[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Poland – Krasiczyn Castle in southeast Poland, near the city of Przemyśl, hosted some 350 young Hungarians and Poles from 26-30 August for the second edition of a new annual event: the Polish-Hungarian School of Leaders,organised in the form of a summer university. The event is obviously of some importance in the eyes of Hungary and Poland’s current leaders,as in addition to the main instigator of this event, Marek Kuchciński, until recently speaker of the Sejm (replaced at the beginning of August after he was criticised for having family members fly with him many times on a government plane), two deputy parliamentary speakers took part in the first day of discussions: Ryszard Terlecki of the Polish Sejm and János Latorcai of the Hungarian National Assembly.
The main organiser of the event is the Wacław Felczak Institute of Polish–Hungarian Cooperation, a Polish institution established by an act of parliament of 8 February 2018, a year after the creation of its Hungarian sister organisation, the Wacław Felczak Foundation. Felczak was a researcher on Polish-Hungarian relations, who during the Second World War organised a secret courier service leading through Budapest between the Polish Home Army (AK) and the Polish government-in-exile based in London.
Relations between the two countries have been close and almost always friendly for centuries, with a long tradition of mutual support in difficult times. But since Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (PiS) came to power in Poland in the autumn of 2015, and since Kaczyński and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared that Europe needed a cultural counter-revolution during their meeting at the 2016 Krynica Economic Forum, attacks from Brussels against both Central European capitals have prompted them to reinforce their cooperation and bolster their region’s integration in order to counterbalance a Franco-German duet whose dominance in the EU is bound to become even more oppressive for smaller countries after Brexit.
If relations between the two Central European countries are already so good, why then organise such summer universities? Professor Maciej Szymanowski, director of the Felczak Institute, explains: “We have just conducted an opinion survey which shows that nearly 90% of Hungarians want their country to have good relations with Poland, and well over 50% want those relations to become even closer. On the other hand, in particular among the younger generation, we can observe that awareness ofthe realities of contemporary Poland is declining. And I am afraid it is much the same thing the other way around. The goal of our summer university is precisely to raise awareness about Polish-Hungarian relations, mutual knowledge about Poland and Hungary, and about the challenges both countries are facing now and are going to face in the 21st century.”
So who are the young people invited to participate at the Polish-Hungarian school of leaders? They are “people who, in spite of their young age, are already active in their surroundings, in universities, in clubs, in local government and in their communities, in editorial teams, and so on,” Szymanowski says. “Many of these people will probably soon have to shoulder some responsibility for their country, for Poland or Hungary.”
The special relationship between Hungary and Poland has been central to the revival of regional cooperation since Law and Justice (PiS) won the Polish elections in 2015. Poland’s ruling party and Hungary’s Fidesz have much in common. As was stated in Krasiczyn during a discussion panel with Kuchciński, Terlecki and Latorcai, because they have preserved a sense of their identity deeply rooted in Christianity, 30 years after the fall of communism the nations of Central Europe are the ones which can divert Western Europe from its current self-annihilating course.
During a recent speech, Hungary’s nationalist-populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán attacked the idea that replacement migration should be used to solve the demographic problems that many Western countries face.
Orbán’s speech was delivered at Budapest’s 3rd Demographic Summit that was held on the 5th and 6th of this month. During the speech, Orbán emphasized that the most important problem currently facing Europe is its population decline, Hungary’s 888 online newspaper reports.
“Why is this the case? It’s most certainly not because of some sickness of Christian civilization – after all, the number of Christians are rising all around the world. This is a sickness of Europe in general,” Orbán said.
For the Hungarian Prime Minister, immigration must never be regarded as a solution to demographic problems.
“We must never accept population exchange,” Orbán declared.
Orbán also noted that his government was currently working towards a strong policy which prioritizes the family and incentivizes having children.
Without families and children, the national community will disappear, he explained, “and if a nation disappears, something irreplaceable will disappear from the world,” reports Hungary Today.
According to Orbán, the future of a nation and people can only be secured if the nation’s families are guaranteed better financial opportunities to have children as opposed to not having children
“We win only if we can build a system where those who bear children live significantly better than if they hadn’t started a family,” Orbán continued.
This is the way by which the Hungarian government is pursuing its pro-family policy.
Orbán also criticized the “meaningless” so-called green argument that Europeans should stop having kids to save the earth, saying that this kind of talk should be completely dismissed.
It’s widely assumed in thriller movies that if ever the truth is allowed to leak out about a powerful institution’s fundamental corruption, then its reputation must come crashing down once and for all.
But in real life, multiple disgraces can have negligible impact on an organization’s reputation in the prestige press as long as it continues to serve its function in furthering The Narrative.
I notice that among intelligent but naive young people of a scientific bent, there is a recurrent assumption that once the facts get out, then everything will change. If the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment about the speed of light turns out negative, then the Newtonian model is shattered and eventually there must be a paradigm shift to Einsteinian relativity.
But that’s not the way it works in public affairs, where control of The Megaphone is what matters because most people can’t remember much. You have to repeat the facts over and over and over to have any chance of ever moving the needle.
For example, since the 1990s close observers of the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of America’s most profitable nonprofits (endowment in fiscal year 2018 was $471,000,000, up from $319,300,000 just two years earlier), have recognized that it is America’s most lucrative hate organization.
The SPLC’s legendary founder Morris Dees (currently on his sixth wife) is basically a sleazy Southern TV preacher type, but one who long ago figured out that poor Southern Baptists had less money to send him than rich Northern liberals. This junk-mail genius realized he could monetize the regional, ethnic, and class hatreds directed against his own people.
But isn’t it a little crass to whip up hatred of poor white Southerners among rich white Northerners? Morris had the perfect answer: He’s not the hater; it’s the people he hates who deserved to be hated because they are the haters.
“I just want to give you a sense for what liberalism is. The United States is a thoroughly liberal country. It is a liberal democracy. Both Republicans, who we sometimes refer to as conservatives, are liberals and Democrats are liberals. I’m using the term liberal in the John Lockean sense of the term.
The Unites States was born as a liberal democracy. The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Bill of Rights, these are thoroughly liberal documents.”
We are a liberal people, okay? But what exactly does that mean? It’s very important that you understand it, because you have to understand what liberalism is to understand liberal hegemony and what went wrong. Then, it’s very important to understand what nationalism is.
John’s argument is very simple here.
Nationalism is the most powerful ideology on the planet.
And in a contest between liberalism and nationalism, nationalism wins every time.
And what I want to do is explain to you what liberalism is, what nationalism is, and why nationalism defeats liberalism. Then what I want to do is talk about what liberal hegemony is. What does it mean to say that The Unites States is interested in remaking the world in its own image? So, I’ll describe that. Then I want to talk about why we pursued liberal hegemony.
...of course I tipped you off by telling you that The United States is a thoroughly liberal country, but there’s more to the story.
Then I want to tell you what our track record is. I want to describe our failures ...in the Middle-East, with regard to NATO expansion, and Russia, and with regard to engagement in China. Lets talk about the evidence that we goofed.
Then I want to talk about why liberal hegemony fails, and this, again, is basically as story about nationalism and realism trumping liberalism. And then I want to make the case for restraint, what I think is a wise foreign policy, okay?
Let me start with what is liberalism…
There are two bedrock assumptions that underpin liberalism:
One is, that it is individualistic at its core.
And number two is that there are real limits to what we can do with our critical faculties.
...to reach agreements about first principles or questions about the good life.
And what exactly am I saying?
You have to decide, when you think about politics, whether you think human beings are first and foremost individuals who form social contracts or if you think that human beings are fundamentally social animals, who carve-out room for their individualism.
Right? This is very very important to think about alright?
Liberalism is all about individualism. Liberal theorists are known as social contract theorists because they believe that individuals come together and form social contracts, so the focus is on the individual.
The assumption underpinning liberalism is not that human beings are social animals from the get-go.
That’s the first point.
The second point is that liberalism assumes that we cannot use our critical faculties - we cannot use reason to come up with truth about first principles (think about issues like abortion, affirmative action - you cannot get universal agreement on those issues, right?). And I’ll talk about this more as we go along.
But the roots of liberalism are traced-back, in my opinion, to the liberal wars of Britain between Catholics and Protestants. And the fact is that you cannot use your critical faculties to determine whether Catholicism is a superior religion to Protestantism or vice a versa, or whether atheism is superior to both of them ..or Judaism or Islam is superior to Catholicism and Protestantism, Who knows? Right? You just can’t reach agreement. You just can’t reach agreement. There are real limits to what we can do with our critical faculties, okay?
So these are the two bedrock assumptions: One, you focus on the individual, and number two, you accept the fact that you can’t reach universal agreement.
Now, central question - how should politics be arranged to deal with this potential for violence?
And you say to yourself, what does he mean, potential for violence?
The fact is that Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in huge numbers, not only in Britain, but all over Europe. People today, Shias and Sunnis, kill each other, because they can’t agree on whether Shi ism or Sunnism is the correct interpretation of Islam ..or communists versus liberals, people can’t agree on first principles. And when they can’t agree on first principles, if they feel really strongly about them, there is potential for violence.
So, when you have all these individuals running around, who, don’t agree, they may agree in some cases but don’t universally agree, there’s tremendous potential for violence.
So, liberalism is basically an ideology that’s based on conflict, and the question is, how do you solve that conflict?
There’s a three part solution:
And this should be dear to all of your hearts.
The first is, you focus on individual rights. Remember, the importance of the individual. You know The Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” - those are natural rights, those are inalienable rights.
This means that every person on the planet has a particular set of rights, sometimes defined as freedoms. This is to say, you, if you want to be a Protestant, have the right to practice that religion, and if I want to be a Catholic, I have the freedom, I have the right to be a Catholic.
The name of the game is to recognize that everybody has these freedoms to choose. This makes perfect sense when you think about Catholics killing Protestants, right? Or Jews killing Muslims or whatever group you want, atheists killing believers, communists killing whatever, right?
The point is, you want to focus on the individual and let the individual choose for him or herself what kind of life they want to lead. You want to let them lead, as much as possible, their version of the good life. And, very important, every person on the planet has that right, and let me get ahead of myself here, just put this seed in your brain.
If you focus on individualism and inalienable rights, you go almost automatically from an individualistic ideology to a universalistic ideology, right? Because again, you’re focusing on the individual, you’re saying every individual has a set of rights, every individual on the planet. And that individualistic ideology becomes a universalistic ideology. But we’re talking about the individual here.
The second is, you purvey the norm of tolerance. We talk about tolerance all the time. Universities are really big on tolerance. We’re supposed to tolerate opinions that we don’t like. You bring in speakers, or you allow speakers to come in who say things that you find reprehensible, right? Tolerance really matters.
But the fact is that tolerance only takes you so far. because you’re dealing with people who sometimes are so committed to their beliefs. Somebody who believes that abortion is murder is willing to murder a doctor who practices abortion, alright?
So, you need a state, that’s the third element of the equation.
You need a state that’s effectively a night watchman. That makes sure that those people over there who want to live as Protestants don’t attack those people who want to live as Catholics and vice versa.
This is the liberal solution.
This is what America is all about.
Individualism - we talk about it all the time. We talk about rights, everybody has rights. My kids, over the years, have always reminded me when I tell them that they have to do X, Y and Z that they have rights and I cannot interfere with their rights, right? It’s the way we’re educated from the get go and of course, we’re a remarkably tolerant people as societies go. Not completely, but that’s, of course, why we have a state, right?
You’ve got to have a police force, you’ve got to have a system of courts, right?
So, that’s what liberalism is all about, right? Liberalism focuses on the individual, purveys the norm of tolerance and accepts the fact that you need a nightwatchman state.
Now, let’s talk about nationalism. Different animal…
Nationalism is based on the assumption that human beings are social animals.
We are born and heavily socialized into tribes.
We are not born in the state of nature.
We are not individuals, born and left alone in the woods.
We are born into groups. We are very tribal.
So, you see in terms of starting assumptions, or bedrock assumptions, what underpins nationalism, what underpins liberalism, very very different.
And individualism takes a back seat to group loyalty, right?
Somebody around the world kills an American, ISIS kills an American, it’s fundamentally different than killing a Saudi, or killing a Brit, because you’re killing one of us. This is the tribe, right? You’re an American. Americans look out for other Americans.
We are social animals from the get-go.
And aside from the family, the most important group, remember I said that you are born into and heavily socialized into particular groups ...tutting aside the family, the most important group in today’s world, is the nation (I’ll say more about that in a second).
What’s nationalism?
Here’s my simple definition:
It’s a set of political beliefs which holds that a nation, a nation, a body of individuals with characteristics that purportedly distinguish them from other groups, should have their own state. Think of the word nation-state.
Nation-state. Nation-state embodies what nationalism is all about. It says the world is divided up into all these tribes called nations and each each one of them wants its own state.
If you think about the world today, just look at a map of the world today, it is completely covered with nation-states. Nothing but nation-states.
If you went back to 1450 and looked at a map of Europe, there isn’t even a single state on that map. Over time, the growth of the state, and then the growth of the nation-state, you move to a world that is filled with nothing but nation-states. Look at the Palestinians and Israelis. The Jews who believe in Zionism, what is Zionism all about? It’s all about having your own Jewish state. Theodore Herzel, who is the father of Zionism, his most famous book is called, The Jewish State, Jewish nation-state.
What do the Palestinians want? Two state solution? Palestinians want their own state. Palestinians as a nation, want their own state.
The planet is filled with nations, many of which have their own state, almost all of which want their own state, nation-state, right?
That’s what nationalism is all about.
Take it a step further. Nations place a enormous importance on sovereignty, or self-determination, which is why they want their own state.
The Palestinians don’t want the Israelis deciding what their politics should look like. Palestinians want their own state. Jews want their own state.
Germans want their own state.
Americans want their own state.
..because they believe in sovereignty.
[...]
Liberal hegemony is based on intolerance. It says that everybody has to be liberal…
[...]
Mearsheimer argues against trying to impose liberal democracy, as it is necessarily a failed foreign policy against staunch nationalism, but he defends “liberal democracy” as a good way of life for The US.
However, he does not observe that The U.S. has failed democratic principle in important ways - notably in the open border/ opening of group boundaries policies in exploit of the “civic nationalist” concept that his YKW people have perpetrated through power niches in cahoots with liberals/right wingers to overturn democratic will (for closed borders) ..open borders and boundaries, weakening The United States nationhood and putting The U.S. effectively, on a trajectory of non-nationhood.
Note Mearsheimer’s use of the pejorative word “purportedly” when discussing nationalist claims to distinguish their people in ways (e.g., important biological differences) requiring a nation-state to protect their differences; i.e., that they are only “purportedly” different from other people in significant ways which require national boundaries/borders to protect them.
Nevertheless, in places, Mearsheimer makes the point, quite eloquently, that people are social, very profoundly social, from the start; thus making nationalism as it protects their sociality something they care about more deeply than liberal democracy. They will defend more ardently the security, social order and stability that provides for general fairness and just recourse against the secondary priorities, bullying ‘prerogatives’ of individual liberal choice over the security of group interests. Noting our deep social nature (including Europeans) from the start is correct, and is the point of correction that Whites need to understand and prioritize as opposed to right wing reaction (itself a species of liberalism) reaction to Jewish didacticism.
Rumour has if that veteran nationalist Eddy Morrison (pictured) is about to launch an online version of ‘‘Action”. I am unashamedly nostalgic but I think that Mosley’s journal should be left in peace.
“Action” was a newspaper that was sold at meetings and regular pitches. The proposed online version would have none of the feel, and smell of newsprint. The Internet is a priceless asset but it cannot recapture the past.
Seth Tyrssen, the American assistant editor of Eddy’s blog “White Voice,” produces “The New Thunderbolt” in homage to the old National States’ Rights Party. There’s not much difference in ideology between “The New Thunderbolt” and the old “Thunderbolt.” But a new “Action” produced by Eddy Morrison would be a contradiction. Oswald Mosley supported Imperialism pre-war and ‘Europe a Nation’ post-war, but he was never a parochial nationalist.
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Jeffrey Wallder, also known as Gordon Beckwell, is revising the Friends of Mosley 18 B detainees list as more information becomes available. But most of his fellow “Action” writers are dead; Oswald Mosley, Jeffrey Hamm, Robert Rowe, and John Warburton have all passed away, and I don’t feel too good myself.
I pinched that line from the entertainer Vic Oliver, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law, who said: “all the great musicians are dead; Mozart’s dead, Beethoven’s dead, and I don’t feel too good myself.” He once asked Winston Churchill who was the greatest war leader. Churchill replied: “Mussolini, because he had the courage to have his son-in-law shot.”
Many of Union Movement’s policies have been overtaken by history. We wanted to send home immigrants with their fares paid, That would gave been possible in those days but today there are far too many of them. We also supported white rule in South Africa and Rhodesia but both countries have been taken over by the blacks.
And then there us the matter of copyright. “Action” and all other Union Movement and Action Society titles are the property of Sanctuary Press.
What is to be Done - Eddy Morrison.
In 1978 when I was a National Front organiser I firmly believed that we would have our first members of parliament by 1980. We didn’t and the period known as the ‘horrible 80s’ was upon us. Split after split with eventually a by-election where one schism of the National Front stood a candidate at the same time as another schism of that splintered wreck of a once mighty movement.
The 1990s got a bit more interesting and we achieved the election of a BNP candidate in London. Things were slow in the BNP but it was, under John Tyndall, going in the right direction. As BNP Yorkshire Organiser I was gladdened to see many old comrades returning to the BNP. Then in 1999 the British National equivalent of the Twin Towers occurred - Nick Griffin became the leader of the BNP.
He spent the next ten years building it up. BNP councillors were everywhere and two MEPs were elected. Then came the second calamity! Griffin’s appearance on a major national TV show. Griffin acted like a buffoon. He even sidled up to the Black ‘celebrity’ who was sat next to him. Be bungled his way through a barrage of outrageous Lefty opposition and made no attempt to either push himself into prominence in a public forum watched live by millions nor to say anything cohesive. He acted like the local village idiot. Was it an Act?
Now we find ourselves in the 2010s. A large number of nationalist grouplets vying for members from an ever dwindling pool of recruits. With the break up of the EDL and the BNP, one would have expected a huge rush to join an existing nationalist party. It never happened. The British Democratic Party seems to be totally static and the National Front is a shadow of its former self. The less said about ‘Britain First’ and the lunatic New British Union, the better!
Unity talks abound. Unity with who and why unity at all? It’s like putting all the hospital patients with transmittable diseases in a ward of basically healthy people. Unity serves one purpose - it gives a platform for people who like to talk about nationalist unity who can go on home and do little more than look forward to the next unity meeting ad infinitum.
It’s never going to happen folks - believe me! We need, as we did in the 1960s, a fresh start. We need a White Nationalist movement that is no holds barred. We need one that rejects the inevitable compromises that come with unity. We need a movement that rejects both internal and external democracy and runs on the meritocratic principle.
You join, you work hard and you get the benefits. You join, you gripe about provocative tactics and you should for the good of all rush off and join Ukip (if it’s still there of course).
A new movement (I can feel the shuddering from here) it must be. And for the first few years of its life it should avoid elections like the plague. It shouldn’t even be registered with the ZOG control apparatus called ‘The Electoral Commission.” Give them your membership numbers; state of finances; sign forms that bind you to a Liberal Stalinist state and for what? To get seven votes in a council election (Nick Walsh - Hull 2016).
A new movement must be uncompromising in its White Nationalist principles and uncompromising in its drive for power. What we need comrades is a movement of disciplined fanatics!
International Finance
I am a 59 year old Englishman who understands the racket that is our money creation system. Fiat money heralds the destruction of any country that is silly enough to allow it in.
The US Federal Reserve is not federal and holds no reserves. President Wilson himself said he felt he had sold his country to International Finance. What did they have on him for him to sell his country out?
I have friends who have spent 9 years in studying for professional banking examinations and still don’t understand fiat money; so cleverly is the course designed.
I believe that if the people were actually educated as to how it works their outrage would be deafening. Naturally, as the same people who own the banks own the media, reaching the people to educate them will be difficult. Remember, any mention of who these people might be may bring you up on antisemitism charges. They really have the bases covered.
Education is the way forward but it will be an uphill struggle.
Nation Revisited replies to A.L.
You appear to believe in the Jewish conspiracy theory. This was endorsed by AK Chesterton in his 1965 book “The New Unhappy Lords.” Unfortunately, he offers no evidence. In his foreword he explains:
“The strength and the weakness of this book is that it is not annotated. The weakness is that the author, having checked his facts to the best of his ability, does not cite his authorities, partly because some of the information has come to him under confidential cover from highly placed persons in different parts of the world who would face ruin if their identities were divulged, and partly because, the facts have not been filed and listed. Its strength, on the other hand, is that the reader is presented with a continuous narrative which enables him to follow the workings of the conspiracy without having his attention distracted by the abundance of foot-notes which otherwise would have been necessary.”
Jews dominate the media and they are over-represented in financial circles but they are not all powerful. There are no Jews on the boards of the Bank of China or the Bank of Japan. And they were not able to save Lehman Brothers or Northern Rock. Why didn’t they just create some more money?
An Uncertain Future
We are due to leave the European Union on October 31st - with or without a trade agreement. The Brexiteers are predicting a rosy future but most economists are pessimistic. The massive disruption to our economy resulting from Brexit coincides with America’s trade war with China and a global decline in car sales. It seems that a recession is inevitable.
To manage this chaos we have a broken party system serving a divided and discontented population. Boris Johnson (pictured), our larger-than-life prime minister, leads a right- wing Tory Party propped up by the sectarian Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. He is spending money like a drunken sailor; two billion here, two billion there, 20,000 more policemen, and 10,000 new prison places. After years of penny-pinching the Tories are being forced to spend our money on public services.
One of the main factors in the Brexit debate was immigration. Boris Johnson frightened the electorate with predictions of millions of Turks coming to the UK if we stayed in Europe. But he called for an amnesty for 500.000 undocumented migrants when he was Mayor of London, and he has promised to make immigration easier to attract the skilled workers that we need.
During the referendum campaign we heard much from the Brexiteers about ‘sovereignty’ but Boris Johnson has now made himself a dictator by suspending Parliament.
The Old Gang have left us short of doctors, nurses, policemen, scientists and engineers.. All of these workers can be recruited but they will have to be trained and provided with affordable housing. The police will also need somewhere to work as they have sold off so many police stations.
A start has been made on building affordable houses but young couples cannot get mortgages. We need social housing and New York style housing courts to control rents and prevent exploitation.
The tit-for-tat tanker war with Iran has shown that we. We don’t have enough destroyers and frigates to defend British-flagged ships in the Persian Gulf. We could send HMS Queen Elizabeth, our gigantic aircraft carrier, but “Big Lizzie” with her 14 operational F35B aircraft is hardly suitable to counter Iranian inflatables, it would be like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
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We are also short of soldiers but that doesn’t stop our government from warning the Chinese over Hong Kong. Our 81,500 regulars are ready to take on the People’s Liberation Army of two million men. But don’t worry, we always punch above our weight, and the Chinese don’t like it up ‘em.
We urgently need a Government of National Unity, not just to sort out Brexit but to realistically appraise our situation and put country before party. In the meantime we face an uncertain future.
Violent Crime
Stabbings and shootings have reached epidemic proportions in our major cities. The victims are young men, mostly black, that are involved drug running. The police are calling for drugs to be legalised but, fortunately, our laws are made by Parliament, not by the police. It would make their job easier but that is not what law and order is all about.
Boris Johnson is electioneering by promising more policemen, longer prison sentences, and extra prison places. These measures would certainly help but the real answer is better parenting and education. Many of these kids have never experienced discipline and they do not recognise authority. The liberal experiment in education has failed and we will not see an improvement in juvenile behavior until we return to traditional teaching methods.
Tony Blair made a monumental mistake when he sent British troops to invade Iraq. But he was right when he said “education, education, education.” It really is the answer to most of our problems.
Fortunately, we still have some dedicated teachers who can exert authority. Schools have been throwing out disruptive pupils rather thn deal with them but exclusion is not the answer. The art of raising children to be productive citizens has not been lost, but teachers need the backing of parents and their employers.
When I was working at the Shell building in Waterloo, some years ago, parties of schoolboys used the company’s swimming pool. Some of them were rowdy but one particular school was very well behaved. It was a private school and the pupils were all black. It’s all a matter leadership. Kids from all backgrounds can succeed in life if they are given the chance. Letting them ‘do their own thing’ is not the answer.
Theresa May’s ban on ‘stop and search’ when she was Home Secretary was misguided. She was frightened of upsetting race relations but the police need all the help they can get. They have been undermined by manpower cuts and the privatisation of the probation service. Drug-related crimes are committed by young men of all races but the majority are black. When the police stop and search them they are not being racist, they are protecting the public
We have tried ignoring the problem but it won’t go away Parents must be held responsible for their children, and teachers, magistrates, judges, social workers, probation officers, and policemen must enforce the law.
Over-sensitive concerns about race-relations should not be allowed to confuse the issue. The majority of Black people would welcome a return to law and order.
Nation Revisited
This blog seeks reform by legal means. All articles are by Bill Baillie unless otherwise stated. The opinions of guest writers are entirely their own. We are protected by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19: “We all have the right to make up our own minds, to think what we like, to say what we think, and to share ideas with other people.”
Comments
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Our flag was designed by John Bean in 1957 for his National Labour Party. It is used by Nation Revisited with his blessing.The cross represents our nation and the radiant star represents Socialism
We are again reaching the point in the business cycle known as “peak debt,” when debts have compounded to the point that their cumulative total cannot be paid. Student debt, credit card debt, auto loans, business debt and sovereign debt are all higher than they have ever been. As economist Michael Hudson writes in his provocative 2018 book, “…and forgive them their debts,” debts that can’t be paid won’t be paid. The question, he says, is how they won’t be paid.
Mainstream economic models leave this problem to “the invisible hand of the market,” assuming trends will self-correct over time. But while the market may indeed correct, it does so at the expense of the debtors, who become progressively poorer as the rich become richer. Borrowers go bankrupt and banks foreclose on the collateral, dispossessing the debtors of their homes and their livelihoods. The houses are bought by the rich at distress prices and are rented back at inflated prices to the debtors, who are then forced into wage peonage to survive. When the banks themselves go bankrupt, the government bails them out. Thus the market corrects, but not without government intervention. That intervention just comes at the end of the cycle to rescue the creditors, whose ability to buy politicians gives them the upper hand. According to free-market apologists, this is a natural cycle akin to the weather, which dates all the way back to the birth of modern economics in ancient Greece and Rome.
Hudson counters that those classical societies are not actually where our financial system began, and that capitalism did not evolve from bartering, as its ideologues assert. Rather, it devolved from a more functional, sophisticated, egalitarian credit system that was sustained for two millennia in ancient Mesopotamia (now parts of Iraq, Turkey, Kuwait and Iran). Money, banking, accounting and modern business enterprise originated not with gold and private trade, but in the public sector of Sumer’s palaces and temples in the third century B.C. Because it involved credit issued by the local government rather than private loans of gold, bad debts could be periodically forgiven rather than compounding until they took the whole system down, a critical feature that allowed for its remarkable longevity.
The True Roots of Money and Banking
Sumer was the first civilization for which we have written records. Its notable achievements included the wheel, the lunar calendar, our numerical system, law codes, an organized hierarchy of priest-kings, copper tools and weapons, irrigation, accounting and money. It also produced the first written language, which took the form of cuneiform figures impressed on clay. These tablets were largely just accounting tools, recording the flow of food and raw materials in the temple and palace workshops, as well as IOUs (mainly to these large public institutions) that had to be preserved in writing to be enforced. This temple accounting system allowed for the coordinated flow of credit to peasant farmers from planting to harvesting, and for advances to merchants to engage in foreign trade.
In fact, it was the need to manage accounts for a large labor force under bureaucratic control that is thought to have led to the development of writing. The people willingly accepted this bureaucratic control because they viewed the gods as having decreed it. According to their cuneiform writings, humans were genetically engineered to work the fields and the mines after certain lower gods tasked with that hard labor rebelled.
Usury, or the charging of interest on loans, was an accepted part of the Mesopotamian credit system. Interest rates were high and remained unchanged for two millennia. But Mesopotamian scholars were well aware of the problem of “debts that can’t be paid.” Unlike in today’s academic economic curriculum, Hudson writes:
Babylonian scribal students were trained already c. 2000 BC in the mathematics of compound interest. Their school exercises asked them to calculate how long it took a debt at interest of 1/60th per month to double. The answer is 60 months: five years. How long to quadruple? 10 years. How long to multiply 64 times? 30 years. It must’ve been obvious that no economy can grow in keeping with this rate of increase.
Sumerian kings solved the problem of “peak debt” by periodically declaring “clean slates,” in which agrarian debts were forgiven and debtors were released from servitude to work as tenants on their own plots of land. The land belonged to the gods under the stewardship of the temple and the palace and could not be sold, but farmers and their families maintained leaseholds to it in perpetuity by providing a share of their crops, service in the military and labor in building communal infrastructure. In this way, their homes and livelihoods were preserved, an arrangement that was mutually beneficial, since the kings needed their service.
Jewish scribes, who spent time in captivity in Babylon in the sixth century B.C, adapted these laws in the year or jubilee, which Hudson argues was added to Leviticus after the Babylonian captivity. According to Leviticus 25:8-13, a Jubilee Year was to be declared every 49 years, during which debts would be forgiven, slaves and prisoners freed and their property leaseholds restored. As in ancient Mesopotamia, property ownership remained with Yahweh and his earthly proxies. The Jubilee law effectively banned the outright sale of land, which could only be leased for up to 50 years (Leviticus 25:14-17). The Levitican Jubilee represented an advance over the Mesopotamian “clean slates,” Hudson says, in that it was codified into law rather than relying on the whim of the king. But its proclaimers lacked political power, and whether the law was ever enforced is unclear. It served as a moral rather than a legal prescription.
Ancient Greece and Rome adopted the Mesopotamian system of lending at interest, but without the safety valve of periodic “clean slates,” since the creditors were no longer the king or the temple, but private lenders. Unfettered usury resulted in debt bondage and forfeiture of properties, consolidation into large landholdings, a growing wedge between rich and poor, and the ultimate destruction of the Roman Empire.
Hungarian PM Viktor Orban - Photo Credits: MTI
SPLC Founder, Morris Dees
