When most people think of slavery they probably have an image of a white slave owner and a black slave. This is the picture of slavery we have been given through countless books, films and TV shows.

It’s an image which fits in well with left-wing theories that white men have established a dominant power structure which oppresses other races, and that therefore white society is morally illegitimate and must be deconstructed.

Up to now, the main argument against such a left-wing view has been that it was actually white men who ended the slave trade. This is a good and effective argument, but it now appears that much more ought to have been said against the left-wing view.

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I heard about the shooting on the radio on Friday morning. A man had been gunned down in his Melbourne home during the night.

In today’s paper we get the full story. The victim was a man by the name of Jafar Heshmaty. He had left his native Iran, worked illegally in Greece, bought a Greek passport and then flown to Melbourne in 1989.

In Melbourne he was put in detention while his claim for refugee status was fought in the courts. He received support from the Baptist Church which organised protests and a Christian community sponsorship for him.

But after three years the High Court ruled against him because of doubts about his real identity. So he sought and received asylum in America instead.

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“They indulge in all sorts of violent activities - killing, rape, extortion, theft,” said Emmanuel Chege, a 24 year-old botany student at Ambrose Ali university in the town of Ekpoma ...

“It’s all about supremacy and in a war that’s when the killing starts,” said Mr Chege.

From a Telegraph article War of the black magic cults brings death to Nigeria’s universities.

Perhaps culture war on campus isn’t that bad after all.

My thanks go to Michael R for a link to a Lew Rockwell article written last month by Ira Katz.  Michael wanted in particular to point out a quote in the article by Ortega y Gasset from his classic of 1930, The Revolt of the Masses.

It is not that one ought not to do just what one pleases; it is simply that one cannot do other than what each of us has to do, has to be.  The only way out is to refuse to do what has to be done, but this does not set us free to do something else just because it pleases us.  In this matter we only posses a negative freedom of will.

Without commandments, obliging us to live after a certain fashion, our existence is that of the “unemployed”.  This is the terrible spiritual situation in which the best youth of the world finds itself today.  By dint of feeling itself free, exempt from restrictions, it feels itself empty.  An “unemployed” existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.  Because to live means to have something definite to do – a mission to fulfill – and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty.

This was Katz’s opening shot in a bid to reconcile libertarianism and Conservatism, somewhat akin to Frank Meyer’s Fusionism of the 1950’s and 60’s.

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Leader writers, those callow redbrick graddies who cut their not-yet-yellow journalist’s teeth on a few hundred words of thunderous pointlessness every day, are not normally the controversial sort.  They can’t afford to be.  Careers ahead of them, editors to impress, ghastly blunders to avoid ... you know how it is.  But one of this morning’s two offerings by the Telegraph’s leader writer ever so slightly cracked the mould.

His or, just possibly, her first paragraph was a standard Telegraph rant at the dishonesty of the BBC.  Read it many a time.  But then our young hopeful warmed to his (or just possibly her) task, displaying a knowledge of Genghis Khan’s liberal social policy that, as they say, rocked: When he conquered a new tribe, it was his custom to liquidate the aristocracy and assimilate the lower orders: “providing opportunities for the many and not the few”, as it were.  Where modern socialists are sometimes accused of cutting high achievers down to size, Genghis did this literally, ordering the execution of all Tatars over a certain height.  He was a great believer in state power, replacing Mongolia’s clan system with a rudimentary bureaucracy.  He was even an early decimaliser, organising his forces in units of 10.

It was a laugh, that was all.  But I stopped smiling and started thinking when I read the penultimate sentence: Above all, he was a supra-nationalist, deliberately mingling subject populations to destroy their sense of national identity.

Suddenly, forbidden knowledge hove into view.  You won’t hear Michael Howard say anything like that about Labour - never mind Genghis - on his shirt-sleeved tour of the marginals.  You won’t hear him roaring at Blair & Co for the utterly deliberate damage being done to the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish - but most especially the English.  You won’t hear any Tory rail at Labour’s transnationalism, or rip apart its blank slate racial egalitarianism.  It’s not part of the electoral discourse.  It’s too complicated.  Too dangerous.  Not polite.  And, accordingly, our heroic young journalist finishes off his (or just possibly her) effort blandly and therefore safely career-wise, “Step forward Genghis Khan, father of European integration.”  But that was a clear after-thought of no significance.  The other words, those ones about the deliberate mingling of populations to destroy national identity, were burnt onto the page.

It’s good to know that this sort of seminal critique of liberalism is received “out there”, beyond the internet badlands of right-wing cyber-bastards like us.  It’s good to know that it’s not completely self-censored as the left dictates, too.  Perhaps it’s all worth saying again ... and again.

The art world is one of the most corrupted components of British society.  It is filled with talentless professional eccentrics, poseurs and intellectual frauds and lightweights who daub with faeces and trade in pure shock value or boorish mundanity.

What might have been excusable were it no more than the surviving rump of 20th century modernism, refining perhaps the irony of Duchamps and Dali but not their outrageousness, has completely taken over the asylum.  As Prince Charles famously said of architecture, the avant garde has become the establishment.  It seems that there is no way back, for the structure of patronage and schooling which produced the great art of our European past cannot be replicated.  Democracy, capitalism and the state have killed it off absolutely and forever.

The consequence, quite apart from the flight from beauty and the total failure of draughtsmanship, is that the general public has become hopelessly innured to badness.  It traipses along to the galleries to be baffled, amused, entertained by the shock of the bad - in the process, naturally enough, creating a demand for more and yet more and worse badness.  We know it’s all crudely unintellectual schlock of the lowest order, a sublime joke in which some Highfallutin Johnny Expert informs us with a perfectly straight face as to that before which we must genuflect.  But still, it seems, we genuflect.

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THE government has secretly calculated there are about 500,000 illegal immigrants in Britain despite repeated claims by ministers that they do not know the scale of the problem.

However, in the face of a political controversy over lax controls at Britain’s borders, experts involved were told not to reveal the figure.

So begins the lead article in today’s Times Online.

One quite expects governments to “finesse” or just hide inconvenient information.  In the public mind “secrecy” and “Whitehall” go together like peaches and cream.  But from what pain and discontent, precisely, are our wise and far-seeing rulers protecting us now?  Surely, they can’t fear that we shall resent the news of 500,000 illegal but always, of course, vibrant and diverse “saints” walking among us.  Why, they told us that kind of thing was a cause for celebration.  Isn’t it, then?

You have to have a heart of stone not to crack a smile at this tale of death-defying baby-hood.  Thirteen-month old baby boy Lavonta Clark - mother Lawanda, sister Latonia (Bob Cosby would not be happy) -  “survived a drop from a third-story window.  Amazingly, a couple of scratches and a bump on the back of his head are his only injuries.”

The “drop” was inflicted by an 11-year old boy who had had enough of Lavonta’s crying.  You know how it is when you are eleven.  Crying baby ... open window ... end of problem.  Except this time the problem had its fall broken by bushes and cushioned by soft mud.  Result: Lavonta’s screaming even louder and you’ve got a new addition to the rap sheet.  But now you know why guns are good.

Mum Lawanda appears to have wandered away, possibly to “get some things together.”  She needed to give some money to her landlord.  It is not known if the things produced any money.  It is known that she had left her baby in the charge of the eleven-year felon’s aunt who ... well anyway, that’s the way they like to do things in Cincinnati.  From here on, though, Lawanda is going to “focus” on her son.  She would do well to focus on the 11-year old, too.