Notes on the Cultural Revolution

'A teenager has been killed and another is critically injured following a knife attack in north-east London'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6534231.stm


In England, the main pumping station of the ideological fantasies of the Left -- outside the Labour Party and the think tanks -- is the BBC. When you watch their news service in the wake of one of the latest youth gun/knife killing, you see how they attempt to plug that gaping, flapping hole in their ideology: the p word and, sometimes, if you're lucky, the r word.
They wheel on a black 'community worker' who generally gives a sensible and clear-eyed report: we've warned you, it's kicking off all over, there's going to be more of it. The 'community worker' is then invited to give an explanation of the upsurge and then, instead of being sensible and clear-eyed about the history of the last 25 years, he parrots the Left's explanation: poverty - and poverty never prefixed with the word 'moral'. And of course that other show-stopping, catch-all obfuscator: racism.
If 'poverty' was the cause of all the mayhem and violence in London right now - one of the richest cities in the world - then why, when London was a lot poorer -- and its poor exceedingly poorer than they are now -- say 50 or 60 years ago, wasn't there the huge amount of violence, murder, mayhem and petty crime and antisocial behaviour we see today? Lefties need to riddle that one, and riddle it good. The 'community worker' cannot blame the dismantling of law and order in the inner cities without pondering the recommendations and ramifications of the Scarman report in 1981 and the McPherson Report of 2002. The former effectively recommended that young black criminals should be allowed to get on with their activities providing they didn't cause too much trouble - the abandonment of the 'sus law' which so enraged liberals and people who wanted to carry drugs and weapons with impunity. The McPherson report finished the job of emasculating the police force into an ineffectual, ideologically-motived, culturally Marxist branch of the civil service, the Police *Service*, whose sympathies were as often as not with the criminal not the victim - this was the result of Leftist-minded graduates from the 70s deciding that the best way to create a fairer society was to start helping criminals get more rights and the law abiding less. This has been the de facto position of the Labour Party since it ceased to be a genuine working class party in the 1960s and veered towards the mores, agendas and obsessions of the middle-class university Left.
The Conservative Party, with their Scarman report and the legal changes which followed it, have been no slouches in that department either.The BBC is of course in a difficult position on this kind of crime because it has, wherever it can, championed criminality, social irresponsibility and the dismantling of effective policing in inner cities. It has done it over years of biased documentaries, news reports, interviews and propagandizing drama. That is what you get when your state broadcaster is run by privileged crypto Marxists.
The journey to the endless mental and moral wasteground that the urban young inhabit today was driven by liberals, helped by conservatives and finally fast-tracked over the last ten years by a government which is has been the ugly final flowering of the 70s Left in their de-bearded, wealthy, epicurean but nonetheless deeply socially irresponsible late-middle age. Meanwhile BBC pumps out its message; the millionaire, champagne social democrat tv journalists fix a look of concern on their faces, pick the politically correct talking heads, extract the politically correct platitude and move on to more comfortable, nebulous area of climate change, the new religion of the middle classes.
Now, after years of preaching the de facto dismantling of social convention, law and order, and adult authority in general - especially schools and in the family - the British Government, hypocrites and obstinate ideological fantasists to a man - or woman (let us be politically correct - the one convention the Left allow nobody to flout) - are now desperately trying to get that genie back in the bottle with ham-fisted legislation and endless, meaningless, vainglorious management-speak.
Out in the real world the poor, the very people this government purport to help, suffer the effects of baby-boomers' munificence and wishful-thinking and the genie refuses to go back in the bottle, making life a misery for the many, who live far out of the sight of the privileged few. Meanwhile, as centre-left and right parties continue with their long-term abdication of reason and responsiblity, the villains of the far-right - and in some cases the far-left - see a gap in the market. Watch that space.

'Jackals howl...

...in the dark of predawn, nearly 200 Royal Marines waited in uncertain silence for their attack on the Taleban to begin...



There is a certain sneaking respect among the Marines for their enemy. Though they do not regard the Taleban as especially competent, the Marines acknowledge their courage in the hammering they have received from British forces in recent weeks.
"To stand up and fight when I am dropping all that ordnance on them is pretty good" admitted Captain Al Cairns, a Marine forward air-controller. "I have to respect that."

No single Taleban has surrendered to the British around Kajaki. Though preferring to fight, then withdraw at the last moment, they are prepared to die in position if surrounded.'

Another great Times report from Helmand:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article1381532.ece

Re the blog versus MSM argument: I don't see any bloggers coming up with copy and pictures like this.

London, after 10 years of a Democratic Socialist...

...approach to law and order:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6337501.stm


Guardianistas used to talk about lack of investment making people stab and kill each other, but...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6338755.stm


Meanwhile, down in Streatham, where 20 years ago when I was sixteen we thought smoking was rebellious, children are being shot dead on the ice rink on Saturday night:


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6330655.stm


Meanwhile, down in Mitcham, another - yes another - teenager is stabbed to death:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6151702.stm

His mother pays tribute here:

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/topstories/display.var.1176878.0
.terror_at_ice_disco_mums_tribute_to_caring_loving_peaceful_son.php

It brought a tear to my eye, but I know that the Utopian/Abstractionist Tendency are made of Sterner Stuff. No arrests for any, no witnesses coming forward. And here's a bit more - most London boroughs can tell a similar story:

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/search/display.var.1145620.0.two
_stabbings_linked_by_police_as_victim_fights_for_life.php

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/search/display.var.1147578.0.gang
_war_erupted_over_grudge_court_hears.php

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/search/display.var.1169729.0.two
_men_stabbed_outside_kings_tun_pub.php

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/search/display.var.1136297.0.man
_stabbed_in_the_head.php


Here's a classic bit of Wanky Leftist Utopia:

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/search/display.var.1159091.0.staf
f_stabbed_by_shoplifter.php

BUT, FOLKS, BUT *BUT*, SCOTLAND YARD IS ON THE CASE IN ONE IMPORTANT RESPECT:


http://cms.met.police.uk/news/policy_organisational_news_and
_general_information/met_named_best_police_force_in_pink_paper_awards

London is now officially a very dangerous city in which to live. God rot this government and the baby boomer leftists who've turned it into the shithole it is today.

Clive James on Amis

Clive James reviews the new bio of Amis Senior here:

http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25336-2576533,00.html

A mate of mine, Nigel, quoted this bit:

"The perpetual dimwit-Left consensus will disgust any liberaleventually, but the aim should be to reclaim the democratic centre,not to take refuge in the illusion that right-wing prejudices were asystem of thought all along."

I said:

The essay is very good, with many memorable turns of phrase. I could make many interjections but time is precious. The bit I take issue with the most is the bit you quoted. As you say, James doesn't unpack this at all and it's not really good enough. It looks like the generously angry waffle of a very pampered man of letters - James to a tee. All this stuff about the democratic centre is a bit cloudy for me.

The thing that James doesn't dwell on enough is booze. The chemical reaction of large amounts of alcohol taken regularly on an unhappy man can have some very striking effects on outlook: he became pickled and vinegary, and add to that his natural state of rebellion against piousness and happy clappy group-delusion and you can see that the nasty stuff was Jim Dixon's subversive behaviour misjudged, like wrongfooting a step at the Garrick. And let's face it: Wanky Lefters are bloody annoying: he was on the lookout for Bertrands all his life - and they won in the end.

In the 50s he took the piss out of the prevailing attitude, ditto in the sixties. Had he not become so pissed and embittered you like to think he could have unpacked the Thatcher years and shown them up for what they were: another nail in the coffin of a civilised culture. However he and Larkin were too pleased at the prospect of Thatcher nailing many trendy lefties and History Men, even though she ultimately further empowered them and (my opinion, strongly held) missed a golden opportunity to smash the BBC when she had the chance. She screwed up because she was a philistine and the late, bottled Amis was thrilled by that.

It was wrong of him to use cab driver bigotry about Jews and blacks, obviously. But was it wrong of him to make the observation that the British were never consulted by their mandarin masters about the most important changes in society and if they had have been, then many of the problems that bedevil this country now may never have arisen? Was it wrong of him to be honest and combative about the trickery, propagandizing and sophistry of the trendy left in education and the media? It would have been easy, in the 60s, to get carried away with the carnival, especially if you were a wealthy writer at the centre of the culture, rather in the same way as it would have been easy to get carried away in the 30s with Stalinism and Communism; but he kept his head and looked to the long game: what he warned about - a degraded, idiotic, ignorant, amoral culture fuelled by pseuds, pop stars and the university of the left - has come about in aces.

Of course, my greatest issue with him is that he didn't like Firbank ;O

Tom Mason, who likes to try and smite me by occasionally attempting to discredit my logic or opinions, tried to suggest that my observation that the BBC manipulated the hammer attack by Asians on a schoolboy in their usual anti-white manner was not my own. That I had stolen it from someone else. He called me 'vain and disingenuous' on the Orwell newsie.

I replied:

'Not the case. I heard the story on the BBC and thought: 'watch this one get pushed down the news editor's pile, watch the manipulation start'. Then one of the Nazis at the radio four newsgroup mentioned it and then I did. Christ, boy, it's not like the story has any new angles in terms of the craven anti-white bias of the BBC: ain't you heard of Kriss Donald? Seen it all before.

Glad you've become a Little Mart groupie: that will fuck your fiction for a decade: better minds than yours have thrown their paddles away trying to be him. No, I'm not talking about me: I was thoroughly bored by London Fields, Dead Babies is a teen's book, Money's all right. It's going to be fun watching Mart drift further to the right: the only place he can go now. I warn you, Tommy, you won't like it; but a reconciliation with Daddy will be essential for his progress.

Vain? Indeed: but not as much as you think: and ain't we all anyway? It's all in Ecclesiastes innit? Please don't become a dreary little Puritan - Orwell will have that effect on some people: see etc round this newsie.

What's new on the law front? Got your snout in that vast trough of money provided by the public that the law serves so badly yet?

Well...

...the Trendy Left finally got what it always wanted:

The Times

January 24, 2007

Schools must 'confront the problem of marginalised white pupils'

Alexandra Frean, Education Editor


'White pupils in areas where the ethnic composition is mixed can often suffer labelling and discrimination, Sir Keith will say. “They can feel beleaguered and marginalised, finding their own identities under threat as much as minority ethnic children might not have theirs recognised.
“It makes no sense in our report to focus on minority ethnic pupils without trying to address and understand the issues for white pupils. It is these white pupils whose attitudes are overwhelmingly important in creating community cohesion. Nor is there any advantage in creating confidence in minority ethnic pupils if it leaves white pupils feeling disenfranchised and resentful.”
The report will quote the example of one white pupil in her early teens who, after hearing in a lesson that other members of her class originally came from the Congo, Portugal, Trinidad and Poland, said that she “came from nowhere”.'


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,591-2563000.html

BBC CXLIV: The Cudlipp Lecture

'Again, until recently, anyone who questioned, however gently, multiculturalism or mass immigration was treated like a piece of dirt - effectively enabling the BBC to all but close down debate on the biggest demographic change to this island in its history.

'No, what really disturbs me is that the BBC is, in every corpuscle of its corporate body, against the values of conservatism, with a small "c", which, I would argue, just happens to be the values held by millions of Britons. Thus it exercises a kind of "cultural Marxism" in which it tries to undermine that conservative society by turning all its values on their heads.

Of course, there is the odd dissenting voice, but by and large BBC journalism starts from the premise of leftwing ideology: it is hostile to conservatism and the traditional right, Britain's past and British values, America, Ulster unionism, Euroscepticism, capitalism and big business, the countryside, Christianity and family values. Conversely, it is sympathetic to Labour, European federalism, the state and state spending, mass immigration, minority rights, multiculturalism, alternative lifestyles, abortion, and progressiveness in the education and the justice systems.

Now you may sympathise with all or some of these views. I may even sympathise with some of them. But what on earth gives the BBC the right to assume they are the only values of any merit?

Over Europe, for instance, the BBC has always treated anyone who doesn't share its federalism - which just happens to be the great majority of the British population - as if they were demented xenophobes. In very telling words, the ex-cabinet secretary Lord Wilson blamed the BBC's "institutional mindset" over Europe on a "homogenous professional recruitment base" and "a dislike for conservative ideas".

--

And in the comments: 'I once worked for the BBC, and a bigger concentration of foaming at the mouth Dave Spart lefties is impossible to find. It really is no surprise that George Orwell based his Ministry of Truth on the BBC.The BBC has an essential Bolshevik attitude - as a collective body it has no problem in imposing its unwelcome will upon the very people who are forced to pay for state propaganda and misinformation under the very real threat of jail.The BBC did not get the way it is by accident. The tenets of Antonio Gramsci have been ruthlessly applied by the apparatchiks who control the bloated lie machine.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1997288,00

My meeting with one of the most famous British politicians of the last 50 years.

----- Original Message -----
From: Nick Garrett
To: Mark Brentano
Sent: Saturday, January 20, 2007 3:14 PM
Subject: Grand Hotel by Procol Harum


Your Excellency!

You’ll like this. I was on a train, sitting opposite, feet not two inches apart, from England’s oldest and once most notorious living politician last night.
But let me rewind. First of all I am supposed to be in Scotland. My cousin has decided to get married in a castle in an inaccessible part of that country. My family booked me a plane ticket many months ago.
On Thursday night I decided I didn’t want to go – I was perfectly OK about the flight until I saw them struggling to land that jet at Manchester airport in the high winds. The passenger on TV who said: ‘people were screaming and being sick.’
I didn’t particularly wish to go on this pretentious jaunt but that settled it for me; my latent fear of flying had leapt up, and that was that.
Except now I’m in a heap of trouble with family.
Anyway. I looked into trains, but it’s at very best an 18-hour round trip, that’s without the inevitable delays plus hundred forty odd quid and I would have arrived at midnight last night. Then a fifty quid cab journey to the venue. Am I going to blow two ton on all that?
So I go to London yesterday, to Borough high street and tap Judgy for 100 quid till I get paid next week. Had a drink with him in the globe tavern. He hobbled off on his crutch back to work. He said: ‘I might go mad for a couple of weeks when this plaster comes off.’
Afterwards I crossed London Bridge and walked through the city, rather disconsolate, lonely as a cloud. I noted the places I’d worked when I was construction industry person.
I walked down past Cannon Street station and on towards St Paul’s. Then I crossed the river once again and decided to do the only appropriate thing to do in Tate Modern: have a shit. I looked at the helter skelters in the turbine hall. Infantile.
Then I wandered along and came to the book stall outside the NFT, where I bought a an orange penguin of Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome and a handsome edition of Waugh’s Letters, which pleased me because they had eluded me until then.
It was cold and windy. I walked up and crossed back at the Festival Hall and got a bus to Victoria from Traf. Sq. I sat next to a rude wop with a video camera who refused to adjust his position as I sat down. The bus sprang and surged its way down Whitehall and past Parliament etc. I read the Standard, which was splashing with the Jade Goody/racism row. Storm in a tea cup. I’m split on the issue: first, it’s hardly racism and yet it’s most complained about thing ever on British TV apparently. Second, this is what you get if you put ugly, thick and stupid cunts like Jade and her mother on television for hours at a time – why do we have to see them? Third, they’re only jealous of the Indian because she’s rich, beautiful and has plenty of class. She, of course, is only in there to increase her profile in the West – she already has 15 million quid.
Slightly disturbed to find that, once again, freedom of speech is subject to mob rule from the militantly righteous of all colours. Talking of which, did you see the Dispatches programme? They finally got round to going undercover into ‘moderate’ mosques – the BBC is yet to. I *wonder* why. You can guess that they found: Nazis wearing tablecloths etc. I went into work the next day and asked the senior reporters and editors if they’d watched it. None of them had. ‘I think we know what we’re dealing with there,’ said one news editor, a pompous, arsy public school type who looks at me with this patronizing smile and a look that says: ‘you could never know anything I don’t know, you could never express an opinion that wasn’t something I had already thought of or knew.’
He went on: ‘ I didn’t watch it but I think we know what we’re dealing with there. They’re like Roman Catholic priests in the 70s who said the IRA were basically OK.’
He has an Irish name and is clearly a recovering Roman Catholic.
I replied: ‘I haven’t seen many catholic priests calling Jews pigs and monkeys recently, and calling for the extermination of homosexuals and non-believers.’
He blinked, and was flummoxed.
‘Well, um yes,’ – he made a sound like Porky Pig used to when his face ripped through the Warner Bros logo at the end of a Bugs Bunny short – ‘but it is similar, um.’
Later I heard him putting forth his idiotic opinion once again. I thought: you’re a cunt, mate.’
Anyway, finally I get on the train at Victoria and sit down opposite an old man wearing a black suit and a royal blue pullover, tatty boat shoes and with a dirty yellow rucksack on the seat next him, reading London Lite. Two ipod kids sat opposite. He had a cup of Costa coffee on the little drinks shelf. I continued to read my Standard. He looked vaguely familiar. I thought for a minute he might be an old, trying-to-be-with-it clergyman. Then I realised it was Tony Benn.
I placed my can of Gordon’s Double Gin and Tonic on the shelf and he, noticing, moved his coffee back an inch – the demarcation line: The Benn *is* anti-Europe, after all.
A little old lady sat down next to me and began to read the Daily Telegraph. Benn produced some printed emails and spread them on the shelf. The train was filling up but he never moved his rucksack off the seat. Noted, I thought, noted.
Lots of things passed through my mind. I could have leant across and said: ‘Ah, it’s the second Viscount Stansgate, I do believe.’ Or: ‘Bit of a choker for your mate, Saddam, wonnit?’
I confess I lacked exuberance and confidence – my family trouble was foremost in my mind – but behind that I thought I should ask him something. What? Why did Socialism fail? Why did Lefties like him remain, as Robert Conquest has it, ‘argument-proof’ and ‘fact-proof’?
Did he know George Orwell? Was he fascinated, as I was, that only a few days previously I was reading in Dominic Sandbrook’s ‘White Heat’ how Kingsley Amis thougt Benn was a cunt and that the government in which he served as Postmaster General was described by P. Larkin as a ‘bunch of nigger-loving, murderer-pardoning, daylight-hating ponces,’
He then produced a mobile phone, not bad for an 81-year-old – mind you he was once Minister for Technology – and announced himself to the carriage by way of making a loud phone call: ‘Hi, it’s Tony, TONY, yes, TONY BENN, I’ll be arriving at Lewes at…’
This, I decided, was self-promotion/aggrandizing. He couldn’t have said it louder than if he’d been yelling in the House of Commons. He clearly wanted to be noticed. The little old lady next to me with the Telegraph started to sort of roll her shoulders: she was of an age to remember this old man as one of the great villains of the conservative press in the 60s and 70s. I remember my mum, never knowledgeable in politics, saying in about 1979, saying: ‘if Benn gets we’re moving to Australia’. I bet we wouldn’t have. The Daily Express, idiotically, once printed a picture of him with a Hitler moustache. His brother was killed fighting the Germans.
So there was no way I was going to be rude and so I sat there and read my paper, he read his and the old lady read hers. Presently we arrived at my station. When I got out I saw the old lady taking my seat opposite him and licking her lips. As the train pulled away she began to speak. I lamented my blowing a chance to get in his diaries.

Bully is getting married in August. I have been asked to be best man if his brother is too unstable to do it. You must attend. Maybe we'll all get up and do Memphis, Tennessee.

Just thought I’d mention it!

I remain, sir, your obedient servant,

The Very Reverend Nicholas Garrett