Have you had the feeling, as you trawl the big news stories for meanings pertinent to our cause, that we are witnessing right now, in 2011, the unfolding of something extraordinary, something that cannot be mapped in advance, that may change the lives of billions of people, including ours, before its energy is spent?  Adrian Hamilton of The Independent certainly has.  He writes in yesterday’s rag:

Events in the Arab world and in Japan are clearly particular to themselves. But the sense they have given of an old order that has run its course, that no longer responds to the feelings of its people, are not unique.

Consider the list of complaints – corruption that enriches the few and oppresses the many, political systems (democratic as well as autocratic) that have lost the confidence of the population, industrial solutions that cannot cope with catastrophe. They are common cries of much of the world.

If the one dominating factor of events today is their unpredictability, then it would be foolish to predict where they will end up. We don’t even begin to know. But the one thing I am sure of is that history is on the move, and we’re only just at the beginning.

There is something in Hamilton’s idea, I think - at least as regards the Islamic world.  One of the commenters to his article weighs up history’s options thus:

One path leads to tyranny, despotism, corruption and violence. The other to chaos, anarchy, corruption and violence.

... and this also is probably a fair appraisal of the way the two tectonic plates of North African and Middle Eastern politics - modernism and traditionalism - are disposed.  But is there anything in this relevant to our situation, above and beyond the very general assumptions that inform Adrian Hamilton’s thinking?  Marine Le Pen certainly thinks so, judging from the quote I reproduced a couple of days ago:

We’re in a pre-revolutionary situation here. What’s happening today resembles what was happening before the French revolution. I think the desire for a revolution like those on the other side of the Mediterranean exists here. Of course, I’m appealing for a democratic revolution – and that’s also perhaps the role of the Front National – for a peaceful revolution by the ballot box, a patriotic revolution.

Where Hamilton with his unpredicatability thesis and Marine with her pre-revolutionary situation differ is on the question of time.  Nationalists know something about revolution.  We have been thinking on the problem for a long while.  We understand that the opposing tectonic plates on which our lives are lived out - racial community and individualism/economism - move at certain moments, and not necessarily with the peaceful results for which Marine appeals.  The American Civil War was perhaps the classic example.  The rise of Hitler and NSDAP was another.  The Kosovo War was the most recent.

So, following (Adrian) Hamilton’s Rule are there signs in the European world that history is on the move at last?  Or is it just that the drive towards the Globality is pushing on and in turn nationalism, in its struggle to resist, is getting things a little more right with Marine, Wilders and associated civic and anti-Islamist politicos?  In other words, the pressure is continuing to build but there’s no sign of any European earthquake, and no matter what happens in North Africa and the Middle-East our historic moment, if it is going to come at all, will come in its own sweet and, one must hope, demographic rather than geological time.

The Marine effect was in evidence in the first round of voting in France’s 2011 local elections, in which some 2,000 seats are being contested.  Historically, Front National, has performed poorly at this level and currently has no councillors.  But around 400 Front National candidates will go forward to the second-round run-offs, following a 15% vote share in the first.

Marine does not offer herself as the explanation for this success.  Speaking to the Guardian she says that there is an intimacy in her relationship with the French public, who recognise her as separate and distinct from “the self-proclaimed elite running France today”.

Le Pen’s verdict is that France is on the brink of a revolution to rival that of the Arab world. Social injustice, people who can’t make ends meet, a growing gap between rich and poor, and overwhelming disappointment with president Nicolas Sarkozy means France hasn’t been this angry since the storming of the Bastille. “There isn’t that much difference between the French people and the Tunisian people or Egyptian people,” she said. “The French want justice - political justice, democratic justice, social justice - they want an end to double standards and they want some ethics from their political class. The French are suffering. They are permanently being asked to make sacrifices and yet there’s a political-financial caste that is reaping all the benefits of the economic situation and awarding itself endless privileges.

“We’re in a pre-revolutionary situation here. What’s happening today resembles what was happening before the French revolution. I think the desire for a revolution like those on the other side of the Mediterranean exists here. Of course, I’m appealing for a democratic revolution – and that’s also perhaps the role of the Front National – for a peaceful revolution by the ballot box, a patriotic revolution.”

I like this line, not least because it has truth to it.  I would like it more if she developed globalisation and its elite interests as the source of the only true racism and intolerance in the West today, which is the racism against and intolerance of Europe’s native peoples.  But like the other broadly right-wing success stories around Europe, she seems focussed in this respect solely on the need to avoid the usual hard questions.  She insists that neither she nor her party is racist, xenophobic or, of course, anti-Semitic.  None of the Semites believe her.  As an appeal for votes in a polity where the discourse on racism and anti-Semitism is so profoundly hostile to nationalism this might be necessary.  But as a policy of a nationalist party in government it would lead absolutely nowhere.  Nonetheless, it seems to be the way forward for now for the right-wing in all the European polities where Moslem demographic dominance is a genuine threat - which it’s not in Britain, in my view.

Continuing my present passage of discourse war at the Telegraph, I am pleased to say a debate about the Holocaust has finally come about.  Some Jews are unhappy with me.  Would you credit it?

It is in the thread to a piece by some old soldier who bears the distinction of having broken into Auschwitz III.  He observes that:

The Jewish workers from Auschwitz III camp, sometimes called Monowitz, were expected to die on the job.

... which I think is right.  He talks about the “sweet, ghastly smell” from the crematoria of Auschwitz II, but only mentions gas chambers in terms of rumours. “I was disappointed with what I had learned from one trip,” he says at the end.

We are still waiting to learn.

by Alexander Baron

Back in the 1990s I spent a considerable amount of time reading the entire backfile of the Jewish Chronicle for the Nazi era, mostly but not exclusively at Colindale. Although I skimmed over a lot of the advertisements and local news, I read and took in most of the significant stories from 1933-45. Actually, I went back to the 1920s and beyond, and forward into the 1950s and beyond the other way, but the story with which I am concerned here appeared in the issue for October 25, 1935. On page 9, an editorial called Scrap the Transfer Agreement! made one of the most bizarre claims against the Nazis I have ever seen.

No, it had nothing to do with “gas chambers”, not at this early date, nor with pogroms, nor was it the usual whining and wailing about how wonderful are the Jews and how everybody has it in for them.  No, it was something much more profound than that. The wicked Nazis were accused of engaging in a most sinister plot to undermine Palestinian Jews … by subsidising them.

Here is the offending paragraph:

These tainted German goods are often being sold … at … far below cost price, thanks to the German export bonus; and the infant industries of Palestine cannot compete with them. Worse still, the Transfer Agreement, by forcing Jewish merchants and commercial houses to buy or sell German products on pain of financial ruin, and at the same time offering substantial advantages for such practices, is … debasing the life of Palestinian Jewry.

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A small disagreement has arisen over the casting for the creakingly long-running ITV crime series, Midsomer Murders.  The essence of it that the series, which is set in a rural idyll of middle-class gentility “somewhere in England”, naturally enough employs an all-white cast.  The lead actor is being changed, and the series sexed up.  But the skin colour of the actors remains all too white.

Well, the executive producer Brian True-May, 65, was interviewed by Radio Times and duly challenged.  “We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work ... I’m trying to make something that appeals to a certain audience, which seems to succeed. And I don’t want to change it.”

The result has been a minor media frenzy, and the production company, All3Media, has rushed to distance itself from criticism by suspending True-May.  The Daily Mail readership is probably closer to the viewer profile for Midsomer Murders than any other English rag, and its reader-vote on whether True-May should have been suspended records a 91% “No”.  But it was one reader comment posted at 1.00 am tonight on the thread to Cristina Odone’s piece at the Telegraph that really caught my eye.  It is by “Henbane”, and here it is:

I grew up in inner city Manchester (where I was the only white girl in my class), and have lived in West Yorkshire and more recently Leicester. A couple of years ago I moved to a small market town in East Anglia. Before this I had thought myself a multi culturalist, I was so used to being surrounded by people of many ethnicities, and often being the minority myself.

But having moved to an area with practically no ethnic minorities (one Indian family and one Chinese family run restaurants here) I have changed my mind. I feel far more relaxed here. Apart from the low crime rate and well behaved children there is such a feeling of community and belonging here.

Although I am an incomer to the area, I feel I belong here far more than any of the multi ethnic places I have lived in previously. It feels like one integrated community, not a town with many different communities. I have no plans to ever leave, it feels like home.

by David Hamilton

A totalitarian method used by the British state is infiltrating state agents into legitimate and rival political parties to discredit and destabilise them and keep the Global elites in power.

The Express newspaper of 18th February 1999 revealed that the Security Services were going to infiltrate:

Scotland Yard and MI5 are planning a huge covert operation to break up violent racist organizations. The Express has learned that intelligence officers will infiltrate far Right groups such as the British National Party.

Since Griffin became leader in 1999 the BNP has been contained when it was riding a wave and now is being destabilised. The tide turned for the BNP in 2001, due to media promotion and hard work of organisers in Oldham and Burnley. Two areas Griffin has destroyed.

Griffin and others contained that growth by quickly undermining branches in areas that growth had taken place in by sacking organisers where it did. East London was the first, followed by Oldham and Burnley later Bradford and Birmingham. The BNP’s peak was contained and undermined by state ops working within.

Around that time previous BNP leader John Tyndall was suspicious of Griffin:

Many of us noticed that shortly before or shortly after the leadership change that took place in the BNP in 1999 a number of new figures emerged in the party, little or nothing of whom had been known previously; and many of these graduated quickly to senior positions. Where were they coming from? What was their motivation? Were they with us to help or hinder?

Absolutely certain answers to these questions cannot be supplied, but it was noticeable that virtually all of these people aligned themselves decisively with the so-called ‘modernising’ faction in the party which had gained the ascendancy through the leadership change.(1)

THE Scottish National Party was spied on by British secret service agents, previously classified Government files seen by Scotland on Sunday have finally proved:

The dossiers contain first-hand accounts from numerous unnamed agents of party meetings, and also include names of SNP members and sympathisers. They also provided transcripts of speeches and give particular attention to members they believed were on the more radical and militant wing of the party.

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One of my compatriots and fellow patriots from the Daily Telegraph threads has come up with an interesting idea.  He wants MR to display censored commentary from the thread wars so that (a) it is not entirely lost, which is extremely annoying for those of us who work this angle, (b) we can keep track of what is verboten, and of media behaviour generally, and (c) where applicable, debates can be continued.

It would require only that the principal URL and the date, time and content of deleted posts be entered on a dedicated thread.  We can initiate as many threads as there are media websites at which we wage the war of discourse.  I would have to expand the side-bar to accommodate an entry point to the project, where all the individual media-dedicated threads would be gathered.  And, of course, it would require the forward-thinking on your part to record the requisite information for every even remotely edgy commentary, and to post here when it was taken down.  But that’s not much to ask, I think.

What about it?  Worth doing?  What media would require dedicated threads?

A Harris interactive poll published today in Le Parisien today gives Marine Le Pen a two-point lead in first-round voting intentions for the April/May 2012 Presidential Election.

Le Parisien described it as a “thunderclap”.

“The beginning of the awakening of the French,” Marine called it.  “The French desire a different policy.  They want to be given a real choice for the second round: the choice between a national and a global project that can be represented either by Nicolas Sarkozy or Dominique Strauss-Kahn or by Martine Aubry,” she said.

As expected, Sarkozy has been toying with the little tough guy act over the last week or so, in response to the revolutions in Tunisia and Libya.  But now he knows that the French public might see not him but Marine and FN as the answer to any new large-scale North African migrations into France.  She certainly has star quality.  Here she is a week ago at the implicitly white Le Salon International de l’Agriculture.  The visit was described by Le Parisien as “opération séduction.”

Does that look like a class political act to you?  It certainly does to me.