Heidegger's arithmetic

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, has been feted as winning a great victory – with The New Statesman, for example, publishing a piece called Jeremy Corbyn won a great victory. His party won 262 seats and Theresa May’s Conservatives won 318.

Has the Left lost all grasp of arithmetic? Unfortunately not. What we are seeing is a political arithmetic from a very sinister time in the first half of the twentieth century in Germany: Heidegger’s arithmetic, from his 1927 work Being and Time.

Martin Heidegger was, famously, “Hitler’s philosopher”. He rebelled against the phenomenology of his mentor, Edmund Husserl, which allowed each person an equal right in collectively constructing the world; instead Heidegger divided humanity into two: the “authentic” and the “inauthentic”.

The authentic are the people who, in Heidegger’s view, matter: the elite, even the Master Race. Their thoughts count for much more than the inauthentic, the rest of humanity in an amorphous herd whom Heidegger calls “the they”, whom Heidegger accuses of the tendency to establish a dictatorship of “inconspicuousness and unascertainability”. It’s not difficult to see how those eager to apply a veneer of intellectual respectability to that franchise of street-fighting gangs called the Nazis saw something they could use in Heidegger’s philosophy and adopted it as their ideology. The classification of the inauthentic as the Other, the they, powered the Holocaust.

In 1940-41 Jean-Paul Sartre read Being and Time while a prisoner of war, and would use it as an inspiration for his existential work Being and Nothingness, in which he retains Heidegger’s classification of “the they”, defining it again as the Other, an amorphous mass that “disintegrates” when one tries to understand it.

Sartre’s importance is not so much in what he wrote, but in that his work provided a bridge for Heidegger’s influence to travel from the Right to the Left – Jacques Derrida, for example, was dismissive of Sartre as “merely another metaphysician”, but his breakthrough and most influential work, On Grammatology, is full of references to Heidegger.

There was a golden age of socialism in Britain. It started in 1948 when Clement Attlee’s government instituted full and equal suffrage with the Representation of the People Act 1948 and founded its corollary, the NHS. And it was ended when the OPEC oil crisis of the mid-1970s swallowed up the money that makes any golden age possible. In the wake of this, the socialists who followed used Heidegger-ridden logic to justify their rejection of democracy as a means to pursue the socialist agenda, a justification that was, in their eyes, intensified when the OPEC-fuelled crisis reached full penetration and swept Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 after the “winter of discontent”.

That’s when Heidegger’s arithmetic became as fully accepted by the hard Left as it had been by the Nazis – not that surprising when you consider politics is a circle, so that as left and right descend below the horizon of democracy they continue to become more distant from the open society, but get closer to each other: see the diagram on the book cover below. So we had Militant running Liverpool City Council in the 1980s, justifying the misery it caused to its own working-class employees by the glories of the Revolution to come: Heidegger’s arithmetic in action.

Heidegger’s arithmetic is also apparent in the attitude of former Home Secretary Diane Abbott sending her son to private school while opposing increasing grammar-school places for working-class children: the offspring of “the they”, the inauthentic, must be denied any opportunity to be able to compete with the children of the elite, the authentic, so as to deny them an intellectual foundation from which they might set out to frustrate the goals of the elite. These goals have never, at any time, had anything to do with enabling the many - the working-class, "the they", to better their lot.

And Heidegger’s arithmetic shines through in Jeremy Corbyn’s composure as a general who has won a great victory: his hard-Left MPs are the elite, and any MPs opposing them, even if they are numerically superior, are inauthentic and therefore their numbers count as nothing.

Nothing is so toxic to Heidegger’s arithmetic as full and equal suffrage democracy, which is why Corbyn has radicalised a horde of young idealists to oppose democracy by calling for restricting the franchise to those under 60. If they succeed in this it is the beginning of the end for democracy: the next step will be epistocracy, where people have to pass exams before they are deemed able to vote by a state who would only pass those who would vote according to its wishes. At present, the only qualification you need to vote is the capacity to suffer because of the deeds or misdeeds of your government, and this must remain so if you wish to be safe from your government.

If this radicalised cadre manages to decentre full and equal suffrage as a means of deciding who rules, we can only make our opposition to our rulers known by unrest, which runs the risk of sliding into civil war. And that’s why Heidegger’s arithmetic needs to be put into history’s waste disposal unit.

Read more about Heidegger, the risks to democracy, and Brexit:

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some estates need bulldozed, but they sink because of people

David Cameron’s vow to take the bulldozer to sink estates applies to England, but I thought some lessons from my homeland might prove a cautionary tale for him.

In Glasgow, there was a much-trumpeted slum clearance project in the 1950s. I’m sure it was proposed for the best of reasons, but what it turned into was an exercise in social cleansing, in that when the slums were knocked down – and they did need knocking down – working-class people were moved out of the city centre and relocated at its periphery. Talk about deconstruction at work! Unfortunately, not all went well in the new estates, and for a simple reason: the same people who made the slums worse than they needed to be turned the new estates into sink estates.

The borderline and more-than-borderline psychopaths who keep people divided and tied up in crises are fireproof: at best landlords are scared of confronting them, and at worst they are invaluable to landlords because they prevent effective tenants’ committees to form and stay stable long enough to hold said landlords’ feet to the fire.

This is, as I say, a Glasgow story, but I would be very surprised if it were just a Glasgow story.

The millionaire songwriters of Squeeze, who changed the lyrics of Cradle to the Grave to send a message to the Prime Minister on the welfare State, might have been lucky enough to get out of council housing before drugs took hold, more in some areas than in others. But I lived through it, so please forgive me for my lack of misty-eyed nostalgia. To make things worse, Glasgow Housing Authority (later Glasgow Housing Association) was so fiscally incontinent as to run up almost a billion pounds in debt, meaning it could do nothing to upgrade its stock, and GHA’s leader was forced to admit that nobody who could afford to live elsewhere was living in its stock. Again I’d be surprised if this were purely a Glasgow story, even if the scale of folly is unique.

Many housing estates do need bulldozing, because they were built not out of respect for human families but along the lines of battery farms, confining the maximum number of voters in the minimum space. But beware agenda contamination: will the new houses be smaller so there’s more of them, to disguise the overpopulation crisis arising from open-door immigration? Will the input of EU money be trumpeted in order to influence the result of the referendum and settlements thereafter?

The ball’s in your court, Prime Minister.

Gerry Dorrian

Call the Midwife and the bleak road to Bethlehem

In Christmas Eve’s Daily Mail, Libby Purves writes a heartwarming piece about the Call the Midwife Christmas Special and how the series as a whole provides an island of emotional comfort in the cynical ocean that modern life has become.

It would be cynical of me, therefore, to point out that Purves, who predicts that BBC’s Call the Midwife’s Christmas Special will outperform ITV’s rival Downton Abbey offering, has been a BBC radio presenter since the 1970s and is using the article to curry favour with her managers.

But there’s a whole further level of cynicism to go to. Call the Midwife seems not just to be an evocation of a fondly-remembered past but also a reflection of how the Establishment works, in that it depicts middle-class professionals doling out largesse to a poverty-stricken and prejudice-ridden populace.

In fairness to the programme makers, that's not a million miles away from how the healthcare Establishment sees itself. A friend’s mother, as a staff-nurse in the 1960s, was reprimanded for “socialising with care assistants”, the latter being traditionally drawn from more working-class backgrounds as the professionals. In the 1980s as a student nurse myself, I had to endure a lecture from a ward-sister on how people from my part of Glasgow’s East End were uneducated, feckless and had too many children. Nowadays it becomes harder and harder for people of working-class backgrounds to become nurses as the entry level qualification is a degree – heaven knows why – and when was the last time you were treated by a senior doctor with an inner-city accent?

And sometimes the programme-makers’ own prejudices show through the slick production, now that the storyline has moved beyond Jennifer Worths original memoirs. For example, in the 2014 Christmas Special, we see a mother-and-baby home for unmarried mothers where the care standards are appalling. The doctor comments, “these places used to be run by charities, then they were taken over by the council”. In fact, the original National Health Service White Paper of 1944 envisaged control of services on the ground by local and borough councils, but with the 1946 National Health Service Act Aneurin Bevan expropriated the councils – and therefore the councillors and the electorates who voted for them – in order to nationalise the whole thing and place it under the control of predominantly unelected officials, ground-level services being entrusted to local health authorities, now trusts and clinical commissioning groups, which were and are almost completely outside of democratic control and oversight. The subtext of the doctor’s comment was, I think, that democracy was not the proper system from which to run services that reach out to “ordinary people”, as I believe we of the non-elite are now called.

I suppose this year’s Call the Midwife Christmas Special will provide an island of warm fuzziness in the bleak ocean of exclusion we all now founder in, and sometimes that’s what the doctor ordered. Programmes like Call the Midwife manipulate our brain chemistry to produce a sense of supported catharsis – a good cry, in other words. But sometimes it’s time to put down the tissues and see the world as it really is. As Mary and Joseph discovered on the bleak road to Bethlehem, the world is cold and unforgiving, and nobody comes to mitigate this. Sometimes the solution can only be that we have to create warmth and forgiveness by ourselves, because when nobody comes then each individual has to ponder whether it is he or she that has to act.

I hope you manage to draw what warmth and forgiveness you can from whatever source you can find this season. As the sun sets on freedom and democracy the road ahead is bleak, and I hope we find each other in the coming year. Resources A magical reminder of a time when those in need really felt cared for: As Call The Midwife is set to top Christmas Day ratings, we can learn something from a bygone era by Libby Purves, Daily Mail 24 December 2015 Call the Midwife Christmas Special 2015 BBC webpage A National Health Service White Paper of 1944 National Health Service Act, 1946

Fascism's ascent through the Labour Party

Eric Hobsbawm said in The New Century that in the early 1980s left-wing activists started entering public services in huge numbers.

The timing is significant: in 1979 Margaret Thatcher won a convincing general election victory after a campaign aimed predominately at working-class people. It became apparent that democracy wasn’t working in the way hard-left figures wanted it to, in not delivering victory to socialist politicians whose plan was to bring the country to its knees financially in order to foment revolution. Post-revolution, democracy would be allowed to wither on the vine so that the middle-class revolutionaries could not be replaced by what they saw as their underlings.

It didn’t quite work that way: the electorate continued to vote Conservative through the 1980s and well into the 1990s in numbers that would be impossible to explain without votes from working-class people, who Marx’s lazy assumptions indicated should be becoming class-conscious and seeking to make the state, and therefore democracy, irrelevant.

Hence the Gramscian infiltration of public services by hard-left activists in what Gramsci’s acolyte, Rudy Deutsch, called a "long march through the institutions". Preparations were made to turn the country into what they claimed would be a multicultural society, which would have been a laudable aim, but was actually a Derridean attempt to deconstruct Britain and ended up giving us a nation of ghettoes. Most unforgivably, Lucaksian views that the state would fall more quickly with the implosion of the nuclear family were used to justify sexualising children, a view that allowed the far-left BBC to ignore Jimmy Savile’s paedophilia, if not tacitly condone it.

Harriet Harman, the interim leader of the Labour Party after Ed Miliband’s resignation, was a follower of the last view, as shown by her lobbying of the Callaghan Government in 1978 to decriminalise child pornography. Her successor, Jeremy Corbyn, became leader after an election without a defined electorate which Labour’s own senior figures where desperately trying to wreck until the last moment. But democracy – largely through their own efforts – had become as irrelevant within the Labour Party as it has outwith, as witness the voting figures for the 2005 General Election which indicate an enquiry as to its democratic probity is required.

The French-Jewish philosopher Élie Halévy, in his landmark 1936 essay The Era of Tyrannies, established that Marxism and fascism are both descended from socialism, which was constructed in the early 19th century to carry on the work of the French Revolution. If he is correct, and I believe he is, we should call a spade a spade and correctly identify the process that has brought Jeremy Corbyn only a short chain of events away from the premiership as fascism at work.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources

Letter from paedophile group links Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt to it AFTER they said it had been marginalized Daily Mail - shows picture of 1978 letter from Harriet Harman, proposing that child pornography only be an offence if the child pictured institutes proceedings

The Federalist Derivation by Kriss day on academia.edu. Go to p15 for figures indicating voting fraud in the 2005 general election. Free - sign in with Facebook, Google+ or email account

the political super-elite: "universal suffrage gave the wrong people the vote"

Between 1945 and 1956, Austria saw four general elections produce parliaments in which the opposition’s tussles with government were choreographed, for which Austrians coined the term Bereichsopposition. This might translate as opposition arranged within a set area; Marxist social scientist Otto Kirchheimer, writing in 1957, translates it as "opposition of principle," which he defined later as "'the desire for a degree of goal displacement incompatible with the constitutional requirements of a given system".

Kirchheimer’s 1957 paper The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes rails at the birth of the cartel arrangement of politics, whereby a group of parties with little to differentiate them dominate parliamentary politics. He notes this was an "extreme procedure" in Austria, but that the same arrangements were emerging in (West) Germany, France and Italy.

These three were the main signatories to the Treaty of Rome the next year. This transformed the European Coal and Steel Community, intended to prevent another war between France and Germany, into the EEC, the proto-EU.

Left-leaning political scientists like Kirchheimer and Peter Mair (right - whose Ruling the Void references the former’s essay) are pessimistic about the outcome of cartel politics. This seems to stem from a middle-class phobia of the revivifying power of the popular vote: a primal suspicion that universal suffrage gave the wrong people the vote. Walter Bagehot’s fear that "ultra-democratic" politics (universal suffrage – "the rich and wise are not to have, by explicit law, more votes than the poor and stupid") will lead to "violent laws" leads straight to Mair’s phobia of populist politics.

Think of this when you hear Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem politicians slate UKIP: you are hearing the self-serving super-elite of the anti-democratic political cartel, perpetually mired in oppositionalism to the mechanisms of government in Brussels, inform you that universal suffrage gave the wrong people the vote.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes - Otto Kirchheimer, Social Research, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 1957. Link takes you to the essay on JSTOR, where permissions may be required. You can click here to try to access the pdf

Political Perfectionism and the 'Anti-System' Party - Michael keren, Party Politics 6, January 2000: a summary of the article giving Kirchheimer's definition of "opposition of principle"

Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (Treaty of Rome)

The English Constitution - Walter Bagehot, second edition, 1873. The quote about giving the vote to the "poor and stupid" is on p127 of the pdf

what the flooding crisis says about our fading citizenship

The thoughts of an Argentinian political scientist about newly-democratised nations might not appear to have much in common with the present flooding crisis, but perhaps we should look closer.

The late Guillermo O’Donnell wrote On the State, Democratization and some Conceptual Problems about the travails of Peru, Argentina, Brazil and other countries, but as comparative politics his insights are valid further afield – for example, you could say that the "profound crisis" of the "big state" becoming democratic mirrors that of the hypertrophied state in danger of losing its grip on democracy.

For O’Donnell, the state is more than the sum of its bureaucratic parts: it is "a set of social relations that establishes a social order" bound together by laws applicable "over a given territory", ie that country’s. He adds that the without these laws and the lawful agencies they underpin "the national state and the order it supports vanish”, leading to "a democracy of low-intensity citizenship".

With the Somerset floods we’ve seen a population which was left in chaos and crisis since the end of last year, with forces personnel only being sent in when the Establishment was embarrassed. Compare this with the near-immediate response to Thames Valley flooding, although even there it seems "some people are getting help and others aren’t": we see "a state whose...publicness and citizenship fade away at the frontiers of various regions and class and ethnic relations". In both areas every adult has one vote each, but each areas’s value to the regime (which O’Donnell stresses can be authoritarian even within a democratic state) seems the variable determining speed and credibility of response.

The Governmental and Environment Agency’s responses to the floods are not what one would expect from democratically-accountable institutions. They evince a vassal state in a neofeudal relationship to the EU overlord.

The question is: will votes challenging the democratic legitimacy of that relationship be respected as having equal value with those cast for parties that accept it?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

On the State, Democratization and some Conceptual Problems - Guillermo O'Donnell, Kellogg Institute, 1993

Chertsey residents claim 'homes sacrificed to save others' - bbc.cocuk - "some are getting help and others aren't"

(neo)feudalism and the EU - 300 words

(neo)feudalism and the EU

The first use of "neofeudalism"seems to have been in 1940, when a doctor complained to the Medical Times about the consequences "if medicine was to be neofeudalized by the state". (Obamacare, anybody?)

Political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell ran with the idea, identifying neofeudalism within "those regions where the local powers…establish power circuits that operate according to rules that are inconsistent with, if not antagonistic to, the law that supposedly regulates the national territory".

European patriots can see the reverse process to O’Donnell’s happening in regard to the EU today – the supranational giant has established power circuits that operate according to rules that are inconsistent with, if not antagonistic to, the systems of laws that supposedly regulate the national territories.

For example, the Atlantic Arc unites fragments of the UK, Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal that have no other link than that the Atlantic laps upon their coasts; and the BBC has admitted taking £3m in grants from the EU, and acts as the EU’s propaganda outlet in the UK.

Like the feudal overlords of old, the EU has enlarged its fief by sleight of hand; it wasn’t announced to the British people until 2001 that "this country quite voluntarily surrendered the once seemingly immortal concept of the sovereignty of parliament and legislative freedom by membership of the European Union". By then all that was needed was a dynastic marriage in the form of a constitution: the Lisbon Treaty was signed by Gordon Brown under the so-called "democratic" mandate of the 2005 election.

So what destroyed feudalism? Here, after the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, in the words of Marxist writer Mark Starr, "the peasants were never reduced to the old Feudal bondage again, and a time of prosperity for them, known as the Golden Age, followed". Neo-feudalist bureaucrats of the Paris-Berlin axis take note.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Excerpt from a 1940 letter to the Medical Times - the first recorded use of "neofeudalism"?

On the State, Democratisation and some Conceptual Problems (A Latin American View with Glances at Some Post-Communist Countries) - Guillermo O'Donnell - go to p10 of the .pdf for a description of what he calls "neofeudalized"

Atlantic Arc homepage

BBC admits receiving millions in grants from EU and councils - Christopher Hope, Daily Telegraph, Feb 2012

Britain and Europe: The Culture of Deceit - Christopher Booker, October 2001; the passage quoted is at the top of the article

Mark Starr: A Worker Looks At History - Chapter 8 The Fall of Feudalism

Did Labour win the 2005 general election? - 300 words

neo-fascism and neo-corporatism: The Emergence of the Cartel Party

Régime censitaire is an interesting phrase: cens was a fee paid to a feudal lord which sometimes accorded voting rights. Thus the régime censitaire refers, in Peter Mair’s and Richard Katz’ seminal 1995 article Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party, to the state of democracy in the late 19th century, where some degree of property ownership was necessary in order to vote.

The "cartel party" refers to a situation where major parties compete for an electorate’s votes with none offering anything qualitatively different from the other, therefore they gain more from cooperating with each other than competing, to democracy’s cost. (Hobbling the free press, anyone?)

Parties evolve from "caucus" entities representing the minority entitled to vote to “mass parties” upon universal suffrage, then "catch-all" parties offering all things to all people, little different from each other. Here the titular cartel starts to form.

Scarily, Mair and Katz note that other bodies such as trade unions and employers’ associations "[develop] relationships with the state that are not unlike those developed by the parties themselves" – I would add developers and the diversity industry. They call this "neocorporatism". I have to wonder if they were referring to a quote by Mussolini, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power". Is neo-fascism the corollary of neo-corporatism?

There is hope: new parties can challenge the cosy huddle, but must resist the trap the Liberal Democrats (identified by the authors) have fallen into of joining "the establishment they once decried".

Mass parties on either side of the pond produced Churchill, Attlee and Thatcher, and FDR, JFK and the Bushes before political cartels reincarnated the régime censitaire by restricting power within the circle of those who possess it already.

My money’s on UKIP and the Tea Party to shake things up. How about yours?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party - Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, originally from Party Politics

(Leveson deal: MPs debate press legislation: as it happens - Rowena Mason, Daily Telegraph, 18 March 2013

"Mussolini on the Corporate state - Political Research Associates

Click for reviews of Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, in which Mair's ideas on the political cartel arising from the article reviewed were posthumously developed from his notes

click for a review of The Triumph of the Political Class, in which Peter Oborne continues on Mair's ideas in Ruling the Void

is the Kenya mutiny symptomatic of wider unrest?

The sit-down strike by soldiers of the 1st Battalion (Yorkshire Regiment) was a very British mutiny. I suppose in a sense Corporal Anthony Brown was lucky to be merely thrown out of the Army: after the 1917 Étaples Mutiny, Cpl Jesse Robart Short was executed for calling an officer a “bugger”.

The present action, taken during the Askari Thunder exercise in Kenya, also stemmed from the actions of people in charge: two commanders – who haven’t had their names plastered all over the press like the enlisted men – got drunk the night before a forced march and were found after the exercise sleeping off their hangover.

Incidents like this never spontaneously erupt; the discontent is usually slow-burning, with a possibly small incident turning into a flashpoint, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It’s also impossible to ignore what’s going on around at the same time. We have the trial of one of Gunner Lee Rigby’s killers, who has been heaping praise on the nursing and medical care he has received, treatment he ensured Gunner Lee would not live to benefit from.

And of course there’s Marine A (Sgt Alexander Blackman), who was sent to Afghanistan to engage with terrorists in irregular warfare, and is facing 10 years in prison for doing precisely that.

There is an inequality inherent in any functional system, without which systems tend to collapse – but that itself can lead to system collapse when the inequality gap is unbridgeable.

This happened literally in the Étaples mutiny, when the officers appropriated billets in the posh resort across the bridge and left troops to fester on the wrong side of the river. If what happened in Kenya is symptomatic of a wider dislocation between officers and enlisted soldiers, perhaps the veteran Fusiliers’ march on London was but the politest of warning shots.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Afghanistan veterans jailed for parade ground sit-in protest over "muppet" officers - The Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Court-martial of Cpl Jesse Robart Short - National Archives

Lee Rigby murder trial: 'I’m a soldier just like Drummer Rigby... I killed him because this is war’ - Tom Whitehead, Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2013

Sgt Alexander Blackman: Marine backed by 60,000 people over killing of Taliban insurgent - Daily Mirror, 8 December 2013

Breaking: 100,000 people (the threshold that should trigger Parliamentary time for a topic) support Sgt Alexander Blackman - Daily Mail, 11 December 2013

Click to sign the HM Government e-petition to free Sgt Alexander Blackman (Marine A) - at time of writing 37,691 signatures

Veteran Fusiliers to march on London - ITV news, October 2012

Marie Antionette: more truth and less cake, please

"Ooh, there's no bread, let them eat cake…" The line comes from Rush’s 1975 hit Bastille Day, about the French Revolution (the 1789 one), and the phrase "let them eat cake" is a reference to Marie Antoinette’s response when she heard of the French people’s poverty not allowing them to buy bread: "qu’il mangent de la brioche" – brioche being an egg- and butter-based bread beyond the reach of said pauvres.

But was she framed?

Marie Antoinette was born on 2 November 1755 and was the mistress of King Louis XVI, and here the attribution becomes shaky: there are no famines recorded during this Louis’ reign. Antonia Fraser, in her biography of Marie, states that the quote was spoken a century previously by Marie-Thérèse (Maria Teresa of Spain), wife of Louis XIV, king during la grande famine of 1693-1694. Marie-Thérèse is said to have recommended "la croûte de la pâté" during the famine. Rousseau managed to get this garbled and recollected in his Confessions that a "great princess" had recommended "let them eat pastry".

But even further back, the 3rd-century Chinese emperor Hui is said to have asked "why can’t they eat meat?" when told his famine-stricken subjects had no rice. That the question still stings is shown by The [Republic of] China Post’s comparison of Taiwan’s President President Ma Ying-jeou to Hui for saying to a student left feeling unfilled by a Bento box "perhaps you need to eat another bento box, or simply endure being hungry".

The attribution of "let them eat cake" to Marie Antoinette is a triumph of misogynistic revolutionary politics over historical fact and it’s woeful that newspapers repeat it on her birthday. Hopefully someday a journalist will interview Antonia Fraser to put the record straight. In the meantime, at least it makes for a good rock song.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Did Marie Antionette really say "let them eat cake"? - history.com

click for more on Antonia Fraser's biography of Marie Antoinette

1693-1694 : Les années de misère - alertes-meteo.com

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - the passage about "the great princess" is on p 255 of the .pdf

DPP chairman gets personal in run-up to Jan. 13 demonstration - The China Post

Popper's theses on gov't (3): democracy confers no benefit on citizens

Democracy as such cannot confer any benefits upon the citizen and it should not be expected to do so. In fact democracy can do nothing – only the citizens of the democracy can act (including, of course, those citizens who comprise the government). Democracy provides no more than a framework within which the citizens may act in a more or less organised and coherent way.

This may seem a strange thing for the person who wrote The Open Society and its Enemies during World War II to say. However, in that work, Popper presages Winston Churchill’s bon mot that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried".

Churchill was speaking after the electorate gave him "the order of the boot" in 1945 and might be forgiven for a dash of rancour, but he identified a key element of democracy: all its stakeholders must be prepared to accept outcomes they disagree with.

An occasional plebiscite is no panacea for our problems. For example, immigration still besets the UK despite a party traditionally tough on immigration leading the Coalition. In fact nearly all politicians fail to act as citizens of a democratic nation, regardless of whether they agree with what the bulk of the people demand.

Those individuals and groups who have exercised their right and their duty to "act in a more or less organised and coherent way" concerning immigration and national identity have been damned by the unelected Establishment, which tolerates only views it agrees with, as fascist and racist (add any derogatory "ism" of your choice). Elected politicians of all political hues, with depressingly few honourable exceptions, collude with and even contribute to the smearing.

Is this merely democracy delivering results we disagree with? Well, with most of our rules coming from Brussels and merely being ratified (as opposed to voted upon) by the European Parliament before incorporation into our law, there’s minimal democracy happening. If we can expect no benefits to arise from the mere fact that our government is democratically elected, what can we expect in democracy’s absence save more of what has always accompanied contempt for common folk, witness the Peasants’ Revolt, the English Civil War and the Regency Riots?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

This series:

Popper's theses on gov't (1): state a necessary evil

Popper's theses on gov't (2): democratic government can be got rid of without bloodshed

Popper's theses on gov't (3): democracy confers no benefit on citizens

Popper's theses on gov't (4): we're not democrats because the majority is always right

Popper's theses on gov't (5): institutions are insufficient without traditions

Popper's theses on gov't (6): Utopia is an impossibility

Popper's theses on gov't (7) - liberalism is evolutionary, not revolutionary

God bless the EDL

The news of Tommy Robinson’s leaving the English Defence League has provoked a deluge of reactions, occupying all points between praise and outrage. And maybe the sheer amount of coverage is something we should look at as well as the direction of Tommy’s journey.

However the EDL emerges from this episode, I’m sure it will carry on, because patriots have arisen, made themselves known to each other up and down the country and beyond, and emerged energised. It has built up a head of steam that cannot simply dissipate.

Things previously unbelievable before 2009 have happened, such as:

• Victims of child-grooming gangs are no longer being labelled as promiscuous or borderline racists on the grounds of their rapists’ and traffickers’ identities.
• Politicians are not being seen as racists (except by the usual culprits) for concentrating on immigration.
• Blue-collar concerns over national identity are being aired much more by the media, even by the BBC.

This has all happened because EDL members have taken all of these and more literally into the public square and have not let politicians forget the inconvenient truth that each one of us has a vote.

But the complex nature of public opinion and debate has also come to the fore, and the full veil is a case in point. Whereas opposition to this identity-smothering garment was initially sidelined as a fringe issue, because of patriots preventing it from dropping from debate the loudest voices now protesting against the full veil are Muslim women. And now the subject is out, bodies such as UKIP – which opposed the full veil under all circumstances – are engaging with its adherents and saying they’ll tolerate it in limited circumstances.

And all because the EDL have not surrendered to bullies, bottles and bricks any more than to far right infiltration – and undoubtedly will continue thus. God bless them.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

towards a "Patriots' Pound" campaign?

For every EDL member I know, I know countless more who support its aims but do not feel they wish to go on marches. Could numbers (and therefore business) have been on Selfridge’s managers’ minds when they gave English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson a free steak dinner to apologise after a member of staff told him to "f**k off"?

Many of us have had similar experiences – I was verbally abused by a bus-driver on the way to a demo in Luton and learnt this was commonplace.

Well-heeled socialists might despise us for our working-class backgrounds, but we – and all those who support our multicultural agenda – represent a lot of spending power. Perhaps it’s time to realise the power of our our patriots’ pounds?

Many of us do already – for example, non-stunning slaughter leaves me cold, so I don’t buy Cadbury or other brands that use ingredients from meat that might be non-stunned if I can help it.

Sometimes we just have to buy where we have to buy. But occasionally, say, might it be possible to buy produce from traditional shops more likely to have been compassionately produced? Or to raise our voices at meetings when service providers with abusive staff are applying to renew their tenders?

Just as the Pink Pound campaign had broad-based popular support, focussed spending power could have wide appeal, perhaps even to integrated Muslims who are trying to put clear water between themselves and Jihadis who want to obscure their daughters’ identities with veils. It could even be an opportunity for vendors of Halal meat from pre-stunned animals (eg Waitrose) to set out their stall in a compassionate, multicultural marketplace.

It mustn’t be a campaign against people – as Tommy tweeted, he didn’t want the eejit to lose his job, just an apology. It has the potential, however, to be a campaign for dignity, for animal welfare and for meaningful community cohesion.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

No action after EDL leader's friend refused Selfridges service - bbc.co.uk

Selfridges Criticised For Giving EDL's Tommy Robinson Free Steak Dinner (POLL, PICTURES) - Huffington Post

Juvenal and the internet: Fear and Loathing Online

If Old Holborn’s been trolling to the extent stated by Jonathan Maitland in ITV’s Tonight program, his Twitter feed shows he’s been behaving himself recently; but he knew the program was coming out.

The Libertarian Alliance compared OH to Juvenal (left, who admittedly railed bitterly against those who he saw as his lessers), but ignored the dearth of literacy and materials in ancient Rome relative to today. And also satire’s traditional targets, as Maitland pointed out: not “the weak and vulnerable” but public figures, especially those in power.

Old Holborn didn’t help himself, coming across as something of a psychopath:

It isn’t my responsibility what other people find offensive. If you don’t like it, turn off.

But it’s not always possible to turn off. Even the act of looking at a computer screen increases cerebral arousal and can create a compulsion to look further.

That’s maybe why some people can’t look away, most notably 14-year-old Hannah Smith, who killed herself after trolls – anonymous hyper-offensive posters – ground her down so much on ask.fm living didn’t appear an option.

Maitland traced a troll, "Jamie Card", who posted offensive comments about a woman’s 2-year-old child with Down’s Syndrome. However, under present laws, he has to be caught “with his hands on the keyboard”.

Old Holborn (Robert Ambridge - masked, right) defended himself as a championing free speech. But, as one victim pointed out, trolls curtail the free speech of their victims. The internet becomes a lawless expanse where only the brave or the abusive dare tread, and where both statutory authorities and social-media operators fail in their duty to enact Tim Berners-Lee’s principle that they must "prevent the Web from being abused by destructive forces to an extent that the overall pain is greater than the gain".

Given that the Internet enables communication and organisation like nothing before, is Establishment inaction in the face of these abusers totally coincidental?

Charles Bond
300 words

Resources

How to deal with an Internet Troll - wikihow.com

Fear and Loathing Online - ITV player, until 11 october 2013

Fear and Loathing Online Homepage - itv.com: scroll to bottom of page for sites to help you if you are a victim of trolling

Old Holborn's Twitter feed

Old Holborn: a Juvenal for our times - Libertarian Alliance blog

Facebook troll ["Jamie Card"] hijacked woman's account and pretended to give her child away

Tim Berners-Lee's internet archeology principles: filtering

anti-fracking and the resurgence of Picturesque

Enclosure has a lot to answer for. True, it’s the basis of all that modern people consider private property, but it also established a precedent for a class of people declaring that what was beforehand held in common belongs to them.

Thus, for example, we have the BBC’s cultural enclosure of immigration, the NHS and the causes of climate change, whereby anybody who expresses views beyond the pale is considered toxic.

The anti-fracking camp is closer to enclosure in its original meaning. The means of harvesting oil from shale has brought energy prices down in the US and could do the same here, but protesters won’t have it. They insist the land cannot be used for this purpose.

And there’s the nub. Like the haves of feudal times, the anti-frackers arrogate to themselves the right to determine how our land is used to support the people lucky enough to live upon it. They seem to have an idea that fracking will turn fields of green to fields of concrete, but are blind to barely mitigated immigration doing just that (see cultural enclosure).

The anti-frackers seem to have a romanticised view of rural land that owes much to William Gilpin's (right) views on the Picturesque – seeing blasted heaths as more attractive than planted ones and ruins easier on the eye than habitations – without realising that Gilpin’s aesthetics concerned art, not life. Add to this the sinister left-wing fetishisation of land as the elite's birthright as pioneered by National Socialism and you have an explosive scenario.

The anti-frackers proceed from the super-privileged who come to lord it over the rest of us. Not only have they no contact with blue-collar life, but enjoy benefits most middle-class people will never see. They seem to think they have ringside seats for a revolution. Perhaps they do.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

chivalry, betrayal and the Peasants' Revolt's relevance

BBC Four’s series on the Hundred Year’s War, Chivalry and Betrayal, is a quality documentary. Simultaneously, it displays the BBC’s inability to portray anything remotely connected with class-based tension without imposing its own agenda.

Presenter Jenina Ramirez' points were lucid and well-argued. I agree with her that the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt was one of the landmark battles of the 14th century, pitting the might (and perceived divine right) of the rulers against the rage of the ruled. And the ruled, particularly serfs, were in uproar at the imposition of new taxes for foreign wars at a time when the taxpayer base had shrunk considerably.

I sighed warily when Ramirez defined the Revolt as class war: while possibly a valid assumption, this phrase indicates that the BBC is entering fetishistic Marxist recontextualisation mode. Sure enough, Professor Caroline Brown of Royal Holloway University of London appeared to inform us that the rulers’ surprise that ordinary people could communicate and organise, including by letter, was redolent of the West’s consternation upon learning on 9/11 that people it had disregarded were actually quite sophisticated.

The Peasants’ Revolt was a civil war triggererd by excessive inequality. It was not a pan-national terror campaign, and to compare it to one is an astounding expropriation of working people’s history.

More than this: to compare the Revolt to 9/11 is a tactic to distract us from the mounting inequalities under which we’ve been labouring since 1997. True, we all reap the benefits of an affluent society, which cannot be created without some inequality; but paying for ill-thought-out wars and EU membership plus public sector waste on top of an open-doors immigration system is unsustainable, and the house of cards is shaking even now.

The Peasants’ Revolt is far more relevant to contemporary British life than the BBC, for all its cod-proletarian rhetoric, would have its licence-payers believe.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Chivalry and Betrayal: Breaking the Bonds - BBC i-player - section on Peasants' Revolt starts 23:08

Chivalry and Betrayal webpage

Janina Ramirez' blog on Chivalry and Betrayal at bbc.co.uk

Money Week: The End of Britain

The People's Songs: tubthumping

"They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot". This was Joni Mitchell’s farewell in Big Yellow Taxi to a middle-class apartment block in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. So it was fitting that the song closed BBC Radio 2’s latest documentary in The People’s Songs strand, entitled Tubthumping – Environmentalism and Anti-Globalism. In case we missed the Beeb’s cultural enclosure of environmental matters, presenter Stuart Maconie prefaced the song with the remark "being kettled has become as much of a modern middle-class youth experience as a gap-year in Asia" (I know middle-class people who have experienced neither).

I’m not trying to do down environmentalist issues and concerns. As Margaret Thatcher once remarked, “we are not only the friends of the earth, we are its stewards and guardians”. But any BBC presenter who unearthed that quote without audibly dripping with sarcasm would soon be sidelined.

Maconie was, in my view, totally right to play Robert Wyatt’s Pigs (…In There). Battery farming is a vile practice – but can only increase while our population is augmented from without virtually unchecked. So why not use the broadcast to suggest common land be used for keeping pigs and other animals who would otherwise be intensively farmed, while keeping a modicum of land free for those who have ethical or religious objections to humanely slaughtering animals for food?

The stars of the show were Chumbawamba and their 1997 hit Tubthumping, which they publicised by drenching John Prescott in water at the next year’s Brit Awards. I can understand that – Prescott occupied his position near the top of New Labour to market it to its traditional voters, while laying plans to abandon those voters in favour of a mass-imported electorate. Which is how predominantly left-leaning environmentalists seeking to protect green spaces were stabbed in the back by the party they worshipped, and which the BBC still does.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Tubthumping – Environmentalism and Anti-Globalism - BBC Radio 2

The People's Songs homepage on bbc.co.uk

Pigs (...in There) - Robert Wyatt

Tubthumping - Chumbawamba

the BBC's choice

English Defence League Tommy Robinson’s excellent performance on Radio 4’s Today has already been skilfully parsed on Kafir Crusaders.

The only thing I’d add is that interviewer Sarah Montague seemed to be somewhat unprepared. When she asked Tommy about representing the views of white working class people, I genuinely don’t think she was trying to trap him. She seems in thrall to Greg Dyke’s doctrine that the BBC is "hideously white", with the BBC predicating the epithet of society at large. Tommy, of course, replied that the EDL represents "non-Muslim communities in Britain". Anybody on a housing estate can tell you that doesn’t necessarily mean white.

Tommy is of course right to complain "no-one wants to sit around tables with working class people in this country". Our sharp-elbowed political classes, ascending through Society’s ethereal heights, position us on the receiving end of an apartheid with mainstream politics as the meadow we look on but whereupon we may not graze.

But I suspect the BBC is paying far more attention to the EDL now than it ever has because it’s not just blue-collar people who nod earnestly when we talk about two-tier Britain, or how ordinary Muslims are Sharia’s first victims. People from all social strata and ethnicities want to make up their own minds about what we say.

The day before Tommy’s interview, Oxford West MP Nicola Blackwood – a tireless campaigner for justice for child-grooming victims – indicated on Today there is another grooming scandal waiting to break. She spoke of Asian victims who weren’t coming forward "because of fear of retribution from their families and communities".

I can understand their alienation: the BBC wasn’t interested in victims of honour-killings until a white girl was murdered. If it comes to a choice between Jihadis and their co-religionist victims, who will the BBC stand beside?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Today, Radio 4, Monday 10 June 2013 - go to 0:53:40 to hear Nicola Blackwood's interview

Today, Radio 4, Tuesday 11 June - go to 1:35:30 to hear Tommy Robinson's interview

Click for Kafir Crusader's analysis of the above interview, contains the interview on YouTube

Nicola Blackwood MP homepage

MP Blackwood granted child exploitation debate in Parliament - Oxford Post

Symphony: Dvořák and nationalism

You never forget your first. This applies to all sorts of things, not least music. My first classical record was the one on which so many people brought up in an environment where the genre was virtually unknown cut their teeth: Dvořák’s New World Symphony.

So it was fascinating to see Dvořák mentioned in Symphony, Simon Russell Beale’s exploration of the perennial form that lets composers rip up the programme to let the music bare their souls.

In Dvořák’s time his native Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the folkish elements in his music – for example the Furiant, a Slavonic dance with a complex time-signature he’d have seen performed in his father’s inn – was looked on with condescension. However, while Wagner’s works were admired by the aristocracy and Vienna’s Musikverein (left) was built for the edification of the middle classes, Dvořák’s nationalist populism fired the patriotic sentiments of his people to whom his music spoke.

I don’t know how well Czech nationalism translates into American nationalism, but patriots can often appreciate the sentiments of their peers from abroad. Thus when Dvořák – now head of New York’s National Conservatory of Music – adapted negro spirituals (such as Swing Low Sweet Chariot), incorporated sentiments of the admittedly Rousseauian fable of Hiawatha and inaugurated rolling passages that would inspire Copland, his New World Symphony (no 7) was a hit. Add to this the two-octave prototype for the walking bass snuck in at the very end of the symphony that would inspire first swing then rock’n’roll, and you have an epoch-making work.

The demotic output of Dvořák’s fecund mind made him, if I may mix art-forms, the Tom Clancy or Peter Robinson of his day. It’s so sad, therefore, that his music is largely dislocated from blue-collar culture. Are we ready for another outbreak of nationalism in musical form?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Symphony homepage on BBC4

Open Learn - Open University on the BBC: Symphony

Antonin Dvořák at Classical.net

Wagner Week on BBC Radio 3

Wagner having been born on May 22 1813, BBC Radio 3 is devoting a week to the man whose works are totemic amongst left-wing intelligentsia everywhere.

I don’t object to his music, I find some of it sublime. And film-scores from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings would be all the poorer without his influence, even though he himself inherited the Leitmotif from Berlioz. I’m sure his chordal progressions – for example in Ride of the Valkyries – informed rock’s metamorphosis into psychedelia and thence to proto-metal; one might even say no Wagner, no Iron Maiden.

What grates is the interminable histrionic caterwauling and bellowing his music often accompanies. Even Richard Dawkins, who you’d think would be a fan of the concept of the old gods fading before German Idealism’s new man, can only bring himself to say in The God Delusion that "Wagner’s music is better than it sounds".

Of more interest to me personally is The Essay this week, featuring philosophers analysing Wagner’s relationship to the thinkers who informed his world and whose worlds he informed. It’s a shame it’s only 15 minutes per night: if he’d had longer, perhaps Roger Scruton could have went into how Kant sent the modern world down the path to post-modernism by standing on the shoulders of British philosophe David Hume, who set the ball rolling by abolishing any availability of real things to our senses.

I’ll be interested how Radio 3 treats the H-word – Wagner’s place on the runaway train that led to Hitler, the Nazis and the Shoah. Perhaps Burkhard Kosminski, whose Nazi-themed production of Tannhäuser was closed down by Deutsche Oper am Rhein for its “extreme impact”, will turn out in the end to have placed Wagner in the most appropriate context: where the runaway train crashed.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

The Essay: Wagner and German Idealism part 1 of 5 of Wagner and the Philosophers, BBC Radio 3

Composer of the Week: Wagner and his World part 1 of 5, BBC Radio 3

Wagner Week Live Blog - BBC Radio 3

#WagnerWeek on Twitter

Nazi-themed Wagner opera cancelled in Germany after audience treated for shock - Telegraph

Clik to read the story of the above painting, Adolf Hitler as a Grail Knight like those in Parzival, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum