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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Evidently, there is a millenarian mood in the air at this point in time.  So it is appropriate that John “Birdman” Bryant circularised his contact list earlier in the week to draw attention to a re-write of his, let it be said, never inflammatory or seditious article, Final Solution to the Washington Question.  The original was circularised on 19th Aug , 2008.  The re-write is reproduced here under the fold.

John belongs in that fine tradition of flinty and indomitable, free-born and proud American citizens for whom that phrase from V for Vendetta was surely written: “The people should not fear their government, their government should fear the people.”  And it is on the theory of governmental fear that John wrote - and rewrote - this essay.

I must say, it brings to mind Geoff Beck’s time at MR, and his heady exhortations to the “Men of the West” to take up their arms and march up the steps of the Capitol Building.  But Geoff’s romanticism was a cry in the dark, and I don’t think he gave it very much thought beyond the pleasures of its utterance.  John, on the other hand, is theorising cooly and logically about change.  His question is: If the point arrives - or has arrived - when lethal violence is the only path left by which white Americans can secure a future for themselves and their children, what is the minimum degree of violence that will lead to that happy end?

Now, I have three criticisms to make of the scenario that John sketches very skilfully.  The first is that, in his eagerness to arrive at a minimal cost in life, he has underestimated the enormity and profundity of the task.  He has not allowed for the resilience of the Establishment, nor its strong preference for giving not an inch, and for a security solution.

Establishments do not go weak at the knees in the face of terror attacks.  They pursue a dual strategy of endeavouring to snuff out the physical threat while buying off popular support.  They pose constant questions for the resistance movement at every possible level via visible security, surveillance and interdiction, arms stings and false flags, infiltration, fund tracking, hearts and minds propaganda, political initiatives, etc.  Their objective is always and in everything to win.  A war with a government is always a long war.

The second criticism is in that old and very moral cliché, one man’s freedom-fighter is another’s terrorist.  If the people whom a freedom-fighter seeks to release from bondage view him only as a terrorist there is an immediate problem of legitimacy.  Without legitimacy, without a recognised shared cause, there will be no support from the people, and a resistance movement cannot prosper in a fight against a government without considerable tacit and active support.  Compare the political impact of the Provisional IRA with that of Brigate Rosse, or the political impact of ETA with that of Baader Meinhof.

This brings us straight back to the abiding issue of why American WN is so splintered and ghettoised.  A movement that cannot be heard at all beyond the badlands of the internet obviously has quite a job to do if it expects terroristic attacks on government officials to be understood in the wider community as the people’s own struggle.  Realistically, the movement should be in a position to lead popular opinion ... to tell a moral story to the hearts of the people while they absorb news over breakfast of the latest “act” done in their name.

The third criticism is an ideological one.  Like many race-loyal Americans, John is a believer in the theory - which is what it is - of isostatic recovery.  If the causes of the malaise are removed, the theory goes, everything will slowly and inevitably return to a point of societal balance and health.  Resolve Jewish power, kick the race-traitors out of their positions of influence, and the process of recovery will commence automatically and proceed unguided.

This theory is predicated on faith in the foundational instruments of the Republic, and on the enduring, indeed, eternal goodness and conservatism of White America.  It denies agency to the America of the past in the creation of the America of the present - since, of course, everything creatively bad rests with Jews and the race-traitors.  It eschews complications like the hyper-moralism and consumerism of modern America, which have their antecedents in Puritanism and the myth of progress, and which tend to far from balanced and healthy outcomes.  If one refuses to acknowledge the extrusions of the past into the present, one is almost certainly inviting what is euphemistically known as “unforeseen events”.  One must know oneself, I think.

Anyway ... here, for you to judge for yourself, is John’s provocative essay:-

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Yes, Søren, it is important.  Now is the next time—and you stated it so eloquently that it is a pleasure to listen to it.  Thank you for that oratorical work of true art and philosophy that so clearly expressed your vision.

Here is my written response.

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By David Hamilton

To insinuate that those of us who follow a traditional conservative way, and love a nation that lost thousands fighting Nazi Germany, are ourselves nazis or fascists is malicious, disrespectful and offensive. A racial world view is a traditional world view. It goes back to our Anglo-Saxon tribal days. Hitler ventured far beyond that, of course, and fashioned not simply something that held his people together but excused military aggression and race-hatred. But he was an historical exception and no part of my tribal tradition anyway.

In fact, many aspects of wanting to conserve or recreate our homogeneity can be traced back deep into our history. Britons have a great and noble tradition of conserving our homogeneity, and, at least until the end of the war, had a better and more pleasant life for being homogenous.

Queen Elizabeth was firmly in the Great Tradition. In 1596, she sent an “open letter” to the Lord Mayor of London, stating:-

“there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie,”

She order that they be deported. A week later, she repeated the treatment:-

“good pleasure to have those kinde of people sent out of the lande.”

And commissioned the merchant Casper van Senden to “take up” certain “blackamoores here in this realme and to transport them into Spaine and Portugall.”

In 1601, she again complained about the:-

“great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which [as she is informed] are crept into this realm … infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel,”

And she had them repatriated.

Edmund Burke offered a definition of a nation which involves a shared identity, history, ancestry, and continuity:-

As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living and those who are dead, but between those who are living and those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Today we are concerned that “those who are to be born” will be dominated by immigrant populations. We read repeated reports that we are becoming a minority in our own towns and cities. The immigrants are human and like us, are subject to the same failings, and are likely to treat us no better than they perceive we treated them.

Then there is the threat of miscegenation.

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About half-way through Obama’s acceptance speech, my wife had to stop watching.  I asked her what was wrong and she said she found it too depressing.  I stopped the streaming video and put my copy of Idiocracy in the DVD drive.  She emerged from her funk presently.  I don’t have a link to the full movie but this scene may be sufficient for most cases of post-acceptance speech depression:

Just time for one last blast before the US election - this one from Martin Hutchinson at Prudent Bear.
GW

The number of economically damaging policy ideas imposed on the United States has greatly increased in the last few months. However from the statements of the Presidential candidates, the next few years may turn this storm of bad ideas into a blizzard. Those with an emotional attachment to the US economy should brace themselves for trauma.

The new salience of bad economic ideas is not particularly surprising. The US economy is heading into an economic downturn that promises to be at least as severe as those of 1974 and 1980-82, whose memory is already fading a generation into the past. Additionally, the 2000-07 period was one in which US voters made very small if any income gains, with such gains arising only through refinancing of ever more gigantic home mortgages. Meanwhile the distant and dislikeable titans of Wall Street apparently scooped up all the money generated by the economy.

Now the housing bubble has burst, the average jaundiced voter naturally sees the free market system and the George W. Bush administration as responsible for the recent not-particularly-pleasant years and the economic horror that has followed. Claims by Republican politicians that the debacle was all the fault of the housing finance agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while partly true are wholly unconvincing.

With voters miserable and facing a disastrous economic position that they believe was caused by free market excesses, it is not surprising that they are looking favorably on statist nostrums. Both political candidates have propounded bad ideas; Obama more than McCain largely because he has more ideas in general. In addition, there are a few bad ideas that have embedded themselves into the system, accepted by both political candidates and the political class as a whole.

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It appears to be the season for lecture series.  BBC Radio 3 has been hosting its Free Thinking 2008 series, involving approximations to wisdom and originality by a colourful variety of folk.  One of these is the smooth-mover of the MultiCult, Trevor Phillips, who has discerned six questions, no less, which liberal democracy cannot answer.  Sadly, when he last had a proper job is unlikely to be one of them.  The BBC has a 7-day storage system for its radio output.  So I will listen to Trevor tomorrow and, if he is remotely interesting, I will post accordingly.

But now I want to focus on last night’s speech by the only slightly wierd writer, broadcaster and lecturer in psychology, Susan Blackmore.  Her subject was one close to my own heart: The myth of Free Will.

In my last post on it I explained the significance of an absence of free will in humans thus:-

Now, there is no small difference between the self equipped with free will and the self bereft of it.  It is the difference between consciousness and mechanicity, between “I” and “it”.  What emerges from John-Dylan Haynes study is a model of Man in whom Mind, in its ordinary waking state at least, weaves the story of a decisive self over the endless blizzard of electro-chemical impulses in the brain?

And from that, if we are honest, there emerge only questions for which we never have more than an inadequate answer.

For example, if “I” am only a dream of self, a piece of artifice made in the moment and remade in another, is there really any sense in which “I” can be said to exist at all?  In a mechanistic sense only, perhaps.  If one is prepared to dispense with the usual dignifications, the mechanicity of Man is not so great an affront.  It is what it is, and there are a fair number of reflective people who have always known it.  None of them are radical liberals, of course.  The notion of the “fully-human” director of a free and unfettered will absolutely does not fly.  It never could.  Liberal political philosophy is a flightless bird.

Susan Blackmore is a lot closer to the action than I am, and these are the significant passages from her lecture:-

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Global media billionaire Rupert Murdoch, the Chairman and Chief executive of News Corporation, has returned to his native land to deliver the 2008 Boyer Lectures.  The series is titled “A Golden Age of Freedom”.

The Boyer Lectures are a series of six live speeches touching on politics and society, and given each year by a different major public figure in Australia.  The equivalent in the UK is the Reith Lectures.

Murdoch opened today with an offering rather oddly titled “Aussie rules: Bring back the pioneer”.  It served to outline his intentions for the rest of the series:-

My theme for these lectures is the great transformation we have seen in the past few decades: the unleashing of human talent and ability across our world, and the golden age for humankind that I see just around the corner.

... I will talk about how the opening of new markets is leading to the rise of new nations and adding hundreds of millions of people to a new global middle class.  I will address technology, education and the importance of cultivating human capital.

... Most of all I will speak of the challenges which all these developments pose for the land of my birth.  The main reason I agreed to come to Australia to deliver these lectures is that the country I see before me simply is not prepared for the challenges ahead.

One wonders what “the rise of new nations” means.  It does not sound like the rise of old nations like India and China.  Then again, “internationalisation”, as Murdoch later calls it, implies not new nations but the post-nation - essentially the MultiCult.  Is he saying that the condition of Australia is that of a post-nation, and that the advent of the artificial “new nation” awaits - if the appropriate internationalist outlook is internalised by Aussies?

I assume so.  But right away we see what Murdoch’s new nation will amount to.  The only understanding that the man who made his money from Page 3 has of human purpose is material advancement.  He is offering a life of consumerism and wage-slavery in return for the cinematic Arthur Jensen’s:-

“perfect world in which there is no war or famine, oppression or brutality.  One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock.  All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquillized, all boredom amused.”

Here it is again in Murdoch’s only slightly more prosaic version:-

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