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.”

by Alexander Baron

Recently, while doing some totally non-controversial research into contemporary music, I happened upon a website called 100GreatBlackBritons; I was led there by the name Phil Lynott. I was surprised to find his name on this site, because although I knew he was born in Britain, I have never regarded him as great in that context. I have been a Thin Lizzy fan since I first heard Whiskey In The Jar way back in the early 1970s, and have studied no less than three biographies of the man.

Phil Lynott was one of a kind, along with Rory Gallagher he is unarguably the most influential figure in Irish rock music. Thin Lizzy hailed from Dublin, and Lynott himself often claimed to be Irish born and bred. In March 1973, articles in Melody Maker and New Musical Express said he was born at Dublin and in the Irish Republic respectively; the former gave his date of birth as August 20 1951. In fact, Philip Parris Lynott was born in the Hallam Hospital, West Bromwich, the illegitimate son of an Irish Catholic teenager and a Negro civil servant. Although black, or technically half-black, he was totally assimilated, paying only lip service to his Negroid roots by writing a mere handful of songs with racial themes, mostly early on in his career. In his personal as well as his musical life he was surrounded by white people, and was totally accepted by them as he grew up between Manchester and Dublin. It is doubtful if he ever experienced racism, even if such an entity existed.

Although renouncing his British identity, Lynott was not in any way ashamed of it; he identified with Ireland for mystical reasons, primarily his fascination with Irish history and legend, which is reflected in many of his songs. This romanticising flowed over into his personal life; he liked to claim his father was a Brazilian seaman, but in January 1976, after rising star Phil and his band were featured in the popular weekly Titbits, Cecil Parris materialised. Rather than a character from an Errol Flynn film, he appears to have been more like Del Boy out of Only Fools And Horses. They did not meet again.

Phil Lynott was the archetypal rock star – live fast, die young. He succumbed to septicemia and multiple organ failure in January 1986, the result of his addiction to heroin. Although not the greatest bass player in the world, he was a competent rock musician, but his true strength was as a writer/composer. A lot of his songs, even the more commercially oriented, have deeper meanings, and to call him the High Poet of Irish Rock is no exaggeration. But was he a great man?

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From the Telegraph:

Separatists win Flanders region in Belgian elections
Belgium’s future as a unified federal state was in doubt last night after a national election landslide for Flemish separatists in the Dutch-speaking north of the country

Early results put the nationalist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) on an unprecedented 29 per cent of the vote in Flanders, catapulting separatists to the forefront of Belgian politics.

French speaking Socialists on the opposite end of the political spectrum to the right-wing N-VA, both on the question of Belgium and on economic policy, were the largest party, on 36 per cent, in Wallonia, which has a smaller number of voters than Flanders, as well as Brussels, the country’s only officially bilingual area.

Bart De Wever, the N-VA’s leader, may have won a historic number of votes, however he is unlikely to be asked by Belgium’s King Albert II to form a Federal government.
Instead, Elio Di Rupo, the Walloon Socialist leader, is expected to become the first French-speaking Prime Minister since 1974 at the head of an uneasy alliance of five federalist parties.

Following the election, the Dutch-speaking Flemish and francophone Walloon communities have never been more divided since they were welded together in an unhappy Belgian union in 1830.

The rise of mainstream Flemish nationalism, with the N-VA on course to become the country’s largest party, is unprecedented in Belgium’s 180 year history and will lead to a protracted political deadlock as the divided country tries to form a coalition government.

“It is a true earthquake,” said Mark Eyskens, a former Belgian Prime Minister and a Flemish Christian Democrat.

The N-VA vote will have more than doubled since the 2007 election.  Vlaams Belang, on the other hand, won 11.99% of the Flemish vote in 2007, a performance which dipped to 9.87% in the 2009 European Parliament election.  I cannot find their figure for today’s poll, but it must have been hit by the N-VA’s success.  If so, that would be clear evidence that where an electorate like the Flemish (or the Scots or the Welsh) defines itself through grievances against an ancient neighbour the racial issues which exercise ethno-nationalism cannot come to the fore.  That would beg the perennial question, of course, whether those issues can ever come to the fore.

Perhaps the best that ethno-nationalists in Flanders can hope for is that civicism will deliver separation and facilitate a redefining of the national conversation.  Out of that an opportunity to raise the larger questions may arise.

In any event, tonight the Belgian marriage looks more certain to end in divorce than ever.

by PF

This is a question, open-ended, for your consideration, stemming from debates with liberal friends ...

A recurring picture-argument is that of the possibility of a universal Renaissance, conditioned on the possibility that all people everywhere get a middle-class white upbringing. Essentially this scheme would graft onto the private lives of numberless ghetto-dwellers the kind of nurturing, loving, book-reading childhood enjoyed by upwardly-mobile middle class whites. This is justified because the liberal formulating the argument understands that patterns of behavior are given their first impetus by parents when the child is young. That component of non-genetic variation which is formed by imprinting in childhood is the wiggle-room they need to make everyone theoretically conformable to European standards of behavior.

A person adept at truth search would have to detect in themselves, were they to find themselves arguing in this way, the existence of a cherished hypothesis beating a hasty retreat into a shadowy corner of plausibility where its premises can evade inspection ... for the moment. Realizing that one cherished a hypothesis, which is a sin in the truth search, one would have to take steps to remedy it. But since our liberal friends might not be tainted by that degree of enthusiasm, we have to encounter this argument on its own terms and not point out how suspiciously it resembles certain things you might have learned to recognize from elsewhere ...

Its not clear which entity would ‘reach in’ at the appropriate time to prevent the inappropriate behavior while the non-whites are being upbring-ated. Who would shop for them, and choose healthy groceries? Who would prevent the Dad from drinking? Who would prevent the mother from spending 20+ hours watching television? Who would allocate the spending of money which resulted in enough money being left over for cultural events such as attending art museums? Who would attend to the thousand little details (time allotted? car keys? everyone present? enough gas? directions?) which in the absence of real motivation to go to the art museum, give birth to myriad rationalizations about why it need not happen. In the absence of the DNA-sprung desire to see art, explore and understand the world, who would explain to the children the context of what was being seen, and tie it into a larger narrative emerging from adult experience and knowledge? Who would prompt the natively-uninterested person to bring up the same issues later at the dinner table, sustaining a living interest in what had been experienced? Are government entities going to do this? Individual concerned citizens?

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The MultiCult played itself in the opening Group C game of World Cup 2010 this evening.  The result was a one-all draw, which was suitably egalitarian, I thought.  Both teams were equally unconvincing, too, which is only fair when you think about it.

Apparently twenty-three million people in the MultiCult in England thought it was worthwhile experiencing this equality in real time.  But I don’t know, somehow the build up to the whole event just hasn’t grabbed me.  I can’t think why, because quite a few people have tried very hard to enthuse me.

“Umbro’s stirring anthem for a multicultural England” gushed the headline of Kanishk Tharoor’s piece in yesterday’s Guardian, praising an anti-English ad by a sportswear and equipment manufacturer.  At every level, British bien pensant journalism, and not just British journalism, has been in overdrive for the last month, at least.

Some of the commentary is beyond parody:

It made anyone with tactical knowledge of football wonder why South Africa didn’t make the obvious team change and put Nelson Mandela in goal. I know he was too frail to open the tournament but he’d only have to lie there on the goal line. Who would possibly have the audacity to score past him? Even if the ball accidentally went near him, a Mexican striker would have felt obliged to dive and catch it, preventing his own side from scoring and getting sent off for deliberate handball.

Truly, World Cup 2010 is proving a sink-hole of journalistic integrity.  And as with the magical Mandela, so with the South African Bantu in general - people, we are told, so brim-full with salt-of-the-earth goodness, and so overwhelmingly excited to be “hosting” this event, yes excited, I tell you, in that simple green, gold and black doggy way that liberal journalists naturally expect of Africans, and thoroughly approve of, well, it goes without saying that we are required to “celebrate” with them (the Bantus, that is) … feel good for them … hope with them that their long wait (15,000 years, but who’s counting) for “change” (white man’s stuff) and “justice” (white man’s stuff) is somehow all over now.  It isn’t but we have to believe, you see.

This, apparently, involves smiling along with all the happy Bantu teeth crowding in on the camera lens, as bright in the African sun as light-bulbs in the Blitz.  We should also try without any success whatsoever to emulate that embarrassingly unselfconscious, drop-of-a-hat bump ‘n grind thing that Africans do whenever someone clobbers a piece of stretched animal skin twice.  And, of course, we must admire the clobbering.  Such rhythm.  It’s in the blood , you know.  Not that I meant to imply in any way that they are, you know, less cerebral than anyone else.

No, it’s all trade-mark, feel-good MultiCult stuff.  Those happy, happy Bantus, hey?  How did we ever feel so exquisitely guilty without them?

However, there is one minor downside.  The more the liberal media shove all this journalistic excrement down our throats, the more weary of it some of us become.  Well, not me obviously, because I was sick to death of it years ago.  But in general and on average, as a rule, people who aren’t Bantus and aren’t liberal hypocrites just can’t stick with the picturesque, lovable thing long enough, not when the reality all around them is so, er, different and, for not a few, so tragic.

So any moment I am expecting rainbow overload and thought-direction burn-out.  I am expecting absolutely nothing in the way of “change” and “justice”.  All that has gone to the ANC elite.  I am expecting that the MultiCult will not win the game.  It will lose everywhere on the pitch, because it is built on lies.

Oh yes, and both Argentina and Spain, one of whom will undoubtedly emerge in one month from now as the real winner of World Cup 2010, are white sides.

The Telegraph reports on the outcome of yesterday’s Dutch general election:

With 88 per cent of the votes counted, published partial results showed the Liberals with 31 and Labour on 30.
But the real victory went to Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), which demands an end to immigration from Muslim countries and a ban on new mosques. The PVV took its number of seats from nine in the last parliament to 24, and could hope to enter a coalition government.

The far-right leader with his distinctive shock of fair hair called the result “magnificent”.

“The impossible has happened,” he told a televised party gathering. “We are the biggest winner today. The Netherlands chose more security, less crime, less immigration and less Islam.”

Wilder’s party has been a beneficiary of the Dutch committment to proportionality (for the delivery of which the list system is employed).  We are about to see whether the resultant coalition-driven politics are kind or unkind to Wilders.  That there is any possibility of kindness at all is testimony to Wilders’ ability to avoid at least some of the wages of dissidence.  But there is a challenge to conventional nationalism contained in that.  Wilder’s Judeophilia, whether it is sincere or simply a stratagem, has worked to his advantage thusfar.  The same can be said for his Islamophobia, which shifts the focus to cultural rather than racial preservation.  It’s about “the Judeo-Christian heritage” and “Western civilisation”.  The focus has shifted from a revolutionary nationalism that sees the challenging of the system in toto, and the deliverance of European Man into his own hands, as the ultimate political good to a civicism that is customised to an electorally proportional representative system and that sees electoral progress as the ultimate good.

Whether anything of actual value can be achieved by this means we may now learn.

by PF

The following are quotes from the 1998 Harvard edition of Rüdiger Safranski’s intellectual biographical work, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, originally published in German in 1994.

We already know one moment when “disguises” break up and authentic Being discloses itself - the moment of anxiety. The world loses its significance, it appears as a naked “that” against the background of nothingness, and Dasein experiences itself as homeless, unguarded and unguided by any objective Being.

The breakthrough to authentic Being thus takes place as a contingency shock, as the experience of “there is nothing behind it.” Even more clearly than in Being and Time, Heidegger formulated this initiation experience for a philosophy of authenticity in his Frieburg inaugural lecture of 1929. Philosophy, he then said, only begins when we have the courage to “let nothingness encounter us.” Eye to eye with nothing, we then observe not only that we are “something” real, but also that we are creative creatures, capable of letting something emerge from nothing. The decisive point is that man can experience himself as the place where nothing becomes something and something becomes nothing. Anxiety leads us to this turning point. It confronts us with the “being possible” that we are ourselves.

Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety expressly does not have fear of death as its subject. It would be more correct to say that its subject is fear of life, of a life that one suddenly becomes aware of in its whole contingency. Anxiety reveals that everyday life is fleeing from its contigency. That is the meaning of all attempts to firmly root oneself in life.

One might assume that ‘They’ are only Everyman, [had previously spoken of the fact of self-loss into the ‘World of They’], but ‘They’ are also the philosophers. Because these, as Heidegger remarks critically, firmly root themselves in their grand constructs, their worlds of values and metaphysical backworlds. Philosophy, too, is for the most part busy removing the contingency shock or, better still, not admitting it in the first place.

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