This weekend saw much commemoration of the Battle of the Somme.  It is ninety years since the artillery fell silent, that first whistle blew and, bayonets fixed, the men went over the top.

I can’t deny that military action holds a fascination for me.  I would be surprised if any man of my generation has not wondered whether he had it in him to do what his grandfather and, twenty-five years later, his father did.

Some of our sons are answering that question for us today.  This weekend also saw the latest deaths of British servicemen fighting the War on Terror - in a fire-fight at Sangin in Afghanistan.

Take some time to read this account of an otherwise unreported firefight that took place at the precise same moment.  Forty-eight soldiers of C Company of the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment - with an attachment of airborne troops from the Royal Irish Rangers – fought off a very determined “bunch of Afghans in rubber sandals.”

Excitement aside, the account made me wonder whether the lightly-equipped, friendship-toting British Army has any utility in Helmand.  If it isn’t there to occupy the area in the conventional, lock-down sense, and if it can’t possibly win the goodwill of the people, what is its mission?  The Times’ correspondent, Christina Lamb, doesn’t venture much on the matter, but gives us this:-

I thought about John Reid, the former defence secretary, glibly saying he hoped to complete the three-year British mission to Helmand without a shot being fired.  If this wasn’t a fourth Anglo-Afghan war, it felt very much like it.

Why were we there?  Why had we thought the Afghans wouldn’t fight - they defeated the Russians after all.  And why did everyone in Kabul and London keep insisting that nobody in Helmand really wanted to support the Taliban but were being forced to?

What if they were wrong?  After all, almost everyone in the province now depends on growing poppies.  Whatever the British commanders might say, villagers must see the presence of British troops as threatening the opium trade.

Of course, the operation in Helmand is not at all concerned with poppy cultivation.  It studiously avoids all such inflamatory considerations.  It is a peacekeeping initiative under NATO control (NATO having taken over strategic coordination of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in the summer of 2003).  NATO’s brief is to facilitate the Afghan government’s “ownership of and, eventually, full control and responsibility for” the country.  So, is order imposed from Kabul an objective which the villagers of Helmand would welcome, surviving as they are principally off the narcotics trade?  We would be living in a very strange logical universe if it was.

In a sense wider than just utility, then, I find myself brought back to Christina Lamb’s existential bastardisation, “Why were we there?”  On what basis does NATO, an agent of the elevated and far-distant “international community”, justify its intervention?  And does it lend any real moral legitimacy?

READ MORE...

There are some things that can never be said often enough.  Here’s Desmond Jones on Phil’s Chinese Racists thread, answering a heart-felt plea for peace ‘n lerve from a Chinese commenter:-

... racism (race realism) is good.  It recognizes that it is normal for an ethnic group or race to want to survive and to avoid displacement by others. It recognizes that mass immigration is ethnic competition over territory and that it negatively impacts reproductive fitness.  It realizes that territory ensures survival, and human history is largely a record of groups expanding and contracting, conquering or being conquered, migrating or being displaced by migrants.  The loss of territory, whether by military defeat or displacement by aliens, brings ethnic diminishment or destruction - precisely what is happening in the “multicultural” West today.

It is YOU, who must realize that WE are merely trying to survive, that we want to live in peace with our families in OUR homelands without the threat of diminishment or destruction.

Perhaps one of the denizens of the MultiCult who occasionally drop by to check out the blog would care to offer an explanation as to how this statement is wrong.

The question of Majority Rights is a question about ways and means to regain the rights we have lost. To that extent, instead of allowing Jewish, Arabic, and African Rights & Feelings to hypnotize our higher centers of rational thought, or to find a label for us like Conservatives, Patriots, Whites, Libertarians, Neo-conservatives, Nationalists, Separatists, Supremacists, anti-Semites, and so on, it behooves us to ask what is to be done.

There are many things that majorityites can do. Here are some.

READ MORE...

David Cameron’s first big by-election test was yesterday, in leafy, suburban Bromley & Chislehurst.  He flunked it.

The late, great Eric Forth’s 13,342 General Election majority over Labour was reduced to a pretty desperate 633 over Ming Campbell’s Lib-Dems.  The ground opened up and swallowed Labour, meanwhile - their vote-share dropping from 22.2% at the GE to a paltry 6.6% and 4th place behind UKIP.

Overall, the number of votes cast to the four principal players fell by 40%, which one might expect at a by-election.  On the right of the spectrum the combined Tory/UKIP vote fell by a little more: 44%.  But it was a slightly different story on the left.  Despite Labour’s meltdown the combined Labour/Lib-Dem vote fell by 34%.  The Lib-Dems’ vote actually went-up by 17%.

It is reasonable to conclude that, in this constituency at least, there is widespread disdain for the government but no particular seepage from left to right, and certainly no enthusiasm for the Cameron agenda.  Indeed, there appears to have been an anti-Cameron vote - a case of the centre rejecting itself perhaps!  The killer for him would be if he was actually losing votes to the Lib-Dems for reasons other than the fact that the latter is always the Party of protest.  This, though, is impossible to determine based on numbers alone.

Meanwhile, Cameron’s carefully cultivated line on Europe has done him no good at all.  It came apart in his hands in the days before the poll, utter confusion prevailing over his wish to withdraw his Party from the federalist alliance in the European Parliament and to scrap The Human Rights Act.  It is difficult to see quite where he will go from here on Europe.  It is important to him, being the positive means by which he aims to bind the right of the Party to him (the negative one being that they have nowhere else to go).

They have UKIP, of course.  In Bromley & Chislehurst, Cameron’s Europe debacle surely helped Nigel Farrage to stem the decline evident at May 5th’s local authority elections.  He increased the vote at the last GE by more than half - though at these low numbers small swings can appear more significant than they really are.  UKIP might also have benefitted from the BNP’s reluctant endorsement, though we could only be talking about a hundred or two votes.

Cameron, then, and his little band of ambition modernisers have some thinking to do.  Blair might as well not bother, and chuck it in now.

So, JJR has provoked another “lively” debate about the JQ.  The unedifying spectacle of extreme

judeophilia

phobia

philia threatens.  Antagonism stalks the thread.  Questions are raised, as ever, about the purpose and utility of the blog ...

Situation normal, you might say.  This is MR, after all.  It has never been Amen Corner.

But I think it would do no harm to set out in a formal post why the blog functions in this manner, and why I will not willingly change it.

When one starts a political blog it is usually for the purpose of inflicting upon the world one’s own half-baked opinions, bad jokes and other illiteracies.  It is not wholly beyond the realm of possibility, however, that one may be motivated by something a bit bigger than self.  Apart, I guess, from the survival of the planet absolutely nothing in and beyond politics is bigger than the survival of European Man.  And it is that - the shattering significance of where he stands today and why, and where he is heading tomorrow - combined with the fact that this cannot even be discussed in the political and journalistic mainstream, which   caused me to set-up this decidedly free speech blog.

Now, at the time there was no template to copy.  There were fine websites addressing the issue from various sides, it is true.  But by definition a blog is an open resource.  Uniquely, the time and opportunity exist to interact, to persuade ... to try to answer and, thereby, awaken as many people as possible who are not currently in possession of all the facts and arguments they need to awake.  That, surely, is the first duty of anyone damned fortunate enough to escape the deadly embrace of conventional thinking.

Now, the place to do it is not, in my opinion, among the demonised and ghetto-ised nationalists.  It is out on the edge of the sleeping world where every illusion about us obtains, and only dreams of freedom drift across eyes wide shut.  I once read that it takes five years to change a man’s mind.  I don’t accept that in our case, because we have Nature, tradition and truth on our side.  There are a lot more light sleepers out there, too, as events drag them unceremoniously towards the morning light.

But there was another, more personal reason why I wanted to position MR as close to the mainstream as our interests and material would allow.  Like John, Phil, Martin and Mark, I am a Conservative by instinct.  I did not come to The Great Issue through nationalist politics.  I am comfortable talking to Conservatives about the dichotomies scarring their worldview.  I believe that if Conservatives can gain, or regain, their normal, healthy group-awareness from contact with nationalists, so nationalists can gain realism and respectablity from Conservatives.  The relationship should be mutually beneficial.

That, at least, is the theory.  In practice it has, let us say, been occasionally frustrating.  MR is very like a great pre-war airship.  When the storm-winds blow she is a might susceptible to being driven off-course - quite a bit off-course, actually.  Usually somewhere around Jerusalem.  We have lost bloggers from both wings - temporarily in most cases, I hope - because of the JQ as well as because their tastes and interests naturally diverge.  In the order of things, individual tastes and interests are of little importance and should, ideally, be subservient to a shared notion of the common good.  The JQ, however, is a challenging subject, and it doesn’t help for nationalists who are very familiar with (and completely unphased by) it to discount the difficulties it poses for others.  I have said elsewhere that I think we spend too much time on it.

Still, for all that the blog is what it is, which is something pretty unique and, I hope, valued by some.  I won’t change it.  I want, instead, to push the experiment forward and invite all who read this and who believe, from whatever political standpoint, that the Crisis of European Man is politically paramount to join in that effort.

Janice Turner is the kind of journalist who should never type the word, patriotism.  Or nation, or nationhood.  To state the obvious, she is a lady journalist, you see.  A woman ... a nice, emolient, “why can’t we all just get along?” sort of soft thingy.

In this morning’s Times she simpers, “Help, I think I’m a little Englander.”  But what she really delivered to the doorsteps of the, well yes, nation was a perfectly-honed if unwitting confirmation of my friend Fred Scrooby’s oft-stated view of her sex.

She is unaware that she can’t apprehend race, of course.  Not in its fullness.  For Janice, her homeland and the interests of its people can be only vaguely perceived through the medium of the economy.

This, then, is how she makes the patriotic case:-

... Does it matter that such a cherished British institution [she means Wimbledon 2006 - Ed] has shacked up with a foreign brand?  Lauren’s little polo ponies will trot out of the Wimbledon shop as sure as rain will fall. So he’s worth his £6 million deal.  And anyway, what is British fashion?  Our designers create from Parisian ateliers, their clothes are cut in Milan, sewn in China, shown in New York.  Get with the global economy, grannio, you may think.  Well, perhaps . . . except it just feels so wrong.

Likewise, as I glare at the Saharan patches on my lawn and read about Thames Water, which hiked up my bill on a promise to repair leaks but instead decided to award my hard-earned to its shareholders, my fury is compounded by the knowledge that my water is German-owned.  I keep imagining the executives of RWE — Thames’s parent company — relaxing by glistening swimming pools, amid verdant gardens.

Deep in the Ruhr or Rhine, they won’t get neighbours ear-bashing them about plants shrivelled by the hosepipe ban.  They won’t feel they have failed in their duty to their customers or to this country, because we are faceless, faraway citizens and this is a foreign country.  They don’t feel responsibility, let alone shame.  ... Am I a little Englander, a petty nationalist, an economic dinosaur because I loathe the idea of British utilities and infrastructure being foreign-owned?  In the global free market, the swirling, borderless world of international finance, why should it matter that the Spanish are about to buy Heathrow, Gatwick and five other British airports?  Or that 21 ports, including Hull, Southampton and Tilbury — accounting for a quarter of British seabourne traffic — will soon be controlled by a foreign consortium?  After all, much of our energy is already owned by French or American firms, or at any rate controlled by non-British shareholders.

... And so powerful and cross-party is the belief that liberalised markets mean the best company — regardless of nationality — gets the gig and provides the best value for the customer, it feels heresy to ask two simple questions: is this safe and is it undermining our sense of nationhood? I cannot answer the first. No politician has ever explained what happens if things turn sour with a country that owns our strategic installations: a bunch of power stations, say, or Mersey docks, now property of the people of Dubai. The British Government has already vowed that Russia’s state-owned Gazprom will not be allowed near our gas for fear it will use supplies as a political weapon, as it did in Ukraine. Yet we are expected to believe that all other foreign companies are benign, have only our interests at heart.

Now, at this juncture MR - if not Times - readers will be connecting the dots pretty damned quick.  So what has Janice to say of the surrendering of whole segments of our cities and towns to complete aliens?  Does she rail at the paucity of politicians, by which we must assume she means mainstream politicians, explaining that things will turn very sour racially?  People like us have, of course.  Several times.  But our politicos would rather eat sennapods and gunpowder for a week.

Ms Turner, it turns out, feels the same.  There seems to be a war going on inside her between her feminine emotion and her masculine reason.  Here she is zig-zagging towards an outcome, a synthesis of sorts:-

READ MORE...

The American feminist author and London-based journalist Lionel Shriver disappointed a few Guardian readers today with a classic rant against the Mexican invasion.

“I am obsessed with immigration,” she said.  She obviously meant it.  She railed against “the disappearing ink” of US immigration law, and ended:-

I was bemused to read this week that Mexico has an accelerating immigration problem. Many of the South and Central Americans teeming across its border with Guatemala are heading for the US. But a fair number are staying on in Mexico, where they take “the jobs Mexicans don’t want”. So many Mexicans have left for more lucrative jobs in el Norte that only the Guatemalans will pick mangoes in the baking sun for a few lousy pesos.

Furthermore, foreigners ploughing into Mexico are subject to the same fierce local resentment that brought outraged Mexicans out on America’s streets in April. The coordinator of the government-funded humanitarian organisation Grupo Beta declared, “This society does not see migrants as human beings, it sees them as criminals.” I was startled to learn that Mexico’s immigration law is far more stringent than America’s, even more stringent than the harsher laws now in limbo in the US Congress, over which Mexican president Vicente Fox has been so alarmed.

This is what I mean about double standards. The very same national populations that blithely regard the US as an extension of their own backyard get very stroppy indeed when foreigners start regarding their own countries with the same presumption.

Admittedly, this is a double standard in which American mythology has been complicit. Forever talking up the “melting pot” and our proud tradition as a “nation of immigrants”, US politicians can’t sabre-rattle over stricter immigration policies without sounding like hypocrites. The rest of the world doesn’t believe the US has the right to police its own borders; raised on all that “huddled masses yearning to be free” folderol, Americans don’t either. In short, the US has been helplessly victimised by its own bullshit.

READ MORE...

E-mail to this blog received today from Matt Heaton of our hosting company.

Dear Bluehost.com Customer,

Today we experienced several MAJOR distributed denial of service attacks against our network. We regret that you experienced some downtime today. We have worked diligently today to further protect our network from these types of attacks. The attack today came from MANY different computers at the same time. This makes it difficult to block and resolve the issue.

Please know that we are working as hard and efficiently as we can to make sure interruptions are brief and rare.

We add our apologies for any connection difficulties you may have experienced over the last 24 hours or so.