Wednesday 25 April 2012

My Articles


I would like to clarify a statement about myself which has recently been made on the British Resistance site.

 I have not started writing for the BNP, and have no plans to do so.

What occurred recently was that I received a request from the the BNP asking permission to re-publish some of my previous articles. As it has always been my policy to allow any Nationalist site to use my work if it furthers the Nationalist cause, I agreed to their request.

You will note from my writing that I seek to address the wider issues impacting on Nationalists in Britain, South Africa, America and elsewhere in the world, and I have sought to remain scrupulously neutral with regard to the various divisions which have occurred within British Nationalism in recent months.

The Green Arrow, whom I continue to respect and view as an old friend, is fully aware that I do not support all the views expressed on his site. For instance, as I have stated previously, I find the attacks on gay people ill judged, offensive and irrelevant. I am also a friend and admirer of Paul Weston of the British Freedom Party, and, although I do not agree with everything he says, I do not share or support the low opinion of him currently being expressed at the British Resistance.

My contribution to the British Resistance site has never been an endorsement of all the views expressed here, however, as a believer in free speech I respect other writers’ right to hold those views.

Likewise, by permitting the BNP to republish my work I am not endorsing the BNP, in the same way that I did not endorse Dr. David Duke when previously permitted him to do the same.

*As it turns out it appears the BNP may have chosen not to use my work after all, (possibly because of my previous association with the British Resistance site) but that is beside the point, as they can still do so if they wish to. My sole concern remains the survival of our people and all those of European origin, wherever they are, whatever political party they support and irrespective of the narrow sectarian divisions which I believe are doing terrible damage to our cause.

*Update:  The first of my articles has now been published by the BNP, it was held up because of the forthcoming election not for any other reason. 

Tuesday 24 April 2012

St George’s Day must be preserved and promoted


By Richard Barnbrook

This year, in my part of the world at least, one could be forgiven for assuming that St George’s Day had been cancelled! No flags or buntings, no celebrations, no dedicated evenings in local pubs and restaurants, no staged events. When I visited Trafalgar Square in the early evening of yesterday, I met only a small handful of celebrants, and sadly there were no red and white flags to be seen in the surrounding area.

The Liberal Elite have long felt awkward in publicly acknowledging St George’s Day. They feel ill at ease with any overt display or appreciation of Englishness, presumably because they are anxious at our being reminded in a positive way about our indigenous ethnic roots.

Despite five decades of post-war negative indoctrination, the collective persistent and stalwart efforts of a dedicated few individuals succeeded in putting St George’s Day back on the national calendar. In recent years, its prominence had increased so much that there were calls to make it a bank holiday. Then to some extent, the lefties decided to jump on the band-waggon in an attempt to derail the essential patriotic element by foisting it with an all-inclusive, ‘multi-culti’ bias. Now it seems as if everyone’s given up, which is just what the Establishment has wanted all along. Mission accomplished, or so they think!

But there’s more to the English than the Liberal Elite have bargained for! We are committed to the celebration of St George’s Day as an annual celebration of our valiant, unique English heritage- a birthright of which we can all feel jointly and justly proud and which we must work together to preserve and promote, both for ourselves and for our children.

Sunday 22 April 2012

Stoking the flames

Click image to enlarge

The above screen grab of the CNN news homepage (US edition) was taken this morning.  It is becoming clear that CNN, together with other US media organisations are determined to cause racial conflict in America, maybe even a race war.  Why else, in the middle of all the hype about the Treyvon Martin shooting would they choose to give the greatest prominence on their NEWS website to an 80 year old story about lynchings in pre-world war II America?

I can only assume that they believe that racial conflict will encourage African Americans to vote for a black presidential candidate in November (Or should that be a white black president given the manner in which ethnicity of the man accused of shooting Martin is now described) and that evoking images of long dead white racists, will shame whites into doing so too.

Given that the world has never yet seen a liberal fantasy turn out as it was supposed to, I suspect that once the monster they are goading is released from its cage, they will find it is impossible to get back under control.

_____________________

Related: Black men attack white man as "revenge for Treyvon"

Saturday 21 April 2012

The Definition of Art


By David Hamilton

There is confusion about what art is. The qualities that make something art are intrinsic, not external. It is the artifice, the organising of elements, perspective, choice of colour etc, that make it art. The result is obtained by transforming reality and thus nature through human imagination and emotion and is realised by skill and technique.

The word Beauty (or beautiful) is descriptive if used as an adjective to express the response of the beholder to an object, or if used within a clear context; if used as an abstract noun it is universal, and therefore meaningless.

A significant difference between contemporary art and traditional art is the split between form and meaning. This Cartesian duality is the split between mind and body, subject and form. The split is in all the various forms and styles and substance and meaning, of the respective art forms. In architecture contemporary buildings look like objects they are not which is why they are given comic nicknames - The Gerkhin, The Cheese Grater, or Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral, The Mersey Funnel. The form is not related to function - the interior of a modern cathedral could be anywhere.


Traditional art develops within traditional forms and it develops the forms. In his Christian paintings of the fifties Dali adapted forms to his individual vision but they are recognisably traditional forms. Dali was a genius - contemporary artists are not. They need to shock to get recognition. Real Art grows out of tradition and provides sustenance, spiritual or worldly, for people rather than negative emotions like shock or offence that are harmful.

To Marcel Duchamp it was enough for an artist to deem something "art" and put it in an art venue. But it does not matter where you stick a urinal it is always a urinal with a specific non-artistic purpose. To say something becomes art because you put it in a gallery is very muddled thinking. I had an experience in the Ikon gallery in Birmingham where the only objects with artistic qualities are the water closets and washroom taps which had pleasing curves and smooth surfaces. But they are not art: they are objects for specific non artistic purposes.

It is not the context of underpasses that makes or unmakes street artist Banksy's work art or otherwise: it does not have artistic subject matter and is just technique. Artistic subject matter is realised through qualities of artifice and held together by purpose which concentrates the artifice and technique to the goal of producing art.


George Dickie and Arthur Danto held that works of art are objects connected to various social practices. This depends on beauty as some objects like the taps or a motor car can be beautiful but because they have non-artistic functions are not art whereas a painting is. To Dickie art is about being self-assigned but you can put a car anywhere, it is always a car and its function is different from a work of art even if it is beautifully designed. When Artists begin to create they have a purpose and an artistic end in mind and to bring this into being they use appropriate technique. They do not take into account aerodynamics, say, or how fast water pours out or precisely where its trajectory will take it as these are not part of the artistic purpose. They are to engineers and designers of those objects.

This is the institutional theory of art which is a theory about the nature of art that holds that an object can only be art in the context of "the artworld". Whatever an artworld is.
Danto wrote in:The Artworld: "To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry-an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an art world." That has nothing to do with the work itself but where it is. Art is practice not theory.

Nothing can make Duchamps "readymades" art because they were made for a specific non-artistic purpose. Theory does not change a pile of Brillo cartons in a supermarket into art, yet Danto thought if it was put in a gallery a substantive transformation took place. Andy Warhol's pretentious Brillo Boxes (a pile of Brillo carton, replicas actually, so they are doubly pretentious) are a pile of Brillo boxes wherever they are put.

Dickie's institutional theory can be assessed from the definition in Aesthetics: An Introduction: "A work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artifact 2) upon which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation." On the contrary, what makes something art is the intention of producing art through artifice and technique successfully realised.

Tracey Emin and Damian Hirst have declared works to be art because they say so. They were promoted and financed by Saatchi who first declared their works art but he is not an artist. It is critics and elite art buyers who decide what is art and usually because of its commercial value but that is external to the work, not intrinsic. They are right about the commercial value of objects but not about its classification as art because designating something as art because it has commercial value is to apply external or non intrinsic criteria as the standard of judgement. Some people are supposed to think they are Napoleon or royalty but does that make them so?

This takes us back to Duchamps folly. This argument is that because he placed it in a gallery it became art. To say something like Damian Hirst's pickled shark is important is pretentious. It is supposed to make us think but by taking the shark out of context (the sea) it is rendered meaningless because it is deprived of its being which is its life, and its function to swim and hunt. It habitat and how it lives in are essential not extraneous. A graffito by Banksy is not it is added to the environment not part of it.

Picasso: "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs." Well, he has dismissed proportion but that is only one part of the whole.

Splodgeness Abounds

Commercial galleries need to appeal to a buying public and be more popular than avante garde painters yet they follow the fad of impressionistic landscapes that lose their meaning by technique over imaginative vision: the scene is obscured by splodges of paint! This obtrudes between the scene depicted and the viewer and causes a disjuncture in the meaning. This is technique over intuition; skill over the knack. By contrast the camera can elevate the knack over technique as one makes an artistic judgement on what to photograph. It gives a clear reproduction of the scene not splodgy brush strokes that could be anything from a cloud or wave or a sunbeam to just a slip of the brush. These smears festoon every commercial art gallery in the country. This effect is demonstrated by comparing these with photographs of the same scenes.

Public Art

Fills our ordinary lives with meaning and provides different feelings as they have different purposes.

Trying to shock people is petty and there are many more responses. To shock is a means to the end of making themselves rich because the elites reward these attacks on our Art. It is as though they have a brief to undermine our artistic traditions. They have minor imaginations which cause only one response whereas a work by a major artist like Dali prompts several emotional responses.

A Liverpool pub, The Jacaranda, has a mural in the downstairs bar which John Lennon had a hand in painting when he was an art student, and this creates fascination and joy at the thought of someone so famous being part of it. The painting is well executed but not devoted to a high purpose, but conveys feelings because we know who was involved.

The Peter Kavanagh, also in Liverpool, has a delightful mural based on Dickens characters in the snug-bar. The story is that an artist who was a regular customer in the 1930s could not afford to pay for drinks on account, so he painted the mural. It produces delight and merriment, adds to the pubs character and raises it above the ordinary. ]


Statues are stylised and used to convey various human qualities. Military heroes say, were shown in proud and honourable poses that suggested authority, fortitude, steadfastness such as Lord Nelson's famous column in Trafalgar Square. They were cast in forms that conveyed meaning but contemporary public art fails in that elementary intention as the meaning is disjunctured.

I spent a few days in Shrewsbury recently. It has honoured its famous local Charles Darwin by "public art". But does it succeed in its purpose? One known as Quantum Leap is dissociated meaning as the form is not directly linked to the subject so there is no representation. The title Quantum Leap actually refers to something in physics not evolutionary biology which was Darwin's study. It is probably the contemporary informal term for making a major leap forward but applied to something celebrating Darwin confuses rather than elucidates. These contemporary artefacts arouse no curiosity and one does not feel inclined to enquire about them. They cannot be taken seriously as there is no spirit of genius behind them; rather, a commercial motive which are part of contemporary popular fashion and do not gain gravity from tradition. Quantum Leap looks like an armadillo crossed with a pack of cards and seems to be influenced by popular film Jurrasic Park rather than Darwin.


The Darwin Gate is three separate structures which unite to create an apparently solid structure. What does it mean? How does the form convey the meaning? The sculpture apparently combines the form of a Saxon helmet with a Norman window inspired by features of St Mary's Church which Darwin attended as a boy. They claim that as darkness descends defused light shines through the columns suggesting stained glass windows with the tops of the posts resemble ecclesiastical arches. When it unites it resembles the shape of a church window. However, there is no connection with Darwin and the transmission of meaning to the public is split. It is called The Eggbeater.

 
Even ordinary works can, if in surprising places, prompt a myriad of responses. The Nags Head in Shrewsbury, has an unusual and painting with an obscure origin. It has an unusual context in being on the inside door of a cupboard in a room above the pub. There is a strange atmosphere up there, where the temperature can plummet in seconds. Some think the painting depicts Neptune, others, the Devil. It is thought to be by a prisoner of war during World War II but staff at the local Rowley's House Museum purvey only a mystic tale but no accurate record. One told me it is of a woman who committed suicide by jumping from an upstairs window. In this legend it is said that the female figure will return if painted over. The painting is not of a woman but there is an ambiguity as the figure has feminine legs which are disproportionately long and thick, and a short body. This painting prompts wonder, amusement, mystification, delight.

Rowley's House museum holds the excellent Morning View of Coalbrookdale by William Williamse. (3) An important function of both painting and photography is to reflection a way of life or, as in this case, a defining historical era. There is too little representation of ways of life in contemporary art and fiction and people need this affirmation of themselves. These engaging paintings convey a powerful impression of the impact of early industrialisation on a still natural landscape. There are many forms of art which convey something important to people and prompt a variety of responses. Shock is just one: it is negative and it is unimportant.

Saint Alkmunds church in Shrewsbury, has a beautiful and moving stained glass in the east window. This is The Assumption of the Virgin Mary by Francis Egington. In this the Virgin Mary at the end of her journey through life and about to ascend to heaven. She is standing on the firm ground of the cross; with the Bible as the word of god for guidance and the sacraments represented by the chalice. The struggles of life are symbolised by thistles on the path. She is looking up in faith at the symbolic crown with her arms outstretched and open to heavenly influence as if she were asking and waiting to be uplifted back to her home in heaven. These were developments by Egington the artist who based the work on The Assumption of Saint Mary by Guido Remi of 1638 which is a more conventional Assumption painting and has Mary being lifted by Cherubim.

As you enter the church you are transfixed and walk towards it in awe looking up. It immediately begins to form an emotional response and the feeling of awe grows as you advance. This is not an intellectual proposition but a deep feeling of transcendent emotions.
 
This acts like great art, on a deep, unconscious level like an archetype. It opens the imagination transmitting holy or noble feelings in contrast to the degenerate contemporary art which spreads negative and evil thoughts. Old works have a quiet authority and the viewer pauses to contemplate it with respect, as when looking at old gravestones, to recreate the departed. It is a development of traditional form and links us with our roots.

The contemporary age is one of excess of technique. Jeff Robb, who has a permanent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert, uses a method of lenticular sheets which are only sold by one firm which is in Switzerland. This is very clever and often fascinating but the subject matter is ordinary - nudes. His art is the cleverness of what he does with the subject but he does not transform the actual subject. Jeff needs specific equipment and ink cartridges to produce his results. Technique is important but should be guided by the vision not for its own sake or it is empty form.

The qualities that qualify a work as art are intrinsic to art in general but Art with a capital "A" has an elevated, sublime, purpose and is only realised by a high quality of conception and execution. A visual object or experience created through an expression of skill or imagination. The term art covers various media: painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, decorative arts, photography, and installation. The various visual arts exist within a continuum that ranges from prompting deep feeling or transcendent emotion and great skill to reproducing figures or landscape which have a mood and also prompt thought or feelings.

Kimbolton School has murals by Pellegrini. They give a sense of grandeur and seriousness and create a suitable frame of mind for study.
 
 The modern understanding of art derived from Abbe Batteux in the 1740s who regarded the essence as an "imitation of nature" and, principally, that it caused pleasure. They cause various mental states in the beholder. He defined these mental states as pleasure and the experience of beauty. Prior to this, individual modes of art were attached to various sciences like Music to Mathmatics but this is the skill not the purpose. Kant promoted a universal criteria to decide if something was Art. He used a geometric idea of patterns of shapes and lines. In The Critique of Judgement he developed the notion of beauty as the cause of the the mental state. The problem is beauty is so abstract as to mean something different to everyone, though it is a word that describes the individual appreciation of something very pleasing.

English philosopher Michael Oakeshott described two sorts of knowledge:

"The first sort of knowledge I will call technical knowledge or knowledge of technique. In every art and science, and in every practical activity, a technique is involved. In many activities this practical knowledge is formulated into rules which are, or may be, deliberately learned, remembered, and, as we say, put into practice; but whether or not it is, or has been, precisely formulated, its chief characteristic is that it is susceptible of precise formulation, although special skill and insight.

The second sort of knowledge I will call practical, because it exists only in use, is not reflective and (unlike technique) can not be formulated in rules... "
In art, this equates to the distinction between natural talent or genius and the skill and technique which realises the vision and meaning. Soccer players show a high degree of skill and to great players it is natural but developed by coaching and practice, but there is no high purpose involved.

Technique or genius; skill or a knack

There is a phenomenon in English art: a seven year-old Kieron Williamson. He has an indefinable knack that is called genius. This is artistic judgement in the practice of painting when one knows instinctively what to put and where. He has natural qualities: perspective, choice of colours. He has them automatically but perspective is a technique for realising the vision and choice of colours is part of the expression of the vision.

This knack is the artistic judgement. It is a non rational process - it is intuition or instinct and it is this that technique realises. In Kieron's case it was triggered by the Devon and Cornwall landscape and "sprung full-born into life" like Athena from Zeus's head. It was instantly realised, not slowly educed. (2)

To clarify the working of the two functions of form and content, technique and vision we have a fine example from music. Music was suffering the same culture war as painting and was dominated by atonal styles and was saved from an unexpected quarter. It was a paradox:

What we know as the culture wars and political correctness could not have made progress if it had not been adopted by the popular musicians of the 1960s. The words to The Beatles hit Get Back were developed from a spoof of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech. Paul McCartney later turned into a more conventional rock song.

McCartney and John Lennon wrote melodies and through harmony revived tonal music. Atonalists were destroying traditional classical music as composers Schoenburg and Stockhausen did with water gurgling down a drain noises. The Beatles natural musical genius was realised through the technique of producer George Martin: The Beatles were raw talent, Martin supplied the form.

McCartney and Lennon upported the New Left and McCartney had a single banned by the BBC for apparently supporting the IRA ; Lennon was figurehead of the New Left-Politically Correct movement and his records like the album "Sometime in New York City" promoted it. He donated to The Black Panthers and The IRA.

Atonal composers disdained their audiences as Bourgoise but Lennon and McCartney brought them together. Martin's skill at realising their meaning added to the whole and triumphed over the split between form and meaning in contemporary music.

Martin wrote the orchestral arrangements and instrumentation in collaboration with them. It was Martin's idea to put a string quartet on "Yesterday". To demonstrate his point he played it in the style of Bach to show what "voicings" could be used. To realise "Penny Lane" McCartney hummed the melody, and Martin wrote it in music notation and David Mason, the classically trained trumpeter played it in a piccolo trumpet solo. Eleanor Rigby was heightened by Martin's strings-only accompaniment inspired by Bernard Hermann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho.

For "Strawberry Fields Forever", Martin combined two different takes into one. For I Am the Walrus he provided an original arrangement for brass, violins, cellos, and vocal ensemble. He worked closely with McCartney to develop the orchestral 'climax' in A Day In the Life.

The Artistic Subject

When he became a Christian, Salvador Dali found an artistic subject and the inherent spirtuality of the subject gave him a fuller, more elevated vision and he painted the masterpieces of the twentieth century. He was a skilled draftsman who developed his skills of realisation by studying Renaissance masters. Much criticism of Dali was because he supported General Franco rather than the Marxism of the orthodox Surrealists and art critics. They were ideologues and like all ideologues expected their members to conform to the manifesto or have their thinking corrected. Breton banned Dali from The Surrealist movement in 1941 and tried to ban his "Sistine Madonna" from the International Surrealism Exhibition in New York in 1960. It is said that Breton a Trotskyist, called Dalí in for questioning on his politics as his political allegiances had changed. After World War II, Dalí became close to General Franc's movement and issued statements of support. He congratulated Franco for his actions aimed "at clearing Spain of destructive forces" met him personally and painted a portrait of his granddaughter.

His fascination with the hypercube a four-dimensional cube and unfolding of a hypercube is featured in "Corpus Hypercubus" which changes the traditional form but it is still recognisable and we know what it represents. His "Last Supper" and "The Christ of St. John of the Cross" are the masterpieces of the twentieth century. This brings us to the essence of great Art: genius and inspiration.

Contemporary painters and makers of installations show contempt for the audience and do not work for the public good. They seek a response but it is a negative response. They are not geniuses and have to shock to get noticed. In fact they are not really artists - but purveyors of clever tricks without deep meaning. Art is communication but contemporary art fails to communicate because of a disjuncture between subject and beholder, form and purpose.

The indefinable knack is intuitive practice called genius. This is artistic judgement in the practice of painting when one just knows instinctively what to put or where. This knack is the artistic eye, artistic judgement and it is a non rational process - it is intuition or instinct and it is this that trained and developed technique realises."
John Dryden captures it :"But genius must be born, and never can be taught." It is the technique that is taught not the genius, which is inborn, as the qualities that make a work art are intrinsic to the work, not external nor contingent on where the work is put.

The difference between nature and art is this. When I point my camera at something that pleases me I first use artistic judgement but I record natural phenomena. If I take a sunset it is reproducing nature and is not art but nature. However, if I then use the zoom function, it has the effect of condensing the distance and thereby magnifying the gold or red which is moving from nature to art because it is introducing a technique to change the reproduction of the natural phenomena and make an artistic end. I recently took several photos of a sunrise in Penzance Bay in Cornwall and sunset at Brighton. There is little technique involved and as long as you point the camera at the right thing you are away. The camera is recording natural phenomena but a meaning is conveyed from photographer to viewer as the scene automatically conveys certain emotions to the viewer. In the above examples it is natural beauty. When you look at a photograph of a landscape a chain of thought is triggered which moves from the inherent emotional state conveyed to personal and often unconscious thoughts and feelings.

A similar process occurs in art as the idea or a scene is transformed through human imagination and emotion till it becomes a work of art: transformed reality.

---

Islam and Racism


By Mike Wilson


Islam and racism, the two words that sum up the decline of western societies. The Christian ethos that the meek shall inherit the earth is bringing about the biggest change in Western society that not even two world wars could achieve. The meek won’t inherit the earth, they will simply be subservient to the powerful forces that gave them the lie. Nature does not let the weak survive in favour of the strong so why do we think that nature has other plans for people with ethics and moral values?

Christian morality is at the heart of this decline of Western civilization. We have been so busy turning the other cheek that we did not realize that our pockets were being picked and our lands taken over by those we sought to forgive.

Nature does not forgive and epitomizes the fact that might is right and that the weak perish and disappear. Strength to survive is what nature understands and without being able to protect oneself then we are left vulnerable to those who are determined to take what is ours by force or by subterfuge. In the case of Britain the population has become so brainwashed by those seeking our downfall that we allow stupidity to govern our daily actions rather than to oppose these laws and fight to take back what was once a great and prosperous country.

To have to put up with the endless waves of immigrants from Africa or the Middle East who demand housing and jobs and support all at the expense of the British people is just breathtaking yet we accept it because we have been brainwashed into agreeing that the meek shall inherit our earth, not theirs. For a white Western country to be held to ransom by Islamist racists who are intent on converting us to their way of life is an indication of the extent to which we have sunk because we have done so without attempting to fight back. We have allowed ourselves to be subjugated by laws dictated by foreign interests with no regard or thought to what the average Briton thinks only that we will do as we are told by outside interests who are only intent on taking over our country. The establishment (and who can forget Andrew Marr’s comments, former head of the BBC) has quietly converted the mechanisms of government to do their own bidding and by that I mean the police as well as the politicians, local governments and the main stream media.

To complain about mass immigration is to be called racist in one’s own country and to see events changing our world and being able to do nothing about it is an obscenity. It is both degrading and disgusting yet we still allow speed breeders to demand access to housing and government support when less than the smallest percentile have any plans to do something to help our economy. They would rather just breed themselves into a situation where they don’t have to work. For a race that has a supposed IQ of around 70 they have worked out very well just how to get the best out of life at our expense.

To accept Islam into Britain is akin to turning the other cheek but to reject Islam is to fight back. To accept calls of racism and racial hatred laws is only justified if the white Anglo Saxon is the one doing the calling and not some rainbow coloured free loader. Racism will only be a hate crime whilst it is aimed at the white population so by not accepting it we fight back. Whilst the establishment is busy integrating all manner of foreigners into this country we should be reminding them that this country is British, we are not Islamists nor are we racists but most of us are pure Anglo Saxon White Protestants who dislike these changes and want our country back.

What matters now is what we can do about it and how we do it. By tacitly accepting the overriding laws brought in by the EU and their cronies and our politicians just pandering to these foreign states we are getting closer to the situation becoming irreversible. Since 2009 when the EU laws took precedence over British ones and we became a satellite state of the EU we have been changed dramatically to a subservient state thought by most to be totally vanquished. We don’t have to be but it is up to us not to just accept what has been done to us but to oppose it and take back what is ours. Reject the so called democratic government in favour of British patriots who refuse to accept the rules of foreign governments. Raise awareness of the basic problems affecting us and demand that we become free and independent once more.

-/-

Friday 20 April 2012

Three in a Bed


I may be missing something here, but can someone please explain how two me can be in bed together, having sex with the same drunken woman at the same time, yet only one of them, the white one, is guilty of rape

Wednesday 18 April 2012

The double standard of the left


The BBC have finally been forced to admit that the clenched fist salute, which Norwegian mass murdered Anders Behring Breivik has been making at the beginning of each day of his trial, is not “a far right salute” as the media have so far been insisting, but is in fact one which is more usually favoured by left wing extremists. A gesture, at its most iconic when made by Nelson and Winnie Mandela in front of the world media on the day Nelson was released from prison in 1990, or by black athletes as a sign of “black power” at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

I can only imagine the BBC have been shamed into making this admission by those who have pointed out how misleading earlier reports about the salute had been.

ANC Supporters making what Channel 4 News reader Jon Snow called "salutes to the far right"

A particularly shameful example of the previous day's attempts to mislead the public was that of Channel Four News's superannuated anchorman Jon Snow, who has been around long enough and supported enough dodgy left wing causes to know full well that Breivik's gesture was not the “salute to the far right” which he chose to describe it as in Monday night.

It was left to another Jon, this time Jon Kelly of the BBC, to come clean out the nature and history of the clenched fist salute, its heavily socialist origins and its symbolism within those causes which the left have championed over the years.

Of course, in his article the obedient Mr Kelly attempts to distance his treasured causes from the acts of Anders Breivik by saying that the clenched fist salute “has a long history as a symbol of defiance and solidarity, commonly associated with both left-wing politics as well as the struggles of oppressed groups - most of them far removed from the politics expressed by Breivik”       

Au contraire Mr. Kelly, au contraire, in fact the politics of Anders Breivik bear very strong parallels with the struggles of oppressed groups whom the left have, selectively, championed.  However, the left wing media refuse to acknowledge that, just as they have always refused to acknowledge the “wrong victims” such as the Kulaks in the Soviet Union during the 1930s the Khmer Rouge's victims in the 1970 or the Coptic Christians and Afrikaner farmers of today. They will not acknowledge it because, once again the left is on the side of the oppressors, and Anders Behring Breivik belongs to a group they, the left, wish to see oppressed.

There is actually nothing very unique about Breivik's crime, it is only within the attitude of the left that that we see a contrast.


History is full of such events. On the 22 July 1946 (65 years to the exact day before Breivik committed his act of terrorism) the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed, killing 91 people and injuring another 46, this was an act of terror by the Zionist group Irgun against the British forces which were then in charge of Palestine, and it was one of the main factors which led to the setting up of the state of Israel two years later.  The leader of Irgun at the time, and primarily involved in planning the atrocity was Menachem Begin, who went on to become the sixth Prime Minister of Israil, and in 1979 he received the Nobel peace prize.

On the 26th of March 1953, in what was then Colonial Kenya a group of Mau Mau terrorists (or freedom fighters depending on your perspective) attacked the peaceful village of Lari in the Kenyan uplands and hacked to death pro-British Chief Luka and 97 Kikuyu loyalists, mostly women and children.
 Statue of retired terrorist Jomo Kenyatta

Although the Mau Mau were technically defeated, the bloodshed in Kenya was one of the main factors leading to the end of the British Empire and Kenyan independance. Mau Mau leader Jomo Kenyatta was made Independent Kenya's first prime minister and the country even changed the pronunciation of its name in his honour.  Kenyatta went on to become one of Africa's most internationally celebrated leaders, as  is usual with retired African freedom fighters, fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.
  
 Church Street, Pretoria 1983

Three decades later, the bombing of Church Street in the South African capital of Pretoria took place on the 20th of May 1983, although it only killed 19 people it injured 217, many of whom left horrifically maimed for life.  The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified two of the heroes of the anti-Apartheid struggle Oliver Tambo and Joe Slovo as being primarily responsible for the bombing, however, in his autobiography “The long walk to Freedom” Nelson Mandela, who although in prison at the time, remained the head of the African National Congress (ANC) freely admits that he knew of the planned bombing in advance and “signed it off”.    

The names of Tambo and Slovo are spoken by the left with the reverence they reserve for socialist heros who fought against oppression, whereas retired South African president Mandela is one of the most celebrated figures on the planet, a globally acknowledged saint, god like media icon, and another Nobel Peace Trinket recipient. Whilst, modest by the standard of retired African leaders, Mandela struggles by on a conservatively estimated net worth of $15 million.

The beatified Nelson Mandela with his equally blood stained wife

Many will recoil at these comparisons, especially to the beatified Mandela.

However, cold blooded mass murder is still cold blooded mass murder whatever the politics behind it. 

The left may have fallen out of love with Israel, but likes of Mandela, the Mau Mau, Castro and Che Guevara, all of them mass serial killers, are praised and celebrated by the left because they are viewed as fighting for “their people” against regimes which were, in the view of the left, oppressing “their people”.

That, of course, is exactly how Breivik views his own actions, in fact Breivik goes further, he does not only consider the Norwegian government to be oppressing his people, he believes the government is actively engaged in a deliberate act of genocide against his people.

Had Breivik committed his crime on another continent, or had his skin been a different shade, can anyone doubt that the left would already be excusing his actions and some already calling him a hero.

As it happen, I share Breivik's assessment of the Norwegian government, although, I do not believe they are the worst, the Swedish, French, American, and I am afraid, British governments are all far further down the road to disinheriting and eradicating their own people than are the Norwegians.

However, Breivik is a Norwegian, and he is right to care first about Norway, he is also right when he claims that most western governments are guilty of acts of genocide against their own people, and he has correctly identified multiculturalism as the vehicle of that genocide.

Where he is terribly, terribly wrong however is in believing cold blooded premeditated murder, particularly of children, is the solution or is an act can ever be justified.  Only in the minds of the left wing can a massacre such as he committed ever be forgiven.

In the same way that I entirely condemn the bombing of the of the King David Hotel, the bloody slaughter of Lari village, and the evil carnage of Church Street Pretoria,  I also, with equal vigour, condemn and reject the monstrous acts committed by Anders Behring Breivik on 22 July 2011.

The left however, is far less unequivocal in it's condemnation of mass murder. They rightly condemn Breivik for his blood stained and vile act. Yet they cherish and praise equally bloody and vile acts when they are committed against their enemies and by their friends. Their hypocrisy and their dishonesty would be stunning had we not become so accustomed to it.

In his clenched fist salute the Norwegian monster embraced the gesture of the left, in the same way that in his ghastly act he embraced the methods of the left.  In his terrible crime he chose a solution and a means which has been historically celebrated by the left.

Anders Behring Breivik may have seen what we see, he may have cried for his homeland as we cry and he may have identified the same cause and the same guilty men as we have. Yet when he embarked on his evil work he became their creature, a creature of the left. The left may not want him, but when he chose their path he became one of theirs, he is not one of ours.   
  

"Men of Good Character"?!

An interesting report on Simon Darby's site about the support being provided to some of the accused in the Rochdale child rape trial currently taking place at Liverpool Crown Court.

 

Monday 16 April 2012

Communist salute

He gives a communist salute and the lying media call in a "right wing salute" or "a clenched fist fascist salute" - they are incapable of telling the truth.





The Sovietising of the West



By Sarah Maid of Albion

Bernard Hogan-Howe the newly appointed state apparatchik in charge of the London Metropolitan police assures us that “racists” will be “driven out of the police”, whilst revealing that 10 officers are currently under investigation of suspicion of the most heinous thought crime of our age.

Last week, writing in the London Evening Standard, former deputy editor of the Independent and sometime speech writer for Prime Minister David Cameron, Ian Birrell snarled that racist policemen should be “rooted out”, “prosecuted” and “lose their precious pensions”.  Indeed Mr Birrell addressed his subject which such furious, staring eyed, zealotry, that one suspects only fear of exposure prevented him from adding that they should then be transported to some gulag in a remote part of Wales or the Scottish highlands for forced re-education and recreational rock breaking.

Meanwhile a young man still languishes in prison for the offence of sending an ideologically incorrect tweet, whilst the one time captain of the England soccer team, John Terry, awaits prosecution for allegedly calling a black footballer black, Terry has already been stripped of his captaincy, showing when it comes to “racism” an accusation alone is deemed grounds for punishment, whether guilty or not.  

Elsewhere, a young mother is on bail after some informer turned her in via the internet when he expressed an objection to the forced invasion of her homeland.

We are regaled with shocking accounts of racially insensitive words, thoughts and deeds. Nightly ernest young reporters appear on our televisions, usually standing outside courts, police stations or football fields reporting on some politically incorrect quip as if it were equivalent to the napalm  bombing of a hospice.   (Which they probably think it is equivalent to)

Across the Atlantic in America, news channels such as CNN, or “we are Treyvon” as they have probably re-branded themselves by now, have taken to reporting an almost Lewis Carroll style alternative reality where a man’s colour and ethnicity can be changed at the will of a metanarrative (For example Hispanics and Cherokee Indians can suddenly morph into evil white men just to suit an agenda). Meanwhile alleged victims are transformed into angelic twelve year old versions of themselves. All this parallel universe chicanery is performed in an effort to “root out” the very same legendary (white) racist who are being hunted down by Commissioner Hogan-Howe and Ian Birrell over here.

At the same time hugely popular writers and commentators such Pat Buchanan or John Derbyshire who dare to speak truths which must not be spoken are summarily dismissed, pilloried and their livelihoods destroyed.

Of course, we have seen this all before in other times and in other places, where ideological offenders and thought criminals were subjected to show trials and highly publicised prosecutions, then they were called enemies of the state now they are held up as evil, hate fuelled enemies of the multicultural fantasy which has become the obsession of the state. 

Now as then thought criminals must be purged from our institutions and positions of trust, broken, punished and forced to confess and beg a forgiveness, which is seldom if ever granted  

Now as then victims are judged to be offenders and punished for the crimes committed against them. Now, just like then, fake realities are created to act both as parables of the new religion and as truncheons with which the state can batter its terrorised population into acquiescence.

Just as then we are required to pay lip service to an orthodoxy which we do not agree with, which frightens us and which we know to be flawed, and only dare speak our true thoughts to our most trusted friends in hushed tones, and in private.

As happened then, abject failures held together only by state terrorism are presented by an obedient and craven state media as glorious successes, which fool only those who wish to be fooled, but which few, if any, dare challenge.

What we are seeing, in effect is the Sovietisation of the West.

The Sovietisation of the United Kingdom was the subject with Dr Frank Ellis, then a lecturer at Leeds University, before the university attempted but failed to purge him for expressing his disobedient views, addressed in 2001 following the release of that most Stalinist and  Orwellian of documents The Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

In his outstanding analysis of the report, Frank Ellis exposed the agenda driven fanaticism and false reality which influenced the Macpherson inquiry and its recommendations. and detailed how its purported attempts to combat racism were in reality an outright, and so far successful, attack the existing British society, its native people and our culture.

As Frank Ellis says: “The near unanimous acceptance of its [the report's] assumptions and conclusions by the Labour government represents a major victory for those who are striving to undermine long-established British institutions and accomplish the final destruction of the United Kingdom “

When explaining the process of Sovietisation of which the Macpherson report is part, Dr Ellis describes the fate of the Kulaks, the middle class Russian peasants who Stalin sought to exterminate, and who, as a result, died in their millions.  On reading this I then suggested that we the white race were being set up as the Kulaks of the 21st Century, and Frank told me that Jared Taylor of American Renaissance had also reached that exact same conclusion.

I leave it to you to make your own assessment.

Now eleven years on, it is striking quite how relevant Frank’s analysis of the Macpherson report remains today , and how many of Frank’s predictions have come to pass.  Frank’s review of this poisonous document is a very important and valuable resource, which I urge you all to reread and which I hope Nationalist bloggers will link to.

Because of this I have given it pride of place as the first article I have added to a new site which I have set up for Frank’s writings, which can be visited by clicking on the link below:

 

Thursday 12 April 2012

South African Farm Murders Continue


Various reports I have seen indicate that there have been a total of eight farm murders in South Africa since the 1st of April, however, I have only been able to identify five of those killing, four of which I have reported on previously, those being the killing of  68 year old At van der Merwe on April 3rd and that of the Steenkamp family on Good Friday.  I have now also received details of a further murder which is detailed below.

If anyone had any additional details please write to me at sarahmaidofalbion@gmail.com.

On the subject of farm murders, I am aware that there has been some speculation that the killing of the Steenkamp family may not fall within the category of genocide related farm murder.  This speculation is largely based on the fact that the media, which usually attempts to downplay details of farm killings has been prominently reporting the Steenkamp killing, suggesting they are desperately hoping it will turn out to be a domestic murder.  However, as the police have confirmed that they are not looking at family members as suspects, I will continue to record this as a farm killing, but will amend my figures if this changes.

The latest South African farm killing I have been notified of is of 64 year old Charlotte Sroneman at her farm near George in the southern cape last Sunday.  It is believed that an intruder gained access to the house at around 2:00 am and disturbed Mrs.Stoneman, who went to investigate.  When she confronted the intruder she was stabbed in the chest.

The commotion woke Mrs Stoneman’s husband, who'd also been sleeping, and he took his firearm before going to investigate what was going on in the dining room.

A fight ensued with the intruder and he was also stabbed. He, however, managed to fire several shots, wounding the intruder.  
   
Charlotte Stoneman was declared dead at the scene and Mr. Stoneman was taken to hospital in a serious condition.

A 16 year old youth  has been arrested

Somewhat stomach churningly, the media has dubbed the killing “a failed farm robbery”, whereas it is actually a successful farm murder.  However, as in the rest of the west, news reporting in South Africa continues to be a mixture of denial and deliberate distortion.

In a separate farm attack a farmer survived albeit with serious injuries:

Free State farmer Christo Janse van Rensburg (36) sustained second- and third-degree burns when two men threw a petrol-bomb through the open window of his truck as he arrived home around 10pm on Tuesday.

Van Rensburg's wife Connie told the newspaper that when her husband jumped out of his car and rolled on the ground, his assailants attacked him with a metal pipe and tried to force him back into the burning vehicle.

When this failed, they tried to stab him, then poured more petrol over him and set him alight.

Van Rensburg stripped and ran 200 metres to his farmhouse for help.

"My husband fought very hard. When I heard him screaming, I switched the lights on and the attackers must have taken fright, because they fled," said Mrs van Rensburg.

The victim is currently recovering in  Vereeniging clinic

Of course, Farm attacks are only a small part of what is happening in the rainbow nation, it is estimated that as many as 40,000 whites have been murdered since the end of Apartheid, in one of the latest cases a 74 year old grandmother was slaughtered when she unwisely performed an act of charity

Ria Coetzee’s body was found by her husband, Fanie, a manager at the Margate Sands Hotel, when he arrived back from work on Thursday night.

She had been tied up and strangled with a scarf.

Apparently the elderly lady had answered the door to two men who asked for a glass of water, when she went to get the water they attacked her, tied her up and then killed her.

________________________
Hat Tip: Dina, Jenny and Janse

Re-Conquista - the Death of Catalonia

 
The European country with the highest level of youth Unemployment, which hit over 50% earlier this year is Spain, a country with levels of debt which is currently giving European leaders nightmares.  Of Spans various semi autonomous regions Catalonia in one of the worst states having its debt rating lowered  by Fitch only last September.

The plight of Spain, and in particular Catalonia , may provide an answer as to why the West is now in such a terrible state.

Please click here to watch the re-conquesta of Catalonia at The Death of the Grown Up.  Warning you will find  the video depressing, but it is one you need to watch.

_______________________
Related: Only last August the government of Catalonia banned local protests against the Islamic invasion.

Tuesday 10 April 2012

The Corrosion of Modern Drama



----------
In 2009 Ben Stephenson, the controller of BBC drama commissioning, said that the corporation should encourage "peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking."

Yet, according to its own royal charter, the BBC must "be independent in all matters concerning the content of its output". To show how we got to this undemocratic, totalitarian state I give a survey of the war on our culture and history carried on against us in our theatres for over thirty years.

They were a major phalange in the destruction of our drama in The Culture War through nihilist and then subversive drama. Their technical abilities are excellent and their facility for embodying nihilism and ideology into dramatic form exemplary. An aspiring young playwright would do well to study their use of styles and genres to explicate their message. Their works were frequently televised, films were made of them and they were performed in many countries especially on Broadway.

The Labour Government that came to power after 1945 did not bring The New Jerusalem as expected; the universities had been opened-up to grammar school pupils, not just public school products. These were the followers of the New Left and the new culture of the time. It was the era of CND opposition to Nuclear Bombs.

Disintegrating Worlds

Look Back in Anger is “Kitchen Sink” drama and and in 1956 provided a focus for disillusionment and frustration, for the rebelliousness of a generation that felt lost and betrayed after the certainties of the past. The emotional tirades of Jimmy Porter, the central character, against the drabness and smugness of the class system woke people up like a breaking window. The audiences were used to genteel, quaint, drawing-room dramas and the deeper but quiet dramas of Terrence Rattigan.
In Jimmy's tirade near the end the nostalgia, resentment and aimlessness are expressed:

“I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us in the 30s and 40s, when we were still kids. There aren't any any brave good causes left. If the big-bang does come, and we all get killed off , it won't be in aid of the good old fashioned grand design, it will just be for the brave new nothing-very much- thank you, about as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.”

Osborne's dissatisfaction is an individualist reaction against the consumer society and nostalgia for a lost past rather than political. Many of his later plays were studies of individuals or groups not comfortable in the world they were in because of a sense of betrayal of moral and aesthetic standards in a culture being over run by the mass produced and the second-rate.

Inadmissible Evidence (1964) offers a powerful depiction of one going through a crisis of confidence which stands for the crisis of the country as a whole as it sinks into a pit of mediocrity and hopelessness. Bill Maitland, the central character is a solicitor. We have moved out of the squalid attics and bedsits of his early characters. He now set his plays around "Cocktail Cabinets”. In Hotel Amsterdam and “West of Suez” he dealt with affluent but spiritually empty characters like writers, journalists, politicians, actors, media types, no longer the disaffected.

Harold Pinter(1930) arrived in the 1950s with his “ Drama of Menace”. He had been associated with Samuel Beckett and The Theatre of the Absurd and his method resembles theirs. He did many studies of human disintegration. Before the plays he had written a novel The Dwarves which was later published and his 1963 play of the same name is derived from it. It follows Len through a mental breakdown and retreat into madness. Pinter has used this theme of the mind's retreat into its own kingdom as an escape from the unbearable demands of the world several times. There are “Beth” in Landscape(1967) and Kate in Old Times(1970). Women who insulate themselves from reality in a sort of dream scape.

Pinter's characters usually give unreliable versions of their pasts from Stanely's account of the concert he gave at Lower Edmonton in The Birthday Party(1958) to Ruth's memories of her career as a photographic model in The Homecoming(1965). Whether they are fantasies or deliberate ploy to disconcert an opponent in a psychological game is never certain, but they are not believable recollections of the past.

In No Man's Land(1974) Hurst admits under pressure from the intruder Spooner that for him life has ceased: No Man's land does not move or change, or grow old, remains forever silent.” He is trapped in a frozen world. No Man's land is in some respects a re-working of The Caretaker. In both one occupies a space then comes an intruder to ingratiate himself, move into the space but finally gets rejected. The outsider is Spooner who tries to insinuate himself into a permanent place as secretary in the household of Hurst, the writer. Whereas in he earlier play, Aston, the mental defective, Davies, the tramp , are barely articulate, Hurst and Spooner are educated men. One is a writer and Spooner claims to be a poet only without Hurst's financial success.

In one scene Spooner tries to destroy Hurst's grasp of the past: by querying if he did have the wife he has been boasting of. In the following Scene Hurst produces a photograph album which he seems to offer as evidence against Spooner's attempt to deny him the past of his reminiscences or conceiving. Is he getting back at Spooner or reassuring himself?

“My true friends look out at me from my album.”

But he is unsure of the reality of the past. Pinter's characters often look back in that way, not in anger but in disillusionment. In a sense of being dislocated from a past where they once felt comfortable.
The typical Pinter battle between occupant and intruder is played on a higher level and is largely a claim to an authoritative version of the past: if you control the past you control the future, as Orwell put it.

In Betrayal(1978) Pinter succeeded in using the flashback technique, which he had begun to experiment with in “Old Times”, to scrutinise the mind's conscious and unconscious betrayals of reality. The play deals with the developing relationship between three people: Robert and Jerry have been close friends since their schooldays and Emma, wife of Robert and former mistress of Jerry. Pinter tells the story in a series of scenes moving backwards in time: there are nine scenes beginning in 1977 with meetings between Emma and Jerry and Jerry and Robert – two years after the adultery ended. We are taken back to a moment in the married couples bedroom in 1968, when the affair began. We are shown key episodes enacted after we have heard them discussed. With this technique for the first time in his work Pinter verifies the past. But does it accord with memories and conversations we see the characters have. We learn that there is a lot of deliberate deception which makes a dramatic event that is entwined with tricks of memory that the mind has no control over. They deliberately miss-remember and also involuntarily get the past wrong.

Many plays of the era expressed the retreat from the world tackled frequently by Osborne and Pinter; the individuals failure to cope with everyday life.

David Storey(1933) wrote of the futility of life. Storey was a painter and novelist as well as a playwright and wrote the screenplay for the British Social Realist film version of his play This Sporting Life(1960).

His first play: The Restoration of Arnold Middleton (1966) was on the breakdown of a schoolteacher Home(1970)is set in a mental hospital but the location is only revealed gradually as the story proceeds. There are five characters including apparently benign Harry, opinionated Jack, cynical Marjorie, and flirtatious Kathleen. As we are shown their interactions we realise their delusions and pretensions are similar to those of people living in normal life. This is a poignant evocation of the passing of a way of life - the subtext of most of these plays . In several of his works but more so here, Storey achieves an elegaic quality that has been compared to the mood of Chekov’s last plays. Home has little plot; it is the carrying through of a process of a dramatic image of growth and decay, rise and fall, advance and retreat. Two well-spoken, gentlemen, approaching old-age meet coarse working-class women and try to establish a relationship with them but fail. At the end they are alone again, back on the deserted terrace where we found them, weeping quietly together.

After uncertainty in the opening sequence the audience have realised that their talk of the weather and items from their newspapers is not the small talk of casual acquaintances, but the careful avoidance of subjects too painful to face by two inmates of another institution, a mental hospital, the Home of the title.

In Lifeclass.”(1974) exhibits the disintegration of a man “Allat”, an instructor at an evening class who lost of belief in the value of what he is imparting:

Phillips: Don't give up. That's the message that comes down to us from Rembrandt, Cezanne. From all that countless host that sank their existences in art.”

Allat: “ Don't you get the feeling at times that it is a substitute for living?”

The deeper levels of his despair are revealed when he compares the artefacts left in stone, bronze etc down the ages from the first painters on walls of caves, with the futility of human life “whirring in the void of the meaningless universe.” Storey was not an absurdist in technique like Beckett, Ionesco or early Pinter, but through a naturalistic style he describes a universe without meaning, an absurdity. Allat delivers a powerful evocation of a collapsing character: “

“ Whereas we elements of a work ourselves, partake of existence, simply by being what we are. Expressions of a certain time and place and class, defying hope, defying anguish, defying even definition. More substantial than reality, stranger than a dream, figures in a landscape. Scratching, scrapping, rubbing. All around us our rocky ball hurtling through time singing, to no one's tune at all.”
Early Days(1980) is about the slide into cunning senility of a politician whose life fell apart when he missed his chance to become PM. - the remainder of his life was spent in bitter reminiscing.

Peter Shaffer's (1926) Equus(1973), is about the vile crime of a boy blinding six horses by stabbing . The boy is sent to a child psychologist, Dr. Dysart, by his social worker.(6) Technically, the play is constructed like a detective story with a narrator who has his hat over his eyes and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth a la Humphrey Bogart. He is a professional psychologist but narrates how he goes about the mean streets. It uses the detective genre for the purpose.

Dysart slowly uncovers what made him like that. There was a tension between his fathers atheism and harsh application of discipline and his mother's religious fanaticism and over indulgence. There was an early erotic experience riding a horse on a beach on holiday as a boy; a sexual entanglement with a girl who worked at the local riding school. Dysart discovers that the boy lives in a secret world developed his own private religion and worships a god called Equus. He goes out secretly and holds rituals riding the horse and flagellating himself at night and having an orgasmic frenzy. The primitive psychic energy of this invented god fascinates the psychologist – the figment of a disturbed adolescent imagination.

Dysart's relationship with his wife has died, he has no belief in anything and this god comes to represent the vitality he lacks. Shaffer called this a study in “professional menopause.” Some regard this as an important play, others see the psychology as popular but it is a powerful experience when acted on stage. The film version failed because they used real horses but on stage they were played by actors in brown costumes, wire masks and standing on a couple of hooves which made it unreal and lessened the brutality.

The presence of these unreal horses by mime on stage gives. For example, there is a scene on stage where the girl is grooming them by mime. However, the intellectual content is more objectionable and corruptive than the theatrical content.

Alan Bennett’s(1934) Forty Years On(1968) is set in an English Public School, symbolically named Albion House. Bennett counterpoints the reminiscences of a retiring headmaster with an end of term play which his successor is putting on. It is a play that offers a view of 1960s England which is at odds with the old-fashioned values of the retiring headmaster. The final two speeches make explicit the allegory of a nation that has lost a world-wide Empire is looking for a role for itself. Guess where? in Europe! This was in 1968 when we joined the Common Market. These last two speeches give a funny and satiric but also sad and nostalgic flavour of a society going through change. The headmaster’s speech:

“Once we had a romantic and old-fashioned conception of honour, patriotism, chivalry and duty. But it was a duty which didn’t have much to do with justice, with social justice anyway, and in default of that justice, and in pursuit of it, that was how the great words came to be cancelled out. The crowd has found the door into the secret garden, now they will tear up the flowers by the roots, strip the borders and strew them with paper and broken bottles.”

The schoolboy at the lectern is reading the final bit of the school play:

“To Let. A valuable site at the crossroads of the world. At present on offer to European clients, outlying portions of the estate already disposed of to sitting tenants. Of some historical and period interest. Some alterations and improvements necessary.

Peter Nicholls(1927) took a critical look at the state of the country by the routine in another British institution - a ward in a National Health hospital. The National Health(1969) is a fantasy-Farce.
Among the cross section of contemporary society were Foster, whose standard of living has been greatly improved by the Welfare State, a man who looks back over the preceding 20 years with great gratitude; against one Mackie, a former colonial administrator who speaks for the class that is in retreat before what he calls the armies of democracy: “A nation doesn’t grow great on material greed without a sense of duty, Churchill knew this and he got the best from us, inspired us with purpose. National service turned boys into men. The world’s finest youth club, but now the Chatterley set are destroying our moral fibre with liberalism, fornication, pederasty, drug-taking condoned by the church, remember the fall of the Roman Empire.”

The trick is to present him as objectionable because of his political views,yet, because he is dying of stomach cancer, arouse sympathy for him as a man. Another irony is this black comedy with tragic overtones deals conditions in an under-funded national health hospital contrasted comically with a hospital soap, like the popular Emergency Ward Ten of the time, being shown on the wards.
Tom Stoppard(1937) wrote serious entertainments. Rozencratz and Gilderstern are Dead(1966), showed his affinities with Samuel Beckett and the Absurdists. The play develops these two minor figures from Hamlet - “little men, unheroic, little men astray”. They are backstage, in the wings and are never sure what Hamlet is about. Occasionally, they are bundled onto the stage and take part in a little scene only to be bundled back behind the curtain, uncomprehending, puzzled about what is happening. It is a striking image of dislocated man: off-stage, minor characters in a play they can not understand.

In two of his later most brilliant plays Jumpers and Travesties from the 70s, he succeeds in his aim of contriving what he once described as: “The perfect marriage between the play of ideas and Farce and, or even high-comedy. While presenting dazzling displays of verbal wit and spectacle, he demonstrates by theatrical means, the difficulty of arriving at value judgements in a world where absolutes no longer have universal or even widespread support; where moral, social, religious,political even aesthetic points of view are subject to the laws of relativity.

Jumpers centres on the plight of a professor of moral philosophy who is trying to uphold the existence of God in an atheistic university and society. His wife is a former singer who has lost the will to sing romantic songs about the Moon, since men walked on it and destroyed its mystery. The story is a simple whodunnit and the murder of one of the professor's colleagues takes place against a literal background of the moon as there is an enormous TV screen at the back of the set transmitting newsreel footage of the first British expedition to the moon and a general election; or was it a coup d' tat that has just carried the neo-Fascist, radical liberal, Jumper party to power. The British have got to the moon but one of the rockets motors failed and there is only power to bring one of them back. The astronauts are named Scott and Oats after Britain's failed South Pole explorers.
Agitprop and Dramatised Ideology
There are overtly Socialist writers and here we move from well-written nihilism and negativity to cultural warfare, violence and advocacy of revolution.

What is known as Cultural Maexism replaced liberalism in the 1960s after a series of demonstrations and sit-ins in Western universities, notably Berkely and the LSE; and the streets of France. It began by calling itself New Liberalism but replaced the Liberal idea of individual rights with that of “group rights” which means ethnic minorities arfe victims and have claims upon Whites who are portrayed as “oppressors”. It also uses identity politics which is inverse Nazism. There is the action and behaviour of New Liberals shows little concept of political democracy or individual freedom under the rule of law. The democratic political system was viewed as an enemy to be captured, manipulated and subdued until it gives way to a spoils system whereby power is distributed between interest groups favoured by race, sex and gender.

John Arden(1930) emerged in the late 50s and moved from a balanced, pacifist and intellectual position to a Marxist one. He was involved with Marxist politics in the UK and Ireland. In 1961 he was a founder member of the anti-nuclear and he also chaired the pacifist weekly, Peace News. In Ireland, he was for a while a member of Sinn Féin. He is also a well-known supporter of civil liberties and is critical of government anti-terror legislation which he dramatised in his radio play The Scam (2007).

The Waters of Babylon(1957), and The Workhouse Donkey(1963) concern corruption in local politics and the interference of local bureaucrats in deviant groups like nomadic Gypsy's in Live Like Pigs(1958) and the morality of empire and war in Sergeant Musgrave's Dance(1959).

Arden became disillusioned with parliamentary democracy under the pragmatic Socialism of Prime Minister Harold Wilson and like the younger writers he was disillusioned with established theatres seen as promoting bourgoise cultural values. He had many acrimonious disputes with the managements in the late 60s and early 70s. He and his Irish wife were proponents of Agitprop. He wrote a three-part play The non-stop Comedy for the Liberty Hall in Dublin which was the HQ of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union in 1975.

He favoured techniques derived from Medieval Morality Plays and Brechtian Epic Theatre as well as popular entertainments like music, songs, stand-up comic, rather than methods of Naturalism and Social Realism used in Kitchen Sink drama. He developed these techniques to the fullest in The Non Stop Connolly Show to present an account of Irish Revolutionary James Connelly, who was shot by the British after the failed Easter Uprising of 1916. The Play is in six-parts and was performed non-stop over the Easter weekend of 1975. The audience could come and go. It is presented in the form of a review interspersing dramatised events from history with songs and popular spectacle. For example, there is an election staged as a tag-wrestling match.

They frequently re-worked classic plays from our cannon to undermine our cultural traditions and were redolent of brutality and violence.

Edmund Bond(1934) is Marxist celebrated for Saved(1964) which caused the public debate on censorship that led to the office of The Lord Chamberlaine, being abolished. Under The Theatres Act 1843 scripts had to be submitted for approval by the Lord Chamberlains's Office. The Lord Chamberlain sought to censor Saved but Bond refused to alter it, saying removing the pivotal stoning scene would alter the meaning of the play. He was backed by the play's director William Gaskill and the Royal Court. They used a legal loophole which allowed plays that had been banned to be performed under 'club' by forming a theatre club. However, the English Stage Society were still prosecuted, found guilty and given a Conditional Discharge.

It is a characteristically violent play in which a gang of working-class youths abuse and stone a baby in a pram to death in a frenzied crescendo of violence. It apparently, explored the lives of South London working class youths suppressed according to Bond, by a brutal economic system and unable to give their lives meaning, who drift into barbarous violence. One character, Len, tries to maintain links between people violently tearing each other to pieces. The play shows the Marxist view of the social causes of violence and opposes them with individual freedom. This was Bond's major theme.
Bond and the Royal Court in 1967 produced a new play, the surreal Early Morning which portrayed Queen Victoria in a lesbian relationship with Florence Nightingale, the royal Princes as Siamese Twins, Disraeli and Prince Albert plotting a coup and the whole dramatis personae damned to a cannibalistic Heaven after falling off Beachy Head. The Royal Court produced the play despite the imposition of a total ban and within a year the law was finally repealed. In 1969, the Royal Court it put on and toured the three plays in Europe. They had international success with more than thirty different productions around the world between 1966 and 1969.

Bond's work has three distinct phases. He dramatised violence and eradicating its causes by re-shaping society. His earliest plays like The Pope's Wedding(1962), Saved, The Narrow Road to The Deep North(1968) and Lear(1971)have characters who gradually become aware of a need for an alternative to the way their societies are structured. They react to the awareness differently. Some react positively, some negatively.

Lear, is a re-working of Shakespeare's through Marx's explanation of the historical process. It has the customary excessive violence which is horrific torture of Lear who is left blind after his eyeballs are extracted by a machine (Bond was a a materialist), to make a symbolic gesture of starting to take the great wall that he had built as king between his people and their neighbours which dominated the play. His sufferings by the middle act of he play lead him to an awareness of man as a trapped and degraded creature imprisoned in the reality formed by the ideology and institutions of the society over which he was once king:

“Who shut that animal in that cage? Let it out. Have you seen its face behind the bars? There's a poor animal with blood on its head and tears running down its face. Who did that to it?” Is it a bird or a horse? Its lying in the dust and its wings are broken. Who broke its wings? Who cut off its hands so that it can't shake the bars? Its pressing its snout in the glass. Who shut that animal in a glass cage? Oh, God! There's no pity in this world.”

He is unable to face his insights into what society has done to human nature; reducing it to the subhuman: “I can't live with that suffering in the world.”

But he does live, unlike Kiero of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, who committed suicide when he reached that level of insight.” Lear lives on and learns to believe in the possibility of changing the world. He is eventually shot when he tries to put his new knowledge into practice and starts dismantling the wall that symbolises the barriers that he was once responsible for. That is the first group of plays with people reaching consciousness and either giving up in despair or trying to do something.

The second group of plays, Bingo(1973), The Fool(1974), and The Woman,(1977) he took the lives of William Shakespeare in Bingo, John Clare in The Fool and the classical story of the Trojan War in The Woman. These very different periods and stories he uses as the focus for his view of the way we are deformed and limited by the ideology enshrined in our culture . He uses different periods of history to explicate different stages of development. He saw his task as re-assessing and adjusting the conceptions that modern man has of the past.

The third phase began with The Bundle(1978). He claimed that he tried to develop from plays burdened with problems to those that dramatise the strength of people to find answers. The answers his characters find are hard decisions and to be ruthless in trying to change the world. Like The Bundle which is a Brechtian Parable play. A guerilla leader called Wong throws an abandoned infant into a river because his conventionally good deed of caring for the child would prevent him bring about a successful revolution against the corrupt order of society that causes babies to be abandoned by their parents.

Bond developed again in the 80s and wrote a trilogy of war plays: Red, Black and Ignorant(1983); The Tin Can People(1984) and Great Place(1985). He depicts a grim world after a nuclear war. He imagines the moral challenges to humanity of the survivors and the repressive regime that might have to be inaugurated to husband scarce resources. He takes us into the future. He has an extraordinary range from working-class dialogue in Saved, Restoration, a grim but witty, parody of Restoration Comedies. The first part is in the style of Restoration Comedy, but the second is in The Industrial Revolution and this is cast as a parody of 19c Melodrama.

1968 brings the rise of The New Left who replaced Liberalism. There were race riots in the States, the French Government was nearly brought down by student riots and Russian tanks suppressed the Prague rising. The war in Vietnam had a major impact because it was seen as not in the American national interest but a Capitalist invasion. These events helped to form the outlook of a new generation of young dramatists.

I only have space for three: Howard Brenton, David Edgar and David Hare.

Howard Brenton(1942) began his career with fringe theatre groups The Brighton Combination and and Portable Theatre. Like others by the mid 1970s Brenton was disillusioned with the once radical fringe theatre which had become arty and run by intellectuals. He said he abandoned The Fringe when he heard people discussing what aesthetic methods they had used.

He wrote the first play to be staged at the National Theatre. He claimed that there was a tension which could not be reconciled between a radical dramatist and the bourgoise institution of the large theatre. He implied that the transfer of his work from the Fringe to to established theatre was an act of infiltration by which means the Marxist writer could subvert citadels of the class system from within. 

On the challenge offered by his play for the NT:” I know I am in an exposed position but someone's got to go in first and start doing something. If its the national its got to be about England today and that means new writing.”

Brenton saw England as founded on violence: “ There is nothing to choose morally between the mass-murderer and the policeman who arrests him.”

In the early Portable Theatre play Christie in Love(1969) based on the story of John Christie, the serial killer, "and the roles society forces on people." In Revenge(1969) the sinister master criminal, Hepple, is pursued by the equally sadistic policeman MacLeish. A model is Jacobean Revenge plays.

Magnificence(1973) the central character, Jed, is a terrorist and closes the play with a futile gesture of despair and blows up himself and the cabinet minister he is holding hostage.

Characters like Jed are modelled the Malcontent characters from Jacobean Revenge plays. He vents his anger about the world: “Bomb em, again and again and again, right through their silver screen. Disrupt the spectacle, the obscene parade. Bring it to a halt. Scatter the dolly girls, let advertisements bleed. Bomb em, again and again. Murderous display, an entertainment for the oppressed...”

As with Jacobean drama we are not sure what to make such a character- feel disgusted or sympathetic. Brenton's plays are a series of metaphoric bombs hurled at his audience- attempts to disrupt the spectacle of life, to make them face the uncomfortable truths about the corrupt and repressive system that underlies their comfortable lives.

Romans in Britain(1980) was prosecuted by Mary Whitehouse. Sitting through this state-financed attack on us was described as like someone spitting in your face! This was the aim of these Bourgoise-Marxists – Epater les bourgoise- to spit in the face of the bourgoise. These writers had no moral base as most of them had been to British public schools and had plummy middle-class accents and they were financed by taxpayers money..

Once again we have great technique as a vehicle for a vicious attack on our culture and history. Brenton juxtaposes scenes from 54BC when Julius Ceasar raided Britain as a prelude to the later Imperial conquest; then scenes from when the Romans left leaving the British-Romano aristocracies way of life crumbling before the invading Saxons. He then uses scenes from Ulster in 1980, where a British secret serviceman is caught and executed by members of the IRA.

The juxtaposes are supposed to raise important questions about the nature of Imperialism and what it does to both the oppressed and the oppressors.

As they moved from Fringe to established theatres, to drawing up what David Hare called in one of his plays “Maps of the World,” many of the Marxist writers abandoned single-issue plays, the staple of Agitprop, like David Edgar's Wreckers(1977), which is about the effects of a particular Industrial Relations Act in 1971.

David Edgar's(1948) Maydays(1983) spans 1956 to 1973 and surveys the historical developments that have produced the social and political aspects of contemporary Britain.

Howard Brenton and David Hare's Brassneck, begins in 1945 and ends in 1973, and Hare's Plenty moves from 1943 to the 1960s; from a prologue after the War to an epilogue in Mrs. Thatcher's Britain of the 1980s. These Marxist dramatists tried to create an alternative history of contemporary Britain.
David Hare(1947) is one of Britain's most internationally performed playwrights. He was long associated with The National Theatre, which produced eleven of his plays successively between 1978 and 1997. A trilogy about the church, the law and the Labour Party - Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War - was presented in repertory at the Olivier Theatre in 1993. Nine of his best-known plays, including Plenty, The Secret Rapture, Skylight, The Blue Room, Amy's View, The Judas Kiss and Via Dolorosa have been staged on Broadway.

But if you do not conform you are exiled. Ian Curteis submitted a play about The Falklands War to the BBC, which was sympathetic to Margaret Thatcher. It was rejected. If he had attacked Mrs. Thatcher as a warmonger or an Imperialist it would have been accepted.

These people with the BBC and The Arts Council became the new Establishment and promoted The Culture War from within. If a young playwright wrote about the destructive psychological effects which abortion can have on women Mr Stephenson would reject it. (1)

Its interesting to look over this because they are now the Establishment and oppressing those with a dissident voice. The rehabilitation of Sir Terrence Rattigan brings a a cool breeze sweetening the stables once again, as the dark clouds of Nihilism and Ideological drama recede. Rattigan's plays are once more being staged. (2)

The nihilists and the ideologues are passing into history while contemporary playwrights merely write Politically Correct platitudes leaving a vacuum crying to be filled by a contemporary explanation of our world expressed by new Traditionalist or Conservative playwrights. As they would be refused money by the Arts Council and refused a stage by the theatres they would need places to develop plays, practice and perform.

There are lots of pubs in Britain that need custom since the smoking ban ruined the business for so many and Conservative writers and actors could book rooms above these pubs to develop a drama for our time. The task of these phalanx's would be to re-link to certain traditions and convey a message of our history and continuity.
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