Some months ago I received a manuscript in the mail bearing the return address of an old friend.  This friend later denied any knowledge of the thing.  The postmark and stamps were unremarkable, and I have never been able to discover the identities of the sender, the two correspondents in the remarkable, fragmentary dialogue, or the author of the commentary, one “Johannes Climacus”.

I have been reluctant to publish this material, fearing that it might meet a hostile reception even from those who stand most to gain from an understanding of it.  But finally, overcoming these scruples, I determined to cast it like bread upon the bitter waters of MR, where readers may carp at it at their leisure.

LYCOPHRON:  I suppose that one question (there are several that I won’t raise) is:  given the Eurasian characteristics of Dugin’s perspective (naturally, given where he is), his relationship to his own traditions and to globalization, etc. makes a certain sense.  But how would, say, an American in sympathy with these ideas situate himself?  I don’t necessarily mean practically, but close enough—do you move to Russia and pray for a reversion of North America to primeval forest?  That’s not meant derisively, but it raises an important question, which is: clearly someone in his context can be for something, but can someone in our context appropriate these ideas and be for anything?

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On July 25th BBC2 aired a powerful, half-hour piece of investigative journalism titled, “The Siege of Darley Hall Farm.  It charted:-

... five years of guerrilla warfare directed against John Hall, a guinea-pig farmer whose stock is bred for medical experimentation ...  [It] revealed how the tentacles of extremism exert a stranglehold first over one enterprise, then a series, and from here an entire community.  Stories of personal courage abounded as the Animal Liberation Front’s campaign intensified from dire warnings and attacks against property to arson, accusations of paedophilia, murder threats, and, finally, body snatching.

Altogether, the farm and its surrounds have endured 290 protests and 170 incidents of violence and intimidation.  In March a High Court judge refused the area an exclusion zone, while defining these actions as a terror campaign.  The ALF, it would seem, is not the only perpetrator of inhumanity.

Today we learn that the terror tactics, and specifically the stealing of the remains of the Hall family’s grandmother, were successful.  The Halls will abandon animal breeding in the hope that her remains will be returned.

The legal system badly failed the Halls.  No less importantly, it has failed the cause of scientific research in Britain and it has failed all of us.  Why?

When I consider the rush to protect Muslims through anti-British religious hate speech law, to bring Nick Griffin and his co-defendant to court for predicting 7/7 and to hound John Tyndall to his grave, I can only conclude that the legal will exists in spades if the “offender” suits the liberal establishment.  As far as I know the New Labour clique aren’t militant vegans.  The Animal Liberation Front has no members among Labour MP’s.  So is it that a residual 1960’s Student Union admiration for action directe is at work in them?  Is left-organised protest always allowed to pass because there are, as everybody knows, “no enemies to the left”?

ALF is everybody’s enemy.  Can anyone explain why it is not seen by our betters for the evil it is and stopped in its tracks at the outset?

UPDATE

Adam Nicolson, writing in the Guardian (where else?), has answered all my questions.

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“Leadership elections are intended to expose the ideas of rival candidates - thus making it possible for the party to decide the direction in which it wants to be led.  The Tory party is being denied that opportunity.  That is, I suspect, because none of the leadership candidates has the faintest idea about what Conservatism now stands for.  Meanwhile their supporters are engaged in no more than a doomed search for a “winner” who does not exist.”

Roy Hattersley, his tap dripping less bile than usual in today’s Guardian.

To which, no doubt, spirited Tories will counter that “if a week is a long time in politics four years is a hell of a lot longer.”  Or perhaps “oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose ‘em.”  That is the self-calming fatalism which passes for electoral wisdom on the right today.

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The philosophers of the Enlightenment wanted us all to be part of the same broad humanity - but the brutal truth is that we are all a bit tribal.
Simon Schama, a latter-day Macaulay quoted in yesterday’s Guardian as saying something necessary and true - and, given his background, rather refreshing.

Schama, along with fellow-historian and liberal Tristram Hunt, was endeavouring to explain to TV producer and Guardian invitee Stephen Moss the unexpectedly high viewer figures for BBC2’s series, Coast.  Of these Moss writes:-

One recent episode of Coast, on BBC2, attracted 5 million viewers, the highest rating factual programme on the channel this year.  And it’s not only programmes about the British seaside that are currently winning audiences: series featuring Britain’s landscape (Alan Titchmarsh’s British Isles: a Natural History), history (Tony Robinson’s Time Team and their Big Dig), and our native wildlife (Bill Oddie’s Springwatch) have been some of television’s biggest recent hits.

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THE Government of Robert Mugabe tabled draconian laws yesterday to drive the last white farmers from their land and crush dissent.

The constitutional amendments debated in Parliament will nationalise all agricultural land that has been listed for seizure since 2000. Landowners will have no right to contest the confiscations and will be barred from receiving compensation ...

After five years of murder, assault and harassment of white-owned farms by state agents, the Government has managed to confiscate legally only about 10 per cent of the estimated 4,500 properties. All but a handful of white farmers have had their property listed for “compulsory acquisition”.

However, most of them have kept the Government at bay by fighting their eviction in court. About 450 farmers have stayed on their farms.

Mr Coltart [MDC legal director] said: “These constitutional changes are designed for once and for all to smash the white farmers and to close any possible avenue for using the constitution to protect human rights.”

From todays Times.

Some unfamiliar speculation has appeared in our national dailies since BBC News broke the story of a rape gang operating in the unlikely, quiet south midlands town of Northampton.

The offenders are black and thought to be South Africans, a fact of immediate and deep concern to their victims.  It’s traumatic enough to be raped by a physically healthy criminal and left with only psychological scars.  It would be another to be handed a death sentence by an HIV positive kaffir five thousand miles from home.

Back in good old Jo’burg “jack rolling” gangs block-off two ends of a road with their vehicles and assault every woman caught between.  Something along these lines may be what we are seeing in Northampton.  The five women who were attacked - three rapes, two adbuctions in the course of ten days, all at night and the youngest victim just fifteen - report a three-man gang possibly employing two vehicles.

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I have certainly heard a lot of liberals claim that if we just give a lot of foreign aid to the Third world, then no one would have a reason to immigrate to America.  Marcus Epstein has an interesting article debunking this concept.  He gives a number of reasons why this policy will not work, but ignores perhaps the most important one: IQ.

At the end he says “Cultural, historical, and other factors that cannot be changed anytime soon will probably mean that some countries are always going to be poorer than other countries”  Perhaps he meant to include IQ in “other”.  In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and Vanhannen look at the IQ’s of the countries where post-1965 immigrants, and the trend is clear: low IQ immigrants flood into High IQ countries.  Low IQ countries can never be close to as prosperous as high IQ countries, and immigrants from every failed society will always want to come to prosperous countries.  No amount of foreign aid, humanitarian intervention or government reform will change that.

I was watching Tucker Carlson the other day, and he brought up this story that states that the most liberal city in America is Detroit, MI followed by Gary, IN, and Berkeley California.  The most Conservative city is Provo, UT followed by Lubbock and Abeline, TX.

The center that did the study did not tell their research methods, and the results make me question them.  I doubt that either Detroit or Gary are particularly liberal in the traditional sense.  There is not great interest in gay-rights, environmentalism, or anti-war activities.  Rather they are simply two of the blackest cities in the country, and so they vote the most democratic.

In fact the press release from the Bay Area Voting Research Center who did the study stated,

The list of America’s most liberal cities reads like a who’s who of prominent African American communities. Gary, Washington D.C., Newark, Flint, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Birmingham have long had prominent black populations. While most black voters have consistently supported Democrats since the 1960s, it is the white liberals that have slowly withered away over the decades, leaving African Americans as the sole standard bearers for the left.

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