“Public turns on animal terrorists.  The proportion of people who approve of animal testing is at an all-time high.  Activists have fatally damaged their cause.  People are fed up with protesters’ thuggery.”

So runs the current headline at the Telegraph website.  The YouGov survey which uncovered this development is here.  The supporting articles written for it are here, here and here.

The lesson is simple enough.  After the Wall went down many far left activists looking for somewhere to exorcise their demons migrated into the animal rights movement.  They quickly turned it into animal rights extremism.  Where once it was Red Lion Square it became Huntingdon Laboratory.  But, to modify Newton’s Third Law, in our society extremist activisim unfailingly produces a reaction among ordinary people.  It offends against their inate sense of justice and moderation, and thank heavens for it.

But usually there is a modifier to this: it doesn’t matter.  Reaction is rarely directly transferrable to politics.  Very many issues, and animal rights is one, never arise at election time and thus a reactionary public has no purchase on events.  It must rely on its elected representatives to share its sensibilities.

In our time we have, with the great Marxisation of the zeitgeist since the 1980’s, seen that this does not work nearly well enough.  It is a flaw in the democratic process and it has allowed extremisms other than animal rights - and ethnic interests other than our own - to seize the tiller of our politics.  All the narrow egalitarian “movements” of the last forty years have been anti-democratic in this way, and continue to be so.  What else are the special interest groups, NGO’s and what-have-you but evidence incarnate that democracy has been subborned and the will of the people dismissed?

I really don’t know how much opinion polls like this one by YouGov cost.  More than interested parties such as the BNP can afford, no doubt.  Still, it would be extremely interesting and useful (and novel) to have opinion polled using the language of political freedom.  How would the native English population answer a question that asked, “Do you think it’s right that before the end of this century the English could lose their homeland to people from the Third World?”  Or “Should you be free to speak as you wish, within the bounds of common decency, and to associate with whom you please?”  Or “Should children be taught Marxist ideals at school?”

Any billionaire reader who has tired of the Champagne lifestyle and wants to do something useful for a change could do worse than think on that.

Today Sean O’Neill of The Times deigned to inform us that “Race killings are no longer a matter of black and white”.

Well, thank you very much, Sean.  But excuse me if I am unimpressed.  Race killings never were the sole preserve of white men.  Your headline neatly avoids that, and I wonder why.  Specifically, I wonder why you didn’t write a story headlined, “Who wants you to think that race killers are always white?”

The problem, I suppose, is that it has been journalists of both left and right who wanted this.  What purpose but the construction of a false public perception did the press feeding frenzy over the Lawrence and Walker murders serve?  The Marxist prescription of white guilt somehow became theirs, and they sought to make it ours.

They have no excuses.  The purpose and perniciousness of political correctness was well understood in America by 1992, and the term itself was quite possibly recycled from early Soviet communism by right-wing academics as early as 1980.  What serious journalist of the right anywhere has not debunked it since, and enjoyed himself hugely in the process?

All the more extraordinary, then, that these proud linguistic gladiators, these professional cynics and modern inquisitors should all come to crowd together on an extreme ideological outcrop way out left of human nature.

Let’s take a look at O’Neill’s article today.  The meat of it is this:-

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It is quite surprising to watch the force of the current popular immigration opposition when one considers the state of the US economy. Obviously, the average American is no where near as aware of the problem of immigration and majority-inversion as he should be. None the less, the giant is waking in the American Street, and all this with little appreciable component of the message concerning employment or loss of jobs to immigrants. It is a tribute to the strength of the economy that Bush and Co can even speak of jobs “Americans are not willing to do”.

What makes this so very interesting though is just what a perfect storm is awaiting us when the economy takes its next cyclic downturn. Consider the two forces that will be at work: First, there will be the millions of unemployed Americans feeling the effect of a borderless nation as they try to compete with the locust of the Third World. Secondly however, there will be the 20 million plus illegal, as well as countless “legal” Hispanics also running out of work. How will they react? Will they go home? Try to squeeze Americans out of jobs by intimidation? Will they form mass “protests” for government intervention, welfare, make-work projects? And what will happen if the millions of “family oriented”, “freedom loving”, immigrants take to the streets to do more than just peacefully protest?

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One evening last November I took my daughter to a concert given in Brighton by the English classical pianist, Joanna MacGregor.  The evening and Miss MacGregor were provocative and inspiring in roughly equal proportions, and I wrote about it and her here.

Last Sunday afternoon BBC Radio 3 broadcast a concert which Miss MacGregor gave the previous night in the Assembly Rooms, Bath.  It was her recital contribution to the opening night of the

2006 Bath International Music Festival, and featured much the same content and the same contrasts I blogged about - Professor Longhair staring across the platform at J S Bach, for example.  For the next three or four days the curious can still hear a programme repeat here.  It lasts about 90 minutes (and if you use IE you can pause/advance it - but not with Mozilla).

I put “recital contribution” in italics because Miss MacGregor also makes a weighty administrative contribution to this year’s Festival, being its new Artistic Director.  She speaks about this part of her role at the beginning of the programme:-

When I came to the Bath Festival I was struck, obviously, by the existing core customer audience which is very loyal, and they love chamber music –high quality chamber music – and you’ve got these wonderful venues like the Assembly Rooms, the Guild Hall.

But I knew I wanted to sort of open it up, and I knew I needed to open it up to other audiences.  And I also needed to bring my personality into all this - and, of course, I’m so interested in so many different kinds of music.

So straight away I knew I was going to invent a new focus on traditional music, a new focus on electronica, maintain and expand the jazz programme and let the jazz programme completely burst its banks, you know … and invade the rest of the programme, all this kind of thing.  And, of course, my big thing is “never putting anybody in boxes”.  So I would never ever say, “OK, it’s world music and it’s cool, and it’s classical music over here everybody.  And in the blue corner it’s jazz, you know.”  It’s just never gonna happen like that with me.  And I think this recital programme is an example of that.

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We will be closed for business for up to four hours today so our hosting company can switch servers and effect a substantial upgrade to capacity.  I hope that will resolve the occasional problems we have had with CPU starvation over the past few months.

Thanks for your patience and for your support, as always.

Here is an English blogger’s take on the fate of America under Mexicanisation.  It’s a wide-ranging, somewhat formative but nonetheless good post - well worth a read, I think.  I would be interested in what some of our American friends make of blogger Steve’s view.

I have found myself included in a New Right mailing list which contains much interesting material ... such as this Moscow News interview of the great Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.

One has the impression that the general population in Russia has caught the West’s disease of advanced liberalism (“total liberalism” the Moscow Times calls it) with such swiftness that large parts of the country’s elite have been left behind ... and are morally and politically resisting.  I hope that is true.

All the interview is worth reading.  But the sections which particularly caught my attention are these:-

MN:  It would be natural to assume that, at the very least, you would include a demographic project among these priorities - something that you have called “saving the nation.” What short-, medium- and long-term actions need to be taken as Russia, the Russian nation in particular, is literally dying out?

AS: Indeed, “saving the nation” - numerically, physically, and morally - is the utmost task for the state. (Consider the 25 million compatriots who were cut off from Russia as a result of the crazy conspiracy in the Belovezhskaya Forest: Our law-makers were in a state of chaos, hysterically and irresponsibly going from one extreme to another and contradicting themselves.) All measures to raise living standards - housing, diet, healthcare, education, morality, etc. - are in effect designed to save the nation. This is an overriding priority.

MN: Clearly, our society is in a moral crisis that manifests itself either in the absence of any moral principles or in the existence of opposing moral principles at the same time. Can Russia escape this collision? What is the state supposed to do in this situation - impose a particular set of moral values? What values?

AS: In their actions, state authorities must stay within the bounds of morality even more responsibly than ordinary citizens. They should set an example, but not forcibly impose any rules. I believe that the only way out is through the conscious, voluntary self-constraint and self-denial of people, especially those shaping public opinion.

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The author of Tomorrow is Another Country, Myles Harris, has popped up with a free article in the current Salisbury Review.  It is titled “Made in Broadcasting House” and, fairly obviously therefore, is an attack on the liberal media’s long culture war against the native British peoples.

Here are the best bits:-

Three weeks after the bombings an 18 year old black teenager was murdered by a white thug in Liverpool. Dreadful as it was it was given air time out of all proportion to its significance. Even though it came soon after the London bombings, it was instantly elevated to first place in the news. Senior police chiefs talked sombrely of it, pundits were called in to condemn it and the story was kept alive for months. This was in marked contrast to the way the BBC covered the ‘ordinary‘ murder of a 28 year old white man by a black man in the same week and in almost identical circumstances. It was hardly mentioned on the news, no mention of the race of the victim’s assailant was made and it was quickly dropped. It took a huge number of protests before the BBC gave the story adequate coverage.

The message was clear. Fifty six Britons may have been murdered by religious fanatics, a young white man of 28 may have been casually stabbed to death defending his girlfriend on the top of a London bus, but the murder of a black teenager was far more important. A black man killing a white man or Islamist terrorists killing and maiming people on the tube are crimes but they are not racism. A white man killing a black man is racism and therefore incomparably worse. Racism points to something deeply flawed in a society. So flawed - goes the unspoken message – we can begin to understand how the tube bombings themselves might be ‘explicable’ or even ‘justified‘ in the eyes of a racial minority such as British Moslems, (6% of whom thought them justified). Once we have accepted our racism we will be able to see our society as morally equivalent to that of the Islamist bombers. This view, that all actions are equivalent, that there is really no difference between our society and any other, has been creeping up on us for years. It is a product of extreme liberalism, and its ultimate consequence is a bestial society in which anything is permitted.

... For forty years the British - who had always believed to the contrary - have been told they are irredeemably racist and everything they have automatically thought to be good. We have been told that our police, the army, British tolerance and fair play, our justice system, are all irredeemably flawed. Instead we are constantly reminded that the police suffer from institutional racism, the British army tortures its prisoners, our security service is full of liars, uncontrolled mass migration is beneficial to the country…

At the moment traditional British society is lying whimpering in the floor of its cage under this assault. And like the battered wife awaiting a violent husband, urged on by the left, we are struggling to discover what it is we must do to prevent further blows ...  When all such possibilities are exhausted – and they always are - those who have learnt to be helpless do not remain passive. The beaten wife takes a knife to her husband, the dog lying whimpering on the floor sinks his fangs into the hand that produces a plate of food.

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