by Grimoire

I was sitting in the study re-reading Heidegger, preparing notes should I write an article on the subject, and thought, this is going to take too long.  I put Heidegger back on the shelf, and pulled down my beautiful, antique print of Aeschylus’s The Persians.  This is the stuff for me!  Nothing so clear and direct.  Swords close in, man to man.

Forward, sons of the Greeks,
Liberate the fatherland,
Liberate your children, your women,
The altars of the gods of your fathers
And the graves of your forebearers:
Now is the fight for everything.

One of the greatest works of the heroic type, comes to us from England. We all know it. But I think few have really read it on their own. But please take the time to read it. It is not about a battle, nor is it about history or philosophy.  It is about one day, when individual men stood together, and stood as a “band of brothers”:

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I was impressed by the art and simplicity of this anti-miscegenation video published on YouTube by Divine Fellowship.  It was brought to the attention of BDF readers today by someone I respect.

The imagery, the writing, the voicing by Julian Lee, and the message are all beautifully-crafted.  It was uploaded on May Day this year, and is the second of thirty-three parts under the title White People Are Cool, all devoted to the preservation of our people.

by Alexander Baron

Washington - FamilyRadio, an American-based Christian radio station, has predicted the world will end May 21, 2011. This article argues their chronology is wrong, but probably by less than a hundred years.

Prophets, cranks and ordinary people have been predicting the end of the world since before the Great Flood, including one guy who had the foresight to build an ark so that he, his kin and their family pets could repopulate the Earth, be fruitful and multiply. More recently, the Jehovah’s Witnesses predicted Judgment Day would arrive in 1914; if your name was Harry Patch and you’d been caught up in the living hell that was Passchendaele three years later, you might have thought they’d got it half right. The latest such prediction is for May 21 this year, less than two weeks away according to Americans Brian Haubert and Kevin Brown, and their favourite radio station, FamilyRadio. Their reason for believing the end is nigh is a somewhat novel interpretation of Christian theology, one of the signposts of which is the rise of gay pride and same sex marriages. There must be a joke there somewhere, but this is a family show. Haubert and Brown don’t appear to have mentioned that in .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with Barbara Bradley Hagerty, but although the world most certainly will not end on May 21, their chronology may not be too far out, and this time we are talking science rather than religion.

The end of the world? Not literally, but unless our leaders change course drastically and soon, there are children alive today who will undoubtedly see the end of civilisation as we know it – consider the evidence. First there is Professor Albert Bartlett’s doom-mongering lecture – classic and awesome in equal measure - Arithmetic, Population And Energy. This can be found all over the Internet in video, audio and text formats – the latter in French and Spanish as well as English. A video version was uploaded to Youtube in 8 parts with the modest but terrifyingly accurate title The Most IMPORTANT Video You’ll Ever See.

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The following is my offering - very brief - of Heidegger’s meaning at the very end of the second of the two lectures published under the title Identity and Difference.  You may consider it of no consequence, for it has little to do with nationalism.  But Heidegger does generally, and this is not as unconnected as it may appear.  It is just a small digression from political thinking.

On page 72 of my copy of the Stambaugh translation Heidegger, having remarked upon the openness of god-less thinking to the divine, proceeds:

This remark may throw a little light on the path to which thinking is on its way, that thinking which accomplishes the step back, back out of metaphysics into the active essence of metaphysics, back out of the oblivion of the difference as such into the destiny of the withdrawing concealment of perdurance.

Thinking here does not mean the unending thought process of the intellectual faculty.  It is broader than that.  Heidegger seems to regard thinking more holistically, as the way the mind in general addresses the reality of the world beyond the human organism.  Thus, the “path” or “way” he is talking about here is the procession of the mind from the ordinary conscious state which we all experience in life, and which is characterised by two things.  The first is a state of self-segregation from the real, a state of loss or immersion à la Bacon in passing things (feelings, events, objects).  The second is a state of “perdurance”, of fracture, of sundering to which we automatically ascribe the word “I”.

This ascription conceals our fractured estate, but in the process of advancement from our ordinary waking consciousness it falls away, and with it the states of fracture and immersion.  And then the road is open, perhaps:

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by Alexander Baron

According to a recent UK survey, four people out of five polled believe the long-term unemployed should be compelled to do (unpaid) community work to qualify for their benefits – an idea known to Americans as workfare, and one that has long been more than a belief on the other side of the Pond. Now that Nick Clegg’s alternative vote idea has been well and truly routed, and David Cameron’s hand has been strengthened, there is a real possibility of something like this happening. The concept of the undeserving poor is of course one that predates workfare by a fair few centuries, and was what resulted in a now thankfully long defunct institution known as the workhouse.

The idea that the majority or a large minority of the unemployed are “scroungers” is a mindset that is hard to dispel, but there are distinctly unpleasant consequences of endorsing it. If the unemployed are put to work for a pittance, then real wages are depressed and real jobs lost; the unions have long realised this, which is the major reason they have always opposed such schemes here.

David Cameron’s much vaunted “big society”, a concept which only he seems to understand, is based on the same philosophy. When he talks about people volunteering, what he really means is working for nothing. A graphic example of that has recently come to light with the revelation that many senior police officers who have been forcibly retired by West Midlands Police have been invited back. As unpaid special constables.

When Margaret Thatcher succeeded James Callaghan as Prime Minister in May 1979, one of her first acts was to award the police a massive pay rise, probably sensing she would need them on her side in the coming confrontation with the unions. It may be now that the police officers who were enthusiastically bashing heads on the anti-G20 protests have a change of heart.

All this is a matter of record and speculation, because what the unemployed need is not jobs but livelihood, indeed, we already have far too many jobs. One of the first things the new administration announced was the axing of 192 quangos. Which begs the question, if we don’t need them now, why did we need them before?

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Soren’s review, given in an informal conversation with me, of Guillaume’s Faye’s manifesto for the radical right, Why We Fight.  Please go to the radio page.

Less than three years after the bail out of Scotland’s banks was supposed to have killed talk of withdrawal from the Union, Alex Salmond was able to inform the British public yesterday that during the next Holyrood parliament a referendum on independence will be put before Scots voters.  The future of the Union, of all the Westminster parties, and of political nationalism in England now all rest with a few million Scottish votes.

Salmond, as the big winner of Thursday’s varied election cycle, now has sixty-eight of his colleagues sitting at Holyrood - a feat which was supposed to have been impossible under the complex voting procedure established for the Scottish parliament.  It has also been thought impossible for the SNP to convince Scots to vote for independence - the polls show a consistent two thirds against.  But the media are treating a shift towards independence of under twenty points over the next four years as being distinctly possible, given that Salmond is now a veritable colossus in a country of political pygmies.

How the fortunes of civic nationalism in Scotland contrast with those of ethno-nationalism in the rest of the country.  The Griffin Party has won two council seats and lost all its others where elections were held.  The repeated plaint on the nationalist internet is that the movement is back to where it was before Griffin’s successful leadership bid in 1999.  But with reported debts of over £500,000, mass departure of the (relatively) able, and a nose-diving membership, it’s a lot worse than that.  It ought to be the end of Griffin and his clique.  But it appears that the party must completely wither and die before that happens.

Meanwhile, the English, obviously, voted Labour and Tory as stubbornly as ever - the latter in somewhat surprisingly firm numbers.  UKIP had a bad election night, not even managing to benefit much from disaffected BNP voters, never mind Tories.  Polarity is returning to the English voting pattern if not to the politics.  Taken with the 69% “No” vote in the AV referendum it amounts to a powerful rejection of centrism.  It is inevitable that Tory and Labour strategists will identify this factor and endeavour to spin their way towards it.  But real diversification is impossible in an age when the right must support neo-Marxist social policies and the left neoliberal economic ones.

Only nationalism opposes both, of course.  But its electoral flame was extinguished on Thursday, and though there are efforts to keep it alive via the civicist English Democrats, the culturalist British Freedom Party, the tiny and extremely nascent, ethno-nationalist English People’s Party, and the white nationalist National Front, I for one do not believe they can succeed.  I see the only hope in a sudden and saving, last-minute purification of the BNP brand.  I just don’t know what more can be done to force Griffin out of the party before it finally hits the wall.

by Alexander Baron

This morning, it was announced that Osama Bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan. Most world politicians seem to believe this is a good thing. But not Congressman Ron Paul.

The death of Osama Bin Laden was big news here in England, and even bigger in the USA, understandably. People, and especially Obama supporters, were outside the White House in the small hours calling for “Four more years”, which he will probably get. British Prime Minister David Cameron – Call Me Dave, as he is known – was among the first to congratulate Obama, along with former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Though the possibility or even the likelihood of Al-Qaeda striking back has not been overlooked, and we have all been put on alert, there is something else everybody seems to have overlooked in the euphoria; everybody except Congressman Ron Paul, who in a speech delivered February 24, 2010, Now It’s Assassinations, asked some embarrassing questions:

“What have we allowed ourselves to become? Are we no longer a nation of laws…have we decided that the writ of habeas corpus is not worth defending? Is torture now an acceptable tool for making us safe? Unfortunately the single answer to all of these questions from the leaders of our country and to many of our citizens appears to be yes. And now we’re told that assassination of foreigners as well as American citizens is legitimate and necessary to provide security for our people. It is my firm opinion that nothing could be further from the truth.”

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