by I. Bismuth

I had delivered a triumphantly prolix lecture to the International Coven of Sensitivity Consultants, so it was late on a winter’s evening that I returned to the railway station in a nameless provincial city.

My nocturnal walk trainwards took me along a street suddenly silent apart from my own footsteps. Do not imagine that this made me fearful of an encounter with those who are vulnerable to entering the criminal justice system. Fear in that place and at that time would have been crass racism.

But I confess to having been startled by a sudden, dull thud and the squeal of brakes. The sound came from around the corner I was about to turn. As I did so a few seconds later the air was filled with laughter and shouting - a most vibrant sound, a Cushitic tongue I would say, possibly Somalic. There followed a hysterical glissando of first gear getaway. Then I was walking along a street silent once again but for the echo of my own footsteps and the addition of a low moaning a little way ahead of me. It came from a body lying in the middle of the road.

I approached it and saw it was a man in his late twenties with as much blood on display as you would expect in the circumstances.

“Can you move?” I asked.

“I think my legs are broken.”

“This is terrible. What on earth happened?”

“A car came at me.”

My antennae twitched.

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Finally, I have found a picture of I Bismuth, and he looks like this.  I can also reveal that when he gets some time away from the department, he works for that fine body, the Institute of Race Replations, vibrantly led and staffed as it is.  No cause for righteous complaint there.

In any case, the IRR has surpassed itself today by releasing its latest exposé of dark and unacceptable doings in the sheep- and cow-plagued, too unBrixton-like and too too green English countryside:

Racial violence: the buried issue

Research published by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) today, reveals dangerously high levels of racial violence in the UK - a violence which is spreading into new areas.

As mainstream parties compete as to which can reduce immigration fastest - ostensibly to defuse community fears - no one asks who actually bears the immediate fall-out of such tensions - Black and Minority Ethnic, asylum-seeker/refugee and migrant communities.

As far as the authorities are concerned the Macpherson inquiry (set up in the wake of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993) has dealt with racial violence. It no longer exists, it is no longer a problem issue. But the IRR’s report, Racial violence: the buried issue, reveals that, on average, five people a year in the UK have lost their lives to racial violence since Stephen’s death - a total of eight-nine victims in seventeen years.

And analysis of 660 racial attacks in 2009 reveals that certain groups of people are particularly at risk: ‘dispersed’ asylum seekers, newly-arrived migrant workers, those who look Muslim and/or work in isolating trades such as taxi-cabbing, food take-aways, small shops and eateries.

The map of violence has changed quite dramatically since studies were first done a generation ago, when primarily areas like Southall, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham witnessed the most racial attacks and racist murders. Such areas are now, in part through struggles against racism, more ‘at ease’ with their diversity. Today racial violence is on the rise in towns, cities and villages which are only now beginning to change demographically - with the arrival of asylum seekers, migrant workers, overseas students, and the natural movement of settled BME families from the larger conurbations.

According to the report’s authors: ‘The governments’ line that community tension is based solely on new immigration to the UK is partial and opportunistic. The UK is now witnessing an ever-expanding mosaic of different racisms based on different local conditions. And politicians themselves are responsible, through their neglect of poor disadvantaged areas, policies including the demonisation of certain groups and rhetoric around the war on terror, for creating, particularly in areas where competition over scarce resources is keenest, a climate in which racial violence will flourish. The drastic economic cuts of the new government can only make things worse.’

On its tatty little website there is a page about the history of the IRR.  Cogniscenti of anti-white institutional funding will recognise the names there.  I would like to think that Osborne’s budgetary constraints could put an end to this repulsive little hate-fest.  But the IRR has been sponging off Money since 1952, so I doubt it will disappear now.  Bismuth is hard to kill.

In loyalist Belfast there are signs of a different kind of fight against the drive for a multiracial utopia.  You will remember the Roma physically forced out a year ago.  Well, the attacks on immigrants are, it seems, continuing.  From a Guardian article by a self-described black, self-confessed IRA terrorist turned journalist, who served a seven year sentence for possession of weapons:

The latest race attacks in Northern Ireland are as depressing as they are predictable. Isolated families in loyalist areas having their homes ransacked, their belongings destroyed and their lives threatened is a phenomenon now occurring with sickening regularity.

In the latest incidents, a mob attacked two homes in the loyalist Village area of south Belfast and in Whiteabbey, cars belonging to Filipino and Indian families were burned. The attacks come a year after a hundred Roma people were forced to flee Northern Ireland after racist petrol bombings, also in south Belfast.

... Northern Ireland is changing, slowly. Two major factors have been responsible: the first was the IRA ceasefire in 1994, and the second was the influx of EU citizens, especially from the accession states such as Poland. Foreign nationals from the Philippines, west Africa and elsewhere also arrived here in numbers for work or to study.

The rate of change has been alarming for some people and some communities including, in particular, the working-class loyalist communities in greater Belfast. The middle-class and economically active Protestants have fled to the satellite towns around the city, vacating houses in the process. Migrants, especially Poles, have filled these homes, leaving an ill-equipped, under-resourced Protestant community feeling abandoned.

It was only a matter of time before someone lashed out and, as ever, ethnic minorities make easy scapegoats. It feels like it’s only a matter of time before someone gets killed. The BNP has been recruiting disaffected young loyalists who, in previous years, might have joined the UDA or UVF to attack nationalists. Many suspect that loyalists either orchestrate or acquiesce in many of the attacks.

Education and political leadership are needed to address the racists. In a recent TV interview, the presenter asked me if Irish people needed to show a little more “tolerance” to migrants and blacks in their midst. My response was unapologetic: “I’m not here to be tolerated.”

So the recogniseable elements are all here.  “Some” among Belfast’s working class loyalists (whom, naturally, no one has had the political courage or integrity to consult) are “alarmed” at the “rate of change”.  The immigrants, meanwhile, “make easy scapegoats” for “the racists”.  And what a neat transition into blame mode that is!  That it’s wrong to coerce Belfast folk into accomodating foreigners never enters the writer’s ethnic head.  We are told that education and leadership will “address the racists”.  Well, there are some very hard, very uncompromising, very organised groups in loyalist Belfast.  They stood their ground against the IRA not for years but for decades, and were in no wise less lethal or remorseless.  The question is: are some of them standing again now?  The answer probably depends on whether they possess a political understanding of the war against European existence as nuanced as the one they acquired of The Troubles.  Simple xenophobia wouldn’t have the legs to fuel a long war against the MultiCult.

This is one story to keep an eye on.

I paid a return visit to the BNP section of British Democracy Forum today.  This section, with the Griffin-hating Nationalists Online and its antithesis, the nauseatingly loyal Home of the Green Arrow, is the mainstay of British Nationalist chatter on the net.

What I found on my visit to BDF today was a thread titled Definition of britishness? - your aims & goals which had been begun on 1st May by a lady named Valentina (whoops, Katerina).  She turns out to be an inquisitive Jew, which hardly surprised given that she served up a picture of British Nationalism as Nazism with, of course, a heavy helping of Holosauce on the side.  On page 8 of the thread I offered a novel corrective (using the name of a character from a treasured British film comedy of my childhood).

I wish I could say that the result was a passionate and dangerous, liberating exploration of the issue of ownership of discourse.  But no matter how I spelt it out, neither British nor Jewish Nationalist would take up the challenge.  All that happened, basically, was that the owner of BDF advised me through the in-house mail system:

You have received an infraction at British Democracy Forum.

Reason: Signature Rule Violation

The offence was “dragging threads off topic with your tedious Jew bashing.”

I wonder, sometimes, whether even nationalists (or nominal nationalists, at any rate) are too insensate to their own captivity to recognise the distant, weak light of freedom.

by Cladrastis

There is an ongoing debate regarding how WE might regain the reigns of power – how we might take the captaincy of the vessel, so to speak. We all know the problem – the intoxicated captain (whose name is “He Who Wrestles with God” or Jacob) is steering us directly into an iceberg. Under Jacob’s captaincy, the ship has been neglected; our vessel is already taking on water, and the boilers are running out of steam (not to mention the problem of the exploding rat population). What good will it do us to usurp Jacob’s power if the ship is no longer seaworthy?

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by Alexander Baron

Occasionally in my life I have experienced a revealed truth, usually nothing very profound. In January 1986, I experienced one which led me to renounce alcohol, literally there and then. On April 23, 2010, I experienced another one.

I was doing some shopping in Sydenham, and called in at the Iranian store on the way home; one of the things I wanted to buy was a packet of noodles; I’d bought one there the previous day, but couldn’t find it in the kitchen, so figured I must have left it in the store. This was indeed the case, because the old guy who served me pointed this out, and as he bagged up the replacement with my loaf of bread told me to get another packet and he’d only charge me for the one.

Okay, it’s only a little thing, not even half a quid, but he didn’t have to bother. I looked at him, he was somewhat older than me, and unlike me, almost certainly not childless. I thought he must have grandkids, probably living in Iran. Then I thought of this man, below. Looks uphappy, doesn’t he? Wanna know why he looks so unhappy?

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by I. Bismuth

As an academic at the forefront of social and cultural transformation I like to keep abreast of the latest developments in the visual arts, and I am a regular visitor to the Shooting Gallery, an exciting little space not far from the university. It presents a new exhibition of contemporary works every couple of months. I never trouble to find out beforehand what I am going to see, being confident I can rely on the gallery’s board of trustees to keep pushing the boundaries of artistic expression, but always the same boundaries and always in the same direction. That, at any rate, was my fond belief. So last week, when I picked up the catalogue and entered the main room, I was totally unprepared for the experience I was about to undergo.

The first thing with which I was confronted was a full-length standing nude, a female with pearly skin, not an over-eater, not a starveling, and with no obvious abnormalities, amputations or signs of substance abuse. The painting was beautiful. There was proportion, order, balance, harmony, rhythm, and unity, for God’s sake. The model was beautiful, too. There was the blueness of her left eye and there was the blueness her right eye, and, as if that were not enough, there was the blackness of her hair, the same hair, mind you, that reached down to caress the whiteness of her shoulders, damn them. What was going on here? I was in the Shooting Gallery ... the same Shooting Gallery. I could not be seeing what I thought I was seeing.

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Reading Keynes’ critique of Gesell the key intellectual failing of Keynes’ entire body of work is best exemplified in this concluding remark:

“Thus if currency notes were to be deprived of their liquidity-premium by the stamping system, a long series of substitutes would step into their shoes — bank-money, debts at call, foreign money, jewellery and the precious metals generally, and so forth.”

If Keynes had merely taken one more step beyond Gesell (and himself) to identify in-place liquidation value of net assets as the tax base (or, if one prefers, one can call it the “demurrage base”) he would have escaped the profound irony embodied in his initial observation of Gesell:

“..whose work contains flashes of deep insight and who only just failed to reach down to the essence of the matter.”