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
Sunday 25 October 2009
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.
Popular Culture and Human Nature
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/46574/sec_id/46574
by David Hamilton (September 2009)
I remember being in The Yacht, a fine pub in Torquay, 3 years ago. They had murals of various rock stars and I remarked on their insincerity and the landlady and the barmaid seemed offended. It was as if I had insulted their friends or family: so much part of people’s psychological lives are these icons.
But they are little more than cardboard cut outs: they pose constantly but only show one side of themselves and this pretence is kept up by the media. The pose as rebels but live in fabulous mansions, have gardeners, butlers, nannies and send their children to the best schools.
Human nature is corruptible which is why attempts to degrade our young people work.
They are talented but to get these great riches they corrupt young people by example and by advocating things such as drugs. They are very much part of the general orthodoxy or their careers would soon be destroyed. Their personae are usually an embodiment of a fashionable idea. David Bowie in his early days embodied the feminist idea of androgyny; Madonna popularised sado-masochism, though the philosophy came from Foucault. In real life she tried to live as an English country lady while in public she pretends to be a rebel effing and blinding and snogging Britney at award ceremonies.
The New Left would never have replaced traditional liberalism in the 1960's if it were not for pop singers. An attack on Enoch Powell was contained in the early versions of the Beatles 1969 hit “Get Back” which began as a send up of telling people to "Get Back" to their own countries to satirise the “Rivers of Blood” speech. But Paul McCartney thought better of it and made the lyrics more oblique.
Pop stars are arbiters of taste and behaviour and must take personal responsibility for the harm they have done to young people by creating degenerate images to make themselves millions. Young people identify with them and are beguiled by their rebellious and exciting poses. Those whose pictures they have on their bedroom walls are their role models.
Of contemporary music rap is very popular but corruptive as the aggressive misogynistic lyrics changes the attitudes of young men who start to treat their girlfriends roughly. It also decultures us as it is replacing traditional verse in pub poetry.
Pop stars have replaced religious and national icons for millions of people. The man who undermined the western world Elvis Presley has a religious devotion 32 years after his death and his home Gracelands attracts worshippers on the scale of Lourdes.
Soaps show young females as objects to arouse male desire and break down inhibitions to grooming young girls. I recently heard a man who has an 11 year-old daughter lustingly commenting on Sophie Webster! Those who promote this are not innocent television producers and writers but know what they are doing. In East Enders Jim Branning’s daughter Lauren (born 29th March 1994), usually wore a very short dress; Lucy Beale (born 9 December 1993), looked as though she was wore a push-up bra. On Coronation Street Kevin Webster’s daughter Sophie's breasts push out of her top and she was about 14. Contemporary art and entertainment is creating a climate where our young women are only worth sex. Parents who watch these programmes should start to realise what is being done to their children.
Photos of Girls Aloud posing as "sexy schoolgirls" shows a look to be imitated and turns children into sexual targets. Dressing up little girls like prostitutes signals that this mode of dress is sanctioned by the Establishment to paedophiles who are made to feel their behaviour is becoming accepted.
The modern manipulators are leading us into degeneracy through popular culture. In a recent TV series "I'm a Celebrity Get Me out of Here", simple people, described as Celebrities, were so degraded as to eat 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 decline into more degradation of our people and culture. For example, on a “reality” programme one masturbated a pig and on another, one fried and ate Kangaroos testicles. They do not see themselves as lowering their esteem but reacting to the old image of Twin Set and pearls!
Culture is social engineering now and the desired attitudes are arranged and presented to be sympathetic and thus to change people’s attitudes. The Soaps promote “gay” lifestyles. This does not happen by serendipity. It is planned in meetings. The “Goodies” are shown sympathetically and glamorously, every character they want us to imitate is attractive and cool; the “Baddies”, those they want us to hate, are thick and unlovable. It does not occur in a vacuum but in tandem with other developments and helped to manipulate acceptance for the Government plans to equalise the sexual marriage laws.
Contemporary art is used to undermine the Sacred needs of people. Every year time-warped artists stage a ritual by setting up an ordinary member of the public. The script is this: an elderly person takes a youngster, say grandchild or niece, to an exhibition and is shocked by something on display, like an unmade bed or something that requires little imagination, and complains to the press. Then the curator is quoted as saying, “Art is to make people think, and to provoke feelings”. This hackneyed response has been used on each occasion for at least the last 30 years.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the modernist movement set about destroying the form and grammar of traditional art and thus the content, and made it both unintelligible and uninteresting. In the 60’s the New Left became the new "elites". Aristocrat rulers had sense of “noblesse oblige" towards the working classes and a sense of responsibility but the elites, who grew out of the new left, corrupt them out of contempt and personal gain.
What are the effects of this constant debilitation of people?Ordinary people lose contact with our civilization and become disorientated, lost, suffer from bereavement and become depressed.
Our culture is still amenable to the elites but our manipulated young and those from a de-culturalised background give up. They cannot take refuge in a smaller cultural world like the elites who live in large houses in posh areas of London, or beautiful English villages as country gentlefolk. They lose heart and, having nowhere to go descend into vices and viciousness; they are no longer civilized and do not know how to behave. They become prey to amoral meritocrats who use and exploit them.
The papers devote pages to the drugged and drunken antics of “celebs” and footballers while the celeb magazines and radio stations promote those who have degraded themselves on Reality TV shows. They show them leaving night clubs drunk and question whether they are wearing knickers or not. The people who make these programmes and write the magazines are educated and intelligent people so they know what they are doing to our young people.
I looked at the covers of two celeb magazines: one stated, “Posh is looking tired and stressed. Is it too much partying?” The other, “Britney and Paris’ wild night out.”
They are constantly belittled by TV shows that call them chavs and show them as stupid and dysfunctional which almost subliminally deprives them of self worth and they seek it in drink and drugs. There is a trend in drinking amongst people as young as 10 -15. We see them all over the country in subways, on recreation grounds, schoolchildren drinking cans that they have been sold by shopkeepers.
Our young people do not understand their loss of identity, the loss of the sense of who they are and loss of self-worth. What are the consequences? The degradation shows in their social lives when they try to escape from themselves.
A 20 year-old young woman told me how she and her cousin go on. “We were so drunk,” she said beaming, “...we couldn’t stand.” They could not remember how they got home. I asked if they like getting drunk. “It’s social” one replied; the other, ”It’s good fun.” “It is acceptable now like sex and dress.”
Some politicians claim stopping “Happy Hours” would stop drunkenness but there are ways of getting drunk quickly and cheaply like “drinking glasses of water while drinking alcohol because it reacts in your blood and you get drunk quicker.” There is also a trick of gulping air down while you drink. I asked who originates these tricks. “Probably, the breweries”, she replied.
They have been educated to see themselves as equal to men but in practice women’s vital organs are not as strong as men’s and they have a greater chance of liver and kidney damage as well as permanent brain damage.
Children are selfish, but become civilized as they grow older and take responsibility for the world around them. This is becoming adult. But the new culture prevents them from growing up and keeps them immature which is causing so much uncivilised behaviour. Bar owners and the drinks companies play on the weaker part of people’s nature rather like a sales scam would play on, say, someone’s greed. It is preying on the young’s need for fun and adventure with unhealthy adventures.
Young people drink drinks that have pretty colours and fruity flavours and seem like soft drinks but are about 6% alcohol, or pretty, pleasant tasting cocktails. At the same time in a “cool bar” the hypnotic music pounds away disorientating them. There are often TV screens all around showing sport, pop acts or models on catwalks. One bar had a couple of bouncy castles upon which customers bounced gleefully, mindless that outside their bubbles of pleasure there is a dangerous, hostile world. Recent bomb attacks were outside London nightclubs.
Some say it is their own fault but a cool bar is unreal and like being in a dream so people lose sense of the real world outside that they will re-enter at closing time, and drink too much. There is the use of the hallucinatory effects of drugs in adverts. I saw an advert for vodka shots, which was a square of undulating shades of blue light. You do not see these colours by drinking vodka, gulps of air or not. You see this by taking ecstasy.
On a normal evening in every town and city you see young women collapse onto the pavement and often being attended by paramedics and stretchered away comatose or with cracked heads. Is this all our young women are worth? They walk up to cars waiting at traffic lights and ask for lifts and often just open the door and get in. You see them staggering around the streets at 2 to 4 am lobbing their boobs out to stop passing cars for lifts many get raped but do not remember properly.
On internet “Social Networking” sites young women present themselves as tarts and most say they “like getting drunk.” Their clothes and poses show them as anybody’s meat. They are imitating people on TV talent shows and think they will be spotted, and slappers who have made fortunes showing their silicon boobs. The main article in the Mirror of Friday the 14th of August was about Katie Price (Jordan)!
Our elites promote these as role models for our young people, but only promote honourable and worthy people as role models for ethnic minorities. If you walk around an inner city school or community centre the walls are festooned with heroes from the histories of ethnic groups like Gandhi, Marcus Garvey or Harriet Tubman.
Some bars are used for pills and others for cocaine and most door staff are pumped up on steroids. The drug goes with the music. The coke-heads are hyper and constantly making a sort of chewing motion. The staff of these bars put Vaseline on lavatory cisterns to try to stop customers doing lines of coke on them but the owners are usually on it themselves and door staff are often dealers.
Another mode of destruction is Clubbing on Ecstasy. It is a special occasion like going to church on Sundays. A common feature of ecstasy clubbers is a need to escape from themselves which in a healthier age would have led to a mystic journey in solitude as eremites counting their beads and communing with God. In our degraded times they are prey for the hard-headed business people who use any fashion to make money out of people.
A young woman explained to me: “It heightens the music, makes it more epic.” In common with others it helps them to dance longer, but the important effect is that “It fills you full of love towards those around you, if a girl is being sick in the toilets you pull her hair back for her. I have only seen two fights in eight years of clubbing.” She compared this with aggressive pubs when people are drunk and violent fights ensue. It is a response to the betrayal of the needs of our young people by Christian leaders and has fuelled artificial communities and the illusion of transcendence through drugs.
Popular culture does not have to be destructive: we must revive local fairs and festivals and renew Folk music traditions by expressing contemporary meanings through traditional forms. Bob Dylan did this - “A Hard Rain’s-A gonna fall” is based in the Border Ballad Lord Randall. (1) His anthem for the new age in 1965 “The Times They Are - Changing” used traditional balladic language and was carried by the tune of “Irish Rover” but expressed contemporary matter.
The idea is that the culture grows from the community and is not imposed on the community or by manipulating people to conform to an artificial culture. Contemporary examples are Joanna Newsome(2) in America and duo Show of Hands in England. (3)
These are not rationalist formulae for I leave that to ideologues, but suggestions for creative people to develop in practice. There are countless traditional pubs that need customers now the Government’s totalitarian anti-smoking laws have destroyed their trade that would rent out rooms for performances. New cultural movements grow from joy generated by people with common bonds getting together to produce and enjoy music. They will be able to forge emotional bonds with their culture and begin renewing popular music traditions naturally.
(1) A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall lyrics
Lord Randall lyrics
(2) Joanna Newsom
(3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5h4PFBuzv
by David Hamilton (September 2009)
I remember being in The Yacht, a fine pub in Torquay, 3 years ago. They had murals of various rock stars and I remarked on their insincerity and the landlady and the barmaid seemed offended. It was as if I had insulted their friends or family: so much part of people’s psychological lives are these icons.
But they are little more than cardboard cut outs: they pose constantly but only show one side of themselves and this pretence is kept up by the media. The pose as rebels but live in fabulous mansions, have gardeners, butlers, nannies and send their children to the best schools.
Human nature is corruptible which is why attempts to degrade our young people work.
They are talented but to get these great riches they corrupt young people by example and by advocating things such as drugs. They are very much part of the general orthodoxy or their careers would soon be destroyed. Their personae are usually an embodiment of a fashionable idea. David Bowie in his early days embodied the feminist idea of androgyny; Madonna popularised sado-masochism, though the philosophy came from Foucault. In real life she tried to live as an English country lady while in public she pretends to be a rebel effing and blinding and snogging Britney at award ceremonies.
The New Left would never have replaced traditional liberalism in the 1960's if it were not for pop singers. An attack on Enoch Powell was contained in the early versions of the Beatles 1969 hit “Get Back” which began as a send up of telling people to "Get Back" to their own countries to satirise the “Rivers of Blood” speech. But Paul McCartney thought better of it and made the lyrics more oblique.
Pop stars are arbiters of taste and behaviour and must take personal responsibility for the harm they have done to young people by creating degenerate images to make themselves millions. Young people identify with them and are beguiled by their rebellious and exciting poses. Those whose pictures they have on their bedroom walls are their role models.
Of contemporary music rap is very popular but corruptive as the aggressive misogynistic lyrics changes the attitudes of young men who start to treat their girlfriends roughly. It also decultures us as it is replacing traditional verse in pub poetry.
Pop stars have replaced religious and national icons for millions of people. The man who undermined the western world Elvis Presley has a religious devotion 32 years after his death and his home Gracelands attracts worshippers on the scale of Lourdes.
Soaps show young females as objects to arouse male desire and break down inhibitions to grooming young girls. I recently heard a man who has an 11 year-old daughter lustingly commenting on Sophie Webster! Those who promote this are not innocent television producers and writers but know what they are doing. In East Enders Jim Branning’s daughter Lauren (born 29th March 1994), usually wore a very short dress; Lucy Beale (born 9 December 1993), looked as though she was wore a push-up bra. On Coronation Street Kevin Webster’s daughter Sophie's breasts push out of her top and she was about 14. Contemporary art and entertainment is creating a climate where our young women are only worth sex. Parents who watch these programmes should start to realise what is being done to their children.
Photos of Girls Aloud posing as "sexy schoolgirls" shows a look to be imitated and turns children into sexual targets. Dressing up little girls like prostitutes signals that this mode of dress is sanctioned by the Establishment to paedophiles who are made to feel their behaviour is becoming accepted.
The modern manipulators are leading us into degeneracy through popular culture. In a recent TV series "I'm a Celebrity Get Me out of Here", simple people, described as Celebrities, were so degraded as to eat 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 decline into more degradation of our people and culture. For example, on a “reality” programme one masturbated a pig and on another, one fried and ate Kangaroos testicles. They do not see themselves as lowering their esteem but reacting to the old image of Twin Set and pearls!
Culture is social engineering now and the desired attitudes are arranged and presented to be sympathetic and thus to change people’s attitudes. The Soaps promote “gay” lifestyles. This does not happen by serendipity. It is planned in meetings. The “Goodies” are shown sympathetically and glamorously, every character they want us to imitate is attractive and cool; the “Baddies”, those they want us to hate, are thick and unlovable. It does not occur in a vacuum but in tandem with other developments and helped to manipulate acceptance for the Government plans to equalise the sexual marriage laws.
Contemporary art is used to undermine the Sacred needs of people. Every year time-warped artists stage a ritual by setting up an ordinary member of the public. The script is this: an elderly person takes a youngster, say grandchild or niece, to an exhibition and is shocked by something on display, like an unmade bed or something that requires little imagination, and complains to the press. Then the curator is quoted as saying, “Art is to make people think, and to provoke feelings”. This hackneyed response has been used on each occasion for at least the last 30 years.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the modernist movement set about destroying the form and grammar of traditional art and thus the content, and made it both unintelligible and uninteresting. In the 60’s the New Left became the new "elites". Aristocrat rulers had sense of “noblesse oblige" towards the working classes and a sense of responsibility but the elites, who grew out of the new left, corrupt them out of contempt and personal gain.
What are the effects of this constant debilitation of people?Ordinary people lose contact with our civilization and become disorientated, lost, suffer from bereavement and become depressed.
Our culture is still amenable to the elites but our manipulated young and those from a de-culturalised background give up. They cannot take refuge in a smaller cultural world like the elites who live in large houses in posh areas of London, or beautiful English villages as country gentlefolk. They lose heart and, having nowhere to go descend into vices and viciousness; they are no longer civilized and do not know how to behave. They become prey to amoral meritocrats who use and exploit them.
The papers devote pages to the drugged and drunken antics of “celebs” and footballers while the celeb magazines and radio stations promote those who have degraded themselves on Reality TV shows. They show them leaving night clubs drunk and question whether they are wearing knickers or not. The people who make these programmes and write the magazines are educated and intelligent people so they know what they are doing to our young people.
I looked at the covers of two celeb magazines: one stated, “Posh is looking tired and stressed. Is it too much partying?” The other, “Britney and Paris’ wild night out.”
They are constantly belittled by TV shows that call them chavs and show them as stupid and dysfunctional which almost subliminally deprives them of self worth and they seek it in drink and drugs. There is a trend in drinking amongst people as young as 10 -15. We see them all over the country in subways, on recreation grounds, schoolchildren drinking cans that they have been sold by shopkeepers.
Our young people do not understand their loss of identity, the loss of the sense of who they are and loss of self-worth. What are the consequences? The degradation shows in their social lives when they try to escape from themselves.
A 20 year-old young woman told me how she and her cousin go on. “We were so drunk,” she said beaming, “...we couldn’t stand.” They could not remember how they got home. I asked if they like getting drunk. “It’s social” one replied; the other, ”It’s good fun.” “It is acceptable now like sex and dress.”
Some politicians claim stopping “Happy Hours” would stop drunkenness but there are ways of getting drunk quickly and cheaply like “drinking glasses of water while drinking alcohol because it reacts in your blood and you get drunk quicker.” There is also a trick of gulping air down while you drink. I asked who originates these tricks. “Probably, the breweries”, she replied.
They have been educated to see themselves as equal to men but in practice women’s vital organs are not as strong as men’s and they have a greater chance of liver and kidney damage as well as permanent brain damage.
Children are selfish, but become civilized as they grow older and take responsibility for the world around them. This is becoming adult. But the new culture prevents them from growing up and keeps them immature which is causing so much uncivilised behaviour. Bar owners and the drinks companies play on the weaker part of people’s nature rather like a sales scam would play on, say, someone’s greed. It is preying on the young’s need for fun and adventure with unhealthy adventures.
Young people drink drinks that have pretty colours and fruity flavours and seem like soft drinks but are about 6% alcohol, or pretty, pleasant tasting cocktails. At the same time in a “cool bar” the hypnotic music pounds away disorientating them. There are often TV screens all around showing sport, pop acts or models on catwalks. One bar had a couple of bouncy castles upon which customers bounced gleefully, mindless that outside their bubbles of pleasure there is a dangerous, hostile world. Recent bomb attacks were outside London nightclubs.
Some say it is their own fault but a cool bar is unreal and like being in a dream so people lose sense of the real world outside that they will re-enter at closing time, and drink too much. There is the use of the hallucinatory effects of drugs in adverts. I saw an advert for vodka shots, which was a square of undulating shades of blue light. You do not see these colours by drinking vodka, gulps of air or not. You see this by taking ecstasy.
On a normal evening in every town and city you see young women collapse onto the pavement and often being attended by paramedics and stretchered away comatose or with cracked heads. Is this all our young women are worth? They walk up to cars waiting at traffic lights and ask for lifts and often just open the door and get in. You see them staggering around the streets at 2 to 4 am lobbing their boobs out to stop passing cars for lifts many get raped but do not remember properly.
On internet “Social Networking” sites young women present themselves as tarts and most say they “like getting drunk.” Their clothes and poses show them as anybody’s meat. They are imitating people on TV talent shows and think they will be spotted, and slappers who have made fortunes showing their silicon boobs. The main article in the Mirror of Friday the 14th of August was about Katie Price (Jordan)!
Our elites promote these as role models for our young people, but only promote honourable and worthy people as role models for ethnic minorities. If you walk around an inner city school or community centre the walls are festooned with heroes from the histories of ethnic groups like Gandhi, Marcus Garvey or Harriet Tubman.
Some bars are used for pills and others for cocaine and most door staff are pumped up on steroids. The drug goes with the music. The coke-heads are hyper and constantly making a sort of chewing motion. The staff of these bars put Vaseline on lavatory cisterns to try to stop customers doing lines of coke on them but the owners are usually on it themselves and door staff are often dealers.
Another mode of destruction is Clubbing on Ecstasy. It is a special occasion like going to church on Sundays. A common feature of ecstasy clubbers is a need to escape from themselves which in a healthier age would have led to a mystic journey in solitude as eremites counting their beads and communing with God. In our degraded times they are prey for the hard-headed business people who use any fashion to make money out of people.
A young woman explained to me: “It heightens the music, makes it more epic.” In common with others it helps them to dance longer, but the important effect is that “It fills you full of love towards those around you, if a girl is being sick in the toilets you pull her hair back for her. I have only seen two fights in eight years of clubbing.” She compared this with aggressive pubs when people are drunk and violent fights ensue. It is a response to the betrayal of the needs of our young people by Christian leaders and has fuelled artificial communities and the illusion of transcendence through drugs.
Popular culture does not have to be destructive: we must revive local fairs and festivals and renew Folk music traditions by expressing contemporary meanings through traditional forms. Bob Dylan did this - “A Hard Rain’s-A gonna fall” is based in the Border Ballad Lord Randall. (1) His anthem for the new age in 1965 “The Times They Are - Changing” used traditional balladic language and was carried by the tune of “Irish Rover” but expressed contemporary matter.
The idea is that the culture grows from the community and is not imposed on the community or by manipulating people to conform to an artificial culture. Contemporary examples are Joanna Newsome(2) in America and duo Show of Hands in England. (3)
These are not rationalist formulae for I leave that to ideologues, but suggestions for creative people to develop in practice. There are countless traditional pubs that need customers now the Government’s totalitarian anti-smoking laws have destroyed their trade that would rent out rooms for performances. New cultural movements grow from joy generated by people with common bonds getting together to produce and enjoy music. They will be able to forge emotional bonds with their culture and begin renewing popular music traditions naturally.
(1) A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall lyrics
Lord Randall lyrics
(2) Joanna Newsom
(3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5h4PFBuzv
The Hatred Behind a Mask of Tolerance
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 narrowminded 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, the BNP must set up committees to liaise with our Jewish communities for mutual defence against this imported Jihad.
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 narrowminded 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, the BNP must set up committees to liaise with our Jewish communities for mutual defence against this imported Jihad.
Warnings From the Lion
Churchill understood the threat to the West.
http://www.amren.com/ar/2007/01/index.html
by David Hamilton
Sir Winston Churchill is the only major British politician who had the courage to try to stop open-door immigration. He had strong views about race and was a keen supporter of eugenics. Late in his career, as post-war prime minister from 1951 to 1955, he might have succeeded in barring the door had it not been for failing health. Most biographers and historians now downplay his racial views and thereby give a false picture of the great man.
Churchill was different from academics and mushy liberals who theorize about multi-racial utopia. He was a brave and practical man who did not go to university but to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, and later won a commission in the Fourth Hussars. As a young man he was with Lord Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, when the British avenged the 1885 murder in Khartoum of General Charles “Chinese” Gordon. He was a war correspondent during the Boer War, was captured, held prisoner and escaped. As Home secretary in 1911, he personally took charge of the Siege of Sidney Street, when a small gang of Latvian anarchists holed up at 100 Sidney Street in Stepney, and fired on police. He called in the Scots Guards, and when a fire broke out at 100 Sidney Street, he made the decision to let the anarchists burn rather than have the fire brigade douse the flames. During the First World War, he commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers as a Colonel.
Churchill was not taken in by liberal orthodoxy. He knew that different races compete for power and territory, and he had seen sub-Saharan slavery first-hand. In 1899, he wrote a book about Kitchener’s Sudan campaign called The River War, in which he expressed views that in today’s Britain would have him up on charges of inciting racial hatred:
“The qualities of mongrels are rarely admirable, and the mixture of the Arab and Negro types has produced a debased and cruel breed, more shocking because they are more intelligent than primitive savages. The stronger race soon began to prey upon the simple [black] aboriginals … To the great slave-market at Jeddah a continual stream of Negro captives has flowed for hundreds of years. The invention of gunpowder and the adoption by the Arabs of firearms facilitated the traffic by placing the ignorant Negroes at a further disadvantage. Thus the situation in the Sudan for several centuries may be summed up as follows: The dominant race of Arab invaders was unceasingly spreading its blood, religion, customs, and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time it harried and enslaved them.”
As for Islam, in the first edition of the book he wrote passages well worth pondering today:
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities — but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.”
Churchill was an enthusiastic eugenicist, and was a sponsoring vice president — as were the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Bishop of Ripon — of the first International Eugenics Conference, which took place in London in 1912. Arthur Balfour delivered the opening address with Leonard Darwin — Charles Darwin’s son — presiding.
Churchill’s papers from this period show that he worried that “moral degenerates” and people of low intelligence were outbreeding the educated classes. He proposed that “mental defectives” be incarcerated and that the “feeble-minded” be forcibly sterilized. As Home Secretary, Churchill reportedly told his government colleagues that:
“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded classes, coupled with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a race danger. I feel the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.”
Churchill was deeply suspicious of intellectuals and their utopian theories. In his St. George’s Day address of 1933, he said:
“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded classes … constitutes a race danger.”
“The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country who, if they add something to the culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large portion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible utopias?”
Many of Churchill’s views have gone out of fashion. He was convinced, for example, of Britain’s right to rule the lesser breeds. In a 1931 address at the Royal Albert Hall he said, “We gave India a civilization, far above anything they could possibly have achieved themselves, or could possibly maintain.” In his tribute to the Royal Marines in 1936, he explained that Britain was a gift passed from one generation to the next: “Those who do not think of the future are unworthy of their ancestors.”
Churchill went on to became the embodiment of the struggle against Nazism. He would never have been an appeaser. In October 1930, before Hitler had even taken power, he expressed his views of Nazis: “If a dog makes a dash for my trousers, I shoot him down before he can bite.” The fight against Germany did not change his racial views. During the war, a black official at the Colonial Office had to stop eating at a London club when American officers took it over and enforced segregation. When Churchill heard of this, he replied, “That’s alright. Tell him to take a banjo; they will think he is one of the band.”
Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta
At Yalta with Roosevelt and Stalin.
When he resumed power after the war, he opposed non-white immigration, but he was 76 years old. His instincts were sound but he no longer had the energy of a young man. Records of a cabinet discussion on Nov. 25, 1952 show that he asked if “the Post Office was employing large numbers of coloured workers. If so, there was some risk that difficult social problems would be created.” He then “raised the whole issue … of whether coloured subjects of the Commonwealth and Empire should be admitted to the country from now on.”
“We gave India a civilization, far above anything they could possibly have achieved themselves, or could possibly maintain.”
In 1953 Churchill suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on the left side. He went into decline and was not capable of decisive action, but his cabinet continued to debate immigration. In March 1954, his Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, told the cabinet “that large numbers of coloured people are living on National Assistance” and that “coloured landlords by their conduct are making life difficult for white people living in the same building or area … [T]he result is that white people leave and the accommodation is then converted to furnished lettings for coloured people, with serious overcrowding and exploitation.” In October 1954, Churchill warned Maxwell-Fyfe, “that the problems arising from the immigration of coloured people required urgent and serious consideration.” Maxwell-Fyfe replied that they could not be kept out under then-current law.
Britain allowed all Commonwealth citizens automatic entry but Maxwell Fyfe “did not believe that the problem had yet assumed sufficient proportions to justify legislation, which … would antagonize liberal opinion.” Churchill foresaw, however, that “the rapid improvement in communications was likely to lead to the continuing increase in the number of coloured people coming to this country, and their presence here would sooner or later come to be resented by large sections of the British people.” He, too, was not sure, however, that “the problem had assumed sufficient proportions to enable the Government to take adequate counter-measures.”
Faces from the Empire Windrush, which arrived in 1948
with the first load of Commonwealth immigrants.
Churchill once explained to Governor of Jamaica Hugh Foot why he opposed non-white immigration: “It would be a Magpie society: that would never do.” Ian Gilmour, then owner and editor of the Spectator, relates that just before he stood down because of his health in April 1955, Churchill told him “It [immigration] is the most important subject facing this country, but I can not get any of my ministers to take any notice.”
In fact, many of his advisers were appeasers, though this time it was Indians and Pakistanis they wanted to placate. The Commonwealth Relations Office feared that if Britain kept out non-whites “there might well be a chance of the governments of India and Pakistan introducing retaliatory restrictions against the entry or residence of members of the British business community.” Commonwealth Secretary Earl Home also warned of possible retaliation.
In Eminent Churchillians, Andrew Roberts quotes people who worked closely with Churchill, and who probably had the sentiments typical of the period. One of Mr. Churchill’s private secretaries remembered that “at that time it seemed a very good idea to get [coloured] bus conductors and stuff.” A junior minister complained that “it was becoming hard to find somebody to carry your bags at the station.” As one minister put it later, “we were just stalling and hoping for the best.” After Churchill resigned, the internationalist Anthony Eden took over, and any hope of serious immigration control was lost.
In today’s climate what Churchill really thought is considered so unpalatable that at least one modern biographer chose deliberately to censor him. As Gretchen Rubin wrote in her 2003 book, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill:
“To shield his reputation, this account has downplayed Churchill’s deplorable attitudes toward race. Churchill used opprobrious terms like blackamoor, chink, wop, and baboo and distinguished between the white race and others. [emphasis in the original] For example, he wrote that at a September 1944 conference, he was “glad to record” that “the British Empire … was still keeping its position, with a total population, including the Dominions and Colonies, of only seventy million white people.” He never outgrew his views. His doctor recalled that in 1955, Churchill asked whether “blacks got measles … When he was told that there was a very high mortality among negroes from measles, he growled, ‘Well, there are plenty left. They’ve a high rate of production.’”
Today’s Tories are backing away from Churchill in other ways, claiming that his concept of the welfare state is “out of date.” Tory leader David Cameron recently asked an advisor, Greg Clark, to rethink “conservative” policy on poverty, and this was his conclusion: “The traditional Conservative vision of welfare as a safety net encompasses another outdated Tory nostrum — that poverty is absolute, not relative. Churchill’s safety net is at the bottom: holding people at subsistence level, just above the abyss of hunger and homelessness.” What does this mean? Seaside vacations and cell phones for the poor?
Good sense may run in the Churchill family. Winston’s grandson, also named Winston, was a Conservative member of Parliament from 1970 to 1997. In 1993 he got in trouble for saying that the British way of life was threatened by a “relentless flow of immigrants” from the Indian subcontinent. Then-Prime Minister John Major piled on in the ensuing criticism, but Mr. Churchill was unrepentant, claiming that despite widespread public condemnation, many colleagues, including government ministers, privately expressed their agreement. He left politics when the seat he held was abolished.
It is tempting to imagine what Britain would be like if the grandfather had maintained his vigor and combativeness through the crucial period during which immigration policy was set. Perhaps his force of personality could have pushed through sensible policies. At any rate, it is unlikely he would ever have had to face shouts of “Fascist!” or “Nazi!” no matter how strongly he defended Britain’s right to a European heritage and destiny. AR
Mr. Hamilton is a British free-lance writer
http://www.amren.com/ar/2007/01/index.html
by David Hamilton
Sir Winston Churchill is the only major British politician who had the courage to try to stop open-door immigration. He had strong views about race and was a keen supporter of eugenics. Late in his career, as post-war prime minister from 1951 to 1955, he might have succeeded in barring the door had it not been for failing health. Most biographers and historians now downplay his racial views and thereby give a false picture of the great man.
Churchill was different from academics and mushy liberals who theorize about multi-racial utopia. He was a brave and practical man who did not go to university but to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, and later won a commission in the Fourth Hussars. As a young man he was with Lord Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, when the British avenged the 1885 murder in Khartoum of General Charles “Chinese” Gordon. He was a war correspondent during the Boer War, was captured, held prisoner and escaped. As Home secretary in 1911, he personally took charge of the Siege of Sidney Street, when a small gang of Latvian anarchists holed up at 100 Sidney Street in Stepney, and fired on police. He called in the Scots Guards, and when a fire broke out at 100 Sidney Street, he made the decision to let the anarchists burn rather than have the fire brigade douse the flames. During the First World War, he commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers as a Colonel.
Churchill was not taken in by liberal orthodoxy. He knew that different races compete for power and territory, and he had seen sub-Saharan slavery first-hand. In 1899, he wrote a book about Kitchener’s Sudan campaign called The River War, in which he expressed views that in today’s Britain would have him up on charges of inciting racial hatred:
“The qualities of mongrels are rarely admirable, and the mixture of the Arab and Negro types has produced a debased and cruel breed, more shocking because they are more intelligent than primitive savages. The stronger race soon began to prey upon the simple [black] aboriginals … To the great slave-market at Jeddah a continual stream of Negro captives has flowed for hundreds of years. The invention of gunpowder and the adoption by the Arabs of firearms facilitated the traffic by placing the ignorant Negroes at a further disadvantage. Thus the situation in the Sudan for several centuries may be summed up as follows: The dominant race of Arab invaders was unceasingly spreading its blood, religion, customs, and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time it harried and enslaved them.”
As for Islam, in the first edition of the book he wrote passages well worth pondering today:
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities — but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.”
Churchill was an enthusiastic eugenicist, and was a sponsoring vice president — as were the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Bishop of Ripon — of the first International Eugenics Conference, which took place in London in 1912. Arthur Balfour delivered the opening address with Leonard Darwin — Charles Darwin’s son — presiding.
Churchill’s papers from this period show that he worried that “moral degenerates” and people of low intelligence were outbreeding the educated classes. He proposed that “mental defectives” be incarcerated and that the “feeble-minded” be forcibly sterilized. As Home Secretary, Churchill reportedly told his government colleagues that:
“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded classes, coupled with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a race danger. I feel the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.”
Churchill was deeply suspicious of intellectuals and their utopian theories. In his St. George’s Day address of 1933, he said:
“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded classes … constitutes a race danger.”
“The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country who, if they add something to the culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large portion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible utopias?”
Many of Churchill’s views have gone out of fashion. He was convinced, for example, of Britain’s right to rule the lesser breeds. In a 1931 address at the Royal Albert Hall he said, “We gave India a civilization, far above anything they could possibly have achieved themselves, or could possibly maintain.” In his tribute to the Royal Marines in 1936, he explained that Britain was a gift passed from one generation to the next: “Those who do not think of the future are unworthy of their ancestors.”
Churchill went on to became the embodiment of the struggle against Nazism. He would never have been an appeaser. In October 1930, before Hitler had even taken power, he expressed his views of Nazis: “If a dog makes a dash for my trousers, I shoot him down before he can bite.” The fight against Germany did not change his racial views. During the war, a black official at the Colonial Office had to stop eating at a London club when American officers took it over and enforced segregation. When Churchill heard of this, he replied, “That’s alright. Tell him to take a banjo; they will think he is one of the band.”
Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta
At Yalta with Roosevelt and Stalin.
When he resumed power after the war, he opposed non-white immigration, but he was 76 years old. His instincts were sound but he no longer had the energy of a young man. Records of a cabinet discussion on Nov. 25, 1952 show that he asked if “the Post Office was employing large numbers of coloured workers. If so, there was some risk that difficult social problems would be created.” He then “raised the whole issue … of whether coloured subjects of the Commonwealth and Empire should be admitted to the country from now on.”
“We gave India a civilization, far above anything they could possibly have achieved themselves, or could possibly maintain.”
In 1953 Churchill suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on the left side. He went into decline and was not capable of decisive action, but his cabinet continued to debate immigration. In March 1954, his Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, told the cabinet “that large numbers of coloured people are living on National Assistance” and that “coloured landlords by their conduct are making life difficult for white people living in the same building or area … [T]he result is that white people leave and the accommodation is then converted to furnished lettings for coloured people, with serious overcrowding and exploitation.” In October 1954, Churchill warned Maxwell-Fyfe, “that the problems arising from the immigration of coloured people required urgent and serious consideration.” Maxwell-Fyfe replied that they could not be kept out under then-current law.
Britain allowed all Commonwealth citizens automatic entry but Maxwell Fyfe “did not believe that the problem had yet assumed sufficient proportions to justify legislation, which … would antagonize liberal opinion.” Churchill foresaw, however, that “the rapid improvement in communications was likely to lead to the continuing increase in the number of coloured people coming to this country, and their presence here would sooner or later come to be resented by large sections of the British people.” He, too, was not sure, however, that “the problem had assumed sufficient proportions to enable the Government to take adequate counter-measures.”
Faces from the Empire Windrush, which arrived in 1948
with the first load of Commonwealth immigrants.
Churchill once explained to Governor of Jamaica Hugh Foot why he opposed non-white immigration: “It would be a Magpie society: that would never do.” Ian Gilmour, then owner and editor of the Spectator, relates that just before he stood down because of his health in April 1955, Churchill told him “It [immigration] is the most important subject facing this country, but I can not get any of my ministers to take any notice.”
In fact, many of his advisers were appeasers, though this time it was Indians and Pakistanis they wanted to placate. The Commonwealth Relations Office feared that if Britain kept out non-whites “there might well be a chance of the governments of India and Pakistan introducing retaliatory restrictions against the entry or residence of members of the British business community.” Commonwealth Secretary Earl Home also warned of possible retaliation.
In Eminent Churchillians, Andrew Roberts quotes people who worked closely with Churchill, and who probably had the sentiments typical of the period. One of Mr. Churchill’s private secretaries remembered that “at that time it seemed a very good idea to get [coloured] bus conductors and stuff.” A junior minister complained that “it was becoming hard to find somebody to carry your bags at the station.” As one minister put it later, “we were just stalling and hoping for the best.” After Churchill resigned, the internationalist Anthony Eden took over, and any hope of serious immigration control was lost.
In today’s climate what Churchill really thought is considered so unpalatable that at least one modern biographer chose deliberately to censor him. As Gretchen Rubin wrote in her 2003 book, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill:
“To shield his reputation, this account has downplayed Churchill’s deplorable attitudes toward race. Churchill used opprobrious terms like blackamoor, chink, wop, and baboo and distinguished between the white race and others. [emphasis in the original] For example, he wrote that at a September 1944 conference, he was “glad to record” that “the British Empire … was still keeping its position, with a total population, including the Dominions and Colonies, of only seventy million white people.” He never outgrew his views. His doctor recalled that in 1955, Churchill asked whether “blacks got measles … When he was told that there was a very high mortality among negroes from measles, he growled, ‘Well, there are plenty left. They’ve a high rate of production.’”
Today’s Tories are backing away from Churchill in other ways, claiming that his concept of the welfare state is “out of date.” Tory leader David Cameron recently asked an advisor, Greg Clark, to rethink “conservative” policy on poverty, and this was his conclusion: “The traditional Conservative vision of welfare as a safety net encompasses another outdated Tory nostrum — that poverty is absolute, not relative. Churchill’s safety net is at the bottom: holding people at subsistence level, just above the abyss of hunger and homelessness.” What does this mean? Seaside vacations and cell phones for the poor?
Good sense may run in the Churchill family. Winston’s grandson, also named Winston, was a Conservative member of Parliament from 1970 to 1997. In 1993 he got in trouble for saying that the British way of life was threatened by a “relentless flow of immigrants” from the Indian subcontinent. Then-Prime Minister John Major piled on in the ensuing criticism, but Mr. Churchill was unrepentant, claiming that despite widespread public condemnation, many colleagues, including government ministers, privately expressed their agreement. He left politics when the seat he held was abolished.
It is tempting to imagine what Britain would be like if the grandfather had maintained his vigor and combativeness through the crucial period during which immigration policy was set. Perhaps his force of personality could have pushed through sensible policies. At any rate, it is unlikely he would ever have had to face shouts of “Fascist!” or “Nazi!” no matter how strongly he defended Britain’s right to a European heritage and destiny. AR
Mr. Hamilton is a British free-lance writer
English Music Festival
Interview – David Hamilton talks to Em Marshall, organiser of The English Music Festival
September 4th, 2009 | Author: admin
http://steadfastonline.org.uk/journal/?p=81
www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk
When we are being denied the celebration of our own culture, it takes courage to break ranks and offer people the opportunity to hear our great composers in a beautiful, traditional setting and Em Marshall has that. George Orwell observed that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.” Since then the New Left came to dominance and began a “critique” of our cultural traditions. Em, founder and director of the The English Music Festival1, is not allowing her beloved music to be sniggered at. She is staging the second Festival from the 23rd to 27th of May 2008: “We are bringing an opportunity for people to hear works they will not hear anywhere else,” she told me. It is her vision and she had always wanted to do it. She has loved English Classical music since the age of three when her father used to sing Vaughan Williams’ Linden Lee to her. More people enjoy this music than realised and often she is approached about a work not heard live before – people never had the opportunity. Well, they have now. Gustav Holst’s Walt Whitman had never been performed at a professional concert, only at amateur productions, before the first English Music Festival staged it. Some have objected that the Festival should be held in London but aside from higher costs, the rural setting of Dorchester, Oxfordshire is in keeping with the nature of pastoral music.
The Festival is a celebration of English Classical music from medieval to contemporary. The main evening concerts will be at the medieval Abbey at Dorchester-on-Thames, several at Radley College Chapel, and All Saints Church, Sutton Courtenay. There will also be a concert at the Chapel of Keble College, Oxford University. Over the five days there will be fourteen concerts and recitals that give the audience the almost mystical experience of listening to performances of exquisite English music from the arc of the centuries, yet the focus is on the twentieth century and many overlooked pieces will be performed. It is reviving an important part of our culture.
Which pieces are to be in the Programme?
The series opens with a major concert by the BBC Concert Orchestra of works including Holbroke’s Birds of Rhiannon, Rawsthorne’s Practical Cats and Mackenzie’s Benedictus and featuring music by Parry and Bantock. They will also bring many unjustly neglected pieces back to life. Other artists booked to appear include the Carducci Quartet, performing Vaughan Williams and Moeran String Quartets; Vox Musica, the Amaretti Orchestra, including Finz’s Clarinet Concerto, Ireland and Elgar; Keble College Choir performing Sullivan’s Sacred Music; and Hilary Davan Wetton with the Milton Keynes City Orchestra and City of London Chorus playing Holst and Howells. There will be Elgar’s Banner of St.George and Dyson’s Agincourt, a concert of organ music, a concert of Arne and Linley. Early Music Solo Song and, for a lighter period, Mayerl with David Owen Norris give a broad look at the variety of our national musical inheritance. The conclusion is to be a “Grand Finale.” Philip Lane will be a composer featured, along with David Owen Norris, Paul Carr, and maybe Ron Corp and Matthew Curtis.
If it’s so good, why is it neglected?
In contrast to Orwell’s sniggerers, Yehudi Menhuin wrote to the Times in 1995, “English composers will not slavishly follow some arbitrary theory or construction, whether political or musical. They have kept their Englishness intact, whilst the mercantilistic world has gone all-American.”
If it is so good, why is it neglected? Like other aspects of English culture it is the victim of a negative ideology that devalues it with pejorative labels like “eltist” or “narrow” but, as we shall see, these labels do not fit reality. English music is not imitation but innovative and has developed significantly from the early twentieth century but is still rooted in the English tradition and in what Em calls our “sound-world” – it is tuneful, melodic, tonal, pleasant to listen to and is recognisably English. “John Foulds,” Em wrote in a review, “is one of very many English composers who, despite being brilliant and highly regarded during his lifetime, had fallen into neglect and is only now being re-discovered. He was fascinated by both Indian and Celtic ideas, sounds and thoughts, and by “alternative worlds.” His son, in the introductory notes to a disc, describes his father as “clairaudient.” Many sounds that Foulds created have an “other-worldly” air.
English Classical Music is popular but hidden by a cloud of prejudice and ignorance from its rightful audience by being characterised as “elitist” or “quaint” when in fact it has the tonal qualities that everyone enjoyed before modernism set out to destroy them. It is a living but obscured tradition, and often requested on Classic FM, whose “The Hall of Fame”, is the world’s biggest annual survey of classical music tastes; The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams is the nation’s favourite English work. It is one of the pieces which listeners ask to hear most and epitomises the English pastoral tradition.
The 2005 Proms had a number of all-English programmes. All but one sold-out, whereas other non-English music programmes did not. The Gloucester 3 Choirs Festival in 2001 had a special Festival of only English music and sold out swiftly. The BBC Music Magazine has a Top 20 Best sellers list and there are some really interesting English music discs there, often by obscure composers. Yet despite this noble heritage, much of this glorious music is overlooked. “English Music” festivals tend to either fail at the outset for lack of funds or become internationalised. The Cheltenham Festival was founded as “The Cheltenham Festival of British Music”, but went “international” and no longer features music not played elsewhere.
The first English Music festival was also in Dorchester, and devoted to the “diversity, innovation and brilliance” of composers usually neglected in concert. Entitled Heirs and Rebels it opened with a fanfare: Conductor David Lloyd-Jones produced a thrilling rendition of Holst’s Walt Whitman Overture and changed mood with Vaughan Williams’ Norfolk Rhapsody No.1(1906), which highlights solo clarinets and violas. This was followed by Frank Bridges’ Oration which is a single-movement concerto against the futility of war. It is impassioned and captures the anguish and despair in its vivid images of suffering and death. Then followed Holst’s Invocation and Irish Symphony by Sullivan who had Irish ancestry but musical roots in the English tradition. He was not restricted to comic opera! It united the Viola Sonata of Algernon Ashton, a rhapsody by Elgar’s champion William Reed, and a suite by Benjamin Dale, Lord Berners’ Luna Park, and featured Jeremy Irons narrating Vaughan Williams’s An Oxford Elegy!
Does the festival commission works?
Without renewal culture dies and the Festival renews by commissioning works. An oratorio Prayerbook, written and performed specially for the first Festival by David Owen Norris was acclaimed by the audience. The clarinet and viola heralding Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsody No 1 was a beautiful performance. A bracing work is Oration by Britten’s mentor, Frank Bridge. The haunting cello concerto is a passionate cry against the barbarity of the Great War and expresses the miseries of the Front. Julian Lloyd Webber was sympathetic to the solo line, as the cello strives to extricate a poignant lyricism from the tensions of the orchestral background. He returned for Holst’s seldom performed Invocation (1911).
Em feels, “There is something about the landscape including the poetry and language, the syntax and grammar transmits into the way the music is phrased. It is English: the way we construct our sentences dictates the way we construct our music. It is the way composers compose their music. The construct of our thoughts dictates the way we construct our music. So much is laying neglected. It is usual to get a series of say Mahler, Brahms but rarely English Classical composers. Frederick Cliffe’s First Symphony (1889), was only revived after 83 years’ neglect and was a revelation: a large-scale, distinctive, late Victorian symphony of virile invention and command of the orchestra, varied mix of contemporary influences, and its drama, lyricism and sheer impact.”
The Daily Telegraph of 22 April 1889, published a review: “It may be doubted whether musical history can show on any of its pages the record of such an Opus. The symphony is a masterpiece, and the composer, one might think, feels terrified at his own success. For our own part, noting the imaginative power displayed in the work, the easy command of all resources, the beauty and freshness of the themes, and their brilliant development, we feel inclined to ask a question, propounded concerning another phenomenon “Whence has this man these things?” Mr Cliffe has by one effort passed from obscurity to fame, and must be regarded as a bright and shining star on the horizon of our English art.”‘
Over a century later The Daily Telegraph of 26 April 2004 had a feature on John Foulds as the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra released their recording of Dynamic Tryptich. Conductor Sakari Oramo explained, Foulds composed “some of the most original music ever conceived”. Malcolm MacDonald, editor of music magazine Tempo, believes: “There’s no question he was a genius and one of the most significant English composers of the last century. MacDonald, found some scores in the British Library: “I got out a dozen pieces, and the first thing I opened was the Dynamic Triptych. I was blown away by it. This was music unlike any British composer of the time. I was amazed it was lying around, and no one was playing it. “Foulds’s daughter “ took me to the garage, where there were two coffin-sized boxes full of sketches and manuscripts she’s been left by her mother.” Unfortunately, many of the manuscripts were damaged by rats and ants. In his book Music Today Foulds, explained how, by strict diet and meditation, he had developed his clairvoyant and clairaudient abilities. Much of his music, he claimed, was dictated to him by spirits.”
In the Baroque period we produced composers of immense skill like Purcell, Byrd, Arne, Tallis and Blow. The period between Arne and Parry has been dismissed as a “musical Ice-Age” though we had Stainer, Wesley, Potter, Sterndale Bennett, Crotch, who were on a par with foreign contemporaries, but not progressive enough for international attention. In 1769 Englishman Philip Hayes, who built Oxford’s beautiful Holywell Music Room, composed the world’s first piano concerto! Some great composers died young: Edward Bache, composer of exquisite chamber works, died at 25, and Thomas Linley, died aged 22 in a boating accident in 1777, yet produced wonderful anthems, odes and oratorio, about one of which was written “Neither Purcell nor Mozart ever gave stronger proof of original genius than can be traced in this charming ode”.
Even during the ravages of Modernism in the twentieth century there was a renaissance of music in England of works of innovation, power, drama and beauty. Stanford and Parry were at the fount and in a Brahmsian style created English music equal to Brahms himself; Elgar continued the creation of an English style through merging Brahms and Wagner. Richard Strauss described Elgar as “the first Progressivist in English Music”, and Hans Richter told his orchestra of Elgar’s First, “Gentleman, now let us rehearse the greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest modern composer”! Others found inspiration abroad and incorporated the sounds into something uniquely “English”; Delius turned to the continent and Negro spirituals to develop a unique sound with lush, rich harmonies. Vaughan Williams returned to English roots in folk and Tudor to revive an English music, rebelling against the ubiquitous Teutonic schools. English solo song grew from parlour song and folk roots into a beautiful, high-art form; at the other end of the scale, England had answers to Wagner in the music of Bantock and Holbrooke, “the Cockney Wagner”, composers of long, deeply romantic, intense music – to rival Wagner’s Ring, and epic orchestral works. Writing about Holbrooke’s The Raven, Irish composer Hamilton Harty said “there is beautiful and impressive music in that work, and, as I told the orchestra, it is so infinitely superior to the foreign muck with which we are deluged nowadays!” Other composers of this period to listen to include Bridge, Bowen, Moeran, Finzi, Sainton, Bainton, Mackenzie, Gibbs, Berners, Dyson, Bax, Bliss, Ireland, Lambert, Boughton, Coles, Coleridge Taylor, Dunhill, Foulds, Dale, Goossens, William Lloyd Webber, MacCunn, Armstrong, Harty, Friskin, McEwen, Phillips, Scott, Rawsthorne, Rubbra, Hadley and Howells. These, and many more, are known by a small corpus of recorded works which show great individuality, inspiration, and visionary orchestral confidence.
What makes the English sound-world?
England is a country whose music and literature are drawn from the landscape, from rolling hills to the desolation of mud flats and moors. Seascapes too: an island nation, we are drawn to the wildness and openess of the sea. We have not the sublimity of the Alps nor the majestic sweeps of the Tabernas desert, the spectacular fjords of Norway nor the thick, dense forests of Germany; but, for centuries, artists, poets and composers have been inspired by the picturesque hues and shades in our “blue remembered hills”, the nuances of light-beams in enchanting woods, the changes of seasons, inconstant weather, the dramatic sweeps of the lakes and dales that inspired Wordsworth.
Yehudi Menhuin, wrote: “I am drawn to English music because I love the way it reflects the climate and the vegetation which know no sharp edges, no definitive demarcation, where different hues of green melt into each other and where the line between sea and land is always joined and changing, sometimes gradually, sometime dramatically. The music … is a very human music, not given to shattering utterances, to pronouncements of right or wrong, not to abstract intellectual processes, to human emotion in the abstract, but to a single man’s experience of today as related to a particular place…”
Our neglected heritage: In 1927, Holst wrote incidental music to a mystery play The Coming of Christ which has never been recorded. As I mentioned, Cliffe’s first symphony, an acclaimed masterpiece, has not had a professional public performance for over 90 years. His second symphony has not been published; none of the symphonies by Walford Davies, Coleridge Taylor and Somervell are available, nor is Bowen’s first symphony which was so popular that The Times devoted a whole column to analysing it; Delius’ opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, considered by many the first great modern English opera, has not been performed at either the Royal Opera House or English National Opera for over half a century.
Contemporary artists have similar repertoires and only a small number of works are considered “acceptable” as these things go in fashions. Concert mangers are not prepared to take risks so programme what they know or popular classics for government funding. A programme of Brahms, Tchaikovsky or Verdi is familiar and safe but to present say, Moeran, Gibbs and Farrar a risk. English music is not fashionable. It is not politically correct and managers hesitate to promote anything English, as if inimicable to other cultures. In an era of “diversity” and “multi culturalism” English culture is shunned. It is not the done thing to seem nationalistic by celebrating our traditions: the ending of Elgar’s Caractacus is stigmatised because it points forward to a great British Empire! We are supposed to be ashamed of our culture and ignore it or apologise. Composers of the early twentieth century are dismissed as the “English pastoral composers,” lesser musicians whose works are put below the Germanic, Russian, or Scandinavian schools. But the pastoral tradition has always inspired composers and poets. The term ‘pastoral’ is broad and its meaning of ‘rural’ and ‘innocence’, was used by Classical and Christian artists with its associations of Eden, Arcadia or a ‘Golden Age’, and nostalgia for beauty and sublimity lost through the Fall or the degeneration of Man. Pastoral goes to the roots of our culture: In the ninth century BC, Hesiod contemplated the ages of mankind from a Golden Age to his own ‘Iron Age’. Six centuries later, the pastoral was a literary form in the Idylls of Theocritus, a tradition Virgil built upon in his Eclogues two centuries later. In Christianity the Garden of Eden provided an equivalent to the Arcadia of Classical poets, and the concept of the Fall established the nostalgic pastoral inclination as a natural human impulse. For the Romantic poets, witnessing the beginning of the industrial revolution, the city was a consequence of the Fall and the contrast with nature and a new interest in childhood enabled them to draw a parallel between humankind’s degeneration or Fall from Eden and a child’s loss of innocence as he enters adulthood.
It is often based in a particular location or built from folk song-like melodies – Williams’ three Norfolk Rhapsodies (1905-07), and In the Fen Country (1904); Holst’s A Somerset Rhapsody (1906-7); Butterworth’s Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad (1912), his Two English Idylls (1911) and The Banks of Green Willow (1913); and Finzi’s A Severn Rhapsody (1923). The sleeve notes to a recording of A Severn Rhapsody read: ‘The music gently evokes the mood of the English countryside and the meandering river’. A pastoral characteristic, reflective of rural ‘simplicity’. These works bespeak a retreat from the care, complexity, or harshness of society. English classical music has its roots in the country; is rooted in our landscape but not necessarily a picturesque one. Gustav Holst was walking in the desolate Dorsetshire country between Wool and Bere Regis in 1926 when visited by inspiration and he started Egdon Heath, also prompted by the opening chapter of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native. The music is stark and austere. As for elitism anyone is welcome to these concerts. Composers like Holst wrote music for brass bands. The Moorside Suite was used in the brass band competition at the Crystal Palace in 1928 which was won by the Black Dyke Mills Band.
There is a distinction between the pastoral “genre” and the pastoral ‘topic’. As a genre, the ‘pastoral’ is a single work or movement ‘that depicts the characters and scenes of rural life or is expressive of its atmosphere’. The term is often applied to miniatures. Pastoral as a ‘topic’ may refer to a section of a large-scale work in which pastoral characteristics are apparent. Pastoral ‘oases’ are usually characterised by introspection or nostalgia, and stand in contrast to their more rhetorical surroundings. Simplicity runs parallel to complexity, constancy with change, an opposition often present in cityscapes. Most works in the English pastoral tradition are not large-scale works but representative of the pastoral genre, though degree of intersection with other forms and genres like the ‘rhapsody’ is characteristic. Some English composers are known as a pastoral ‘school,’ the creative background to both composition and reception, and that their music is so closely bound to landscapes to which they regularly returned. The English pastoral style shares aspects of the pastoral topic of European Classical and Romantic music, but is particularly associated with the musical language of folk song. It is for this reason that Elgar, Parry and Stanford had individual voices, yet developed their style from the German musical idiom but are often excluded from the pastoral canon, though their importance to the English Musical Renaissance is recognised. Contemporaries like John Ireland and Gustav Holst, despite varied influences and often different styles, played an important part in the development of a recognisably English pastoral style.
Three aspects of English pastoralism: setting, language and sensibility
‘Setting’, the specific location in which the composer has chosen to set a piece; ‘language’, the musical idiom, be it derived from English folksong, French impressionism or the German romantic tradition; ‘Sensibility’ is clearly the hardest to pin-down, but within it resides what I have called the pastoral ‘outlook’, or in other words, the mood invoked by the music; what it sets up to desire or reject. Within each category, there seems to be an ideal, in that one can posit a ‘typical’ English pastoral piece of music as one set in the West of England, derived from the musical language of folk song and with a nostalgic, introspective sensibility. However, these categories allow a degree of flexibility in that a piece need not have a specified setting, or, if it does, its idiom need not be folk-song related. Thus Ireland’s piano miniature Amberley Wild Brooks and Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony though disparate, both inhabit the English pastoral tradition.
John Ireland’s music belongs to the school of ‘English Impressionism’. Having been steeped in German classics, especially Brahms, he was strongly influenced in his twenties and thirties by the music of Debussy, Ravel, and the early works of Stravinsky and Bartók.
Contemporaries such as Vaughan Williams and Holst developed a language strongly characteristic of English folk song, Ireland developed a complex harmonic language like French and Russian. He was very influenced by poetry and his settings of such poets as A E Housman, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Masefield and Rupert Brooke are among the best known of his works. He was susceptible to the spirit of place. Chelsea Reach is a depiction in the form of a barcarolle of the great sweep of the Thames as it flows past the Houses of Parliament. He loved the Channel Islands but his main love was Sussex, a landscape of undulating downs and then isolated villages, including Amberley of Amberley Wild Brooks – streams coursing through the fields, inspired most brilliant of his piano pieces.
Many contemporary composers are writing tonal, innovative, exciting and melodic music which spreads from the English tradition, which is difficult to hear in concert yet is too good to be ignored. There are now record labels releasing English Classical and they sell well.1 The BBC music magazine has a classified chart and they usually get in. But concerts are not put on because they are thought not to be popular: but when they are, they are enjoyed. When the BBC put on some English music it sold out. The Gloucester Three Choirs in 2001 put on an all-English programme and it sold out!
Em wants to bring unseen gems to light; feature undiscovered works and even undiscovered composers. She wants to trace lost scores and unknown ones that may be lying in relatives’ attics and tool sheds. There can be the use of old instruments but this depends on the composers being featured. This broadens people’s tastes. It is uplifting and a concert changes the listener for the better and makes them feel part of a cultural tradition, not an alienated, atomised individual.
Some day hence the English Music Festivals may seem as important to our culture now as the Olympiads were to Greek athletic prowess.
This hidden treasure of English music is part of the revival of English culture and is being brought into the light by Em and the English Music festival. The atonal era when music sounded like water gurgling down a sink is over.
Em is the main worker and works about 18 hours a day. It takes a lot of organising. Last year alone she wrote to around 5,000 companies but they think it is not popular enough or too narrow and wanted to make it international. She cannot get funding from the Arts Council. The only political organisation to give support was the Campaign for an English Parliament and their name worried some sponsors who wanted it removed from the programme, for fear of political embarrassment. Several high-profile companies declined as they did not want to be associated with elitist forms of music, preferring pop and rock. She was upset at the way some firms, first pledged their support and then let her down. She would ideally like sponsors with faith in the project. They do have a number of minor sponsors whence they get a third of their income. The other two-thirds come from ticket sales and trust funds, with the final portion from their Friends scheme and donations. The Friends scheme is very important as it brings a regular income to enable her to plan forthcoming events and gives the satisfaction of seeing that they believe in what she is trying to do. The Friends get discounts. In addition to more sponsors and Friends, Em needs helpers for stewarding, fund-raising, and publicity, which includes distributing information and programmes.
____________________________
There are other companies. See for CDs -
www.hyperion-records.co.uk – www.chandos.net
www.naxosaudiobooks.com – www.duttonvocalion.co.uk
September 4th, 2009 | Author: admin
http://steadfastonline.org.uk/journal/?p=81
www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk
When we are being denied the celebration of our own culture, it takes courage to break ranks and offer people the opportunity to hear our great composers in a beautiful, traditional setting and Em Marshall has that. George Orwell observed that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.” Since then the New Left came to dominance and began a “critique” of our cultural traditions. Em, founder and director of the The English Music Festival1, is not allowing her beloved music to be sniggered at. She is staging the second Festival from the 23rd to 27th of May 2008: “We are bringing an opportunity for people to hear works they will not hear anywhere else,” she told me. It is her vision and she had always wanted to do it. She has loved English Classical music since the age of three when her father used to sing Vaughan Williams’ Linden Lee to her. More people enjoy this music than realised and often she is approached about a work not heard live before – people never had the opportunity. Well, they have now. Gustav Holst’s Walt Whitman had never been performed at a professional concert, only at amateur productions, before the first English Music Festival staged it. Some have objected that the Festival should be held in London but aside from higher costs, the rural setting of Dorchester, Oxfordshire is in keeping with the nature of pastoral music.
The Festival is a celebration of English Classical music from medieval to contemporary. The main evening concerts will be at the medieval Abbey at Dorchester-on-Thames, several at Radley College Chapel, and All Saints Church, Sutton Courtenay. There will also be a concert at the Chapel of Keble College, Oxford University. Over the five days there will be fourteen concerts and recitals that give the audience the almost mystical experience of listening to performances of exquisite English music from the arc of the centuries, yet the focus is on the twentieth century and many overlooked pieces will be performed. It is reviving an important part of our culture.
Which pieces are to be in the Programme?
The series opens with a major concert by the BBC Concert Orchestra of works including Holbroke’s Birds of Rhiannon, Rawsthorne’s Practical Cats and Mackenzie’s Benedictus and featuring music by Parry and Bantock. They will also bring many unjustly neglected pieces back to life. Other artists booked to appear include the Carducci Quartet, performing Vaughan Williams and Moeran String Quartets; Vox Musica, the Amaretti Orchestra, including Finz’s Clarinet Concerto, Ireland and Elgar; Keble College Choir performing Sullivan’s Sacred Music; and Hilary Davan Wetton with the Milton Keynes City Orchestra and City of London Chorus playing Holst and Howells. There will be Elgar’s Banner of St.George and Dyson’s Agincourt, a concert of organ music, a concert of Arne and Linley. Early Music Solo Song and, for a lighter period, Mayerl with David Owen Norris give a broad look at the variety of our national musical inheritance. The conclusion is to be a “Grand Finale.” Philip Lane will be a composer featured, along with David Owen Norris, Paul Carr, and maybe Ron Corp and Matthew Curtis.
If it’s so good, why is it neglected?
In contrast to Orwell’s sniggerers, Yehudi Menhuin wrote to the Times in 1995, “English composers will not slavishly follow some arbitrary theory or construction, whether political or musical. They have kept their Englishness intact, whilst the mercantilistic world has gone all-American.”
If it is so good, why is it neglected? Like other aspects of English culture it is the victim of a negative ideology that devalues it with pejorative labels like “eltist” or “narrow” but, as we shall see, these labels do not fit reality. English music is not imitation but innovative and has developed significantly from the early twentieth century but is still rooted in the English tradition and in what Em calls our “sound-world” – it is tuneful, melodic, tonal, pleasant to listen to and is recognisably English. “John Foulds,” Em wrote in a review, “is one of very many English composers who, despite being brilliant and highly regarded during his lifetime, had fallen into neglect and is only now being re-discovered. He was fascinated by both Indian and Celtic ideas, sounds and thoughts, and by “alternative worlds.” His son, in the introductory notes to a disc, describes his father as “clairaudient.” Many sounds that Foulds created have an “other-worldly” air.
English Classical Music is popular but hidden by a cloud of prejudice and ignorance from its rightful audience by being characterised as “elitist” or “quaint” when in fact it has the tonal qualities that everyone enjoyed before modernism set out to destroy them. It is a living but obscured tradition, and often requested on Classic FM, whose “The Hall of Fame”, is the world’s biggest annual survey of classical music tastes; The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams is the nation’s favourite English work. It is one of the pieces which listeners ask to hear most and epitomises the English pastoral tradition.
The 2005 Proms had a number of all-English programmes. All but one sold-out, whereas other non-English music programmes did not. The Gloucester 3 Choirs Festival in 2001 had a special Festival of only English music and sold out swiftly. The BBC Music Magazine has a Top 20 Best sellers list and there are some really interesting English music discs there, often by obscure composers. Yet despite this noble heritage, much of this glorious music is overlooked. “English Music” festivals tend to either fail at the outset for lack of funds or become internationalised. The Cheltenham Festival was founded as “The Cheltenham Festival of British Music”, but went “international” and no longer features music not played elsewhere.
The first English Music festival was also in Dorchester, and devoted to the “diversity, innovation and brilliance” of composers usually neglected in concert. Entitled Heirs and Rebels it opened with a fanfare: Conductor David Lloyd-Jones produced a thrilling rendition of Holst’s Walt Whitman Overture and changed mood with Vaughan Williams’ Norfolk Rhapsody No.1(1906), which highlights solo clarinets and violas. This was followed by Frank Bridges’ Oration which is a single-movement concerto against the futility of war. It is impassioned and captures the anguish and despair in its vivid images of suffering and death. Then followed Holst’s Invocation and Irish Symphony by Sullivan who had Irish ancestry but musical roots in the English tradition. He was not restricted to comic opera! It united the Viola Sonata of Algernon Ashton, a rhapsody by Elgar’s champion William Reed, and a suite by Benjamin Dale, Lord Berners’ Luna Park, and featured Jeremy Irons narrating Vaughan Williams’s An Oxford Elegy!
Does the festival commission works?
Without renewal culture dies and the Festival renews by commissioning works. An oratorio Prayerbook, written and performed specially for the first Festival by David Owen Norris was acclaimed by the audience. The clarinet and viola heralding Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsody No 1 was a beautiful performance. A bracing work is Oration by Britten’s mentor, Frank Bridge. The haunting cello concerto is a passionate cry against the barbarity of the Great War and expresses the miseries of the Front. Julian Lloyd Webber was sympathetic to the solo line, as the cello strives to extricate a poignant lyricism from the tensions of the orchestral background. He returned for Holst’s seldom performed Invocation (1911).
Em feels, “There is something about the landscape including the poetry and language, the syntax and grammar transmits into the way the music is phrased. It is English: the way we construct our sentences dictates the way we construct our music. It is the way composers compose their music. The construct of our thoughts dictates the way we construct our music. So much is laying neglected. It is usual to get a series of say Mahler, Brahms but rarely English Classical composers. Frederick Cliffe’s First Symphony (1889), was only revived after 83 years’ neglect and was a revelation: a large-scale, distinctive, late Victorian symphony of virile invention and command of the orchestra, varied mix of contemporary influences, and its drama, lyricism and sheer impact.”
The Daily Telegraph of 22 April 1889, published a review: “It may be doubted whether musical history can show on any of its pages the record of such an Opus. The symphony is a masterpiece, and the composer, one might think, feels terrified at his own success. For our own part, noting the imaginative power displayed in the work, the easy command of all resources, the beauty and freshness of the themes, and their brilliant development, we feel inclined to ask a question, propounded concerning another phenomenon “Whence has this man these things?” Mr Cliffe has by one effort passed from obscurity to fame, and must be regarded as a bright and shining star on the horizon of our English art.”‘
Over a century later The Daily Telegraph of 26 April 2004 had a feature on John Foulds as the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra released their recording of Dynamic Tryptich. Conductor Sakari Oramo explained, Foulds composed “some of the most original music ever conceived”. Malcolm MacDonald, editor of music magazine Tempo, believes: “There’s no question he was a genius and one of the most significant English composers of the last century. MacDonald, found some scores in the British Library: “I got out a dozen pieces, and the first thing I opened was the Dynamic Triptych. I was blown away by it. This was music unlike any British composer of the time. I was amazed it was lying around, and no one was playing it. “Foulds’s daughter “ took me to the garage, where there were two coffin-sized boxes full of sketches and manuscripts she’s been left by her mother.” Unfortunately, many of the manuscripts were damaged by rats and ants. In his book Music Today Foulds, explained how, by strict diet and meditation, he had developed his clairvoyant and clairaudient abilities. Much of his music, he claimed, was dictated to him by spirits.”
In the Baroque period we produced composers of immense skill like Purcell, Byrd, Arne, Tallis and Blow. The period between Arne and Parry has been dismissed as a “musical Ice-Age” though we had Stainer, Wesley, Potter, Sterndale Bennett, Crotch, who were on a par with foreign contemporaries, but not progressive enough for international attention. In 1769 Englishman Philip Hayes, who built Oxford’s beautiful Holywell Music Room, composed the world’s first piano concerto! Some great composers died young: Edward Bache, composer of exquisite chamber works, died at 25, and Thomas Linley, died aged 22 in a boating accident in 1777, yet produced wonderful anthems, odes and oratorio, about one of which was written “Neither Purcell nor Mozart ever gave stronger proof of original genius than can be traced in this charming ode”.
Even during the ravages of Modernism in the twentieth century there was a renaissance of music in England of works of innovation, power, drama and beauty. Stanford and Parry were at the fount and in a Brahmsian style created English music equal to Brahms himself; Elgar continued the creation of an English style through merging Brahms and Wagner. Richard Strauss described Elgar as “the first Progressivist in English Music”, and Hans Richter told his orchestra of Elgar’s First, “Gentleman, now let us rehearse the greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest modern composer”! Others found inspiration abroad and incorporated the sounds into something uniquely “English”; Delius turned to the continent and Negro spirituals to develop a unique sound with lush, rich harmonies. Vaughan Williams returned to English roots in folk and Tudor to revive an English music, rebelling against the ubiquitous Teutonic schools. English solo song grew from parlour song and folk roots into a beautiful, high-art form; at the other end of the scale, England had answers to Wagner in the music of Bantock and Holbrooke, “the Cockney Wagner”, composers of long, deeply romantic, intense music – to rival Wagner’s Ring, and epic orchestral works. Writing about Holbrooke’s The Raven, Irish composer Hamilton Harty said “there is beautiful and impressive music in that work, and, as I told the orchestra, it is so infinitely superior to the foreign muck with which we are deluged nowadays!” Other composers of this period to listen to include Bridge, Bowen, Moeran, Finzi, Sainton, Bainton, Mackenzie, Gibbs, Berners, Dyson, Bax, Bliss, Ireland, Lambert, Boughton, Coles, Coleridge Taylor, Dunhill, Foulds, Dale, Goossens, William Lloyd Webber, MacCunn, Armstrong, Harty, Friskin, McEwen, Phillips, Scott, Rawsthorne, Rubbra, Hadley and Howells. These, and many more, are known by a small corpus of recorded works which show great individuality, inspiration, and visionary orchestral confidence.
What makes the English sound-world?
England is a country whose music and literature are drawn from the landscape, from rolling hills to the desolation of mud flats and moors. Seascapes too: an island nation, we are drawn to the wildness and openess of the sea. We have not the sublimity of the Alps nor the majestic sweeps of the Tabernas desert, the spectacular fjords of Norway nor the thick, dense forests of Germany; but, for centuries, artists, poets and composers have been inspired by the picturesque hues and shades in our “blue remembered hills”, the nuances of light-beams in enchanting woods, the changes of seasons, inconstant weather, the dramatic sweeps of the lakes and dales that inspired Wordsworth.
Yehudi Menhuin, wrote: “I am drawn to English music because I love the way it reflects the climate and the vegetation which know no sharp edges, no definitive demarcation, where different hues of green melt into each other and where the line between sea and land is always joined and changing, sometimes gradually, sometime dramatically. The music … is a very human music, not given to shattering utterances, to pronouncements of right or wrong, not to abstract intellectual processes, to human emotion in the abstract, but to a single man’s experience of today as related to a particular place…”
Our neglected heritage: In 1927, Holst wrote incidental music to a mystery play The Coming of Christ which has never been recorded. As I mentioned, Cliffe’s first symphony, an acclaimed masterpiece, has not had a professional public performance for over 90 years. His second symphony has not been published; none of the symphonies by Walford Davies, Coleridge Taylor and Somervell are available, nor is Bowen’s first symphony which was so popular that The Times devoted a whole column to analysing it; Delius’ opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, considered by many the first great modern English opera, has not been performed at either the Royal Opera House or English National Opera for over half a century.
Contemporary artists have similar repertoires and only a small number of works are considered “acceptable” as these things go in fashions. Concert mangers are not prepared to take risks so programme what they know or popular classics for government funding. A programme of Brahms, Tchaikovsky or Verdi is familiar and safe but to present say, Moeran, Gibbs and Farrar a risk. English music is not fashionable. It is not politically correct and managers hesitate to promote anything English, as if inimicable to other cultures. In an era of “diversity” and “multi culturalism” English culture is shunned. It is not the done thing to seem nationalistic by celebrating our traditions: the ending of Elgar’s Caractacus is stigmatised because it points forward to a great British Empire! We are supposed to be ashamed of our culture and ignore it or apologise. Composers of the early twentieth century are dismissed as the “English pastoral composers,” lesser musicians whose works are put below the Germanic, Russian, or Scandinavian schools. But the pastoral tradition has always inspired composers and poets. The term ‘pastoral’ is broad and its meaning of ‘rural’ and ‘innocence’, was used by Classical and Christian artists with its associations of Eden, Arcadia or a ‘Golden Age’, and nostalgia for beauty and sublimity lost through the Fall or the degeneration of Man. Pastoral goes to the roots of our culture: In the ninth century BC, Hesiod contemplated the ages of mankind from a Golden Age to his own ‘Iron Age’. Six centuries later, the pastoral was a literary form in the Idylls of Theocritus, a tradition Virgil built upon in his Eclogues two centuries later. In Christianity the Garden of Eden provided an equivalent to the Arcadia of Classical poets, and the concept of the Fall established the nostalgic pastoral inclination as a natural human impulse. For the Romantic poets, witnessing the beginning of the industrial revolution, the city was a consequence of the Fall and the contrast with nature and a new interest in childhood enabled them to draw a parallel between humankind’s degeneration or Fall from Eden and a child’s loss of innocence as he enters adulthood.
It is often based in a particular location or built from folk song-like melodies – Williams’ three Norfolk Rhapsodies (1905-07), and In the Fen Country (1904); Holst’s A Somerset Rhapsody (1906-7); Butterworth’s Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad (1912), his Two English Idylls (1911) and The Banks of Green Willow (1913); and Finzi’s A Severn Rhapsody (1923). The sleeve notes to a recording of A Severn Rhapsody read: ‘The music gently evokes the mood of the English countryside and the meandering river’. A pastoral characteristic, reflective of rural ‘simplicity’. These works bespeak a retreat from the care, complexity, or harshness of society. English classical music has its roots in the country; is rooted in our landscape but not necessarily a picturesque one. Gustav Holst was walking in the desolate Dorsetshire country between Wool and Bere Regis in 1926 when visited by inspiration and he started Egdon Heath, also prompted by the opening chapter of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native. The music is stark and austere. As for elitism anyone is welcome to these concerts. Composers like Holst wrote music for brass bands. The Moorside Suite was used in the brass band competition at the Crystal Palace in 1928 which was won by the Black Dyke Mills Band.
There is a distinction between the pastoral “genre” and the pastoral ‘topic’. As a genre, the ‘pastoral’ is a single work or movement ‘that depicts the characters and scenes of rural life or is expressive of its atmosphere’. The term is often applied to miniatures. Pastoral as a ‘topic’ may refer to a section of a large-scale work in which pastoral characteristics are apparent. Pastoral ‘oases’ are usually characterised by introspection or nostalgia, and stand in contrast to their more rhetorical surroundings. Simplicity runs parallel to complexity, constancy with change, an opposition often present in cityscapes. Most works in the English pastoral tradition are not large-scale works but representative of the pastoral genre, though degree of intersection with other forms and genres like the ‘rhapsody’ is characteristic. Some English composers are known as a pastoral ‘school,’ the creative background to both composition and reception, and that their music is so closely bound to landscapes to which they regularly returned. The English pastoral style shares aspects of the pastoral topic of European Classical and Romantic music, but is particularly associated with the musical language of folk song. It is for this reason that Elgar, Parry and Stanford had individual voices, yet developed their style from the German musical idiom but are often excluded from the pastoral canon, though their importance to the English Musical Renaissance is recognised. Contemporaries like John Ireland and Gustav Holst, despite varied influences and often different styles, played an important part in the development of a recognisably English pastoral style.
Three aspects of English pastoralism: setting, language and sensibility
‘Setting’, the specific location in which the composer has chosen to set a piece; ‘language’, the musical idiom, be it derived from English folksong, French impressionism or the German romantic tradition; ‘Sensibility’ is clearly the hardest to pin-down, but within it resides what I have called the pastoral ‘outlook’, or in other words, the mood invoked by the music; what it sets up to desire or reject. Within each category, there seems to be an ideal, in that one can posit a ‘typical’ English pastoral piece of music as one set in the West of England, derived from the musical language of folk song and with a nostalgic, introspective sensibility. However, these categories allow a degree of flexibility in that a piece need not have a specified setting, or, if it does, its idiom need not be folk-song related. Thus Ireland’s piano miniature Amberley Wild Brooks and Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony though disparate, both inhabit the English pastoral tradition.
John Ireland’s music belongs to the school of ‘English Impressionism’. Having been steeped in German classics, especially Brahms, he was strongly influenced in his twenties and thirties by the music of Debussy, Ravel, and the early works of Stravinsky and Bartók.
Contemporaries such as Vaughan Williams and Holst developed a language strongly characteristic of English folk song, Ireland developed a complex harmonic language like French and Russian. He was very influenced by poetry and his settings of such poets as A E Housman, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Masefield and Rupert Brooke are among the best known of his works. He was susceptible to the spirit of place. Chelsea Reach is a depiction in the form of a barcarolle of the great sweep of the Thames as it flows past the Houses of Parliament. He loved the Channel Islands but his main love was Sussex, a landscape of undulating downs and then isolated villages, including Amberley of Amberley Wild Brooks – streams coursing through the fields, inspired most brilliant of his piano pieces.
Many contemporary composers are writing tonal, innovative, exciting and melodic music which spreads from the English tradition, which is difficult to hear in concert yet is too good to be ignored. There are now record labels releasing English Classical and they sell well.1 The BBC music magazine has a classified chart and they usually get in. But concerts are not put on because they are thought not to be popular: but when they are, they are enjoyed. When the BBC put on some English music it sold out. The Gloucester Three Choirs in 2001 put on an all-English programme and it sold out!
Em wants to bring unseen gems to light; feature undiscovered works and even undiscovered composers. She wants to trace lost scores and unknown ones that may be lying in relatives’ attics and tool sheds. There can be the use of old instruments but this depends on the composers being featured. This broadens people’s tastes. It is uplifting and a concert changes the listener for the better and makes them feel part of a cultural tradition, not an alienated, atomised individual.
Some day hence the English Music Festivals may seem as important to our culture now as the Olympiads were to Greek athletic prowess.
This hidden treasure of English music is part of the revival of English culture and is being brought into the light by Em and the English Music festival. The atonal era when music sounded like water gurgling down a sink is over.
Em is the main worker and works about 18 hours a day. It takes a lot of organising. Last year alone she wrote to around 5,000 companies but they think it is not popular enough or too narrow and wanted to make it international. She cannot get funding from the Arts Council. The only political organisation to give support was the Campaign for an English Parliament and their name worried some sponsors who wanted it removed from the programme, for fear of political embarrassment. Several high-profile companies declined as they did not want to be associated with elitist forms of music, preferring pop and rock. She was upset at the way some firms, first pledged their support and then let her down. She would ideally like sponsors with faith in the project. They do have a number of minor sponsors whence they get a third of their income. The other two-thirds come from ticket sales and trust funds, with the final portion from their Friends scheme and donations. The Friends scheme is very important as it brings a regular income to enable her to plan forthcoming events and gives the satisfaction of seeing that they believe in what she is trying to do. The Friends get discounts. In addition to more sponsors and Friends, Em needs helpers for stewarding, fund-raising, and publicity, which includes distributing information and programmes.
____________________________
There are other companies. See for CDs -
www.hyperion-records.co.uk – www.chandos.net
www.naxosaudiobooks.com – www.duttonvocalion.co.uk
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