Hi All,
From the Guardian downwards and along with most of establisment Europe, there's a lot of self- congratualtions and sighs of relief that Marcon won the second round of the French elections and the far right having been defeated.
Interesting that France's Overseas Departments (In the Caribbean, Africa, South America and elsewhere) actually voted for Le Penn.... (See below):
Hi All,
Tonight marks the first day of Passover! Everything is prepared for the Seder - can't wait - as this is the first proper Passover we've had since the begining of Covid.
Hi All,
What's fascinating with blogging is the worldwide reach of people who read content. This month the UK tops the chart with the US and Russia coming in joint second. The other caterogry includes Israel, Canada, Netherlands and (strangely) 1 viewing from the Vatican City...
Hi All ,
This is why the utter nonsense of abolishing the police force is left wing rubbish :
Hi All,
Once upon a time in an alternative reality...
The left liberal undergraduate students were in outrage as they
decided to strike (not take their exams) ; there were riots across America as
various coalitions of the American liberal left came together to oppose
the latest expression of GOP, racist, colonialist, slavery supporting, Cis
gendered, straight, white male privilege, even worse this time it in cahoots with the old Imperialist oppressor
Fascists of the British Empire, whom it was well know had interfered and ‘meddled’
in the last few elections in favour of the GOP!
The coalition included The IARAW (Irish American Republic Army of
Woke), The MLM (Muslim Lives Matter) , ALLAH (Africa American Liberal
Left Alliance of Hope), FARCE (Feminists of America Racial Community For
Equality), , CUNTP ( Continental Union of Nationwide Transgender Persons)GLAT (Gay,
Lesbian Alternative Lifestyle) , SJWUS (Social Justice Warriors of the United
States), BB (Bollinger Bolsheviks) ,ASWD (Allied Straight White Dudes) & finally
AMLW (Alliance of the Marxist Leninist Woke) . All of them were armed to the
teeth as they marched on Washington DC for a showdown at the British
Embassy.
What did the British do then to upset the American left? Well it was
technically nothing to do with the British government as such, but one of their
Universities called the Royal Greater Manchester Collegiate University
& Educational Seed Trust. This University was founded several years after
the Anglo-Soviet War and had the academic rigour and tradition of
Oxbridge, with a billion pound fund, with a special mandate to open up other
educational centres across known space, which 40 years later it had done in
abundance.
What you may ask could cause such an angst in our American Liberal Youth? The answer is because the University was to be called 'The Robert E Lee University of America' and its first College was to be called Wilberforce, to be based somewhere in Texas (mainstream America was still in awe at the recent battle of the Constainople straits where the Med Fleet of the Royal Navy, had thrashed the Russians at a 'new Trafalgar' or 'Tsushima', despite being outnumbered 5 to 1 or quite how the Anglo-Martian Marine and Para force undertook an amphibious and air assault on Sebastopol within five days and initated an overthrow of Russian President Pytor Kryuk, followed the French President Emmuel Limace's delight at hosting a peace conference.
To the American Left the idea that any American University should be named after an infamous confederate general was anathema and bordering on Fascist. Except that this Robert Elijah Lee was born in 1920s Shanghai, the son of Eleanor Mofaz, of a prominent Baghdadi Jewish family and Ying Set Lee of the Court of the Dragon Throne . Lee's life was worthy of a Hollywood movie, for whilst he was born into a relatively upper middle class family, they were forced to leave China, during the Japanese occupation. After many adventures Lee became part of General Slim's 'forgotten army' and after world war II, joined the nascent IDF, fighting in both the war of independence, the Suez campaign, the six days war ,the Yom Kippur war, finding the love of his life and building his business empire in between.
When the Soviets invaded
Britain in 1976, despite middle age, Lee volunteered to assist the
British in their war and rallied the Manchester Jewish and Chinese Communities
to fight the Communists. For his services in the war , including saving the
Life of key resistance leader Prince Philip, he was created a Baronet , being
granted a 3,400 acre country estate and pad in the home counties. Eager to help
Britain rebuild after the war he pooled all of his (relatively minor) business
interests and maxed out every line of credit he could find and bought the
Dudley Steam Boiler Company, which he transformed into a Interstellar Conglomerate
/ keiretsu. Now at the age of 103, 26 years older than the incumbent
POTUS Judas Sinn Féin Bidet, albeit Lee still maintains fluent cognitive functions.
Not that this mattered to the American left- Lee might as
well have been a confederate for being a Zionist -imperialist -colonialist and
being Jewish (albeit of middle eastern extraction) meant nothing as Jews were
as Whoopie Cushion recently told us 'whites' , successful and therefore came
with that privilege of race. As for being Chinese it was well known that 'Asian
Americans’ were far up the ladder of privilege than other minorities and were
de facto 'uncle toms'. In any case even if Lee was associated with the
British Labour Party, this meant nothing as that Labour Party was, for taking
Jim Callaghan's lead in fighting against the Soviets, nothing other than a 'Bonapartist' party, rather than a
Democratic Socialist one ( Labour should have refused to form a coalition with Mrs Thatcher, surrendered and embraced Soviet Socialism, leading Britain as a Warsaw Pact pupper State, instead Callaghan as Prime Minister refused to do so and the result was millions of deaths, so the historical revisionist thinking went). Enough said, the left said.
As for Wilberforce - the English (whom America
had fought against as a tyranny) , politically Conservative, devout Christian
Evangelical who campaigned and eventually passed legislation banning the slave
trade and slavery within the vast British Empire (well before America), this meant
nothing to the left . For a start it smacked of 'White Saviour Trope' in which
the white male cis gendered patriarch interlopes, patronises and takes
over the role that an African-American or other minority should & could in
any way take . Wilberforce was a Conservative Tory, part of the British Mercantile
elite and a white Evangelical , so part of the GOP before the GOP
was created, a Lindsay Graham in a powdered wig &
breeches ! He was nothing other than a privileged white man of the patriarchy
taking away the thunder that should have been the purview of the oppressed
black slaves- and let us not forget he voted to compensate slave owners for
their loss of property!!.So naming a College after Wilberforce, however, well
intentioned was just plain wrong and not how to be an "ally".
TBC
Hi All,
As I've noted previously some on the alternative right/left spectrum see the Ukraine war as an extension of the 'cultural wars', ergo the left hate Putin's faux social conservatism as much as the righ love it.
However that isn't the only meme going around, because some just can't get over the general public support for Ukraine to the extent of even wanting to host refugees in our homes and recently in my frequent trips to provinical middle england (tory land writ large) I've been overwhelmed with things like Ukrainian flags everywhere, more so than the Union flag.
What makes these people's heads explode- rather than appreciate that Britian is a more compassionate and non racist place than these doom mongers and race bait, victimhood evangelists loke to make out- is
1) How this contrasts with recent and not so recent wars, such as Bosnia and Syria.
2) Brexit and the UK's collective racist/xenophobic mindset
To some commentators this can only mean one thing and that is -of course -we're all RACISTS regardless of how much compassion we show toward Ukrainians or how much support we give to the Ukraine military. The reason for this argument stems from the mindset of who the victims of the Syrian or Bosnian conflicts were. To the race sensitive left this could only be either Muslims or dark skinned Arabs. So the terrible logic concludes that the ordinary 'Joe Public' who support Ukraine & even want to welcome refugees (gasp! white Christian Europeans), but did not welcome the 29 year old Arab Muslim child refugee with dark olive skin from Syria, must by the left's definition be racists or Islamophobic.
To this I would suggest
1) In regards to Bosnia and Syria. They were complex civil wars. In Bosnia's case there were ethnic and religious tensions (Croatian Catholics, Slavic Orthodox Serbs, Bosniak 'secular' Muslims) and at the time whilst there was a media presence we have nothing like the 24-7 internet and other non -MSM outlets that we have today.
In respect of Syria, again it was a highly fractionalised civil war involving Arabs, Christians, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Kurdish Muslims, as well as Jews (in the form of Israel) and the Non-Arab Iranians (in the form of Persia) and a whole host of ideologies and religious groups, with one in particular - ISIS - which not only imterposed its evil on the lands it had conquered but also to externalise that via terrorism in Europe. But in reality there was no group or fraction which could really bring the British public at least to support. Assad was and is a war criminal cum brutal dictator, but his opposition was not of the liberal democratic mould, but contained jihadists who were only so slighly less derranged than ISIS. Thus there was difficulty in the ordinary people's mindset of trying to sift the 'goodies' from the 'baddies', yes very simplistic but that's how many people see the world in a good vs evil way.
Furthermore with respect to the Syrian refugees there were slight differences.
The first is how and who were pushing these refugees out of Syria in the first place and they were mainly criminal people traffikers, who'd charge refugees to get out &throw them into the med sea on over crowded rafts .
Second it was difficult to tell the genuine refugee from the economic migrant as many of them were grown men and whether or not the refugee was escaping Syria or poverty in sub-saharan Africa.
Thirdly people could see that it was not just women and children fleeing, but also men and grown men at that, not 'boys' as they tried to make out, who didn't stop at their first destination, but made a sojourn which took them to Germany and France .
Contrast this with Ukraine- it is a straight up fight between two nation states- and in Ukraine's case it is either whole families and or women and children only who have been leaving the country, with the men being willing volunteers to serve in the defence forces & many civilians deciding to stay put to support their country. That many more had a chance to flee, but did not and followed the lead of their President, decided to stand and fight for their country. I would add that the conduct of the Ukraine President has also helped in that we have a man whose defiance, but also urbane reserve and self -restraint has struck a chord with most British people.
In respect to Brexit, that Britain is a nation of automatic rascists and nationallists for wanting out of the EU project , is one of these mythologies of the left. Brexit was in part about immigrantion, but -strangely the left never grasped this, even though the traditional left has an emphasis on the material and economic redistribution of the material -about the economic impact of unlimited economic migration of (white) people from poor parts of Europe to Britain. The concern was nothing to do with religion or racism(Eastern Europe being 'white' and Catholic or Christian Orthodox), it was to do with good old economics and material well -being, because cheap labour means lower standards of living for those already in established, but poorly paid jobs. Between that and the austerity toward social services (such as the NHS) people were ready to quit Europe as that was the only mechanism that they could trigger to halt the decline in wage productivity .
So no, supporting Ukraine and Ukranian refugees, but being wary of refugees from other -or any- conflicts you can pluck out of the air, is not racist. If and when the left stops seeing everything of the world through victimhood and race, then it may well
Hi All,
40 years ago today, the Falkands war began. The Falkands are as big as Delaware, but with a much smaller population, of British heritage. In 1982, the Argentine invaded the islands in the (still held) deluded belief that they somehow belong to them, even though Argentine didn't exist when the Falkands were annexed to the Crown. The invasion wasn't taken lightly by the British and a taskforce was sent to re-take the island, which was successful , albeit at the cost of 649 Argentine, 255 British and 3 Islander lives.
