Majorityrights Central > Category: No particular place to go

From the Daily Mail:-

An unusual take on the world, the Atlas of True Names shows how global places came to be named. The etymological take on the world traces Great Britain to Great Land of the Tattooed. The combination of the Greek word ‘prettanoi’, meaning tattoed people, and the Celtic word, ‘brit’, meaning light coloured or speckled, is behind the modern name.

London is re-named as Hillfort, as one theory behind the name of the city’s origin is that the celtic words ‘lon’ and ‘dun’ mean fort on a hill. Birmingham is Bear Guard Home, York is Wild Boar Village and Liverpool and Edinburgh are Choked Pool and Slopecastle respectively. The Orkneys has one of the most fascinating origins. Labelled Isles of the Sea Monsters in the atlas, the word ‘orc’ means whale, or sea monster in Celtic.

Places outside of the UK have equally intriguing origins. Cameroon, for example, is Land of the Shrimps, coming from the Portugese word ‘camaroes’, meaning shrimps. Chicago and Moscow have been given the less romantic monikers of Stink Onion and Bog respectively - Chicago comes from the Native American word ‘checagou’, while Moscow is derived from ‘mosk’, the Slavic word for bog. Other strange names include the Russian city of Vladivostok as ‘Dominate the East!’, and the Indian city of Madras as ‘Realm of the God of the Underworld’.

Today’s Sunday Mail carries a story about the leaking of details of a new MI5 operations centre by a careless council somewhere in south-east of England.  In the course of the article the website Secret Bases was mentioned.  It’s a four-part resume of mostly unacknowledged British intelligence facilities, supported by dozens of aerial photographs - many acquired through a “resident pilot”.  Part One is here.

Secret Bases is run by a guy called Alan Turnbull.  I take my hat off to him. If he has a counterpart in the US, he’s not nearly so outrée.  Does anyone know of a comparable site?

The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,
There’s men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold,
The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there,
And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old.

There’s chaps from the town and the field and the till and the cart,
And many to count are the stalwart, and many the brave,
And many the handsome of face and the handsome of heart,
And few that will carry their looks or their truth to the grave.

I wish one could know them, I wish there were tokens to tell
The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern;
And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell
And watch them depart on the way that they will not return.

But now you may stare as you like and there’s nothing to scan;
And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told
They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

AE Housman’s remarkably prophetic “The Lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair”, from his collection “A Shropshire Lad” of 1896, later set to music by George Butterworth.

Last Sunday afternoon BBC Radio 3 broadcast a highly interesting contribution to its Discovering Music series titled Vaughan Williams and the Lost Generation.  The highly interesting aspect of it was its concentration on early 20th century English music thematically drawn from some deeply recondite folk sources - what presenter Stephen Johnson terms “music of the people”.

This reaching towards the life of the rural people by artists and intellectuals was a political fashion on the left at the time, but a rather honourable one given that Marx was already entering the working class movements of the industrial centres.  The leading musical spirit of the time was Ralph Vaughan Williams, who died fifty years ago this year.  He, along with other young composers, broke with the High Victorian conventions and sought out ancient English folk songs at their source.  Vaughan Williams spent his entire professional life in the act of reaching musically for a spirit of landscape and of people, and he is probably known and loved for it by English music-lovers more today than at any time in the past.

On the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the signing of the Armistice (as I post this it is already the 11th day of the 11th month in England), it is mete to remember the meaning of this search for an English essence.  The search for self, and a putting away of falsehood, is always a valid exercise.  When the French speak of La France Profonde, this self, ageless and unchanging, is what they mean.  For those lingering romantics at the turn of the 20th century who looked at urban life and saw nothing but falsehood and artifice there was only one, now all-changed place to search out a cure.

But as an intellectual fashion, the search itself died in the trenches of Northern France.  When peace finally returned it was gone.  One can argue, I think, that with the witness died the thing itself.  The connection to the land, the character of place were greeted thereafter with a general disinterest.  The national focus was on the city and on the struggle of the industrial poor, which meant that the spirit of a deeper and more inchoate English reality ceased to be any kind of professionally useful metric.

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JWH has responded to a comment of mine here at MR which revisited the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigeneous Peoples (pdf).

My comment included a quote from the Declaration:-

Article 8

1. Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture.

2. States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for:
(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities;
(b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources;
(c) Any form of forced population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights;
(d) Any form of forced assimilation or integration;
(e) Any form of propaganda designed to promote or incite racial or ethnic discrimination directed against them.

JWH then noted that:-

For some reason, majority groups who have evolved for long time periods in specific lands - which would seem to the honest and the rational to be the very definition of “indigenous” - are not included in this definition and are so not meant to be included in the protections that the UN document offers. Of all (currently) majoritarian groups, only Europeans of the major populations are truly endangered. So, although, for example, the Chinese have a case to argue that the UN unfairly deprives them of indigenous status, there’s no real world implications of that. For Europeans being race replaced in their ancient homelands, the issue is of the greatest real world importance imaginable.

Therefore, it is of the greatest importance that this issue not be forgotten and be followed up on. I realize I am just yelling into the wind here and that, as usual, all such urgent pronouncements will be utterly ignored (after a few possible comments of, “he’s right, but now, let’s talk about ‘council housing”).

What should be done if this issue were not ignored? One cannot expect the UN, in the current context, to seriously consider anything that would support the interests of European-derived peoples. After all, it seems like one major objective of the UN (possibly, the major objective) is the destruction of those peoples.

However, that minority of intelligent, thoughtful and reasonable stakeholders in European preservationism need to have this UN document, and the implications of it for European-derived peoples, made clear to them - and they need to be given the intellectual tools to be able to speak out and confront the globalists with demands for change with respect to definitions of “indigenous” and the rights of protection that go along with it (*).

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One of the pleasures of our politics is the wondrous clarity it affords in assessing the interests and, often, ethnicity of those professing European ethno-suicide.  When the facts are known and the assessment is in, it can be very difficult to resist taking a wee bit of advantage.

Now, of course, it goes without saying that I observe to the letter the Rules of Posting at Comment is Free, especially the one about creating multiple identities (my previous five - all banned - in no way imply contempt for this Rule, naturally).

Anyway, some non-liberal poster going by the name of Recititive obviously caught a whiff of something rotten in a conversation between an interesting rightist with anti-immigration and libertarian credentials, and a penchant for mysticism, styling himself “withdrawn” and an academic sociologist, I would say, called Lester Jones.  The headline article to which both were responding was an average-to-simplistic offering about identity by Genevieve Maitland Hudson - plainly a deliciously English “identity” herself:-

Identity is a contemporary buzzword. It has filtered into public consciousness in a wide variety of contexts. A quick search of this very website on June 13 produced 27,139 hits for articles which featured identity, including a special report on “Islam, race and British identity”, an interactive guide on “Multicultural Britain: the world in one country” a story about the redesign of the union flag to include a Welsh dragon and a number of reports on the controversial issue of ID cards. In each case, identity featured as the central conceptual focus of the article. Identity, both individual and collective, is everywhere. This reflects the extent to which it has become unavoidable for the alert citizen, a subject that we are expected to consider and reconsider daily in regard to others and ourselves.

The everyday meaning of identity is never entirely fixed but there are successful definitions that have particular influence in particular contexts. There are two general definitions of identity in the articles featured in the Guardian. The first appears in articles on ID cards and identity fraud and encapsulates the notion of an individual’s possession of official characteristics, a recognised legal identity to which a bundle of rights (political, economic and social) can be attached. The second is primarily concerned with culture and is often tagged with a national, ethnic or religious complement, “British identity” and, “Muslim identity” being by far the most common. In both cases, identity is construed as a recognisable object, a specific something with a given content that can be tagged with an appropriate label. This in itself is not uncontroversial, though it is not questioned as often as it ought to be.

And so forth.  Not incredibly illuminating.

The thread is a good one, and opens with what appears to be a cracking and beautifully reactionary first entry - a link to this fluttering world of identities.  Unfortunately, it transpires later that the guy was not being critical at all.

Four comments in “withdrawn” appears, grumbling about “the chattering classes discussing multiculturalism”, which he expands a few comments later with:-

The article confuses personal identity and multiculturalism.

If you study the history of your local area, you will find that it had a much stronger sense of identity fifty years ago. There were local business, bus companies, accents, customs football teams and so forth. In other words, a local culture. Due to changes in business, film. TV and radio, that sense of place has been slowly eroded.

However multiculturalism has been imposed and is generally unwelcome but it bestows no advantage to most people, quite the reverse. The middle and owner classes generally welcome multiculturalism because they instinctively know it benefits them financially and the reverse is true for the working classes. The BNP are villified, not as fascists but as genuine class enemies.

Life being what it is, the BNP is no more than a heavily monitored arm of the security services that allows the rulers to paint all opposition to immigration as neo nazi.

Lester Jones arrives on the thread a few comments later, making it plain in addressing Genevieve that he conflates ethnic awareness with That Bastard Idea Nazism:-

Interesting article.

Your definition of the second conception of identity (that which is primarily concerned with culture) is questionable, but might more acceptably be described as an adaptable tribal identity that is effectively limited groups of humans who define themselves in opposition, and it’s this abstract concept of group identity that is so easily manipulated to disastrous ends.

In modern Western states like Britain most if not all constructed group identities have almost nothing to do with the day to day experiences of the people who cling so desperately to them, which explains why all kinds of reprehensible, or as you say “narrow and painful definitions” are so easily internalized. But where community norms and community expectations were once either a buffer against or a breeding ground for such dangerous divisive philosophies like those offered by the far right, now in a fragmented society ... people are free to create their own, or more usually be easily manipulated into connecting themselves to false and constructed environments.

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THE MOON OVER ALBION

by Xenia Sunic

She emerged late one night
Heavy–orbed and unnaturally red
Pregnant with some strange powers
Over Albion.

Forests of never-dying city-dazzling lights
Always in conflict with her celestial appearance,
And the maddening crowd twitching for short excitements
Ignoring the beauty of her sudden sight.

She remained with herself,
Her bygone worshippers; long time dead,
And now finding a hideout within a white cloud,
Then powerfully emerging, madly lightning,
Over the ancient waters and stones of Albion.

Her mystery absorbed; carried on the wings of an Albatross
Over the distant seas, reflecting in the deepest waters
Far away from the mechanical city lights
That obliterate the living darkness of the nights,
And the mystery of her existence.

Hail to thee, that carry us over to shores of after-life,
Through your glimmering moonlight gardens
To the worlds of unknown time,
Through your mighty pull and cosmic flow
To everlasting deathless otherness.

The Moon over Albion!

The MEChA wildfire story should not have got on to the page, so it’s been taken down.  I didn’t believe it, but didn’t question the source.  It’s annoying to give a leg-up to this kind of thing.  On the other hand, the thread it spawned is interesting in its own right, and should stand.

A strategy of violence, where this has occurred in Europe and the Americas, seems to require a deep communal affront at some historical injustice.  Whether that really exists in the south-west today is doubtful.  But it might do in time.  It’s one thing to replace the white population.  It’s another to achieve the political ends that the Chicano students want - particularly to replace the old power elite.

Sorry for the misdirection, but please continue to post on the thread.

The Sea Stallion from Glendalough, the longship Havhingsten fra Glendalough, is a faithful reconstruction of the Skuldelev 2 wreck ...

... found on the bottom of Roskilde Fjord, Norway in 1962.

Chemical analysis of the timbers revealed that Skuldelev 2 - one of five such wrecks in preservation today - was built not in any Viking homeland, but in Glendalough, Dublin in 1042.  The Irish capital had been founded by Viking settlers two centuries earlier, and had become a flourishing trading centre with a large Scandinavian population and close ties to the rest of the Viking world.

The Skuldelev 2 is believed to have been sunk in Roskilde Fjord after thirty years of service.

In December 2004, Her Majesty Queen Margrethe launched the project to build her replica in Denmark.  Only traditional methods would be used, even down to cutting the timbers solely with the Viking axe.  She would be thirty metres long and with a beam of almost four metres.  Her sail would be linen and cover 118 square metres.  Her crew complement would be a maximum eighty oarsmen and women.

The summation of that noble effort was her long voyage, begun on June 30th this year, “back” to Dublin.  She left Roskilde on 30th Jun, stopping in Kirkwall in Orkney and Kyleakin in Skye, and Lagavulin Bay on 30th July.  She arrived triumphantly in Dublin on 14th August.

And how did the political world react to this stirring event?  Need you ask?

The Danish government has expressed regret over the Viking invasion of Ireland more than 1,000 years ago.

The apologetic gesture came as a replica Norse warrior ship arrived in Dublin after a voyage across the North Sea.

Danish Culture Minister Brian Mikkelson said his country was proud of the ship, Havhingsten (The Sea Stallion).

“But we are not proud of the damages to the people of Ireland that followed in the footsteps of the Vikings,” he said.

“But the warmth and friendliness with which you greet us today and the Viking ship show us that, luckily, it has all been forgiven.”

Surely, not quite the Viking spirit.