This is Martin Hutchinson’s current article on Prudent Bear, looking back to the mercantilist origins of China’s current grab for natural resources and pondering alternatives to the kind of future it implies.

GW

THE RETURN OF THOMAS MUN

China’s recent announcement that it would use its $2 trillion of foreign reserves to boost its companies overseas acquisitions tells us that its economic beliefs are neither those of Adam Smith, nor of Karl Marx, but of the 17th Century mercantilist Thomas Mun. It is becoming clear that in economics, unlike in “hard” sciences, old belief systems never die.

Mun (1571-1641) wrote a classic magnum opus “England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade.” Published only after his death in 1664, it was nevertheless very influential. Mun had been a Director of the East India Company, and, unlike earlier theorists, believed that foreign trade was beneficial. However he didn’t hold with any high-falutin nonsense like comparative advantage, or maximization of global economic welfare. For Mun the purpose of foreign trade was to export more than you imported and, consequently, amass a huge store of foreign “Treasure,” which you could then use to found colonies that would take control of natural resources.

To further this objective, countries should: cut back domestic consumption as far as possible; increase the use of land and other domestic resources to reduce imports; encourage the export of goods made with foreign raw materials; and export goods with price-inelastic demand because profits would be greater.

Mun’s theory made sense in the 17th Century economic jungle — and today it obviously makes sense to China. The renminbi, China’s currency, is undervalued, so exports consistently exceed imports. Domestic consumption is kept low and savings high, both of which suppress imports. In industries such as automobiles where consumer demand is inevitable, foreign manufacturers are forced into domestic joint ventures, so that domestic manufacturers can be developed to replace imports. Domestic agriculture and resource extraction efforts are intensive. China has set up free trade zones, in which foreign parts are assembled into goods that are then exported. Finally, the country has amassed a gigantic store of $2 trillion of “Treasure,” which is now to be used to assist in foreign acquisitions. Those acquisitions are not to be on Wall Street, as prime minister Wen Jiabao helpfully explained, but in natural resources, where China can assure itself of exclusive raw materials supplies for decades to come.

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by Dan Dare

When Gordon Brown cynically hijacked the BNP’s slogan “British Jobs for British Workers” and featured it so prominently in his keynote speech to the 2008 Labour Party Conference, he could not have had the dimmest inkling of how much grief that would eventually cause him. And yet now, amazingly, and despite all the aggravation he suffered as a result of the “British Jobs” fiasco,  he’s been caught out once again trying to steal the BNP’s thunder.

This time the theme is “Local Houses for Local People”, a catchy title for a brand-new wheeze intended to defuse the controversy which has grown-up around the vexatious matter of how social housing (publicly subsidised rentals) should be allocated. The BNP has enjoyed considerable success in promoting the notion that immigrants obtain an unfair share of the limited amount of social housing that is actually available. Predictably enough, Brown’s announcement proposing to modify the allocation rules to favour ‘local people’ over newer emtrants provoked howls of outrage from the usual suspects. Ironically it has even been denounced as illegal, being apparently in direct conflict with the key sections of the raft of Race Relations and Equalities legislation that NuLabor has painstakingly introduced into law since coming to office.

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By The Narrator

Note: as this is the middle of summer and with so much heavy political subject matter on the table I thought I’d offer something a little lighter yet still relevant. It’s a review of a twenty-year-old film. Actually, as I lay out the entire plot below, it’s more than just a spoiler free review.

It’s, admittedly, a bit of an oddball film, but after viewing it again recently for the first time in years -as well as reading some reviews of it, (plus the fact that I’ve not seen it mentioned on other pro-Western sites) - I went ahead with a write up of it as it struck me as just how pro-nativist the film actually is.

THE BURBS (1989)

‘The Burbs’, a somewhat obscure 1980’s oddball comedy staring Tom Hanks and Carrie Fisher met with mixed reviews and mediocre box office success upon its release twenty years ago, yet its theme is hardly abstract or uncommon.  The story is set in the Midwestern, middle-class (all White), cul-de-sac of Mayfield Place.  Its residents consist of the “rational” straight-man Ray Peterson (Hanks) and his wife Carol (Fischer), pudgy gossiper Art Weingartner, gung-ho war veteran/gardner Mark Rumsfield and his scantly clad wife Bonnie, cantankerous “old guy” Walter Seznick and (of the featured neighbors) nosy teen, Ricky Butler.

It’s the kind of traditional neighborhood where everyone is local and they all know one anothers quirks (such as Ray walking the dog as an excuse to smoke cigars as his wife won’t let him smoke in the house. But all the neighbors know better anyway). It is thoroughly modern, yet quaint and safe in its familiarness.  Into this scene of middle American homogeneity come the new neighbors, the Klopeks.

Little is known of them, accept for their name, yet most seem to have heard, and gladly exchange in, disturbing rumors about them. These rumors are exacerbated by the strange noises coming from the Klopek home at night, and the fact that they are only seen coming and going after dark. The exception to the gossiping is Ray, who consciously works not to notice anything out of the ordinary, as he “vacations” around the house for a week in the world he chooses to perceive.

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True, as we look through Being itself, through time itself, and look into the destiny of Being and the extending of time-space, we have glimpsed what “Appropriation” means.  But do we by this road arrive at anything else than a mere thought-construct?  Behind this suspicion there lurks the view that Appropriation must after all “be” something.  However:  Appropriation neither is, nor is Appropriation there.  To say the one or to say the other is equally a distortion of the matter, just as if we wanted to derive the source from the river.

What remains to be said?  Only this:  Appropriation appropriates.  Saying this, we say the Same in terms of the Same about the Same.  To all appearances, all this says nothing.  It does indeed say nothing so long as we hear a mere sentence in what was said, and expose that sentence to the cross-examination of logic.  But what if we take what was said and adopt it unceasingly as the guide for our thinking, and consider that this Same is not even anything new, but the oldest of the old in Western thought:  that ancient something which conceals itself in a-letheia?  That which is said before all else by this first source of all the leitmotifs of thinking gives voice to a bond that binds all thinking, providing that thinking submits to the call of what must be thought.

The task of our thinking has been to trace Being to its own from Appropriation—by way of looking through true time without regard to the relation of Being to beings.

To think Being without beings means:  to think Being without regard to metaphysics.  Yet a regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics.  Therefore, our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself.

If overcoming remains necessary, it concerns that thinking that explicitly enters Appropriation in order to say It in terms of It about It.

Our task is unceasingly to overcome the obstacles that tend to render such saying inadequate.

The saying of Appropriation in the form of a lecture remains itself an obstacle of this kind.  The lecture has spoken merely in propositional statements.

Martin Heidegger, “On Time and Being” translated by Joan Stambaugh, ISBN:0-022-32375-7, p 23-24

I present this for discussion by those more familiar with continental philosophy than I because I have a hunch it is as important as it pretends.

A couple of days ago the BBC News website informed us that a “Romanian mayor has been strongly criticised by Jewish groups after appearing dressed in a Nazi uniform at a local fashion show.”  Radu Mazare is mayor of Constan?a, the Black Sea port and the oldest living city in Romania (having been founded around 600 BC).  He was, he explained, inspired to wear the costume by the film Valkyrie.  But it’s not an explanation that the “offended party” requires:

Dr Efraim Zuroff, a Holocaust historian and the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, expressed “insult and outrage” at the mayor’s appearance.

In a letter to Mr Mazare, he wrote: “It would be hard to adequately describe the depth of the pain that your appearance caused, not only to Jews and other victims of Nazism, but to any person of moral integrity who knows the history of World War II.

“Today it is well-known that the Wehrmacht played an active role in the mass murder of European Jewry and many other innocent victims.

“By dressing in a Wehrmacht uniform, you are expressing totally unwarranted support and nostalgia for an army which committed the most terrible war acts of genocide.”

Dr Zuroff suggested Mr Mazare could make amends for his “incredible lack of judgement” by bringing an exhibition on the crimes of the German army to Romania.

So, is this the speech of a beautiful but tortured Jewish soul lying flayed and bleeding on the ice-cold alter of German history?  Is he making manifest that great testament to human evil which is the G-d-given lot of all Jews?  Or does he merely have a practical mind?  Never mind the insult and outrage, and even the “pain” of a depth “it would be hard to adequately describe”, is all he really wants to keep Christian Europe’s head-down in the moral mire?  Might one conclude that, far from being a Chosen vessel of Man’s redemption from evil, Dr Zuroff is a ruthlessly opportunistic race huckster ... the kind of man who might not be above employing that indescribable Jewish “pain” in a trick:

(Thanks to reader KD who sent me the link to this video.)

We saw something very like opportunistic trickery with Prince Harry’s fancy dress back in January 2005:

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by David Hamilton

More than 6 million babies have been aborted since the Abortion Act 1967 came into force in Britain and around 75 million in the USA! There are 500 abortions every day in England and Wales and the figures show 67% of are carried out before the 10th week, and 89% before the 12th week. There are about 190,000 abortions a year in England and Wales. The official practice is that an abortion can be performed up to 24 weeks and needs the consent of two family doctor’s. The woman can seek a second opinion or go private. It is usual in cases when the child is likely to be disabled or not expected to have a high quality of life.

The debate is between liberals and feminists on rights, but is never on the woman’s duty to our posterity: the needs of our ethnic group are ignored. The two sides argue where the rights lie, couching the argument in rational terms. But what about our natural instincts? What about our emotional bonding with our people and the consequent responsibility for one another and the continuity of our people?

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I want to use this brief post to express my thanks to MR reader Gina.  Here’s why.

She mailed me a few days ago to let me know that she had discovered during a visit to Manchester that MR is blocked by the web-filtering software used on one or other local authority network.  Internet filtering is something we’ve known about for quite a while.  It’s three and a half years since Johan Van Vlaams warned us about its coming.  At the time, the software was still being explored by the purchasing bodies (who are mostly central and local government bodies).  It was immediately apparent that this blog might be bracketed with the more stereotypical nationalist and dissident sites.  And, indeed, it was not very long before the first case of MR-blocking reached our ears through the auspices of erstwhile commenter Effra (WJ Phillips) who reported that we were blocked from the PCs in his local library.

Frankly, blocking the public’s access to any political site that doesn’t encourage law-breaking or otherwise break the law itself is a vexing issue - and not just for the website operators.  The censors, too, are exposed to the possibility of making errors of judgement.  Inevitably, it is not straightforward to identify a consistent and defensible basis on which sites can be blocked.  Official dislike is obviously not enough, though it’s the danger, of course.  An opportunity always exists for the ban to be challenged and overturned, and I am pleased to report that, in one Manchester local authority’s area at least, that is what has happened with us.

When Gina mailed me on 11th July, I asked her where the PC was located.  She did not immediately respond, but set about contacting the person in Manchester responsible for the decision to list MR among the sites deemed unsuitable for public viewing.  Today I received another mail from her with a message appended from the relevant Systems & Technology Manager.  It read:

Thank you for your enquiry about the web site majorityrights.com

After looking at the site we have agreed that the site should be unblocked. This should happen within 5 working days.

This is a very small victory.  But it is also gratifying and instructive.  We should not accept the dispensations of a hostile bureaucracy.  We do not merit the labels our opponents apply to us.  Ask why “antiracist/nonracist” thought so ill of us, or why Robert Lindsay considers Prozium and every White Nationalist “a maggot”, and you will receive no coherent reply.  Defending prejudice, as the social constructionists so love to tell us, is an impossible task.

Thanks Gina for doing a little bit to defeat the prejudice under which we labour.  You’ve set a good example for the rest of us.

by David Hamilton               

The one thing former Conservative MP K Harvey Proctor constantly warned of was a white backlash.  To keep the indigenous people under control the Caste has devised various underhand and undemocratic methods. The idea was to manage the population into a sort of utopian state. But ideologies need an enemy, and that was “whites”.  We were all held responsible for the slave trade, which meant only a heavily-censored version of slavery with the main dealers – the Arabs - left out of the account.  We are, after all, only allowed to think “correct” thoughts.

What Alan Clarke, the former Conservative government minister and famous diarist, lauded as “the British military spirit” and a matter of honour and pride is scorned as yobbery by the Establishment.

The people who were the backbone of our traditional military prowess are slandered and misused. They are misused because they are not wanted in the armed forces, where they should be cherished as heroes ready to defend our country and control our borders to repel the current invasion. Our troops are held in contempt and not even provided with adequate equipment to save their lives.

People who have committed youthful misadventures but who naturally belong in the forces are barred. At one time young men who were at risk of being sent to young offenders institutions were given the opportunity of joining the military. To the traditional aristocratic-ruling warrior class, they would have been ideal recruits possessed of potential noble virtues.  Now those virtues are now left unexplored, and the young are left in their criminality.

A classic example of how these virtues are presented as wrong or even low-class was in the Daily Mail of 5th July. In this deceitful piece of fiction – a real hatchet piece - the scribbler Niall Firth linked several disconnected phenomena.

Neo-Nazis are plotting a ‘spectacular’ terrorist attack on Britain to fuel racial tension, Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism officers fear.

Senior officers have increased their surveillance of suspects to monitor their ability to carry out a deadly attack aimed at causing a ‘breakdown in community cohesion’.

The chilling warning comes after last month’s startling gains by the BNP in the local and European elections which many fear may ‘embolden’ violent Far-Right extremists.

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