CONSPIRACY TO SILENCE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS

Alex Jones of Infowars has been banned by the tech companies from most social media platforms.  Tommy Robinson, ( whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) the former leader of the EDL and a self-proclaimed campaigner for free speech and against Islamification of Britain (accused by many of simple agitation against Muslims), has been released from prison following his appeal heard before the Lord Chief Justice of England.

What both these political activists have in common is their repeated accusations that the establishment has a Left wing agenda.  These claims have landed them in very hot water.  Of course, it is possible to get bogged down in the legal argument about Tommy Robinson.  It is true that he is only released on bail and that he will have to face court again with regard to the contempt of court accusation.  Nonetheless it was found that his imprisonment was wrong and that the court acted in haste and disproportionately in sentencing him to a custodial sentence for contempt.

Many figures from Right and Left, including Nigel Farage, have suggested that Tommy Robinson went too far in broadcasting outside the court room where men (of Muslim background, which is significant to Tommy Robinson’s argument that the establishment turns a blind eye to Muslim crime) were being tried for the crime of grooming under-age indigenous girls for sex.  Tommy Robinson states he was careful only to read from a published BBC article still in the public domain on his live feed, but many have suggested he was jeopardising the prosecution of the accused.

Alex Jones is also a controversial figure, in particular with his comments on the Sandyhook massacre, for which the parents of the children murdered are suing him.  In his vociferous defence of the right to bear arms he suggested that the massacre might have been a hoax to support a campaign against guns.  Nonetheless, the social media platforms are relying on the vague concept of “hate speech” to remove him from their platforms. 

Of course it is important to understand the exact reasons why Alex Jones has been de-platformed and why Tommy Robinson was imprisoned, but looked at from a broader perspective it seems something very concerning is taking place.  It is something the public in general perceive, despite what they are told by the BBC or CNN – that because these men are on the Right they have been dealt with more harshly by the system.  In that sense what these two men say about the establishment, which might have looked like conspiracy theories before, is now looking more credible.

In the light of the over-reaction to Boris Johnson’s article in which he argued against banning the full-face-veil, yet is being attacked for Islamophobia for colourful comments, it seems a pattern is emerging.  The tension seems at first to be about free speech versus causing offence, but looked at more closely it is actually about protecting certain favoured groups from offence.  Whether it be transgender people, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, women or in this case Muslims, there is a special protection given to certain groups in accordance with a specific ideology that dominates the thinking of the Western universities from which our politicians and leaders emerge.  This is what many right-wing internet personalities describe as Cultural Marxism, by which the old Marxist analysis of the rich bourgeoisie having power over their victims the proletariat is replaced by a broader narrative of power and oppression.  Like the Marxists, these new ideologues do not look at people as individuals, but whether they belong to an oppressor or victim class.  For this reason there are no restrictions on causing offence to those in the oppressor class, which is why the general public is right to feel that there is one rule for them and another for us, so to speak.

This is a dangerous and destructive ideology that prevents integration and encourages feelings of resentment and entitlement.  Psychologically, as Dr. Jordan Peterson has made clear, one does far better in life if one takes responsibility for oneself, rather than sinks ever deeper into the resentment and disempowerment caused by such an ideology ( if you are a member of one of the groups classified as oppressed).  However, for the privileged elite who believe in this cultural-Marxist analysis, it has the great advantage of making them feel good and virtuous without the economic and other costs of a real Marxist revolution.

Yet, the recent events relating to Tommy Robinson and Alex Jones suggest this is slightly more sinister (and we do not have to agree with their conspiracy theories to be worried).  When you reduce your analysis of a society to a crude binary battle between oppressor and victim, in which all nuance, individual virtue and ideals are ignored, then that justifies the use of power against your political enemies, who are seen as the enemies of progress and by definition evil oppressors.

Therefore, we need to start to take seriously the possibility that due process and fairness will cease to matter to the powerful Cultural-Marxist Left because they are so sure they are on the side of right and progress.  For that reason, rules and laws may be used simply as tools to silence those perceived as reactionaries.

   

Because this ideology has solidified its view of who is in the oppressor and victim group, adherents are not able to comprehend the possibility that those who were once oppressors could be left behind.  This is why so little has been done about white working-class schoolboys falling behind in education.  It is also why the establishment cannot understand why someone like Tommy Robinson has achieved such a following.  Neither can they imagine that mass immigration could ever be negative on the poor, because any criticism of mass migration is an attack on a group classified as a victim group.

What all this means is that the apparent conspiracy theories advocated by Jones and Robinson are not necessarily crazy at all.  While their specific claims might be questionable, they have been shut down by the powerful.  It was their advocacy of such theories that led to their draconian treatment to a large extent.  They are right to suspect freedom of speech is being shut down, as evidenced by the hysterical reaction to Boris Johnson’s article on the niqab.  These are all consequences of the Manichean and simplistic yet sanctimonious belief-system dominant in our establishment.  Alex Jones and Tommy Robinson, whether you agree with them or not, are really victims of this new oxymoronic phenomenon of liberal totalitarianism. 

Novichok and Holy Russia

Russia’s recovery from Bolshevism and Return to Christian Values is a Beacon of Hope – yet where were these values in Salisbury?

It seemed like the Barsetshire Chronicles had met John Le Carre when a Russian former spy and double agent and his daughter were poisoned by a chemical substance.  The cathedral city of Salisbury has been the site of the first chemical attack on these islands.  Since then one British subject has died from novichok poisoning and another has finally been released from hospital.

The evidence appears to point to Russian actors.  Russia denies this.  The alternative, put forward by conspiracy theorists, that British intelligence was responsible seems far-fetched to British ears.  To regard such an accusation as credible would require most of us to reconstruct completely our understanding of how the British state functions.  This is far easier for a Russian who is familiar with a state that commits crimes. History is clear, the Soviet state committed moral crimes against its people.  One only needs to peruse Solzhenitsyn to find this out.  The idea that the British Government would have fabricated or staged the poisoning may seem incredible to us, but not to a Russian citizen.

Neither is it very persuasive to draw an equivalence with the British State’s assassination of Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Syria.  These are cases of war zones and the former state is one where the government is an ally of the British and the latter state is no friend of the Islamists.  By contrast, in Salisbury an attack was made on British soil with a chemical weapon, with callous disregard of the danger to lives and the local economy.  In parenthesis  it is simplistic to imagine that the vast state of Russia and its intelligence services are as centralised as those of the British state, nonetheless, on balance, as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt, the Russian state appears to be guilty.  Western allies rallied to the cause of Britain – showing Brexit Britain continues to have international stature.

Herein lies the main point – Russia may have seen many dramatic changes since the fall of the Soviet Union, but nonetheless its starting point is very low if we recall Stalin, the KGB and the GUlag.  It is a low that is now far more familiar to those in the West, as the Soviets enforced by the jack boot what left-wing university professors in the West are re-educating middle-class students to support – abolition of capitalism and suppression of the Church, mass abortion and shifting women en masse into the work place.  Once we grasp this then we can understand how a nation that is seeing a resurgent Church can also be connected to a crime that was committed with a cavalier attitude to the sanctity of innocent life.

After the regicide of the Tsar Russia began a moral decline into atheistic tyranny.  Truth was sacrificed to a materialistic ideology and the sanctity of the person was as nothing.  The state became all intrusive and claimed citizens’ loyalty over and above human loyalties to family, Church and God. 

Of course the resurgence of Orthodoxy and the veneration of the Romanovs is proof that for all this state oppression the human values of the Russians did not disappear, but simply went underground.  Yet as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, the effect of the totalitarian system of Communism was to replace Truth with the Lie.  In effect – the attempt to abolish the Logos.  It was in that sense a Satanic project.  Russia hit a nadir in its civilization, whatever the nostalgia now for the certainties of the Soviet period, following the abuse of the common weal by capitalistic oligarchs. 

Countries' stories are not straight lines, but always revert to national archetypes.  If we think of the history of nations and cultures as cyclical rather than progressive we not only get a more accurate understanding of what is happening, but can rationalise the apparent contradictions of that vast country Winston Churchill once described as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.  Russia has hit the bottom point of a cycle and now is rising up again, but that does not mean the powers that be in the Russian establishment are untainted by the brutal system of the Bolshevik state of which many of the current establishment were part. Furthermore, any revolution is disruptive and undoubtedly criminal elements have benefited from the collapse of the Soviet Union, just as there has been the opportunity to resuscitate former traditions of value.

Quite apart from the apparent direct attack on our soil, why is this so important to us?  Because, continuing the theme of the cycle in the history of nations, it seems that Western civilization has reached a tipping point and is in precipitous decline.  The doctrines of the postmodernists and cultural Marxists have spread like a destructive contagion out of the university campuses and into mainstream life.  These destructive forces are too subtle to manifest themselves in the same bloody way that they did in Russia, but these forces are now more insidious.  Therefore Russia’s rediscovery of Christian tradition is the great hope of the West and to see it tarnished by the apparent disregard for the sanctity of the human person can seem to undermine this hope.

What must therefore be understood is this :  The shadow of brutal Bolshevik atheism is cast long over modern Russia, on the one hand.  On the other hand, the forces of tradition, religious faith and the Church were never extinguished and are now resurgent, with the support of the same state still tainted by a Bolshevik past.

Two parallel ideas are underpinning post -Soviet Russia, that of Holy Russia and that of Greater Russia.  In the figure of Vladimir Putin both ideas are honoured, although perhaps the latter to the greater degree.  Putin recognises the importance of religious faith and apparently was secretly baptised and raised as a believer.  Yet to believe he is manipulating religious belief and imposing it upon people to disguise his alleged tyranny is a complete misunderstanding of a very simplistic Western mind-set.

The Russian Church is a grass-roots phenomenon, its flame was kept burning by the people.  The Government has recognised this as a fact, just as Stalin had to recognise it during the German invasion.  A cultural Marxist narrative of religion being a means of control simply will not do as an intelligent analysis of what the situation is in Russia.

Furthermore, Putin is not having to contrive at remaining in power – he is very popular because he stood up to the oligarchs and because he, like the Russian people at large, felt the humiliation of the fall of the Soviet Union.  He is a patriot, for all his faults.

The western media may describe Putin as a kleptocratic reincarnation of Hitler, but this is almost a back-to-front misunderstanding.  Putin’s mind-set is defensive not aggressive, I believe.  He wishes to maintain Russia’s status and a sphere of national interest on the world stage.  That need not affect Western interests.  His speech at Munich in 2007 goes a long way to explain his world view.  The expansion of NATO, the stationing of US missiles on his border and Western intervention in the Ukraine, prior to his annexation of the Crimea have all created a feeling of encirclement. Russia had not expected this and initially believed that the end of the Cold War would mean a partnership of equality between the United States and the Russian Federation, with mutual respect for their different traditions.

We are rightly proud of our own turning point after another event in Munich, when we were to go on to stand alone against Hitler.  Yet this moment of true pride in our national valour sometimes misleads us into thinking every international situation is one of a moral test to resist the temptation of appeasement.  Anthony Eden arguably made this mistake over the Suez Canal.

Russia is changing or going full circle, rediscovering values and traditions we are on the point of losing.  Russia needs to know it is still an equal player on the world stage and that its own traditions, which are not liberal-democratic, can be regarded with respect.  Let us remember the U.S. started intervening in Russia’s choice of leader before Russia ever did so in US elections. 

For this reason President Trump, in the teeth of opposition from the Washington establishment and the military-industrial complex, is approaching Russia in the right way.  Friendship and mutual respect will bring the best out of relations with Russia.  Were Russia no longer painted as a pariah state we might also learn something from how traditional values can resurrect after Marxism.  This is a very necessary lesson we could learn as our own traditions and values, from Christianity to the meaning of gender are being corroded by unchallenged cultural-Marxists.

So what about Novichok?  Well again it seems that President Trump has it right in an approach that is both realist and principled.  While the UK is rightly going through the process of a criminal investigation, the President took a clear stand against Russia with the recall of diplomats, but he is now adopting the constructive policy of engagement.  For unlike National Socialist Germany, engaging with Christian Russia will undoubtedly lead to benefits for both civilizations. Engagement should not always be regarded as appeasement.   

WHY MONARCHIES FALL

Today is the anniversary of the brutal regicide of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II and the bloody murder of his wife Empress Alexandra (Queen Victoria's favourite granddaughter), their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia (collectively referred to as OTMA by themselves in family correspondence) and the haemophiliac Tsarevich Alexey.  Their murders were brutal, clumsy and bloody.

Another anniversary occurred a couple of days before - the celebration of the storming of the Bastille in France in 1789 - which led to the state murders of King Louis XVI and his Austrian Queen Marie Antoinette.  Burke famously lamented the treatment of the Queen with the following words in his famous Reflections: 

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendour and joy.

Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness."

Marx despised this passage, which is reason enough for us to take it to heart.  For Marx was the inspiration behind the brutal crime against the Romanovs.  They were killed in the name of his ideology in a basement of their prison in Ekaterinburg and their bodies dumped and an attempt made to dissolve them with acid.  Thus modern regicide hit a new low of depravity.

Solzhenitsyn, the Russian intellectual, saw a direct link between the horrors of the French Revolution and its reign of Terror and the Bolshevik Revolution that tore down his own country's social fabric and hierarchy.

In our own island the British Monarchy remains and continues to hold the respect and love of its subjects.  It survived where others did not and it is often assumed that is because of the pragmatism of British institutions.  The British Monarchy unlike the Russian Autocrat adapted to a constitutional role in a parliamentary-representative democracy.

Yet such an understanding suggests a shallow and positivist perspective of history.  The British Monarchy has not simply survived because it adapted to the Whigs' Glorious Revolution.  Just like the Russian and French Monarchies it is closely associated with the Church and Tradition.  And if Monarchy is to be what it should be, it must retain a connection with transcendental Tradition.

Nonetheless it is true that while that transcendental aspect of Monarchy inspires loyalty and sacrifice, it also makes it a target of those who would flatten out our society with the aim of breaking any connection with the Transcendent.  Yet our own Monarchy is closely linked to the idea of transcendent Tradition and the power of this idea was demonstrated by the impact of the traditional Coronation service upon Queen Elizabeth II.  The anointing with oil within a tabernacle was a sacramental experience for Her Majesty, which has continued to sustain her through the many trials of her reign.

This claim to a divine connection led to attacks upon our own Monarchy.  It faced revolution and suffered regicide as a result of the Civil War.  Charles I approached his death with the stoicism of his Christian faith so that he is still regarded (albeit quietly) as a Martyr of the Anglican Church.  The same progressive and regicidal forces, somewhat moderated later in the Century, ensured after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that the Monarchy's powers were curtailed by Parliament, and its survival would be conditional on popular assent, as demonstrated by the lines in our national anthem:

"May she defends our laws
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice
God save the Queen"

Yet the Monarchy itself has a place in our hearts and moves us because of its sacred and traditional elements.  This power of Tradition has also shaped Prince Charles' values and idea of vocation.  His Royal Highness has associated himself with perennial and Traditionalist ideas of religion, which has clearly drawn him to orthodox religion of many forms, from his own Greek Orthodox heritage on Mount Athos to traditionalist Islam (which should be distinguished sharply from the revolutionary Islam of the Salafists - unfortunately often misleadingly described as "conservative").

So the British Monarchy does not really fit the Whiggish mould and retains its connection to the transcendent Tradition, albeit less obviously than the Romanovs.  And it was that connection with the transcendent Tradition that meant the Bolsheviks needed to eliminate the Romanovs.  For the revolutionaries believed the Transcendental to be fake and that all could be explained by economics and materialism.  They wanted to break the connection with the Transcendent.

For Tsar Nicholas and his family however, their Orthodox faith was of central importance.  It was for this reason the kindly father and reluctant monarch Nicholas, resisted calls for a full parliamentary-democracy and remained the autocrat.  It was Empress Alexandra's Orthodox faith (combined with her Victorian and Protestant upbringing) that led her to bring up their children un-spoilt and un-corrupted by the decadence of the Russian Court, leading to resentment from the aristocracy.

Often the involvement of Rasputin in the Romanov family is used by secularist historians to point to the superstition of their religious faith and paint it as one of the causes of their tragic overthrow.  Yet this is to take the Bolshevik propaganda at face value and to fail to understand certain important elements of Russian Orthodoxy.

Empress Alexandra was a sincere convert (after initial reluctance) from Lutheranism to the highly Traditionalist Russian Orthodox Church.  A central sacred figure of Orthodoxy is the fool for Christ or yurodivy.  Alexandra became convinced Rasputin was such a figure and furthermore she depended on him because of the love she had for her family.  Only Rasputin had the power to heal her precious son of his haemophilia when the medical doctors could do nothing.  Is the Empress to be found at fault for this?  Rasputin (unlike the Romanovs -declared martyrs by ROCOR and Passion Bearers by the Russian Church) has never been acknowledged by the Orthodox Church, but it is our modern post-Enlightenment mindset that prevents us understanding his importance to the Royal Family.

Just as with the French Monarchy, the Russian Monarchy had to be eliminated in the opinion of those forces that emerged from the Enlightenment.  Monarchy maintained the connection between man and the Transcendent, right back to the early beginnings of our human story.  A Monarchy that has lost this connection, as it can do by becoming secularised or modernised, is no longer a threat to the materialist and anti-sacred agenda of the revolutionaries.  It is no longer a target.  It is therefore of great credit to the the Stuarts, the Bourbons and the Romanovs that they were considered such a threat as to be necessary to murder.  They courageously went to their deaths believing in the divine aspect of the kingly vocation.  To lose this sense is to lose the point of Monarchy.

While our own Royal Family has accommodated itself to modernism in the mixed economy of the British constitution, made up of representative democracy and monarchy as it is, our Queen has maintained the sacred nature of her vocation and this sense of the Transcendent has shaped her reign.  Albeit with his own personal perspective, Prince Charles too is clearly a believer in the Transcendent Tradition.  Yes such an aspect to Monarchy will always provoke the hostility of those who wish to break the connection with the Transcendent in the name of progress, but to lose that Tradition would make the Monarchy purposeless, causing it to degenerate into mere celebrity.

     

GLOBALISM TRUMPED?

After a long hiatus and many major political events having taken place I have decided to resume this 'blog.  This year is the centennial anniversary of both the end of the Great War and the regicide of the Tsar - two events that were to shape the next century in so many dreadful ways.  From the perspective of the English shires neither event brought much happiness.  The Great War drastically and tragically reduced the number of young men in the fields and was arguably the cause of the next cataclysm, the Second World War.  The Tsar's murder and the murder of the Empress, the Tsarevich and their daughters, made hard-line Socialism a real alternative that inspired some of the British Left's worst attacks on the English of the shires.

The Century went on to see rapid mechanisation of agriculture, the replacement of smallholders with agri-business, the mass shifting of women into the workplace, with all the implications for family, and a profound loss of confidence in faith and patriotism.  After the Second World War the move towards the abolition of the nation state by the powerful elite of Europe gathered momentum and became more formalised with the first steps towards a United Europe.  With National Socialism vanquished in the Second World War and International Socialism with the fall of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War, Fukuyama's End of History with the triumph of liberalism seemed to have been reached.  The secularist individual whose only guiding principle is choice has become the ubermensch, so contrary to the actual Nietzschean idea.

Yet this victory now seems hollow.  If the new liberal world can be seen as globalist and cosmopolitan, so that everyone is just an individual, not defined by culture, religion or nationality - a citizen of the world and therefore a citizen of nowhere to paraphrase the current (at the time of writing) Prime Minister - then human beings seem to be rebelling against this individualist, consumerist globalism.

And this rebellion is completely understandable, because we are more than consumers, more than individuals and life is about more than choice.  The effect on the English shires of this liberal globalism has been profound.  The high street has become a uniform entity from John o' Groats to Lands End.  Agricultural workers are cheaper migrant labour, and even more noticeably to most, retail and services have recruited from abroad, changing the fabric of small communities and the pressure to accommodate a massive influx of foreigners means the green and pleasant land young men went to die for a century ago is to be turned into housing.  Meanwhile a political class that has become absorbed into a globalist elite has no sensitivity or understanding of the impact of these issues, only able to think as it is, in terms of GDP and economic calculation.

Globalisation can certainly be said to have had a greater impact on the third-world economies, for better or worse.  Economic growth has certainly been achieved (and we cannot surely begrudge that) but at the expense of traditional lifestyles and has brought in the Western-liberal influence that cannot tolerate the traditional family structure and wants to pull women out of the family home into the workplace.

Yet in the West, from which the reductionist doctrines of individualism and globalism emerged, resistance too can be found.  The referendum in the UK in which the public chose by the highest ever turnout to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States were serious blows struck against a detached elite's vision of one globe of atomistic individuals.  Immigration has been the very real problem that has galvanised popular resistance; yet other issues, such as deindustrialisation and firms relocating to countries with cheaper labour on the economic side, and on the social, an aggressively liberal vision of human beings that places choice of lifestyle above any sense of a human telos in family, were also being rejected.

In reaction to the perceived effrontery of ordinary people rejecting the ideology of their betters, the elite has responded with ferocity to both Brexit and Trump.  At every turn the political/globalist establishment has attempted to subvert these two Anglo-Saxon rebellions.

Part of the tactic of the liberal elite has been to attempt to tarnish Brexit and Trump by association with the bogeyman caricature of Russia that its allies in the media have created.  Anyone in Britain must be unnerved by the prospect of Russian interference, given the recent appalling crime in Salisbury, where a British subject has now become a fatality; yet Russia is being portrayed as a bastion of reactionary conservatism by the elite in an attempt to discredit the valid cause of Anglo Saxon conservatism.  Russian politics is far more complicated than that and this caricature has been created by the elite for its own propaganda purposes.

What is the vision the Anglo Saxon people on either side of the Atlantic have voted for, which has so horrified the establishment?  It is no Corbynista socialism (our elite seems far more comfortable with Corbyn, than with President Trump or Nigel Farage interestingly!).  It is rather a more compassionate version of our own economic system.  Donald Trump with his emphasis on protection is not a Socialist revolutionary, but is a patriot.  He is proposing economic policies that protect domestic jobs.  He wants capitalism to serve people rather than people having to serve a capitalism with no roots in any country.  President Trump recognises that globalisation and mass-immigration are choices made by the elite and that they are not inevitable.

In just the same way Brexit was about restoring national control, in terms of democratic accountability for laws that we live by and an end to the right to freedom of movement of virtually a whole continent to our small island.  This is not revolutionary, it is the restoration of common-sense and a capitalist economy that enables people's lives to get better, rather than live at the whim of globalist companies.

This vision won the democratic battle, but now the battle continues in the corridors of power and in the media, which is compliant to and complicit in the globalist agenda.  Given Theresa May's decision to betray the public on Brexit and the continued attempts to undermine the Trump presidency, it is by no means clear whether two victories in two battles against globalism will ever translate into winning ultimate victory.