Letter to the Editor, June 2020

Posted on June 4, 2020 by leslie

Letter to the Editor, June 2020

Sir,

The demographic profile of the American protestors is indicative. Predominantly late teens and millennials. Multi-ethnic, mainly urban, well-educated, with affluent backgrounds. Pre-destined for professional careers, present circumstances notwithstanding.

Professor Glayde Whitney once told me that American school children are subjected to relentless brainwashing about the putative benefits of mass immigration and multiculturalism. The upshot is that in the absence of countervailing influences, they are rabidly anti-Trump. They doubtless voted for “crooked” Hillary. They support safe spaces, no platform for “fascists” and the “de-colonising” of the curriculum i.e. censorship. And, like the Isis iconoclasts, they advocate the destruction or removal of politically incorrect statuary.

Meanwhile, the 62 million Americans in “fly over country” who elected Donald Trump have almost no voice in the fake news, main-stream media. And here in the UK, public school educated commentators such as Jon Snow and Emily Maitlis (married to an investment manager), virtue signal about black oppression from the safety of gated communities. They encourage British Blacks to emulate their enraged American counterparts.

Prediction and conclusion; the “Donald” to be re-elected with an increased majority. The liberal-left are now the stupid party. Once again, they are playing into Trump’s hands. He will swallow Zombie candidate Joe Biden whole. And, all in all, “The justice of it pleases”.

From Saturn, aka Alligator Mississippiensis

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ENDNOTES, June 2020

Posted on June 2, 2020 by leslie

John Ireland’s grave, Shipley

ENDNOTES, June 2020

John Ireland et al. at the online English Music Festival;  music for horn by Peter Seabourne and Robin Holloway, reviewed by Stuart Millson

With our concert halls closed and orchestras silent, the performance of classical music has become the preserve of solo artists, broadcasting via the internet. This year, the English Music Festival – usually held in rural Oxfordshire – was salvaged by a number of its loyal and regular musicians recording talks and concerts from their homes. The listening public were able to log on to the EMF website and follow a “virtual” Festival performance. One of the highlights of the event was a recital of British piano music, played by Duncan Honeybourne, from his home in Dorset. Introducing each item, Mr. Honeybourne provided an extremely well-thought-out sequence of works, distinguished especially by Vaughan Williams’s meditation on the Tudor music of Orlando Gibbons (the Hymn Tune Prelude on Song 13) and John Ireland’s expansive, three-movement, 1940 evocation of the Channel Islands, Sarnia – the ancient Roman name for Guernsey.

Duncan Honeybourne’s living room may not have provided the ideal acoustic for the music, but there was no doubting the dramatic atmosphere, pulse of natural feeling – especially in the elemental movement, Song of the Springtides – and the tantalising, almost impressionistic colours and supernatural feeling summoned up by his impassioned interpretation. The Neolithic world of the first movement, Le Catioroc (the name of an ancient site on the island), fully encapsulates the composer’s mood and artistic philosophy; one of using music as a means of awakening brooding forces and emotions from the landscape, bathed as it seems in the light of almost other-worldly sunshine, and with sea and the echo of folklore ever present. Ireland’s music often celebrates and describes a particular place but transforms it into a dimension of dreamscape and supernatural hallucination. Continue reading →

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Covidus Interruptus, Part Two

Posted on June 1, 2020 by leslie

Injection syringe

Covidus Interruptus, Part Two

by Ilana Mercer

The managerial elites find themselves in a pickle. The coronavirus pandemic is a serious event. Members of a serious society treat it as such; they look out for one another—and they don’t flee into conspiracy and denial in order to cope with the incongruity of it all. Alas, courtesy of its globalist elites, America is no longer a society; much less a serious one. In the absence of solidarity between citizens, social capital—”goodwill, fellowship, sympathy”—is scarce. Hence the struggle to mount a coherent response to the pandemic.

Centrally Planned Diversity Begets Disunity

Coherence is certainly not a thing immigration policy has supplied. If anything, policy makers have cheapened citizenship. The populations from which chosen, future citizens are drawn come to America not in search of constitution and community. Rather, the corporate state’s preferred immigrants bring their own community with them and hyphenate its members. On arrival, immigrants are encouraged to cling to a militant distinctiveness. The only tacit agreement shared by a majority of Americans, native and newcomer, is that America’s exceptionalism obligates it to both control the world through military and moral crusades and welcome it to America.

The extent to which Americans have, nevertheless, managed to galvanize logistically against COVID-19 is a testament to just how energetic a people we are. Still, the credentialed, cognitive elites who’ve turned the country into this multicultural, money-focused, Tower of Babel, now find that many Americans—united by commerce, not creed—don’t want to go the extra mile for the strangers who make up their country. Continue reading →

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Covidus Interruptus, part one

Posted on May 27, 2020 by leslie

Alan Dershowitz

Covidus Interruptus, part one

Ilana Mercer, beyond the pleasure principle

Ideas about liberty, thankfully, have evolved. Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist, received a Nobel Prize for performing lobotomies on his vulnerable, unconsenting psychiatric patients, or victims. Today, he is despised by decent mental-health practitioners. (If he isn’t, they’re not decent.) The same fate may well await Alan Dershowitz’s status as a constitutional scholar for his coronavirus jurisprudence. Dershowitz maintains that the State has the power of precedent to drag you to a doctor’s office and plunge a vaccine-filled syringe into your veins.

Contra Dershowitz’s forced-vaccination violence, social distancing and masking are mere inconveniences. They are not rights-infringing. Being inconvenienced is not the same as being unfree. That you are asked to sanitize, suite-up and give people space means only that you are inconvenienced. That you are being requested not to encroach upon others—not to rub-up against them, or expel sputum on them: this is but an inconvenience. In the context of a pandemic, these are quotidian requests, to be associated with civility and comity. They crimp your style, not your rights. The thing that infringes on your natural rights to sustain life and liberty is the lockdown. Sequestering you so that you cannot feed yourself and your dependents is a violation of both natural and constitutional rights. Continue reading →

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A Light, Shining in Darkness

Posted on May 24, 2020 by leslie

Lenin and Stalin

A Light, Shining in Darkness

Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2019, pp. ix-xi + pp. 1-326 + notes, photos, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-300-22278-4, reviewed by Frank Ellis

I begin with the Soviet century. In 1917, a gang of ideological fanatics seized power in Russia. They then proceeded to conduct an experiment affecting millions of people not just in Russia but throughout the world. The apparent aim of this experiment was to create something akin to paradise on earth. To this end, the owners of factories, banks and other private assets were dispossessed and their property now managed by the state in the name of the people and for the good of the people. All manifestations of inequality – racial, economic and political – were abolished (just like that), and henceforth, all forms of racial and ethnic prejudice, especially Great Russian chauvinism, were declared to be anti-Soviet and punishable. In the new classless society, one free of any racial and class antagonisms, wars would cease and a new age of unimaginable peace and prosperity would ensue. The very existence and success of this society would inspire the workers of the world to take up arms against their capitalist oppressors.

Inequalities in wealth, intellectual achievement and status are natural, arising when people are left to their own lawful devices. In order to eradicate these naturally occurring inequalities, the terror apparatus of the Soviet state had constantly to intervene in people’s lives. The results of this experiment were not class solidarity, liberty, prosperity and equality but terror, genocide and economic collapse. By 1939, Stalin, Lenin’s successor, had created the world’s first totalitarian state: liberty enslaved; equality in squalor; and loneliness in grief and suffering. In 2020, many academics and politicians in the West and in the Russian Federation, do not wish to be reminded that contrary to Hollywood and our universities, the period from 1917 to 1991, more accurately, the Communist Century, was a catastrophe for the planet (and since 1991, the ideological fallout has mutated into something worse). Continue reading →

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Assignation with Greta

Posted on May 21, 2020 by leslie

Greta Bridge

Assignation with Greta

by Bill Hartley

Some rivers are well known with their name denoting a whole region. Others can be quite obscure and it doesn’t help when more than one river carries the same name. There are two called Greta, the best known being in the Lake District. The other rises close to the northern boundary of the Yorkshire Dales National Park and runs for only about 20 miles until it joins the Tees. Here the country rock is soft limestone and during its short journey the river has created a narrow valley and at intervals deep wooded gorges, meaning it can be a risky business to stray off the footpath. Packed into this short and little visited river is some wonderful scenery. The surrounding country was once well fortified, physical symbols of the area’s turbulent past. Castles are to be found in unlikely locations. In a nearby farmyard is Scargill (no relation), one of the smallest. However it’s not just the scenery which makes the river Greta worth a visit. The final three miles of this river has a significant artistic and literary heritage.

The easiest approach is via the hamlet of Greta Bridge, just off the A66.  A mile or so upstream is the ruins of St Mary’s church and the site of a deserted medieval village. This was once a thriving settlement and no-one is sure why the inhabitants left. A better question would be why people settled there in the first place. Egglestone Abbey lies nearby and perhaps the monks saw it as a good location for lime or charcoal burning, since there is ample timber here. The dissolution of the Abbey and sale of its lands may have led to less centralised rural activities. Continue reading →

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Closely Observed Construction Sites

Posted on May 17, 2020 by leslie

Magnum handgun

Closely Observed Construction Sites 

Ilana Mercer digs deep 

“Nothing unusual; its [sic] my jogging routine,” writes a Twitter user. His sarcastic words are appended to a doctored image of joggers running through a construction site, while Ahmaud Arbery loiters in the background. The Twitter lampoon is of the young black man, shot to death by Travis McMichael and father Gregory McMichael, in Satilla Shores, a community near Brunswick, Georgia. The incident occurred on Feb. 23, 2020.

Prior to the shooting, as surveillance footage suggests, the deceased had wandered onto an open construction site, looked it over, but removed nothing from it. The image is “funny”—only if you were not killed on your jog (real or not), ostensibly because you took a suspicious detour. Trespass, innocent or suspicious, does not warrant a death sentence.

“He’s been caught on camera a bunch at night. It’s kind of an ongoing thing,” said an anonymous caller to the 9-1-1 dispatcher, minutes before the fatal shooting. The caller, it now transpires, was referring to surveillance footage dating back to Feb. 11, on which a younger, more slender black male can be seen strolling on the same property. Fast forward to the 23rd, and the dispatcher is quizzing the caller as to whether a break-in was underway. “I just need to know what he was doing wrong. Was he just on the premises and not supposed to be?” That indeed seemed to be the case. Continue reading →

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The Sick Man of Europe

Posted on May 14, 2020 by leslie

Charge of the Light Brigade

The Sick Man of Europe

By Stuart Millson, moonlighting again

Engulfed by 220,000 Covid-19 infections and with a death toll to date of 32,000 souls, the United Kingdom has, in the current pandemic, truly become the “sick man of Europe” – the evocative phrase used in the 19th-century to describe the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Second only to the United States in its rate of infection and overtaking the former viral epicentres of Italy and Spain, Britain’s ability to deal with the virulent virus now sweeping the world has been, at best, ineffective. Despite the magnificent efforts of the National Health Service – not to mention the work of the British Army in building a temporary hospital in just nine days – our country’s response has been found wanting.

Despite the examples before us of countries such as New Zealand and Taiwan, which had the foresight to immediately close their airports, thereby preventing the circulation of the disease and its possible circulation back to countries not yet infected, the United Kingdom – with the agreement of its scientists and public health officials – allowed its runways to remain open. Only now, a month after the disease was given time to embed itself, has the Government finally decided to apply quarantine rules to airport travellers – a classic example of shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. [Editorial note; travellers quarantined accordingly will be trusted to isolate themselves!] Continue reading →

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Cannibal Lecture

Posted on May 10, 2020 by leslie

Cannibal Lecture

Ilana Mercer on reparations

Apartheid and the Atlantic slave trade have generated an endless, media-generated pretense of remorse, especially in America and Great Britain. Spectacle aside, the real motive is to define, and therefore control, the past by reading it as an aspect of present political aims. “[R]itual apologies,” argues Jeremy Black, author of “The Slave Trade,” “are moves in a political game that relies on “fatuous arguments about ‘closure’ [and] ‘resolution,’” but fails to reach closure, since the purpose of such policies is to keep the imagined wounds suppurating.

Plainly put, racial-grievance politics are levelled, in general, by Africans who were never enslaved or who were not born into apartheid, against Europeans who did not enslave or segregate them. Only in the West could such a vicarious cult of self-flagellation thrive. As I wrote in my book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, “White South Africans are told to give up ancestral lands they are alleged to have stolen. Should not the relatives of cannibals who gobbled up their black brethren be held to the same standards?”

Part of the problem is our ignorance of Southern African history. There was bitter blood on Bantu lands well before white settlers arrived. The Bantu were not indigenous to South Africa. They migrated there out of central Africa and, like the European settlers, used their military might to displace Hottentots, Bushmen and one another through internecine warfare. Continue reading →

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ENDNOTES, May 2020

Posted on May 6, 2020 by leslie

Endnotes, May 2020

In this edition: Bruckner’s Second Symphony, by Stuart Millson

Anton Bruckner (1824-96), organist, Wagnerphile and symphonist, has come to represent the pure, almost naive spirit of late-romanticism. From his earliest days in the Catholic church, to the splendid heights of his last two great achievements – the mighty Eighth and (unfinished) Ninth Symphonies – the composer was always outside the metropolitan tides and ways of music. Uncomfortable in fashionable Vienna and other Austro-German capitals, he was prone to bring a plate of cakes to the conductor’s door – to thank him for a great performance.

Commonly described as “cathedrals in music”, his symphonies bring together great moments – episodes where light streams through a stained-glass window, or breathless phrases which echo fragments of church music, or (at a particular point in the Fifth Symphony, for example) a passing phrase reminiscent of an idea in Mozart’s Requiem. In the Eighth Symphony’s scherzo, we have a headlong rush into Alpine meadows and byways, as Bruckner embraces the almost pagan, life-loving spirit of “Deutsche Michel” – the legendary, Teutonic equivalent of an English yeoman. And in the Seventh Symphony, generally considered his most radiant, there is (again in the scherzo movement) a definite undercurrent of tension, almost a sinister pace that seems to give the music a thrilling, dangerous edge. Continue reading →

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