorious Victorian pub; and the old library, to see the wanton destruction so often perpetrated by local authorities. The Bull Ring shopping area was redeveloped in the 1960s, and was so ugly, so unpopular and so badly constructed that it has since been redeveloped.
The local authorities have no respect for local history. A pub called the Railway in Birmingham was knocked down, despite its local importance as the venue where Ozzy Osborne began his career. After all, it is only local history! A little pub called the City Tavern, the only Victorian one left in Birmingham’s deculturalised city centre, was to be knocked down for a car park until a protest saved it. The Yorkshire Grey in Sheffield was demolished for a car park. Originally the Minerva, it was where Joe Cocker made his first public appearance. The leader of the council wants to look to the city’s future apparently. What an appalling lack of respect for a city, its people and their heritage! Then, of course, the cavern was demolished by business people in Liverpool.
One of the examples sent to me is that of the little Black Country town, Cradley. It recently had one side of its main High Street demolished for a by-pass. It has made the town look ridiculous and odd. This folly was proposed to the council by unelected planners and, in this case, authorised by just one councilor. I rang Sandwell council several times but none of the planners were ever available and the calls were not returned.
On the demolished side of the road a new Tesco was built. Although it is a convenience for shoppers from the surrounding areas, the local traders have suffered greatly. This typifies a serious problem with local councils. They stand for election promising to represent local people but often act against their interests once elected.
A combination of social, cultural, political and now environmental pressures with the underlying shame of what we have achieved, has deculturalised native people leaving them estranged from Englishness, severed from all the civilizing structures that their ancestors could take for granted. A serious and sustained programme of architectural reconstruction, rebuilding our traditional buildings and re-linking to our history could help people reconnect with their roots, and feel proud of their towns and cities.
Local councillors are elected by only a minority of voters, on average 20 percent of people over 18 — but not those younger who inherit the mess local councils are causing — and are not representative of the public. We need to appoint a network of independent officers who have both the responsibility and the resources to preserve or represent the local communities rather than sectional interests. We also need planning law reform to make it harder for councillors, who act as agents for developers, to destroy old buildings.
Former councillors from various areas have told me about corruption and backhanders and this is what we must expose. Those who can be shown to have taken bribes to demolish buildings and redevelop our towns and cities must be exposed.
We need housing policies which encourage the creation of buildings that fit into the traditional milieu, and which seek to rebuild much of what has been destroyed by local governments.
This destruction of all forms of our national identity is engendered by a sense of shame which has been developed and perfected by the ruling elite during the course of the last century. They view all our previous cultural achievements as ‘bad’ or gained immorally at some other nation’s expense. As a result, they wish to eradicate our collective identity and deculturalise us from our roots.
A classic example was taking London Bridge to Lake Havasu, Arizona. It now crosses the Bridgewater Channel from the mainland to a small island on the Colorado River, is world-famous and draws visitors from all over the world. The bridge was sinking into the River Thames and should have been corrected but instead was sold to America. Robert P. McCulloch had the bridge dismantled and sent by barge to the California coast where it was loaded and taken by lorry to Lake Havasu and rebuilt ‘brick’ by ‘brick’. The bridge is a focal point for the city.
Near the bridge is an ‘English Village’ which pays respect to our culture. It has Tudor style architecture, and the shops and restaurants create the atmosphere of old England, with tree-lined walkways and local breweries for hand-brewed ale. There is an English pub in San Francisco — but in England they are being replaced by continental café bars!
For more than 140 years, London Bridge served as a crossing over the River Thames. It survived both world wars and a terrorist attack in 1884. If an American entrepreneur could do all that, then why could London council not conserve it? Because Americans have more respect for our traditions than our local authorities. American tourists constantly ask locals, “Why are you ruining your culture?” We are not — local authorities are imposing this on us.
There is also the eradication of our culture and its replacement by almost any other culture. We have seen the destruction of the traditional British pub, a centre of community and so much admired by tourists, for continental café bars. We see ‘Social Engineering’ by design, in schemes throughout the country whereby our towns and cities are having European style piazzas built to make us feel more European and thus less British. There was an attempt by the council to turn famous London landmark Sloane Square into a European piazza but a strong local opposition stopped it. People are born with an emotional need for community with their own kind and are not units to be re-organised to suit inorganic plans.
It is impossible to love cold, unnatural tower blocks or office buildings built along these lines, or places dominated by such buildings. But this is not just aesthetics; it is about our very identity, which is reinforced by the reciprocal relationship between people and the places in which they live. Building on what we have in a similar scale and style maintains continuity and helps to focus culture and identity. National and local governments alike are destroying places that are sanctioned by time and use, where communities have grown up and grown together instinctively. People’s natural bonding instincts are thwarted by high-rise buildings that separate them from one another and are not physically conducive to developing community spirit — the sense of belonging and of knowing with whom you belong.
Social engineering was to change the physical and mental environment, and thereby change people, who were seen as malleable. But people are not malleable — human nature needs familiar surroundings to develop and be happy. People react aggressively and destructively if this is denied.
Canadian Plains Indians, the Innu, were moved by the Canadian government into specially built estates. They were effectively forcibly transformed into Canadians, just as Britons are being forcibly transformed into ‘citizens of the world’. Like us, the Innu are having their past erased and are being offered nothing for the future — despair has set in, as it is setting in on Britain’s sink estates. A superficial difference is that the Innu were dispossessed by a different ethnic group (Canadian globalists), whereas we are being dispossessed by our own elected representatives (British globalists). But it is the same global movement. In the young Innu, deculturalisation manifests in drug and alcohol abuse and petty crime.
A parallel process is imposed here. In the same deculturalising vein, John Prescott issued a Government directive to destroy 40,000 terrace houses in England by dictat. Twenty thousand habitable homes in Liverpool were to be demolished and replaced by homes outside the range of the dispossessed locals. This is not the first time that ‘Scousers’ have been moved without thought for where they belong and uprooted and forced onto estates modelled on schemes in the Soviet Union.
A parallel with the Innu in England was moving ‘Scousers’ from their root in Liverpool to new towns like Skelmersdale. They should have followed on from traditional estates. Instead they were designed to separate vehicles from pedestrians with a system of courtyard layouts and cul-de-sacs emerging off spine streets, which led to disproportionate costs in street cleaning, refuse collection, ground and street furniture maintenance and, particularly, policing. Skelmersdale was built on an old coalfield and around a series of deep clefts in the moor side that go down into the middle of the town, which meant that extensive ground remediation and stabilisation was required for any construction.
It was built using innovative and experimental techniques — but these were deeply flawed, requiring expensive remedies. Many houses had central heating outlets in the ceiling. The fact that heat rises was ignored, so the bedrooms were heated moderately well but not the downstairs rooms. And one can punch a hand through walls because the houses’ metal frames are corroded and the concrete slabs have collapsed.
More and more of Britain’s young people are aimless, lacking in self-respect, without tradition or a sense of being part of something significant. They are being denied the inheritance of their forbears. There have always been people at the bottom of the pile, but they used to develop within a cultural tradition to which they belonged. Most young people do not misbehave out of endemic wickedness, but because they have been deculturalised. Thanks to a combination of social, cultural, political and environmental pressures, many young people in this country have been estranged from Britishness and severed from structures that helped civilise their ancestors. Buildings need to develop from traditions. We must renew those familiar traditions to civilise young people and minimise the vicious crimes we now have. These are often caused by unnatural and inorganic developments.
Walk along Eccleshall Road ‘Golden Mile’ and through St. Mary’s Gate subway, in Sheffield, and you will see pedestrians averting their eyes in fear, too frightened to look at anyone approaching. I went through recently and was appalled when a young Chinese woman who was walking towards me averted her eyes with terror on her face. “Well,” you might say, “Why not run over the dual carriageway as people in Birmingham do to avoid being mugged in subways?” Because the council put railings inside the hedge along the strip between the two roads to force people through the underpass.
We must restore our town and city centres and historical buildings to the way they were before councillors and developers began destroying them.
A plethora of radical new municipal building swept across the country from the 1950s onwards — schools, hospitals, offices, civic centres, entertainment and sports venues, shopping parades, shopping malls, new road schemes and street furniture, and apartment tower blocks to house tenants whose “slums” had been bombed or condemned as unfit for habitation.
Historic towns such as Peterborough were changed by vast, bland new housing estates for ex-slum-dwellers. These schemes looked exciting in the plans but in practice were ugly, expensive and inefficient.
You only have to look at pictures of old Birmingham, which show a fine Victorian city with buildings like Snow Hill station, which was like a cathedral in its proportions; the Woodman, a glorious Victorian pub; and the old library, to see the wanton destruction so often perpetrated by local authorities. The Bull Ring shopping area was redeveloped in the 1960s, and was so ugly, so unpopular and so badly constructed that it has since been redeveloped.
The local authorities have no respect for local history. A pub called the Railway in Birmingham was knocked down, despite its local importance as the venue where Ozzy Osborne began his career. After all, it is only local history! A little pub called the City Tavern, the only Victorian one left in Birmingham’s deculturalised city centre, was to be knocked down for a car park until a protest saved it. The Yorkshire Grey in Sheffield was demolished for a car park. Originally the Minerva, it was where Joe Cocker made his first public appearance. The leader of the council wants to look to the city’s future apparently. What an appalling lack of respect for a city, its people and their heritage! Then, of course, the cavern was demolished by business people in Liverpool.
One of the examples sent to me is that of the little Black Country town, Cradley. It recently had one side of its main High Street demolished for a by-pass. It has made the town look ridiculous and odd. This folly was proposed to the council by unelected planners and, in this case, authorised by just one councilor. I rang Sandwell council several times but none of the planners were ever available and the calls were not returned.
On the demolished side of the road a new Tesco was built. Although it is a convenience for shoppers from the surrounding areas, the local traders have suffered greatly. This typifies a serious problem with local councils. They stand for election promising to represent local people but often act against their interests once elected.
A combination of social, cultural, political and now environmental pressures with the underlying shame of what we have achieved, has deculturalised native people leaving them estranged from Englishness, severed from all the civilizing structures that their ancestors could take for granted. A serious and sustained programme of architectural reconstruction, rebuilding our traditional buildings and re-linking to our history could help people reconnect with their roots, and feel proud of their towns and cities.
Local councillors are elected by only a minority of voters, on average 20 percent of people over 18 — but not those younger who inherit the mess local councils are causing — and are not representative of the public. We need to appoint a network of independent officers who have both the responsibility and the resources to preserve or represent the local communities rather than sectional interests. We also need planning law reform to make it harder for councillors, who act as agents for developers, to destroy old buildings.
Former councillors from various areas have told me about corruption and backhanders and this is what we must expose. Those who can be shown to have taken bribes to demolish buildings and redevelop our towns and cities must be exposed.
We need housing policies which encourage the creation of buildings that fit into the traditional milieu, and which seek to rebuild much of what has been destroyed by local governments.
One Nation
One Nation
By ?
Burke wrote this:
A nation is not an idea only of' local extent, and individual momentary aggregation: but it is an idea of' continuity which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space. And this is a choice not of one day, or one set of people, not a tumultary and giddy choirs; it is a deliberate election of the ages and of generations; it is a constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice, it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dis-positions, and moral and special habitudes of' the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time....'
He also wrote:
Society ... is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partner-ship cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living and those who are dead, but between those who arc living and those who are dead, and those who are to be born.²
These words of Burke are quite well-known. They express sentiments which every Tory heart thinks it has known before, and to which every Tory breast returns a muffled echo. They have taken their place among conventional Tory pieties, which is to say that they have been added to that (perhaps) slightly threadbare stock of propositions, some of which are mutually contradictory, others of which, if really believed in, would shock most of the present Tory party. I begin with Burke, first because I think that what he says is true; and secondly in the hope that by starting with accepted pieties I shall make some of the things that I shall later go on to say less hateful to pious ears than they would otherwise be.
But Burke was himself not uttering pieties. He was brilliantly undermining a plausible view of human society which is still extremely powerful today. He was combat-ing a view of society which would fragment it, and which would dissolve what he was to argue was its organic nature. Above all he wanted to show that we cannot understand our own society, and our allegiance to it, speculatively: for instance, by invoking alleged universal principles like `the rights of' man', principles, which are taken to transcend the customs, pieties, traditions of a particular nation - of this nation.
Throughout the nineteenth century English writers on what Maurice Cowling calls 'public doctrine'3 took seriously the questions Barks had raised, whether or not they agreed with the answers he had given. They too reflected on the way in which society transcends `gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature', and the most important way they did this was in reflecting on the notion of culture which first assumes its modern meaning in this period. Culture ~was taken to be the whole life of the people, and not just its highest achievements in, say, the fine arts. This involved an attempt to understand society and the nation through the sum total of its prac-tices, traditions and institutions. This tradition of thought has always had political implications, since the public institutions of' the nation - religious and political - are clearly part of the whole life of the people. And the term most frequently invoked to express the whole life of the people, including its sense of itself as a political entity, was nation. The idea of the nation was of something that could include the life of' local communities, relations between classes, and indeed all those ways in which people impose a sense of' themselves upon merely economic arrange-ments. Amongst the thinkers who have contributed to a distinctly English tradition of thought upon culture, society and nationhood have been Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Newman, Buskin, William Morris and T S. Eliot. To quote Eliot:
... how much is here embraced by the term culture. It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of -a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.
And:
There is one problem when we come into contact with a lower culture for the first time.... There is another problem where a native culture has already begun to disintegrate under foreign influence, and where a native population has already taken in more of the foreign culture than it can ever expel. There is a third problem where, as in some of the West Indies, several uprooted peoples have been haphazardly mixed. And these problems are insoluble.'
If I mention these famous names it is not because I want to appeal to authority, but because I wish to point a contrast. Although in this audience, I suppose, ideas such as tradition, even nation, will not be regarded as just primitive, they do not find much place in that congeries of sentiments, prejudices and catch-phrases that make up the liberal consensus. There has been an extraordinary reduction to the primitive of political language. Ideas about the relation between the culture of a community and its sense of itself as a nation, between a people's sense of itself as a people and its political institutions, may well give rise to very complex considerations. But there is a rich tradition of thought on all these subjects in this country, a tradition that has obvious relevance to the development of the very idea of England as a parliamentary democracy. These ideas, which formed as it were the ground-rules for debate amongst thinkers as diverse as Coleridge and William Morris, seem to have sunk into a sort of twilight existence as instincts which are scarcely avowed, feelings no longer fully understood even by those who feel them, or hopes which few dare clearly to articulate. And the liberal consensus, instead of pro-ducing a reasoned critique of such ideas behaves as though they never existed. It does not offer any clear alternative, merely a set of sentiments which, it is assumed, all decent people will share, combined with an extraordinary determination to suppress any real debate on the issues involved. It is a sad commentary on the decline of our political culture that all those ways in which people define themselves as a community, relate this to their sense of themselves as political beings, understand the sources of their own pietas towards their country, the root, as Hegel said, of all true mental or spiritual life in family, fatherland, state - should be summed up by so many of the educated class in one vulgar, and above all banal catchphrase: `racialism'.
But our problem also concerns the Tory Party itself. It should be a proposition agreed by all reasonable men that the present Tory Party uses a language of politics that is hopelessly impoverished. This is above all seen in the triumph of the idea that what the Tory Party ultimately stands for is freedom of the individual, rolling back the frontiers of the State, etc. This again seems to me to be a form of political primitivism. This and the analogous notion that Toryism is essentially about a particular economic doctrine - the free market - which is seen as the economic version of individual freedom (itself a doubtful notion, of course), a doctrine which is quite obviously a version of classical laissez faire liberalism, has meant that it has almost forgotten how to use the language of State and of Nation. And until recent happy events altered things for the moment, and freed the Prime Minister to express her entirely healthy instincts, a good deal of recog-nition of it as a national party had been lost.
To take what seems to me an obvious example: Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is officially discussed as though the only real justification for that province's remaining within the United Kingdom (or, to put it more cynically, the chief obstacle to its being excluded) is that a majority of its inhabitants wish so to remain. Obviously that there is this settled desire is a necessary condition for its being politically plausible and possible to maintain the Union. But it is not a sufficient condition. For as all Irish nationalists will tell you, that majority was created through the hiving off of six of the counties of Ulster when in the rest of the island those who wished to uphold the Union were in a minority. That the wish of the majority of the Northern Irish to remain British should be respected must depend upon facts beyond the mere existence of such a wish. It must take into account a community long settled in one place, with a sense of its own identity that is not a fantasy but corresponds to actual historical events, a people who differ from a majority of the inhabitants of the island in being of partly Scottish descent, and Protestant -who differ, that is to say, in race and religion; who have in their national life an idea of continuity which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space, and is a deliberate election of the ages and of generations. This is the under-lying justification for according to Northern Ireland a separation front the rest of Ireland in the first place, and for using the power of the State to support the wish of the majority to remain British now. It is not the unhistorical and unargued liberal and Wilsonian principle of `self--determination' which has been such a source of evil and humbug in the modern world (and was so useful, inciden-tally, to Hitler in the 'thirties). In other words their wish to remain British commands respect because they are British, a fact which discloses itself through the occasions, tempers, dispositions and moral and special habitudes of the people, only in a long space of time. If by some mischance Parliaments in the nineteen-fifties had legis-lated to incorporate Malta within the United Kingdom (and perhaps we all remember that `integration with Britain' was the platform on which Mr. Mintoff first came to power), then should it have proven expedient later to undo this legislation (as it surely would have), I do not think that the Maltese would have had a claim upon our honour that they remain British in any way comparable to that of the Northern Irish. And yet the language of `self-determination' is the one which nearly all Tories use to defend the status quo in Ulster. They therefore help to obscure the vital distinction between an already existing fact of nationality which may help to justify a subsequent Act of Parliament, and nationality of a largely fictitious nature which Parliament may devise in a fit of absence of mind without foreseeing the consequences, and which might be subsequently rescinded without any profound moral or national issues of principle being involved. For instance: the 1948 Nationality Act; and the 1981 British Nationality Act.
Onew other example: the Anglo-Argentine War of 1982 (only for some reason - I am sure this is symptomatic - it was not called a `war' but a `crisis' or a `dispute'). The official line varied somewhat. Sometimes we were fighting to uphold the wishes of the Falklanders; sometimes their interests. We were also said to be obeying a United Nations resolution (of a highly ambiguous character).
Now I say nothing disrespectful about the United Nations this evening - except to agree with a reported remark by T. S. Eliot that it is a plot against European civilisation - but the notion that the inherent right of self-defence (which presumably Elizabeth I thought she had against the Armada) should be enhanced by the decisions of such a body does strike me as curious. The other popular line was that we were fighting in defence of a principle: I think that this time the principle was that `aggression does not pay'. Now apart from the fact that it would clearly be morally indefensible to send men to their deaths in defence of a principle, rather than of sovereign territory or national interest, and especially a principle pulled out of a hat, (and one which, if taken as a statement of fact is manifestly false), it is curious that so few prominent Tory politicians apart from Mrs. Thatcher gave the real reason for the war, which explains also why it was so de-terminedly supported by the British people: that the Falklands were sovereign territory, perhaps strategically important, and that the Falklanders were British by every conceivable test (although not under the new Nationality Act), by language, custom and race.
It has been well said that `The life of nations, no less than the life of men, is lived largely in the imagination'. One way of understanding this, I think, is that nation-ality, in addition to whatever else it may be, is a sentiment. It cannot be reduced to such things as long settlement in one place, legal and constitutional continuity, shared religion and culture, because all these things may exist without the sentiment of nationality: e.g. the Greeks under Turkish rule. And it may exist without most or all of them- e.g. the Jews of the Diaspora. But in the case of the English, and the British, it seems certain that the sentiment of nation-ality is inseparably bound up with shared history, law, custom and kinship.
If the United Kingdom is a prescriptive monarchy in which the crown derives its authority from its immemorial acceptance in one particular nation, and if we can take this as the type and source of all legal authority within the nation, then obviously the constitution of the nation depends upon a particular sort of community. It implies at least that there be a degree of continuity, cohesion, com-munity of sentiment that makes acceptance of this authority both truly general and truly `immemorial'. The destruction of continuity and community must tend to the destruction of the constitution itself. There is no way of understanding British and English history that does not take seriously the sentiments of patriotism that go with a continuity of institutions, shared experience, language, customs, kinship. There is no way of understanding English patriotism that averts its eyes from the fact that it has at its centre a feeling for persons of one's own kind. The Germans have the term Sittlichkeit to express the moral obligations I have to an historic community of which I find myself a part. The moral life finds its fulfil-ment only in an actual, historic human community, and above all in a nation state. The 'sentiment' of nationality is actually one's ability to see the community in which one lives, in all its variety of customs and practices, as issuing in a nation, and to see that as a moral idea.
Now one very respectable way to refer to all this is to talk of the sense of race. Unfortunately in the nineteenth century `race' became the name of a scientific theory, rather than of a political and moral idea. I have no opinion about race as a scientific theory, except that it seems no sillier than many more fashionable theories in the biological and social sciences. But it really stands proxy for that feeling for, loyalty to people of one's own kind that I have been trying to describe, and as such expresses a moral idea, and a noble one. In Britain it expresses all those forms of trust that allow the country to be a free, self-policing state which takes the loyalty of its citizens in peace and war more or less for granted.
If the account which I have given of the `immemorial acceptance' of authority within the British state, and the immemorial loyalty that goes with it, be correct, then there must at least be a potential problem should a com-munity exist, in large numbers, which defines itself because of its numbers, culture and other observable characteristics, in separation from the rest of the com-munity. This would be even more clearly true were it to become dominant in the big cities. Britain is an urban society. The cities have created modern Britain and defined its character. All the nineteenth century thinkers whom I have mentioned were greatly concerned with the condition of the cities, as they pondered how to relate modern mass society to civilisation. But do we not have the grave apprehension that the great English cities are now becoming alienated from national life, and that the Victorian achievement of civilising them and rescuing them from the old city mob shows signs of breaking down' I refer you to an admirable pamphlet 'The Old People of Lambeth' by Charles Moore.6 I quote out of context, and only the last sentences, but they seem to me moving and ominous:
Perhaps the worst feeling they have to endure is of loss and betrayal. Many of the people I met remember both World Wars; most of the men have served in one or the other. They have worked, and raised families and obeyed the law. They feel they are true English people, who love their country. They are devoted to the Royal family, and feel they inherit and live out a life which has the right to be the envy of the world. And yet, without provocation on their part, they find most of the things they value neglected or taken away. As one old man said simply, `It's our country and our Queen. Why should we be afraid to go out?
This points to a conjunction of `sentiment' and facts: We come to the problem of the West Indians. There are various specific features that may lead us to suppose that the West Indian community, especially the Jamaicans, and above all those actually born in this country, is structurally likely to be at odds with English civilisation. There is an extraordinary resentment towards authority - police, teachers, Underground guards - all authority. This anarchic attitude seems to spill over so readily into an antagonism against Britain itself that it would not be irrational (although it might be incorrect) to wonder whether a resentment against the country and its prin-cipal institutions is not actually at the root of it. Then there is the family structure, which is markedly unlike our own; educational standards that are below those of all other racial groups, these going with extremely- unrealistic career expectations; the involvement of West Indians in a vastly disproportionate amount of violent crime.
But all this is secondary to the real problem: Because of their sudden and recent entry, because they are already a very large community, but above all because of their colour, which distinguishes them from the rest of the population in both their own and others' eyes, they have a solidarity one with another that gives them a sense of identity and interests different (in their eyes) from that of the majority-. And if you put the particular features I have catalogued together with this general feature, then you will not be altogether surprised by recent events. Last year's riots were the first really serious sign in Britain of the breakdown of that Victorian civil order. The first riot was scarcely over when it was, as it were, officially announced that it had not been a race-riot. More non-race riots followed, and Lord Scarman was wheeled out to write his trivial report. He found various conditions which created a predisposition towards violent protest, con-ditions which reveal a good bourgeois lawyer's bewilderment at English -,corking class life and at features of it that had never previously been thought to create the con-ditions for riot and arson. These included lack of recreational facilities (playing fields), the depressing effects of physical decay, and (most potent, perhaps of all) the existence of street corners as social centres. The on( - matter on which Lord Scarman did not concentrate his attention was the fact that the riots, although as they developed they drew into their vortex many white youths and looters, some of them unemployed, but most not, and on one occasion Asiatics, were always found to coincide, when one traced their origins, with a preponderance of West Indians. And they reflected habits particularly characteristic of Jamaica, including that general rebel-liousness that I have mentioned (and, incidentally, that curious interest in fire). In fact the interpretation given by the radical young blacks themselves, in the teeth of bien pensant sociologists, was the most plausible: that the riots were directed at the police-that is to say, at the represen-tatives of lawful authority which restrains the West Indian life style (which seems to include drugs and other unlawful activities).
This was all very horrible: but I do not wish to say that the problem about the West Indian community is just a problem about the possible destruction of civilised life in the centres of the big cities. (Although that is what is happening.) It is also that all this offends a sentiment - a sense of what English life should be like, of how the English behave towards duly- constituted authority, a sense of what is civilised behaviour. What it offends is the sentiment that `this is our country' -a sentiment that the behaviour of the rioters and their numerous sympathisers within the black community seemed, in its violence and arrogance, to deny.
What is finally at issue comes out more clearly with the Indian community or communities - intelligent, in-dustrious, peaceable people, with most of the domestic virtues. Nevertheless, by their very large numbers, their profound difference of culture, they are most unlikely to wish to identify themselves with the traditions and loyalties of the host nation. Indeed, they have never done so, wherever in the world they have settled. They have always remained rooted in the Indian sub-continent. If the source of authority and the focus of loyalty in Britain is as I have described, then the existence by the end of the century of a community of, say, five to seven million persons in this country who, in the circumstances in which they find themselves, cannot instinctively identify them-selves with the State will call the actual constitution into question.
What is to be Done?
I believe that the great majority of people are actually or potentially hostile to the multi-racial society which all decent persons are supposed to accept. At the same time they tend to be abashed, even intimidated by the propa-ganda of those who dominate the media into feeling that their own attitudes - attitudes that would have been regarded as absolutely normal thirty years ago, a mere orthodox patriotism - are disreputable. They tend to think, therefore, that nothing can be done.
At the centre of the moral and emotional objection to even considering any large-scale repatriation of coloured immigrants - by whatever means, however financially advantageous - stands the idea that they are `black Englishmen'. This is a notion that trades upon the idea of Englishness whilst at the same time taking away those very features that give it emotional weight. Had the immigrant community- been here fifty, eighty, a hundred years, it would look more and more as though it were composed of Black Englishmen. This would be still more clearly true if it adopted the culture, customs and values of the English. But at the moment it looks much more likely that the large, self-conscious black and brown com-munities will turn Britain itself into a different sort of place. I take it that no one seriously sets the horrors of the Northern American cities, which have experienced com-parable immigration, before us as an inspiration. I forget who the wit was who said of the famous American melting pot that the only thing that melted was the pot.
If we think that something is to be done, then I can see only two possible courses. The first was proposed by Mr. Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday, Telegraph a year or so ago. It would be a policy that recognises the dangers of large, self-conscious separate Communities, communal politics, division of loyalties. It would involve the break-ing up of large concentrations of immigrants so that our cities do not become foreign. The end is desirable, but I do not see by what means it is to be achieved. It would require direction of labour, and, presumably, some system of internal passports to ensure that those directed to one place did not return illicitly. There would also have to be some vigorous policy of cultural assimilation carried out through the schools. But for Britain to carry through such a policy successfully would require a change in our political ethos as far reaching as that likely to be caused by immigration itself. It would require a giant step towards authoritarianism.
I believe that the only radical policy that would stand some chance of success is repatriation of a proportion of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population. Voluntary. assisted repatriation is one possibility, and, on the face of it, the most humane. Voluntary assisted repat-riation was once part of Tory policy but was forgotten so soon after the 1970 election - in which attitudes to immig-ration played no small part, especially in the Midlands - as to make one wonder how seriously it had been put forward, except, perhaps, for electoral purposes. One could envisage some thousands of millions of pounds being spent over the years in the form of compensation to, and assistance for, immigrants returning to their countries of origin, taking with them newly acquired skills and useful capital.
Such a policy would certainly call forth a tidal wave of protest from the liberal conscience of this country. And on this matter the genuineness of the conviction would not be in doubt Nor should one understate what is repulsive and contrary to British traditions in proposing such large -scale population movements. Yet consider: Algeria was a Department of France, and had been so for about a hundred years. Yet about a million Algerians `returned' to France and were integrated into French life within a very few years. De Gaulle had the vision, and the cunning, to carry through a policy that to preceding French govern-ments of both Left and Right had seemed unthinkable. Yet the French presence in Algeria was incomparably more profound and powerful and of much longer duration than the West Indian and Indian presence in this country. Many thousands of Portuguese left Africa precipitately in the wake of independence, leaving nearly all their posses-sions behind. It was a sudden and tragic exodus, but there does seem to be a good prospect that they will settle successfully in Portugal. Again, many people envisage, with regret certainly, but not with horror, that a large proportion of-Whites will, in a few years, leave Zimbabwe for Britain and South Africa. Yet about half the White population have been there since before the War, and they have created and sustain the wealth of that country, and have created all its institutions. Their possible departure is looked upon as something that can be negotiated about by Britain for the best possible terms, but not as a nameless horror. Again, under an agreement between India and Ceylon, about half a million Tamils will have left to return to the sub-continent within a few years.
Movements of population are painful to contemplate, and should not lightly be proposed. But in comparison with these quite recent events, a scheme of' voluntary, assisted repatriation, with very substantial compensation and perhaps the continuation of welfare payments for some considerable time, might be thought of as not bar-barous, but a regrettable necessity of State.
However there are at least two drawbacks. First: it may not work. I say nothing more about that except that it is an obvious possibility, and to eliminate it the sums involved might have to be enormous. Secondly. in order to promote this policy public opinion would have to be mobilised, the political language would have to change, the liberal con-sensus - which in this case officially includes the whole of the Labour Party, the Liberal/S.D.P. Alliance and the Trades Unions - would have to be challenged and de-feated. _All this could create a climate of popular excite-ment that could actually lead to illegal and offensive pressure upon immigrants of a sort that it is of over-whelming importance to avoid. Because it would be volun-tary the whole process might be out of political control.
The alternative is generally considered unthinkable in polite society: This would be retrospectively to alter the legal status of the coloured immigrant community, so that its members became guest-workers - analogous to the Turks in Germany and Switzerland - who would eventu-ally, over a period of years, return to their countries of origin, with their pension benefits, property, and perhaps a large measure of compensation out of public funds. They would be like the perioeci in ancient Greece; or, perhaps, like Plato's poets - crowned with olives, anointed with oil, provided with a capital sum and sent away from the city. After such a measure had been enacted, it would still be possible for Britain to decide upon a proportion of the immigrant community to consider for naturalisation - being guided by numbers, special skills and requirements - much in the same way that, say, Australia selects its potential immigrants.
I need not elaborate on the conflicts that such a policy would bring about. I do not think that the fact that such legislation would be retrospective in itself a decisive argument against it. As Mr. Powell has said, in a sense all legislation about nationality is retrospective in that it alters an already existing status. We can all imagine the outcry that there would be both at home and abroad. However this policy would have about it an air of in-evitability once enacted, and of political control that might actually make it less damaging and less inhumane than a voluntary scheme.
I am well aware that for many this talk has now entered the realm of fantasy. Here I sit, in a civilised drawing room, airily envisaging the movement of, hundreds of thousands, perhaps more, human beings from one country to another. And I admit that the imagination fails before the task of really envisaging what this would be like, how circumstances could change politically for such a suggestion to become politically serious. It does not, however, require very much imagination to see what will happen if the present demographic trends in Britain con-tinue. But perhaps that is wrong: it is perhaps a complete lack of imagination in seeing what is emerging rapidly into the daylight that makes people regard proposals such as these as fantasy. What is now actually happening in England would have been regarded as the purest fan-tasy twenty or thirty years ago.
Some of the ideas that I have implied in this talk, and others that I have openly advocated, will seem abhorrent to many. My defence is this: the state of nationhood is the true state of man, and the danger of ignoring the sen-timent of nationhood is actually the danger of the des-truction of man as a political animal. Although the courses of action that would possibly be open to us to preserve the fullest sense of nationhood would be severe, perhaps callous, that alternative political philosophy which sees nothing really profound in the problems posed by mass immigration, but only difficulties that can be solved by good-will, money for inner cities, and Race Relations acts, would actually reduce human society to what Burke called `the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature'.
Notes
1. Reflections on Present Discontents.
2. Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.
3. Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England.
4. Speech by J. Enoch Powell, at Trinity College, Dublin, 13 November 1964.
5. A formulation taken from a speech by J. Enoch Powell, 1978.
6. Salisbury Papers 9.
By ?
Burke wrote this:
A nation is not an idea only of' local extent, and individual momentary aggregation: but it is an idea of' continuity which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space. And this is a choice not of one day, or one set of people, not a tumultary and giddy choirs; it is a deliberate election of the ages and of generations; it is a constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice, it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dis-positions, and moral and special habitudes of' the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time....'
He also wrote:
Society ... is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partner-ship cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living and those who are dead, but between those who arc living and those who are dead, and those who are to be born.²
These words of Burke are quite well-known. They express sentiments which every Tory heart thinks it has known before, and to which every Tory breast returns a muffled echo. They have taken their place among conventional Tory pieties, which is to say that they have been added to that (perhaps) slightly threadbare stock of propositions, some of which are mutually contradictory, others of which, if really believed in, would shock most of the present Tory party. I begin with Burke, first because I think that what he says is true; and secondly in the hope that by starting with accepted pieties I shall make some of the things that I shall later go on to say less hateful to pious ears than they would otherwise be.
But Burke was himself not uttering pieties. He was brilliantly undermining a plausible view of human society which is still extremely powerful today. He was combat-ing a view of society which would fragment it, and which would dissolve what he was to argue was its organic nature. Above all he wanted to show that we cannot understand our own society, and our allegiance to it, speculatively: for instance, by invoking alleged universal principles like `the rights of' man', principles, which are taken to transcend the customs, pieties, traditions of a particular nation - of this nation.
Throughout the nineteenth century English writers on what Maurice Cowling calls 'public doctrine'3 took seriously the questions Barks had raised, whether or not they agreed with the answers he had given. They too reflected on the way in which society transcends `gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature', and the most important way they did this was in reflecting on the notion of culture which first assumes its modern meaning in this period. Culture ~was taken to be the whole life of the people, and not just its highest achievements in, say, the fine arts. This involved an attempt to understand society and the nation through the sum total of its prac-tices, traditions and institutions. This tradition of thought has always had political implications, since the public institutions of' the nation - religious and political - are clearly part of the whole life of the people. And the term most frequently invoked to express the whole life of the people, including its sense of itself as a political entity, was nation. The idea of the nation was of something that could include the life of' local communities, relations between classes, and indeed all those ways in which people impose a sense of' themselves upon merely economic arrange-ments. Amongst the thinkers who have contributed to a distinctly English tradition of thought upon culture, society and nationhood have been Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Newman, Buskin, William Morris and T S. Eliot. To quote Eliot:
... how much is here embraced by the term culture. It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of -a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.
And:
There is one problem when we come into contact with a lower culture for the first time.... There is another problem where a native culture has already begun to disintegrate under foreign influence, and where a native population has already taken in more of the foreign culture than it can ever expel. There is a third problem where, as in some of the West Indies, several uprooted peoples have been haphazardly mixed. And these problems are insoluble.'
If I mention these famous names it is not because I want to appeal to authority, but because I wish to point a contrast. Although in this audience, I suppose, ideas such as tradition, even nation, will not be regarded as just primitive, they do not find much place in that congeries of sentiments, prejudices and catch-phrases that make up the liberal consensus. There has been an extraordinary reduction to the primitive of political language. Ideas about the relation between the culture of a community and its sense of itself as a nation, between a people's sense of itself as a people and its political institutions, may well give rise to very complex considerations. But there is a rich tradition of thought on all these subjects in this country, a tradition that has obvious relevance to the development of the very idea of England as a parliamentary democracy. These ideas, which formed as it were the ground-rules for debate amongst thinkers as diverse as Coleridge and William Morris, seem to have sunk into a sort of twilight existence as instincts which are scarcely avowed, feelings no longer fully understood even by those who feel them, or hopes which few dare clearly to articulate. And the liberal consensus, instead of pro-ducing a reasoned critique of such ideas behaves as though they never existed. It does not offer any clear alternative, merely a set of sentiments which, it is assumed, all decent people will share, combined with an extraordinary determination to suppress any real debate on the issues involved. It is a sad commentary on the decline of our political culture that all those ways in which people define themselves as a community, relate this to their sense of themselves as political beings, understand the sources of their own pietas towards their country, the root, as Hegel said, of all true mental or spiritual life in family, fatherland, state - should be summed up by so many of the educated class in one vulgar, and above all banal catchphrase: `racialism'.
But our problem also concerns the Tory Party itself. It should be a proposition agreed by all reasonable men that the present Tory Party uses a language of politics that is hopelessly impoverished. This is above all seen in the triumph of the idea that what the Tory Party ultimately stands for is freedom of the individual, rolling back the frontiers of the State, etc. This again seems to me to be a form of political primitivism. This and the analogous notion that Toryism is essentially about a particular economic doctrine - the free market - which is seen as the economic version of individual freedom (itself a doubtful notion, of course), a doctrine which is quite obviously a version of classical laissez faire liberalism, has meant that it has almost forgotten how to use the language of State and of Nation. And until recent happy events altered things for the moment, and freed the Prime Minister to express her entirely healthy instincts, a good deal of recog-nition of it as a national party had been lost.
To take what seems to me an obvious example: Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is officially discussed as though the only real justification for that province's remaining within the United Kingdom (or, to put it more cynically, the chief obstacle to its being excluded) is that a majority of its inhabitants wish so to remain. Obviously that there is this settled desire is a necessary condition for its being politically plausible and possible to maintain the Union. But it is not a sufficient condition. For as all Irish nationalists will tell you, that majority was created through the hiving off of six of the counties of Ulster when in the rest of the island those who wished to uphold the Union were in a minority. That the wish of the majority of the Northern Irish to remain British should be respected must depend upon facts beyond the mere existence of such a wish. It must take into account a community long settled in one place, with a sense of its own identity that is not a fantasy but corresponds to actual historical events, a people who differ from a majority of the inhabitants of the island in being of partly Scottish descent, and Protestant -who differ, that is to say, in race and religion; who have in their national life an idea of continuity which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space, and is a deliberate election of the ages and of generations. This is the under-lying justification for according to Northern Ireland a separation front the rest of Ireland in the first place, and for using the power of the State to support the wish of the majority to remain British now. It is not the unhistorical and unargued liberal and Wilsonian principle of `self--determination' which has been such a source of evil and humbug in the modern world (and was so useful, inciden-tally, to Hitler in the 'thirties). In other words their wish to remain British commands respect because they are British, a fact which discloses itself through the occasions, tempers, dispositions and moral and special habitudes of the people, only in a long space of time. If by some mischance Parliaments in the nineteen-fifties had legis-lated to incorporate Malta within the United Kingdom (and perhaps we all remember that `integration with Britain' was the platform on which Mr. Mintoff first came to power), then should it have proven expedient later to undo this legislation (as it surely would have), I do not think that the Maltese would have had a claim upon our honour that they remain British in any way comparable to that of the Northern Irish. And yet the language of `self-determination' is the one which nearly all Tories use to defend the status quo in Ulster. They therefore help to obscure the vital distinction between an already existing fact of nationality which may help to justify a subsequent Act of Parliament, and nationality of a largely fictitious nature which Parliament may devise in a fit of absence of mind without foreseeing the consequences, and which might be subsequently rescinded without any profound moral or national issues of principle being involved. For instance: the 1948 Nationality Act; and the 1981 British Nationality Act.
Onew other example: the Anglo-Argentine War of 1982 (only for some reason - I am sure this is symptomatic - it was not called a `war' but a `crisis' or a `dispute'). The official line varied somewhat. Sometimes we were fighting to uphold the wishes of the Falklanders; sometimes their interests. We were also said to be obeying a United Nations resolution (of a highly ambiguous character).
Now I say nothing disrespectful about the United Nations this evening - except to agree with a reported remark by T. S. Eliot that it is a plot against European civilisation - but the notion that the inherent right of self-defence (which presumably Elizabeth I thought she had against the Armada) should be enhanced by the decisions of such a body does strike me as curious. The other popular line was that we were fighting in defence of a principle: I think that this time the principle was that `aggression does not pay'. Now apart from the fact that it would clearly be morally indefensible to send men to their deaths in defence of a principle, rather than of sovereign territory or national interest, and especially a principle pulled out of a hat, (and one which, if taken as a statement of fact is manifestly false), it is curious that so few prominent Tory politicians apart from Mrs. Thatcher gave the real reason for the war, which explains also why it was so de-terminedly supported by the British people: that the Falklands were sovereign territory, perhaps strategically important, and that the Falklanders were British by every conceivable test (although not under the new Nationality Act), by language, custom and race.
It has been well said that `The life of nations, no less than the life of men, is lived largely in the imagination'. One way of understanding this, I think, is that nation-ality, in addition to whatever else it may be, is a sentiment. It cannot be reduced to such things as long settlement in one place, legal and constitutional continuity, shared religion and culture, because all these things may exist without the sentiment of nationality: e.g. the Greeks under Turkish rule. And it may exist without most or all of them- e.g. the Jews of the Diaspora. But in the case of the English, and the British, it seems certain that the sentiment of nation-ality is inseparably bound up with shared history, law, custom and kinship.
If the United Kingdom is a prescriptive monarchy in which the crown derives its authority from its immemorial acceptance in one particular nation, and if we can take this as the type and source of all legal authority within the nation, then obviously the constitution of the nation depends upon a particular sort of community. It implies at least that there be a degree of continuity, cohesion, com-munity of sentiment that makes acceptance of this authority both truly general and truly `immemorial'. The destruction of continuity and community must tend to the destruction of the constitution itself. There is no way of understanding British and English history that does not take seriously the sentiments of patriotism that go with a continuity of institutions, shared experience, language, customs, kinship. There is no way of understanding English patriotism that averts its eyes from the fact that it has at its centre a feeling for persons of one's own kind. The Germans have the term Sittlichkeit to express the moral obligations I have to an historic community of which I find myself a part. The moral life finds its fulfil-ment only in an actual, historic human community, and above all in a nation state. The 'sentiment' of nationality is actually one's ability to see the community in which one lives, in all its variety of customs and practices, as issuing in a nation, and to see that as a moral idea.
Now one very respectable way to refer to all this is to talk of the sense of race. Unfortunately in the nineteenth century `race' became the name of a scientific theory, rather than of a political and moral idea. I have no opinion about race as a scientific theory, except that it seems no sillier than many more fashionable theories in the biological and social sciences. But it really stands proxy for that feeling for, loyalty to people of one's own kind that I have been trying to describe, and as such expresses a moral idea, and a noble one. In Britain it expresses all those forms of trust that allow the country to be a free, self-policing state which takes the loyalty of its citizens in peace and war more or less for granted.
If the account which I have given of the `immemorial acceptance' of authority within the British state, and the immemorial loyalty that goes with it, be correct, then there must at least be a potential problem should a com-munity exist, in large numbers, which defines itself because of its numbers, culture and other observable characteristics, in separation from the rest of the com-munity. This would be even more clearly true were it to become dominant in the big cities. Britain is an urban society. The cities have created modern Britain and defined its character. All the nineteenth century thinkers whom I have mentioned were greatly concerned with the condition of the cities, as they pondered how to relate modern mass society to civilisation. But do we not have the grave apprehension that the great English cities are now becoming alienated from national life, and that the Victorian achievement of civilising them and rescuing them from the old city mob shows signs of breaking down' I refer you to an admirable pamphlet 'The Old People of Lambeth' by Charles Moore.6 I quote out of context, and only the last sentences, but they seem to me moving and ominous:
Perhaps the worst feeling they have to endure is of loss and betrayal. Many of the people I met remember both World Wars; most of the men have served in one or the other. They have worked, and raised families and obeyed the law. They feel they are true English people, who love their country. They are devoted to the Royal family, and feel they inherit and live out a life which has the right to be the envy of the world. And yet, without provocation on their part, they find most of the things they value neglected or taken away. As one old man said simply, `It's our country and our Queen. Why should we be afraid to go out?
This points to a conjunction of `sentiment' and facts: We come to the problem of the West Indians. There are various specific features that may lead us to suppose that the West Indian community, especially the Jamaicans, and above all those actually born in this country, is structurally likely to be at odds with English civilisation. There is an extraordinary resentment towards authority - police, teachers, Underground guards - all authority. This anarchic attitude seems to spill over so readily into an antagonism against Britain itself that it would not be irrational (although it might be incorrect) to wonder whether a resentment against the country and its prin-cipal institutions is not actually at the root of it. Then there is the family structure, which is markedly unlike our own; educational standards that are below those of all other racial groups, these going with extremely- unrealistic career expectations; the involvement of West Indians in a vastly disproportionate amount of violent crime.
But all this is secondary to the real problem: Because of their sudden and recent entry, because they are already a very large community, but above all because of their colour, which distinguishes them from the rest of the population in both their own and others' eyes, they have a solidarity one with another that gives them a sense of identity and interests different (in their eyes) from that of the majority-. And if you put the particular features I have catalogued together with this general feature, then you will not be altogether surprised by recent events. Last year's riots were the first really serious sign in Britain of the breakdown of that Victorian civil order. The first riot was scarcely over when it was, as it were, officially announced that it had not been a race-riot. More non-race riots followed, and Lord Scarman was wheeled out to write his trivial report. He found various conditions which created a predisposition towards violent protest, con-ditions which reveal a good bourgeois lawyer's bewilderment at English -,corking class life and at features of it that had never previously been thought to create the con-ditions for riot and arson. These included lack of recreational facilities (playing fields), the depressing effects of physical decay, and (most potent, perhaps of all) the existence of street corners as social centres. The on( - matter on which Lord Scarman did not concentrate his attention was the fact that the riots, although as they developed they drew into their vortex many white youths and looters, some of them unemployed, but most not, and on one occasion Asiatics, were always found to coincide, when one traced their origins, with a preponderance of West Indians. And they reflected habits particularly characteristic of Jamaica, including that general rebel-liousness that I have mentioned (and, incidentally, that curious interest in fire). In fact the interpretation given by the radical young blacks themselves, in the teeth of bien pensant sociologists, was the most plausible: that the riots were directed at the police-that is to say, at the represen-tatives of lawful authority which restrains the West Indian life style (which seems to include drugs and other unlawful activities).
This was all very horrible: but I do not wish to say that the problem about the West Indian community is just a problem about the possible destruction of civilised life in the centres of the big cities. (Although that is what is happening.) It is also that all this offends a sentiment - a sense of what English life should be like, of how the English behave towards duly- constituted authority, a sense of what is civilised behaviour. What it offends is the sentiment that `this is our country' -a sentiment that the behaviour of the rioters and their numerous sympathisers within the black community seemed, in its violence and arrogance, to deny.
What is finally at issue comes out more clearly with the Indian community or communities - intelligent, in-dustrious, peaceable people, with most of the domestic virtues. Nevertheless, by their very large numbers, their profound difference of culture, they are most unlikely to wish to identify themselves with the traditions and loyalties of the host nation. Indeed, they have never done so, wherever in the world they have settled. They have always remained rooted in the Indian sub-continent. If the source of authority and the focus of loyalty in Britain is as I have described, then the existence by the end of the century of a community of, say, five to seven million persons in this country who, in the circumstances in which they find themselves, cannot instinctively identify them-selves with the State will call the actual constitution into question.
What is to be Done?
I believe that the great majority of people are actually or potentially hostile to the multi-racial society which all decent persons are supposed to accept. At the same time they tend to be abashed, even intimidated by the propa-ganda of those who dominate the media into feeling that their own attitudes - attitudes that would have been regarded as absolutely normal thirty years ago, a mere orthodox patriotism - are disreputable. They tend to think, therefore, that nothing can be done.
At the centre of the moral and emotional objection to even considering any large-scale repatriation of coloured immigrants - by whatever means, however financially advantageous - stands the idea that they are `black Englishmen'. This is a notion that trades upon the idea of Englishness whilst at the same time taking away those very features that give it emotional weight. Had the immigrant community- been here fifty, eighty, a hundred years, it would look more and more as though it were composed of Black Englishmen. This would be still more clearly true if it adopted the culture, customs and values of the English. But at the moment it looks much more likely that the large, self-conscious black and brown com-munities will turn Britain itself into a different sort of place. I take it that no one seriously sets the horrors of the Northern American cities, which have experienced com-parable immigration, before us as an inspiration. I forget who the wit was who said of the famous American melting pot that the only thing that melted was the pot.
If we think that something is to be done, then I can see only two possible courses. The first was proposed by Mr. Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday, Telegraph a year or so ago. It would be a policy that recognises the dangers of large, self-conscious separate Communities, communal politics, division of loyalties. It would involve the break-ing up of large concentrations of immigrants so that our cities do not become foreign. The end is desirable, but I do not see by what means it is to be achieved. It would require direction of labour, and, presumably, some system of internal passports to ensure that those directed to one place did not return illicitly. There would also have to be some vigorous policy of cultural assimilation carried out through the schools. But for Britain to carry through such a policy successfully would require a change in our political ethos as far reaching as that likely to be caused by immigration itself. It would require a giant step towards authoritarianism.
I believe that the only radical policy that would stand some chance of success is repatriation of a proportion of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population. Voluntary. assisted repatriation is one possibility, and, on the face of it, the most humane. Voluntary assisted repat-riation was once part of Tory policy but was forgotten so soon after the 1970 election - in which attitudes to immig-ration played no small part, especially in the Midlands - as to make one wonder how seriously it had been put forward, except, perhaps, for electoral purposes. One could envisage some thousands of millions of pounds being spent over the years in the form of compensation to, and assistance for, immigrants returning to their countries of origin, taking with them newly acquired skills and useful capital.
Such a policy would certainly call forth a tidal wave of protest from the liberal conscience of this country. And on this matter the genuineness of the conviction would not be in doubt Nor should one understate what is repulsive and contrary to British traditions in proposing such large -scale population movements. Yet consider: Algeria was a Department of France, and had been so for about a hundred years. Yet about a million Algerians `returned' to France and were integrated into French life within a very few years. De Gaulle had the vision, and the cunning, to carry through a policy that to preceding French govern-ments of both Left and Right had seemed unthinkable. Yet the French presence in Algeria was incomparably more profound and powerful and of much longer duration than the West Indian and Indian presence in this country. Many thousands of Portuguese left Africa precipitately in the wake of independence, leaving nearly all their posses-sions behind. It was a sudden and tragic exodus, but there does seem to be a good prospect that they will settle successfully in Portugal. Again, many people envisage, with regret certainly, but not with horror, that a large proportion of-Whites will, in a few years, leave Zimbabwe for Britain and South Africa. Yet about half the White population have been there since before the War, and they have created and sustain the wealth of that country, and have created all its institutions. Their possible departure is looked upon as something that can be negotiated about by Britain for the best possible terms, but not as a nameless horror. Again, under an agreement between India and Ceylon, about half a million Tamils will have left to return to the sub-continent within a few years.
Movements of population are painful to contemplate, and should not lightly be proposed. But in comparison with these quite recent events, a scheme of' voluntary, assisted repatriation, with very substantial compensation and perhaps the continuation of welfare payments for some considerable time, might be thought of as not bar-barous, but a regrettable necessity of State.
However there are at least two drawbacks. First: it may not work. I say nothing more about that except that it is an obvious possibility, and to eliminate it the sums involved might have to be enormous. Secondly. in order to promote this policy public opinion would have to be mobilised, the political language would have to change, the liberal con-sensus - which in this case officially includes the whole of the Labour Party, the Liberal/S.D.P. Alliance and the Trades Unions - would have to be challenged and de-feated. _All this could create a climate of popular excite-ment that could actually lead to illegal and offensive pressure upon immigrants of a sort that it is of over-whelming importance to avoid. Because it would be volun-tary the whole process might be out of political control.
The alternative is generally considered unthinkable in polite society: This would be retrospectively to alter the legal status of the coloured immigrant community, so that its members became guest-workers - analogous to the Turks in Germany and Switzerland - who would eventu-ally, over a period of years, return to their countries of origin, with their pension benefits, property, and perhaps a large measure of compensation out of public funds. They would be like the perioeci in ancient Greece; or, perhaps, like Plato's poets - crowned with olives, anointed with oil, provided with a capital sum and sent away from the city. After such a measure had been enacted, it would still be possible for Britain to decide upon a proportion of the immigrant community to consider for naturalisation - being guided by numbers, special skills and requirements - much in the same way that, say, Australia selects its potential immigrants.
I need not elaborate on the conflicts that such a policy would bring about. I do not think that the fact that such legislation would be retrospective in itself a decisive argument against it. As Mr. Powell has said, in a sense all legislation about nationality is retrospective in that it alters an already existing status. We can all imagine the outcry that there would be both at home and abroad. However this policy would have about it an air of in-evitability once enacted, and of political control that might actually make it less damaging and less inhumane than a voluntary scheme.
I am well aware that for many this talk has now entered the realm of fantasy. Here I sit, in a civilised drawing room, airily envisaging the movement of, hundreds of thousands, perhaps more, human beings from one country to another. And I admit that the imagination fails before the task of really envisaging what this would be like, how circumstances could change politically for such a suggestion to become politically serious. It does not, however, require very much imagination to see what will happen if the present demographic trends in Britain con-tinue. But perhaps that is wrong: it is perhaps a complete lack of imagination in seeing what is emerging rapidly into the daylight that makes people regard proposals such as these as fantasy. What is now actually happening in England would have been regarded as the purest fan-tasy twenty or thirty years ago.
Some of the ideas that I have implied in this talk, and others that I have openly advocated, will seem abhorrent to many. My defence is this: the state of nationhood is the true state of man, and the danger of ignoring the sen-timent of nationhood is actually the danger of the des-truction of man as a political animal. Although the courses of action that would possibly be open to us to preserve the fullest sense of nationhood would be severe, perhaps callous, that alternative political philosophy which sees nothing really profound in the problems posed by mass immigration, but only difficulties that can be solved by good-will, money for inner cities, and Race Relations acts, would actually reduce human society to what Burke called `the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature'.
Notes
1. Reflections on Present Discontents.
2. Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.
3. Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England.
4. Speech by J. Enoch Powell, at Trinity College, Dublin, 13 November 1964.
5. A formulation taken from a speech by J. Enoch Powell, 1978.
6. Salisbury Papers 9.
Sunday, 25 October 2009
BIZARRE PERCEPTION
I recently had an article picked up by composer Alaistair Hinton and his views have been posted on the net without my being notified. He represents the old-fashioned view. I will respond when I get over an ilness. In the meantime...
http://www.mvdaily.com/articles/2009/08/english.htm
ALISTAIR HINTON discusses
a recent article on English music
by David Hamilton
I was recently alerted to an article by David Hamilton on the neglect of English music published in the New English Review when my attention was drawn to it by a reference on an online discussion forum by Canadian pianist and composer Gordon Rumson; it contained a number of points with which I felt impelled to take issue -- and by no means because I am a Scottish composer!
The author opens with a quotation from Yehudi Menuhin writing in The Times in 1995 in which Menuhin observes that
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.
I find this to be at the very least unhelpful; Menuhin avoids specifying to which English composers he refers (it can't possibly be all of them!) and in any case he seems to make a sweeping generalisation here. What in any case is the 'Englishness' of these composers and how can we tell that it remains 'intact'? His notion that 'the mercantilistic world has gone all-American', irrespective of its truth or otherwise, seems to have no obvious relevance in that American music can hardly be said to have taken some kind of precedence over that of other nations.
Much of the remainder of Mr Hamilton's article seems redolent of a kind of narrow parochialism in its suggestion that 'English' music is somehow identifiably different to any other and may and should accordingly be more strongly supported in England as such. I am all for supporting English music that is worthy of support, but I cannot help but return to the questions 'who are these English composers?' and 'what makes them and their music identifiably English?' One has only to consider the immense differences between a handful of English composers born in England between 1943 and 1946 to realise that there is no obvious commonality besides the country and origins of their birth -- I refer (in chronological order of birth) to Brian Ferneyhough, David Matthews, Robin Holloway, John Tavener, Colin Matthews and Michael Finnissy; can it reasonably be said that all of these identifiably represent what can be called an 'English musical tradition' -- and the same one at that?
Thanks to a variety of researchers, performers, record companies and the like, we know far more English music now than was the case thirty years ago and there can, of course, be no doubt that some of this unearthing has proved to be of immense value in reviving the justifiable fortunes of music that has for far too long been overlooked. The case of John Foulds, to which a paragraph is devoted, is a classic example of this, whereas that on Frederick Cliffe borders on the fatuous; is it reasonable to expect to class his 1889 symphony with the early symphonies of Mahler, Brahms's and Bruckner's final symphonies and Tchaikovsky's last two symphonies?
Whilst it is obvious that the term 'land without music' in the period between Purcell and Elgar in England was always an exaggeration, can we really be expected to believe that the works of Stainer, Wesley, Potter, Sterndale Bennett, Crotch, Hayes, Bache, Linley and others whose names the author might have mentioned but decided to omit 'were on a par with their foreign contemporaries', irrespective of whether or not they were considered 'progressive enough for international attention'? In what ways were any of these on such a par? Who were the contemporary English equivalents of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bellini, Rossini, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Alkan, Weber, Verdi, Wagner, Bruckner, Smetana, Brahms, Dvorák and others? There were undoubtedly some interesting figures in English music during this period, but I remain unconvinced that England could field anyone of the order of these composers.
The paragraph beginning 'Even during the ravages of Modernism in the twentieth century' prompts the hackles of suspicion to rise before its very credibility is undermined by its leading to the claim 'there was a renaissance of music in England at which 'Stanford and Parry were at the fount and in a Brahmsian style created English music equal to Brahms himself'; leaving aside the facts that Stanford and Parry did no such exalted thing and that a substantial proportion of their mature music was in any case composed after Brahms's death, what on earth is meant here by 'the ravages of Modernism' and when were they supposed to have 'ravaged' what?
We are then told that 'Elgar continued the creation of an English style through merging Brahms and Wagner.' That Elgar was, by the time of his first symphony, the most important English composer for many decades is surely beyond doubt and he certainly knew well his Brahms and Wagner, although he felt influenced more by Schumann than either. But how did he 'continue the creation of an English style'? How could he in any case have 'created' one 'through merging Brahms and Wagner'? He developed his own, to be sure and was subject, like all composers, to certain influences in his earlier days, but he seems to have taken little from anyone in that list of earlier English composers that the author provides. Richard Strauss certainly recognised Elgar's greatness; his claim for him as 'the first Progressivist in English Music' was no more patronising towards Elgar than it was towards English music, but taken at face value it might at the same time be seen as somewhat misleading, in that Elgar's finest work had more to it than mere 'English Progressivism' (as I am sure Strauss also recognised).
Perhaps even more improbably, we are expected to believe that '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'; to begin with, no one was asking a question (so how did England come up with an answer?) and, important as Holbrooke was, the idea that his orchestral epics 'rival' Wagner's Ring would surely have been as absurd to him as it should be to the rest of us -- and almost as risible as the idea of anyone being able to assume a mantle such as 'the Cockney Wagner'!
We are then given another long list of English composers active during the twentieth century -- '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'; phew! -- pause for breath needed. I was unaware that Macs kenzie, Cunn and Ewen -- or Harty -- were 'English' in any case and it might likewise be salutary to question the extent and validity of Goossens' and Moeran's 'English' credentials. We certainly know more about most of these composers' works nowadays and some of the explorations have again yielded many treasures, yet do they all belong on anything like the same plane? -- Rubbra, Howells, Rawsthorne, Goossens, Foulds, Ireland, Bliss, Bax and Bridge seem to stand pretty much head and shoulders above most of the remainder (although the jury might yet be out on the standing of Bowen among this group) -- but what does this lengthy list of names prove in any case, beyond the author's ability to create lists?
Menuhin's Times piece is then reinvoked in a quoted statement that he was
drawn to English music because ... 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, sometimes dramatically.
If that isn't woolly thinking, I don't know what is! Leaving aside the dubious topographical claims, how can or does any English music identifiably reflect those things? -- and was there ever in any case climate, vegetation and the rest in England that was so utterly distinguishable from their equivalents anywhere else on earth that they somehow begat music that is likewise so very different from that of other nations and instantly recognisable for its origins, irrespective of who wrote it? I remain mindful of the need to justify my questions here without putting my remarks firmly to the test, so next time I listen to Rubbra's First Symphony, Ferneyhough's Third Quartet, Bridge's Second Piano Trio or Birtwistle's Earth Dances (English earth, is it? -- and producing vegetation devoid of sharp edges?), I promise to make a point of looking out for -- er -- something or other that offers even a tenuous thread of commonality and continuity that might accord in some way to Menuhin's somewhat strange vision of England and things English, though I suspect in advance that the search will be at least as fruitless as those identified in the Scottish writer Norman Douglas' reference to looking for 'a needle in a haystack or a joke in the Bible'.
Menuhin continues
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 ...
What is he talking about? Is musical humanity the exclusive province of English composers? (One would hope not!) If there are no 'shattering utterances' in Brian's Gothic Symphony and Vaughan Williams' Fourth Symphony I'm an Englishman! Is there a prevalence of 'pronouncements of right or wrong' in non-English music? Is Ferneyhough's music free from 'abstract intellectual processes'? How is English music uniquely given to 'a single man's experience of today as related to a particular place', whatever that is in any case supposed to mean (and why only a single man?!).
Since the principal points are largely already made, I will refrain from picking apart the remainder of Mr Hamilton's article (which readers may sample for themselves) and confine myself to a few brief final observations.
I am unaware of the nature and extent of conspiracy against the promotion and performance of English music that the author strongly and repeatedly suggests is predicated upon the giving of priority to the promotion of non-English music in England, an argument that is at best suspect and at worst specious.
With his references to 'English pastoralism', the author seems to be regarding the notion of 'tradition' with which he opens as something locked in the past but which is at the same time possessed of some kind of justifiable immutability that ought to ensure its perpetuation. Many of us are familiar with the term 'cowpat school' ascribed to Constant Lambert -- one of many English composers overlooked by the author as well as the barb from Elisabeth Lutyens -- another one -- about 'folky-wolky modal melodies on the cor anglais' but, amusing as these are, what about 'English pastoralism' in present-day music? -- is it not, for example, alive and well (albeit in what is arguably a reified form) as a palpable influence over some of the music of David Matthews -- yet another one -- for example The Music of Dawn, In the Dark Time and the Sixth Symphony?
The author writes of an 'age of diversity' that supposedly acts against the recognition of English music; why does he therefore say so little about the sheer range and diversity of English music itself?
To return to Elgar -- the author cites his Caractacus. The admittedly imperialist tone of its ending is as nothing to the unalloyed embarrassment of the same composer's Crown of India which I understand is shortly to be revived (albeit only momentarily, one hopes!); now if anything by a great composer could really be regarded as absurdly and emptily jingoistic and utterly beneath both him and contempt, then that work surely well surpasses the second and third of Shostakovich's symphonies! Much has often been made of the 'Englishness' of Elgar's music; not only can I simply not hear it but I had initially been put off the very idea of it by what I had read and heard about this supposedly pompously-circumstantial antediluvian imperialist Edwardian land-on-which-the-sun-never set music -- which was a great pity, since I had therefore to be dragged kicking and screaming to a performance of his first symphony, fearing the very worst, yet what I heard thrilled me intensely and still does to this day.
Elgar's finest work is arguably of an order of importance equal to any work produced by non-English composers in his own time, yet what is there that is so quintessentially 'English' about it? (and, let's face it, it seems that nothing can be deemed to be truly and uniquely 'English' without that woefully overused knee-jerk qualifying adverb!). Those very characteristics about which I had initially felt so queasy are rarely present at all -- which is hardly surprising, given such factors as Elgar's lower-middle-class origins, his Roman Catholic faith (and his doubts about that) and his frequent bouts of unconfidence, all of which identify him as a most unlikely candidate for the 'English establishment figure' of his day into which mould people tried to force him (although, notwithstanding Elgar's virtuosity as a cyclist, shouldn't one of his 'friends pictured within' have gently persuaded him to shave off those handlebars?). One does not have to be a Roman Catholic or an English person to be profoundly moved by The Dream of Gerontius, as well I know (and I doubt that it had been any kind of perceived 'Englishness' in Newman's text that discouraged Dvorák from setting it before it came Elgar's way).
Finally, it is blindingly obvious that very few of the examples that the author provides are post-World War II, so where this article really falls down is in its omission of, among others, Tippett from the past century's first decade, Lloyd, Britten, Searle and Arnell from its second, Arnold and Simpson from its third, a clutch of 1930s-born composers (Wood, Goehr, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, Maw, Payne, Crosse, McCabe, etc), those whom I have already mentioned from the 1940s, Knussen from the 1950s, Benjamin from the 1960s and Adès from the 1970s; if that's all a mere coincidence, it's a pretty drastic one! (and the author is clearly not the only writer capable of listing English composers) ...
Music that is any good must stand -- and, yes, sometimes needs to be helped to stand -- on its own two feet, but because it is worth bothering with, not because it is 'English'; do we only or mainly care about Debussy and Dutilleux because they were/are French or Copland and Carter because they were/are in someone's bizarre perception the offspring of Menuhin's 'mercantilistic all-American society'?
Copyright © 30 August 2009 Alistair Hinton,
Herefordshire UK
http://www.mvdaily.com/articles/2009/08/english.htm
ALISTAIR HINTON discusses
a recent article on English music
by David Hamilton
I was recently alerted to an article by David Hamilton on the neglect of English music published in the New English Review when my attention was drawn to it by a reference on an online discussion forum by Canadian pianist and composer Gordon Rumson; it contained a number of points with which I felt impelled to take issue -- and by no means because I am a Scottish composer!
The author opens with a quotation from Yehudi Menuhin writing in The Times in 1995 in which Menuhin observes that
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.
I find this to be at the very least unhelpful; Menuhin avoids specifying to which English composers he refers (it can't possibly be all of them!) and in any case he seems to make a sweeping generalisation here. What in any case is the 'Englishness' of these composers and how can we tell that it remains 'intact'? His notion that 'the mercantilistic world has gone all-American', irrespective of its truth or otherwise, seems to have no obvious relevance in that American music can hardly be said to have taken some kind of precedence over that of other nations.
Much of the remainder of Mr Hamilton's article seems redolent of a kind of narrow parochialism in its suggestion that 'English' music is somehow identifiably different to any other and may and should accordingly be more strongly supported in England as such. I am all for supporting English music that is worthy of support, but I cannot help but return to the questions 'who are these English composers?' and 'what makes them and their music identifiably English?' One has only to consider the immense differences between a handful of English composers born in England between 1943 and 1946 to realise that there is no obvious commonality besides the country and origins of their birth -- I refer (in chronological order of birth) to Brian Ferneyhough, David Matthews, Robin Holloway, John Tavener, Colin Matthews and Michael Finnissy; can it reasonably be said that all of these identifiably represent what can be called an 'English musical tradition' -- and the same one at that?
Thanks to a variety of researchers, performers, record companies and the like, we know far more English music now than was the case thirty years ago and there can, of course, be no doubt that some of this unearthing has proved to be of immense value in reviving the justifiable fortunes of music that has for far too long been overlooked. The case of John Foulds, to which a paragraph is devoted, is a classic example of this, whereas that on Frederick Cliffe borders on the fatuous; is it reasonable to expect to class his 1889 symphony with the early symphonies of Mahler, Brahms's and Bruckner's final symphonies and Tchaikovsky's last two symphonies?
Whilst it is obvious that the term 'land without music' in the period between Purcell and Elgar in England was always an exaggeration, can we really be expected to believe that the works of Stainer, Wesley, Potter, Sterndale Bennett, Crotch, Hayes, Bache, Linley and others whose names the author might have mentioned but decided to omit 'were on a par with their foreign contemporaries', irrespective of whether or not they were considered 'progressive enough for international attention'? In what ways were any of these on such a par? Who were the contemporary English equivalents of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bellini, Rossini, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Alkan, Weber, Verdi, Wagner, Bruckner, Smetana, Brahms, Dvorák and others? There were undoubtedly some interesting figures in English music during this period, but I remain unconvinced that England could field anyone of the order of these composers.
The paragraph beginning 'Even during the ravages of Modernism in the twentieth century' prompts the hackles of suspicion to rise before its very credibility is undermined by its leading to the claim 'there was a renaissance of music in England at which 'Stanford and Parry were at the fount and in a Brahmsian style created English music equal to Brahms himself'; leaving aside the facts that Stanford and Parry did no such exalted thing and that a substantial proportion of their mature music was in any case composed after Brahms's death, what on earth is meant here by 'the ravages of Modernism' and when were they supposed to have 'ravaged' what?
We are then told that 'Elgar continued the creation of an English style through merging Brahms and Wagner.' That Elgar was, by the time of his first symphony, the most important English composer for many decades is surely beyond doubt and he certainly knew well his Brahms and Wagner, although he felt influenced more by Schumann than either. But how did he 'continue the creation of an English style'? How could he in any case have 'created' one 'through merging Brahms and Wagner'? He developed his own, to be sure and was subject, like all composers, to certain influences in his earlier days, but he seems to have taken little from anyone in that list of earlier English composers that the author provides. Richard Strauss certainly recognised Elgar's greatness; his claim for him as 'the first Progressivist in English Music' was no more patronising towards Elgar than it was towards English music, but taken at face value it might at the same time be seen as somewhat misleading, in that Elgar's finest work had more to it than mere 'English Progressivism' (as I am sure Strauss also recognised).
Perhaps even more improbably, we are expected to believe that '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'; to begin with, no one was asking a question (so how did England come up with an answer?) and, important as Holbrooke was, the idea that his orchestral epics 'rival' Wagner's Ring would surely have been as absurd to him as it should be to the rest of us -- and almost as risible as the idea of anyone being able to assume a mantle such as 'the Cockney Wagner'!
We are then given another long list of English composers active during the twentieth century -- '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'; phew! -- pause for breath needed. I was unaware that Macs kenzie, Cunn and Ewen -- or Harty -- were 'English' in any case and it might likewise be salutary to question the extent and validity of Goossens' and Moeran's 'English' credentials. We certainly know more about most of these composers' works nowadays and some of the explorations have again yielded many treasures, yet do they all belong on anything like the same plane? -- Rubbra, Howells, Rawsthorne, Goossens, Foulds, Ireland, Bliss, Bax and Bridge seem to stand pretty much head and shoulders above most of the remainder (although the jury might yet be out on the standing of Bowen among this group) -- but what does this lengthy list of names prove in any case, beyond the author's ability to create lists?
Menuhin's Times piece is then reinvoked in a quoted statement that he was
drawn to English music because ... 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, sometimes dramatically.
If that isn't woolly thinking, I don't know what is! Leaving aside the dubious topographical claims, how can or does any English music identifiably reflect those things? -- and was there ever in any case climate, vegetation and the rest in England that was so utterly distinguishable from their equivalents anywhere else on earth that they somehow begat music that is likewise so very different from that of other nations and instantly recognisable for its origins, irrespective of who wrote it? I remain mindful of the need to justify my questions here without putting my remarks firmly to the test, so next time I listen to Rubbra's First Symphony, Ferneyhough's Third Quartet, Bridge's Second Piano Trio or Birtwistle's Earth Dances (English earth, is it? -- and producing vegetation devoid of sharp edges?), I promise to make a point of looking out for -- er -- something or other that offers even a tenuous thread of commonality and continuity that might accord in some way to Menuhin's somewhat strange vision of England and things English, though I suspect in advance that the search will be at least as fruitless as those identified in the Scottish writer Norman Douglas' reference to looking for 'a needle in a haystack or a joke in the Bible'.
Menuhin continues
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 ...
What is he talking about? Is musical humanity the exclusive province of English composers? (One would hope not!) If there are no 'shattering utterances' in Brian's Gothic Symphony and Vaughan Williams' Fourth Symphony I'm an Englishman! Is there a prevalence of 'pronouncements of right or wrong' in non-English music? Is Ferneyhough's music free from 'abstract intellectual processes'? How is English music uniquely given to 'a single man's experience of today as related to a particular place', whatever that is in any case supposed to mean (and why only a single man?!).
Since the principal points are largely already made, I will refrain from picking apart the remainder of Mr Hamilton's article (which readers may sample for themselves) and confine myself to a few brief final observations.
I am unaware of the nature and extent of conspiracy against the promotion and performance of English music that the author strongly and repeatedly suggests is predicated upon the giving of priority to the promotion of non-English music in England, an argument that is at best suspect and at worst specious.
With his references to 'English pastoralism', the author seems to be regarding the notion of 'tradition' with which he opens as something locked in the past but which is at the same time possessed of some kind of justifiable immutability that ought to ensure its perpetuation. Many of us are familiar with the term 'cowpat school' ascribed to Constant Lambert -- one of many English composers overlooked by the author as well as the barb from Elisabeth Lutyens -- another one -- about 'folky-wolky modal melodies on the cor anglais' but, amusing as these are, what about 'English pastoralism' in present-day music? -- is it not, for example, alive and well (albeit in what is arguably a reified form) as a palpable influence over some of the music of David Matthews -- yet another one -- for example The Music of Dawn, In the Dark Time and the Sixth Symphony?
The author writes of an 'age of diversity' that supposedly acts against the recognition of English music; why does he therefore say so little about the sheer range and diversity of English music itself?
To return to Elgar -- the author cites his Caractacus. The admittedly imperialist tone of its ending is as nothing to the unalloyed embarrassment of the same composer's Crown of India which I understand is shortly to be revived (albeit only momentarily, one hopes!); now if anything by a great composer could really be regarded as absurdly and emptily jingoistic and utterly beneath both him and contempt, then that work surely well surpasses the second and third of Shostakovich's symphonies! Much has often been made of the 'Englishness' of Elgar's music; not only can I simply not hear it but I had initially been put off the very idea of it by what I had read and heard about this supposedly pompously-circumstantial antediluvian imperialist Edwardian land-on-which-the-sun-never set music -- which was a great pity, since I had therefore to be dragged kicking and screaming to a performance of his first symphony, fearing the very worst, yet what I heard thrilled me intensely and still does to this day.
Elgar's finest work is arguably of an order of importance equal to any work produced by non-English composers in his own time, yet what is there that is so quintessentially 'English' about it? (and, let's face it, it seems that nothing can be deemed to be truly and uniquely 'English' without that woefully overused knee-jerk qualifying adverb!). Those very characteristics about which I had initially felt so queasy are rarely present at all -- which is hardly surprising, given such factors as Elgar's lower-middle-class origins, his Roman Catholic faith (and his doubts about that) and his frequent bouts of unconfidence, all of which identify him as a most unlikely candidate for the 'English establishment figure' of his day into which mould people tried to force him (although, notwithstanding Elgar's virtuosity as a cyclist, shouldn't one of his 'friends pictured within' have gently persuaded him to shave off those handlebars?). One does not have to be a Roman Catholic or an English person to be profoundly moved by The Dream of Gerontius, as well I know (and I doubt that it had been any kind of perceived 'Englishness' in Newman's text that discouraged Dvorák from setting it before it came Elgar's way).
Finally, it is blindingly obvious that very few of the examples that the author provides are post-World War II, so where this article really falls down is in its omission of, among others, Tippett from the past century's first decade, Lloyd, Britten, Searle and Arnell from its second, Arnold and Simpson from its third, a clutch of 1930s-born composers (Wood, Goehr, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, Maw, Payne, Crosse, McCabe, etc), those whom I have already mentioned from the 1940s, Knussen from the 1950s, Benjamin from the 1960s and Adès from the 1970s; if that's all a mere coincidence, it's a pretty drastic one! (and the author is clearly not the only writer capable of listing English composers) ...
Music that is any good must stand -- and, yes, sometimes needs to be helped to stand -- on its own two feet, but because it is worth bothering with, not because it is 'English'; do we only or mainly care about Debussy and Dutilleux because they were/are French or Copland and Carter because they were/are in someone's bizarre perception the offspring of Menuhin's 'mercantilistic all-American society'?
Copyright © 30 August 2009 Alistair Hinton,
Herefordshire UK
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Maggots Feeding on the Body of Art
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
Maggots Feeding on the Body of Art - David Hamilton
http://conservativedemocraticalliance.blogspot.com/2008/07/maggots-feeding-on-body-of-art-david.html
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.
Maggots Feeding on the Body of Art - David Hamilton
http://conservativedemocraticalliance.blogspot.com/2008/07/maggots-feeding-on-body-of-art-david.html
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.
Maggots feeding on the body of art
Reflections on modern art, morality and the state of contemporary culture
David Hamilton
http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/maggots_feeding_on_the_body_of_art/
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 were the bookmakers’ favourites and grabbed headlines as the most shocking nominees. Maggots feeding off a body is a fitting picture of contemporary artists. Contemporary art has developed from great artistic traditions, yet often destroys the common values embodied within them. The resultant separation of form and content undermines traditional art without managing to create new meanings.
Contemporary art is not really art at all. Today’s art is commodified and used to make money for the elites who buy and sell it. Art is a financial asset. Sotheby’s contemporary art auction in July last year raised more than $1 billion, which shows how the world’s super-rich are investing in art in spite of gloomy economic predictions. Sotheby’s evening contemporary art sale raised 95 million pounds, 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 (Pecho/Oreja)’, owned by Irish rock band U2, sold for $10.1 million. Senior executives are confident the art market will sustain soaring values in spite of falling stocks and house prices with rising oil costs. Jussi Pylkkanen, President of Christie’s Europe, said the success of auctions held around the world in recent months ‘demonstrated the continued strength, depth and breadth of the global art market’.
Contemporary art is a movement of an elite that finances its interests through grants and sponsorship from global corporations. It is exhibited by commercial art galleries, private collectors, corporations, publicly funded arts organisations, contemporary art museums or by the artists themselves who are supported by grants, awards and prizes as well as by selling work. There are interlocking and exclusive relationships between publicly funded contemporary art organisations and corporations. A select few dealers represent the artists featured in major publicly funded contemporary art museums, whilst individual collectors are highly influential - Charles Saatchi has dominated the market in British contemporary art for twenty years.
Historically, there were qualities that denoted an idea of civilisation that gave meaning to culture: confidence and a sense of belief in one’s own people that generated a sense of permanence. This was reflected by the arts elite of the day. A major collector at the beginnings of our civilisation was King Athelstan. Among his gifts to Chester-le-Street was 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, alongside the Cuthbert material. Athelstan stands out among the relic-collectors of late Saxon England as a great relic-collector of his time. Several churches’ traditions attributed their own collections to his religious largesse.
There was a self-belief in our society’s values and a desire to receive them from our ancestors and transmit them to our descendants. These values came from a sense of continuity: that we have endured and will continue to do so; but now it seems this process is being jettisoned for a vague future that is being artificially constructed by cultural elites. To combat this, artists would need not only great talent but also independence of mind and the courage to stand alone and rebel; not just go along with fashion for personal gain.
Promoting cultural diversity is the Arts Council’s main goal. Here their ideology of conforming to fashion is expressed in customary Doublespeak: it 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’ (BME) 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 ‘inclusive’? However, ventures representative of our culture, like the English Music Festival, are discriminated against on the grounds they are ‘exclusive’.
But there is a tension between the traditional culture that elites benefit from themselves, and that they want to give to society. The current chairman of Arts Council England is Sir Christopher John Frayling (born 25 December 1946) 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’.
A similar sense of double standards is shown by many artists. 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, 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. Arts Council England is the national development agency for encouraging this disturbing practice. It distributes public money from the Government and the National Lottery to the arts organisations that share their ideology and refuse those that do not.
A further feature of contemporary art is paedophilia. Bowie’s 1975 concept album 1.Outside has a tale about the dismemberment of a young teenage girl. Hypocrisy is another. In his video ‘Let’s Dance’ Bowie is filmed playing the guitar and singing while watching an Aboriginal couple struggling with metaphors of Western cultural imperialism. It looks cool and gives an atmosphere of culture and poverty. Bowie is worth £200 million. Modern art is not really art but anti-art and detached from true culture which develops amongst a people or community and grows traditions over time. However, the irony is that the people producing unmade beds or piles of bricks need the established old masters and traditional art as a background; for if the old standards were truly swept away, no one would be able to say: ‘Oooh, what a provocative statement, Tracey’.
For the June 2008 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Tracey Emin was invited be curator of a gallery. The sex-themed works on show include a Zebra with an erection. ‘... it is 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 a piece of propaganda for cultural elites; changing the Victorian woman to someone like Cherie Blair or Diane Abbott would provoke hysterical prejudice from these pseuds.
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 Beck’s beer as part of a series of limited edition labels produced by contemporary artists.
The Chapman brothers were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003, and their work also centred on themes of sex and death. Their piece ‘Sex’ referred to their previous work ‘Great Deeds against the Dead’. The original work shows three dismembered corpses hanging from a tree; ‘Sex’ shows the same scenario, but in a further state of decay. Clowns’ 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.
But one could get still more pretentious than this. In May 2008 the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave a performance of composer John Cage’s 4’33”, which does not have a single note. Radio 3 broadcast it live and switched off its emergency system that cuts in when there is silence. The performance took place at London’s concrete block the Barbican Centre. TV viewers were also able to watch the event when BBC Four broadcast the concert. Cage’s justification for 4’33” was to demonstrate that ‘wherever we are what we hear mostly is noise’. General manager Paul Hughes told BBC Radio 5 Live the orchestra had rehearsed to ‘get in the right frame of mind’. Even though they had no notes to play, the musicians tuned up and then turned pages of the score after each of the three ‘movements’ specified by the composer. The audience applauded enthusiastically.
Mr Hughes said Cage believed ‘music was all around us all the time’ and the piece was his attempt to make the audience focus on sounds that were ‘part of our everyday lives’. But the audience at the premiere in 1952 was not so gullible and people were heard walking out. Mr Hughes said, ‘They were completely outraged and extremely angry’.
An interesting precedent comes from 1937 when novelist Graham Greene reviewed the Shirley Temple film Wee Willie Winkie for Night and Day magazine. He was sued by Twentieth Century Fox and Miss Temple. The plaintiffs objected to this section:
‘Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret and adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is a complete totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.’
When this review was written Miss Temple was eight years old. Greene suggested the film makers were pandering to those older men who had an unhealthy and perverted sexual interest in young children. This was a complaint about the sexualisation of children by Hollywood. Greene found himself being vilified as some sort of abuser of children for daring to point out that Temple’s films were a magnet for dirty old men. The basis of the claim was that Greene’s article damaged her and was libellous to the extent that it suggested she was deliberately sexually provocative. The trial was before the Lord Chief Justice of England in the Kings Bench Division on 22 March 1938. Temple’s counsel described the article as ‘one of the most horrible libels that one could well imagine’, and described Night and Day magazine as a ‘beastly publication’. The magazine was on its last legs anyway the trial finished it off.
Greene was in Mexico and apologised through his counsel for the libel and paid £3500 in damages to 20th Century Fox/Temple - a considerable sum then. The Lord Chief Justice wanted Greene arrested and prosecuted for criminal libel, describing the article as ‘a gross outrage’ but he was not arrested. Now, it is clear Temple’s films did portray children as objects of lust which is now commonplace - TV soaps have a tendency to show their younger female cast as objects to arouse desire and break down people’s inhibitions to grooming young girls. Those who do this are not innocent television producers and writers but culpable and therefore punishable. On EastEnders, Jim Branning’s daughter Lauren (Madeline Duggan) who was born on 29 March 1994, usually wears a very short dress; Lucy Beale (Melissa Suffield), who was born on 9 December 1993, looks as though she is wearing a push-up bra. On Coronation Street Kevin Webster’s daughter Sophie’s breasts almost fall out of her top and she is about 14. Contemporary art and entertainment is creating a climate where our young people are only valued as sex objects. Parents who watch these programmes should start to realise what is being done to their children and future generations of society.
David Hamilton
http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/maggots_feeding_on_the_body_of_art/
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 were the bookmakers’ favourites and grabbed headlines as the most shocking nominees. Maggots feeding off a body is a fitting picture of contemporary artists. Contemporary art has developed from great artistic traditions, yet often destroys the common values embodied within them. The resultant separation of form and content undermines traditional art without managing to create new meanings.
Contemporary art is not really art at all. Today’s art is commodified and used to make money for the elites who buy and sell it. Art is a financial asset. Sotheby’s contemporary art auction in July last year raised more than $1 billion, which shows how the world’s super-rich are investing in art in spite of gloomy economic predictions. Sotheby’s evening contemporary art sale raised 95 million pounds, 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 (Pecho/Oreja)’, owned by Irish rock band U2, sold for $10.1 million. Senior executives are confident the art market will sustain soaring values in spite of falling stocks and house prices with rising oil costs. Jussi Pylkkanen, President of Christie’s Europe, said the success of auctions held around the world in recent months ‘demonstrated the continued strength, depth and breadth of the global art market’.
Contemporary art is a movement of an elite that finances its interests through grants and sponsorship from global corporations. It is exhibited by commercial art galleries, private collectors, corporations, publicly funded arts organisations, contemporary art museums or by the artists themselves who are supported by grants, awards and prizes as well as by selling work. There are interlocking and exclusive relationships between publicly funded contemporary art organisations and corporations. A select few dealers represent the artists featured in major publicly funded contemporary art museums, whilst individual collectors are highly influential - Charles Saatchi has dominated the market in British contemporary art for twenty years.
Historically, there were qualities that denoted an idea of civilisation that gave meaning to culture: confidence and a sense of belief in one’s own people that generated a sense of permanence. This was reflected by the arts elite of the day. A major collector at the beginnings of our civilisation was King Athelstan. Among his gifts to Chester-le-Street was 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, alongside the Cuthbert material. Athelstan stands out among the relic-collectors of late Saxon England as a great relic-collector of his time. Several churches’ traditions attributed their own collections to his religious largesse.
There was a self-belief in our society’s values and a desire to receive them from our ancestors and transmit them to our descendants. These values came from a sense of continuity: that we have endured and will continue to do so; but now it seems this process is being jettisoned for a vague future that is being artificially constructed by cultural elites. To combat this, artists would need not only great talent but also independence of mind and the courage to stand alone and rebel; not just go along with fashion for personal gain.
Promoting cultural diversity is the Arts Council’s main goal. Here their ideology of conforming to fashion is expressed in customary Doublespeak: it 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’ (BME) 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 ‘inclusive’? However, ventures representative of our culture, like the English Music Festival, are discriminated against on the grounds they are ‘exclusive’.
But there is a tension between the traditional culture that elites benefit from themselves, and that they want to give to society. The current chairman of Arts Council England is Sir Christopher John Frayling (born 25 December 1946) 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’.
A similar sense of double standards is shown by many artists. 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, 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. Arts Council England is the national development agency for encouraging this disturbing practice. It distributes public money from the Government and the National Lottery to the arts organisations that share their ideology and refuse those that do not.
A further feature of contemporary art is paedophilia. Bowie’s 1975 concept album 1.Outside has a tale about the dismemberment of a young teenage girl. Hypocrisy is another. In his video ‘Let’s Dance’ Bowie is filmed playing the guitar and singing while watching an Aboriginal couple struggling with metaphors of Western cultural imperialism. It looks cool and gives an atmosphere of culture and poverty. Bowie is worth £200 million. Modern art is not really art but anti-art and detached from true culture which develops amongst a people or community and grows traditions over time. However, the irony is that the people producing unmade beds or piles of bricks need the established old masters and traditional art as a background; for if the old standards were truly swept away, no one would be able to say: ‘Oooh, what a provocative statement, Tracey’.
For the June 2008 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Tracey Emin was invited be curator of a gallery. The sex-themed works on show include a Zebra with an erection. ‘... it is 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 a piece of propaganda for cultural elites; changing the Victorian woman to someone like Cherie Blair or Diane Abbott would provoke hysterical prejudice from these pseuds.
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 Beck’s beer as part of a series of limited edition labels produced by contemporary artists.
The Chapman brothers were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003, and their work also centred on themes of sex and death. Their piece ‘Sex’ referred to their previous work ‘Great Deeds against the Dead’. The original work shows three dismembered corpses hanging from a tree; ‘Sex’ shows the same scenario, but in a further state of decay. Clowns’ 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.
But one could get still more pretentious than this. In May 2008 the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave a performance of composer John Cage’s 4’33”, which does not have a single note. Radio 3 broadcast it live and switched off its emergency system that cuts in when there is silence. The performance took place at London’s concrete block the Barbican Centre. TV viewers were also able to watch the event when BBC Four broadcast the concert. Cage’s justification for 4’33” was to demonstrate that ‘wherever we are what we hear mostly is noise’. General manager Paul Hughes told BBC Radio 5 Live the orchestra had rehearsed to ‘get in the right frame of mind’. Even though they had no notes to play, the musicians tuned up and then turned pages of the score after each of the three ‘movements’ specified by the composer. The audience applauded enthusiastically.
Mr Hughes said Cage believed ‘music was all around us all the time’ and the piece was his attempt to make the audience focus on sounds that were ‘part of our everyday lives’. But the audience at the premiere in 1952 was not so gullible and people were heard walking out. Mr Hughes said, ‘They were completely outraged and extremely angry’.
An interesting precedent comes from 1937 when novelist Graham Greene reviewed the Shirley Temple film Wee Willie Winkie for Night and Day magazine. He was sued by Twentieth Century Fox and Miss Temple. The plaintiffs objected to this section:
‘Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret and adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is a complete totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.’
When this review was written Miss Temple was eight years old. Greene suggested the film makers were pandering to those older men who had an unhealthy and perverted sexual interest in young children. This was a complaint about the sexualisation of children by Hollywood. Greene found himself being vilified as some sort of abuser of children for daring to point out that Temple’s films were a magnet for dirty old men. The basis of the claim was that Greene’s article damaged her and was libellous to the extent that it suggested she was deliberately sexually provocative. The trial was before the Lord Chief Justice of England in the Kings Bench Division on 22 March 1938. Temple’s counsel described the article as ‘one of the most horrible libels that one could well imagine’, and described Night and Day magazine as a ‘beastly publication’. The magazine was on its last legs anyway the trial finished it off.
Greene was in Mexico and apologised through his counsel for the libel and paid £3500 in damages to 20th Century Fox/Temple - a considerable sum then. The Lord Chief Justice wanted Greene arrested and prosecuted for criminal libel, describing the article as ‘a gross outrage’ but he was not arrested. Now, it is clear Temple’s films did portray children as objects of lust which is now commonplace - TV soaps have a tendency to show their younger female cast as objects to arouse desire and break down people’s inhibitions to grooming young girls. Those who do this are not innocent television producers and writers but culpable and therefore punishable. On EastEnders, Jim Branning’s daughter Lauren (Madeline Duggan) who was born on 29 March 1994, usually wears a very short dress; Lucy Beale (Melissa Suffield), who was born on 9 December 1993, looks as though she is wearing a push-up bra. On Coronation Street Kevin Webster’s daughter Sophie’s breasts almost fall out of her top and she is about 14. Contemporary art and entertainment is creating a climate where our young people are only valued as sex objects. Parents who watch these programmes should start to realise what is being done to their children and future generations of society.
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