Welcome To England

Comment on this Ed West piece (on moral panic - thanks for the hat-tip, Ed) at the Telegraph :

"From time to time I fly to Stockholm from Manchester. On arriving at Arlanda, I'm greeted by giant posters of Stockholmers saying (in English), "Welcome to my town!" On return to Ringway, I'm greeted by posters warning me not to assault airport staff.

A few months ago I flew to Munich for the first time. On arrival I was greeted by a Bluetooth message from BMW, promoting their cars. Returning to Manchester, I was greeted at luggage reclaim by a giant poster offering me a test for chlamydia."

Breivik Massacre - The Hidden Hand

I'm not a terribly frequent visitor to Lenin's Tomb - the author, unable to emulate his murderous namesake in the real world, compensates by getting very abusive with commenters who stray from the Party line - and, like Neville Chamberlain, I am a man of peace to the depths of my soul.

But, as chance would have it, I was over there a week or two ago, in that short period between the Norway massacre and the UK riots, and was idly browsing his visitor stats - he's obviously a cheapskate like me who won't pay for the full, private version. What sort of people, I wondered, read this stuff - he gets between 3 and 4 thousand hits a day ? A lot of Septics, I noted - getting on for 50% of the traffic and seemingly somewhat biased towards the great universities of the West and East coasts. It figures.

Anyway, I idly followed a link to a site that seemed to be providing a fair few readers to the Tomb on that 6th August. In fairness to him, we can't control who links to us - and as I say when I reciprocate a link, that doesn't constitute an endorsement.

Hmm.

"It appears that Breivik was led on his way by, and probably financed by, that mysterious group that met in London in 2002. He would have been one of a number of 'sleepers' whose legend was prepared for when they were needed (they would also have set up the complicated legal structure to hide the source of financing). That is what authorities should be looking at (but of course won't, as they tend to shy away from real power).

Once you get over the 'lone nut' lie, anybody could have been using Breivik to accomplish their wicked ends. That's when we start to look at motive, and ask the very reasonable question of which group which tends to use covert means and false flag attacks had a big motive to send a violent message to the Norwegian political class at this time. "

Who could these mysterious, wealthy backers be, who might want to send a message to the Norwegians* ?

The commenters are in no doubt at all.

(Top rated) "9/11 and oslo/2011 came out of the same shop"


"There are few readers in the States who will make the connection between Oslo Accords, the assassination of Rabin and the emergence of this Breivik character, who attacks the very capital where it happened, from where the Peace Prize is given, and where the kids on the island were calling for boycott. This looks like an attack on the former broker of a peace process which conceded that Palestinians had rights."


"in all these attacks, there is never a single dead jew" (really ? LT)

"breivik thoroughly zionized. it would be mossad or some other part of jewry."

There's no doubt that if you go far enough round to the left, you end up coming back from the right. On the dark side they're pretty close.

"The point, like the point of the conspiracy behind the fertilizer bombing of the Murrah Bldg. in Oklahoma City, is to terminate anti-immigration, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic right wing nationalism"

Well, if Mossad really did set up the massacre for their own nefarious ends, they've improved their organisation since their last outing to Norway, when they shot dead a perfectly inoffensive Moroccan waiter under the impression that he was the Chief of Operations for the Black September terrorist group.


Still, call me old fashioned or lacking in imagination, but I still can't quite picture Israel setting up the slaughter of scores of kids, and car-bombing the Norwegian PM, in order either to give the UAF a stick to beat the EDL with, to teach those uppity Norwegians which side their bagels are buttered, or to discredit the (generally sober and reasoned) Gates of Vienna website. The means seems wholly disproportionate to the end, for starters - quite apart from the whole 'morality' bit.

But some people obviously can ...







* It transpires that the Norwegians were withdrawing their air contribution from the NATO force in Afghanistan, and that the Labour Party youth section had passed pro-Palestinian resolutions. You learn something new every day.


UPDATE - from one of the comments it seems that gentle irony goes straight past some people...

Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Man

I've been a fan of the educationist Tony Sewell for quite a long time - ever since he whupped Lee Jasper* in a Guardian education debate back in 2003. He's that rare thing, a black activist who believes that not every problem in the community is caused by racist whitey - that maybe, inter alia, black street and rap culture has a teensy influence on the youth, too - a bit of a UK John McWhorter, in fact.

I was pleased to hear him on R5 this morning, dismissing David Starkey's discussion of Great Enoch as irrelevant but focusing on, and agreeing with, Starkey's claim that white urban youth are taking up (as best they may) the black gangsta culture which has left so many dead on London's streets.

He's in the Mail, too :

"Despite the attempts of some apologists to dress up the looting as a political act against an oppressive Tory establishment, the fact is that the ethos of materialism — or ‘bling’ to use the street term — that pervades urban black youth played a major part in the widespread criminality perpetrated by rioters of all races.

That is why the looters targeted specific stores that are cherished in this culture, such as those selling mobile phones, trainers, sports clothes or widescreen TVs. Let’s face it, there were no reports of the vandals looting bookshops or public libraries.

What motivated the troublemakers was not genuine poverty but rather a raw acquisitiveness that is fuelled by so much in this black-led youth culture, from the imagery in rap videos to the lyrics of hip-hop music. The twin central themes of this world are sex and material possessions... young white and Asian, often middle-class, Britons — anxious for a bit of street cred — adopted the language and clothes of the culture, as Sacha Baron Cohen so mercilessly parodied in his comic creation Ali G, a white teenager from Staines who is desperate to be seen as black. And here, I think, we are getting at what David Starkey wanted to convey.

So prevalent is this ‘gangsta’ culture that, if you get on a bus in London and shut your eyes, you will often not be able to tell the ethnicity of the young people who are speaking, since they all use the tone, phraseology and language patterns of black youths."

Though like everyone else, he gets Starkey base-over-apex about Enoch. What Starkey said was that Enoch was wrong, in that the rivers of blood aren't one race fighting another, but :

"Black and white, unite and loot,
Smash the phone-shop front !"

* Jasper is, according to the now defunct BlacksandJews site "a Jewish-Zionist agent working in the Black Community, a man without honour, morals or common decency". I can't answer for the first part, but as for the second, even a stopped clock ...

BBC Presenters Against The Toffs

Kaye Adams, the BBC broadcaster, has been accused of being unfit to present a top current affairs programme after she tweeted in response to Boris Johnson's suggestion that rioters should face tough punishments, "P*** off back to boarding school, Boris".

Hmm. Obviously a toilet-mouthed working class girl supporting her fellow workers/rioters against the assaults of the fascist state.

The former presenter of Loose Women, the ITV talk show, who presents a popular Radio Scotland show, was on holiday in Tuscany when she made a series of expletive-filled Tweets about London's mayor.

UPDATE - Adams attended St. George's School for Girls in Edinburgh - boarding £5,800 a term! Oh, the hypocrisy!

Hitch Nails It ...

Say to David Cameron that naughty children should be smacked at home and caned in school, that the police (and responsible adults) should be free to wallop louts and vandals caught in the act, that the police should return to preventive foot patrols, that prisons should be austere places of hard work, plain food and discipline without TV sets or semi-licit drugs, and that wrongdoers should be sent to them when they first take to crime, not when they are already habitual crooks, and he will throw up his well-tailored arms in horror at your barbarity.

Say to him that divorce should be made very difficult and that the state should be energetically in favour of stable, married families with fathers (and cease forthwith to subsidise families without fathers) and he will smirk patronisingly and regard you as a pitiable lunatic.

Say to him that mass immigration should be stopped and reversed, and that those who refuse any of the huge number of jobs which are then available should be denied benefits of any kind, and he will gibber in shock.

Yet he is ready to authorise the use of water cannon and plastic bullets on our streets (quite useless, as it happens, against this sort of outbreak) as if we were a Third World despotism.

Water cannon and plastic bullets indeed. What an utter admission of failure, that after 50 years of the most lavish welfare state in the solar system, you cannot govern your country without soaking the citizenry in cold water and bombarding them with missiles from a safe distance.

Here is an example of how little Cameron knows about Britain. He says that the criminals of August will face the ‘full force of the law’. What ‘force’?

The great majority of the looters, smashers, burners and muggers have not been arrested and never will be. Our long-enfeebled police were so useless at the start that thousands of crimes were committed with total impunity.

Now we know why they don’t call themselves ‘police forces’ any more. But they aren’t ‘services’ either, for they certainly don’t serve us or do what we want them to do, preferring to arrest us for defending ourselves. The criminals, who are cunning without being intelligent, all know this. They will wait for the next chance.

The loping, smirking, shuffling creeps who eventually appeared before the courts were the ultimate losers – the ones who came late to the looting and who were too slow or too stupid to run before they were put in the bag.

A good point about the arrests. The vanguard of the working class movement aka the first guys to actually smash the shutters down at PC World or Carphone Warehouse, were doing their deeds when the police had lost control of many streets early on Monday evening. I'd imagine the vast majority of these 'early adopters' got away with it (although CCTV may well nail some). An awful lot of arrests seem to have been of stragglers, people late to the party. And Little Miss Perfect, allegedly driving the getaway car with two other persons of pallor, was a lot safer stop-n-search for a couple of lone officers than a car full of Man Dem Crew. Say what you like about grammar schools, but we were taught not to shank the Feds.

Who's "we", Paleface ?

Henry Porter in the Guardian :

'We will wear the great shame of these riots for a very long time. A great shock has been delivered to England's sense of identity blah blah blah wibble ...'

It was interesting to see how quickly the BBC responded to Alex Salmond's taunting and changed the "UK Riots" heading into "English Riots".

I'm not sure the BBC will want to take that laudable principle of localisation too far, though - are you ?






I just get a feeling from today's Guardian and BBC that it's back to normal as far as our rulers are concerned.They're all going to try and understand a little more and condemn a little less, having used up about five years worth of condemnation over the last week. Business As Usual ? We shall see.



UPDATE - a comment :

I am a teacher of English and taught in England for 15 years before emigrating to Australia in 1987.

In 2000, 2006 and 2009, I returned to the U.K. and did Supply Teaching at five secondary schools, two in London, three in towns a few miles outside.

All five had many moments redolent of 'Lord Of The Flies' , but the saddest and most revealing experience occurred at a school in Essex in 2000, as I'd taught at that school for 8 years when I still lived in England, leaving there in 1983. Thus I had not set foot in that school for 17 years and, amazingly, two teachers were still there. Both, so sadly, and independently of each other, while over-joyed to see me, said don't let what you see spoil your happy and positive memories of the school.

I'm not being alarmist - it hadn't just declined, it had plummeted.

I still vividly remember voicing my first concern with a Deputy as when we approached the entrance, which I'd so many times gone through, it was now necessary to enter a code in order to get in. When I said that was worrying, the Deputy disagreed, saying you couldn't have parents just being allowed to enter the school and assault staff. I looked sharply at him when he said this but he didn't notice. It is so obviously nothing more than a short-term, band-aid solution that clearly reveals far more worrying, serious, disturbing and underlying issues, concerns and realities that long-term just simply have to be addressed.

To be honest here, while looking at the scenes with incredulity, especially those from Tottenham and Enfield because these areas are where I was born, raised and still stay in when over over there, I just could not separate what was happening with what I'd experienced and witnessed in those five schools.

In a way, as unbelievable as it all seemed, none were that surprising.