Victor Klemperer - "I Will Bear Witness."

 

Victor Klemperer

Not all Germans, liked Adolf Hitler or hated Jews. I've just been reading about Victor Klemperer, the cousin of the conductor Otto Klemperer. 

Victor Klemperer lived in Dresden during the war. He was married to a Protestant and his family, who had been Jewish, had converted to Protestantism. He did believe that his conversion, marriage, and his war record, would give him a degree of immunity under the Nazis. This was not to be. He was banned from teaching, publishing, travelling and owning a car. He had to wear a yellow star and he and his wife, like all Jews, were banned from owning cats and dogs. The Nazis had decreed that all domestic pets should live only in "pure Aryan homes." They had to put their beloved tomcat, Muschel, to sleep by anaesthetic. Klemperer was even told that he could no longer make donations to the fund for the prevention of cruelty to German cats. 

In his published diaries, he describes what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler and the Nazi regime. He calls Theodor Herzl, the Jewish founder of the Zionist movement, "a mirror image race theorist and nationalist." Klemperer had an abiding distrust of Zionism and remained a liberal German. In his diaries he cites numerous acts of random or planned solidarity and generosity shown towards him. Cuts of meat and fish are offered to him in rationed stores. Tram drivers abuse the Fuhrer for his benefit. A worker passes by and says: "Chin up - the scoundrels will soon be finished " Klemperer also mentions the exemplary behaviour of German communists and socialists. 

Ironically, it was the allied bombing of Dresden that turned out to be the salvation for Victor Klemperer and his wife. They had already heard that all Jews were to be rounded up and deported to the camps. Amid all the chaos after the bombing of Dresden, Klemperer and his wife, removed their yellow stars and just walked away from Dresden. 

Lucy Connolly to sue police!

 

Lucy Connolly portrayed herself as a thug and now portrays herself as "Starmer's police prisoner." She knew that her comments were likely to backfire on her and that's why she later deleted them. She pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred online.  I believe she did child minding and she said that if Ofsted contacted her, she would say that she hadn't written the comment but had been 'doxed'. She also said that she would play the mental health card.

However, I do think a sentence of 30 months' imprisonment for this offence was OTT and it has implications for free speech. If you read her comment, it is a moot point as to whether she did really incite racial hatred, but she did plead guilty to that offence. Many other people were also imprisoned for making online comments after the Southport attack but the right-wing press don't seem to have taken up their cases because they're not married to Tory councillors.

Three children tragically died that day and it is no wonder that people became angry about it. Many believed that the attacker was a Muslim and an asylum seeker. He was neither.

Is the UK education system a racket for the middle-classes?

 

Not very long ago, I got into a conversation with a young Asian lad in my local library. He told me that he was a pupil at Stockport Grammar School, which I understand is a fee-paying independent school. He told me that he was at the school on a scholarship which greatly impressed me. I said to him that he'd obviously secured a place at the school on his wits and abilities and not on his parents' ability to pay the fees.

I knew one young girl who was the daughter of a friend, who attended Oldham Hulme Grammar School. She told her father that many of her contemporaries struggled with the academic work and were only at the school because their parents could afford the fees. She thought many of them weren't really grammar school material at all. Her father told me that this was probably correct but the school needed the money. I then said to him but what if you're an intelligent child and your parents can't afford the fees? He said to me, that if that was the case, you shouldn't apply in the first place. I thought this a strange comment coming from a man who professed to believe in something called the 'meritocracy', which I think is a complete fallacy.

The comprehensive system of education was a failed attempt to introduce a form of egalitarianism into the British state education system and to increase social mobility. Many middle-class parents are prepared to sell their homes and to relocate to other areas where there are better performing schools for their children. This not only drives up house prices but increases demand for school places in better state schools and limits access to less affluent families.

Bridget Philipson, Labour's education minister, said recently that the state education system had failed "white working-class children", but I've been  hearing this for most of my life. When I was at primary school, we all seemed to know which of our contemporaries  were likely to go to the grammar school. Yet, if you read 'The Uses of Literacy' by Richard Hoggart, it is clear that for some working-class children from poor backgrounds, like Hoggart, selection by the 11+ examination and education grants, did lead to upward social mobility.

A man that I know who was at primary school with me in the early 1960s, said to me only recently, that if your father wore overalls, you weren't going anywhere in those days. I would caution anyone against being too fatalistic. I think we should always use our best endeavours, but he obviously saw the education system has one huge con-trick and a racket for the middle-classes. He might well have a point. A student that I met at Manchester University, who was from Wakefield, once said to me that he'd been there a week and that I was the first person that he'd spoken to who had a northern accent. I know of one female student who spoke with a Geordie accent, who was interviewed for a place at Oxford University, and was asked what made someone like her think she could come to place like this. I was told of another female student that attended an interview at Oxford, who was asked how many bedrooms her father's house had.

Abraham Lincoln's tribute to the "working men of Manchester" who opposed slavery.

 

The English novelist Charles Dickens said the American Civil War was about dollars and cents. Dickens didn't like slavery, yet he almost came close to supporting the Confederate side during the American Civil War.

The Republican, Abraham Lincoln, was not a supporter of the abolitionist, John Brown, and the Democrats, were then unashamed advocates of the extension of slavery. The idea of secession or separation first arose among abolitionists who were confronted with Confederates who wanted to extend their chattel system, into new territories, thus implicating the entire Union in their system. The Fugitive Slave Act, legalized the recovery of human property from 'free' states. Almost all whites during that period feared most black people and many black slaves were not sympathetic to anti-slavery organizations, that wanted to free them and then deport them to Africa. The Confederacy had opened hostilities on the avowed basis of upholding slavery, which meant in turn, that the Union would be forced to tackle negro emancipation whether its leadership wanted to or not.

Many English textile workers, particularly in Lancashire, did support the boycott of cotton from the Southern States of the U.S. during the American Civil War. This support was driven by a strong anti-slavery sentiment and a belief that ending slavery was more important than the economic hardship caused by the boycott. Karl Marx, helped to organise a boycott of southern slave-picked cotton among British workers.

The Times newspaper had hoped for the defeat of Abraham Lincoln and the wreckage of the American experiment. The Economist newspaper wrote: "The assumption that the quarrel between North and South is a quarrel between Negro Freedom on the one side and Negro Slavery on the other, is as impudent as it is untrue."

In 1863, the U.S. President wrote to the "working men of Manchester" thanking them for their anti-slavery stance. Lincoln's words were later inscribed on the pedestal of his statue that can still be found in Lincoln Square, Manchester. Lincoln praised the workers for their selfless act of "sublime Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country." 

Nietzsche and Fascism.

 

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, has been called the "godfather of fascism" but he wasn't into German nationalism or nationalism in general, and he certainly wasn't an anti-Semite. He proposed marriage to Lou Salome, a Russian-born Jewess. He also embraced cosmopolitanism. I believe that it was his friendship with Jewish people that led to the break-up of his friendship with Richard Wagner and his wife. It was his sister and her husband, Bernhard Forster, who were the anti-Semites. I believe Nietzsche refused to attend their marriage. It is largely because of his sister (Elizabeth), that Nietzsche's name is associated with the Nazis.

As a philosopher, Nietzsche is elitist and anti-democratic. He believed that morality came from the herd instinct of the individual. He wrote: "Morality is just fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior individuals." He saw the vast majority of people as the "bungled and botched", and he didn't think much of mass politics or the big state. To Nietzsche democracy or fascism would have been the politics of the mob. Neither did he think much of socialism which he called the "tyranny of the meanest and dumbest." He said it attracted inferior people who are motivated by resentment.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell, wrote: "What Caesar Borgia was to Machiavelli, Napoleon was to Nietzsche: a great man defeated by petty opponents."

Peterloo, democracy and free speech.

 

Peterloo Massacre

I remember attending a meeting in Manchester shortly before the two hundredth anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in August 1819. There were some people at the meeting who didn't want to give the then Labour MP, Chris Williamson, a platform and the right to speak at the Peterloo event in Manchester in August 2019. Williamson had been suspended by the Labour Party for comments that he had made. The meeting agreed to invite Chris Williamson and the North West TUC then withdrew their support for the Peterloo event.

What those people were fighting for at Peterloo, was to have a democratic voice and the vote for men of a certain age. If democracy means anything then it means the right to be able to protest and the right to exercise free speech. The workers at Peterloo were denied this and some were killed and many injured fighting for this. The Peterloo Massacre was class war.

Although Chris Williamson got to speak at that the bicentennial event, there were some people in the labour movement, including some of the organisers of this event, who wanted to no platform him, and they could see no inconsistency in doing so, and supporting this commemorative Peterloo event.

Trump's crackdown on migrant workers is starting to effect U.S. businesses and driving up prices.

 

California's economy and in other parts of the U.S., is so dependent on migrant labour that the crackdown by Donald Trump on migrant workers, is starting to affect many businesses and raising retail prices in the supermarkets.

There are an estimated 7 million workers who are undocumented in the U.S. labour force. Undocumented workers make up 25% of all farm workers in the U.S. and many of them are Mexicans. Many of these migrant workers work in construction, domestic work, hospitality, agriculture, meat processing and the care sectors. Raids by U.S. immigration officials have led to many migrant workers failing to turn up for work and putting businesses at risk. The Trump administration say that they are targeting illegal (undocumented) migrant workers who do not have a legal right to be in the country, rather than documented migrant workers, who do. They also say they are targeting criminals. Yet, it seems, that undocumented migrant workers are paying local, state and federal taxes while in employment, so how can they be undocumented?

It's also clear that many U.S. employers openly employ illegal migrants and that this demand for migrant labour is what drives immigrants to come to the U.S. Many of these migrant workers basically do the back breaking jobs that many Americans are often unwilling to do because it's hard graft. Many businesses like farms, hotels and restaurants, are now pressing Donald Trump to exempt their businesses from immigration raids.

Is Starmer leading Labour into the electoral abyss?

 

Sir Keir Starmer

In my lifetime I have never known a British politician as unpopular as Keir Starmer. If he appears in public he's subjected to verbal abuse. Starmer is the default Prime Minister. Labour only got elected because the voters lost confidence in the Conservatives. Starmer is a rather boring man who doesn't seem to have much of a clue about how to get the country up and running. When he gives interviews, he appears shifty and awkward and doesn't seem to be able to establish any kind of rapport with the British public. 

I would not trust a man who says that 99.9 per cent of women don't have a penis and is a committed Zionist. Politically, his Labour government make colossal blunders like taking the winter fuel allowance off pensioners and cutting benefits for people with disabilities. Why was this not mentioned when Labour was in opposition?  Starmer had to do a U-turn on this because they were losing council seats to reform UK and facing opposition from some Labour backbenchers. Yet Labour have said that those with the broadest shoulders should bear the biggest burden of taxation, so, why are they hitting pensioners and people on benefits and not the rich? They're now confiscating people's allotments to allow councils to sell off the land.

Starmer can turn on a dime and will break any pledge or promise that he makes. In opposition he promised to clean up politics but takes freebies for clothing and gear for himself and his wife off a gay multi-millionaire called Lord Waheed Ali. Even though Labour has a massive majority I can't see Starmer lasting five years. Starmer is the best recruiting sergeant that Reform UK have got. I think Starmer will lead Labour into the electoral abyss and put Nigel Farage into Downing Street.

Is there any value in a university education? Discuss.

 

People have always harboured doubts about the value of a university education. I'm pretty sure that Henry David Thoreau said that a degree from Harvard College wasn't worth a five-dollar bill.

I have just been reading 'Barnaby Rudge' by Charles Dickens which is about the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London in 1780. Young Edward (Ned Chester), a character in the book, says to his father, "I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated and am fit for nothing..." Yet, that didn't stop Dickens, sending his eldest son Charlie, to Eton College. In those days you went to university to be turned into a gentleman and you would probably study the classics and read ancient Greek and Latin, both dead languages. After university many graduates went into the church or the army. Many classic scholars went on to run the country and became British Prime Ministers.

Part of the problem, I think, arises from this utilitarian point of view that sees a university education as being of no value, if it doesn't lead to a well-paid job. Cardinal Newman, seemed to think that education had value as an entity in itself, and I would tend to agree with that position.

I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine in the early 1980s. He told me that on the train from Oxford, he had got into a conversation with a young lad who had a multi-coloured Mohican hairstyle. It turned out that he was a student at Oriel College Oxford and was studying English literature. My college friend asked him what practical value there was in a degree in English literature. The young punk replied that there was no practical value in it whatsoever, but "one did get to read some jolly good books." I simply laughed and said to my friend, that I thought it was better doing that than working in a pickle factory.

 If the only intellectual concept you've got in your armoury is a hammer, then I suspect that everything in the world is going to resemble a nail to you. Is education really about teaching somebody how to knock a nail into plank of wood even if it leads to a job? I suspect that most of the MPs in the British House of Commons today, if they're not qualified lawyers, are probably arts graduates with "Micky Mouse" degrees. 

Ronny Kray's gun license goes up for auction.

 

Britain now has the strictest and most complicated gun laws in the world but this wasn't always the case. Gun deaths in Britain have always been fairly rare.

In Liberal Victorian England, gun laws were almost non-existent. You could buy a gun by mail order and carry a gun without much difficulty. Gun deaths were almost unheard of and many Victorians carried concealed weapons. There were also many shouting galleries that the public could attend.

As a young lad growing up in Britain in the 1950s and 60's, I remember shooting .22 rim fire cartridges at public fairgrounds and most of us had air rifles.

In May 1964, the gangster Ronnie Kray, was issued with a gun license for 10 shillings. The license issued by the police entitled him "to carry and use a gun." It was a 9mm Luger pistol that he used to shoot George Cornell dead in the Blind Beggar Pub, Mile End, East London, on 9 March 1966. Kray's gun license is now up for auction and is expected to fetch thousands.

Nicola Sturgeon - "Stalin's wee sister."

 

Nicola Sturgeon

Asked by a female intellectual to summarize the difference between a man and woman, a bishop replied, "Madam, I can't possibly conceive." How could the Scottish voter have confidence in a politician that couldn't distinguish a man from a woman?  

I remember watching Nicola Sturgeon when she was the leader of the SNP, wriggling about like a maggot on a fish hook, when she was asked in an interview, whether the trans double rapist Isla Bryson, born Adam Graham, was a man or woman. What a ghastly spectacle it was. She got herself all tangled up in knots.  Graham/Bryson was demanding to be admitted to a woman's prison. 

Nicola Sturgeon is a politically correct dipstick. I recall that the former SNP deputy leader Jim Sillars, saying that the SNP shouldn't just reflect on the SNP's collapse in support but repent. Sillars said that the SNP had spent far too much time on fringe and exotic issues like transgenderism and should have spent more time focused on bread-and-butter issues that matter the most to Scottish voters. He described Sturgeon as "Stalin's wee sister."

There's no doubt about it that Sturgeon's obsession with Trans rights has led to the SNP losing massive support and to Sturgeon becoming politically irrelevant. 

"Let's Go To The Beach" - Stalybridge Civic Hall 19 August.

 

I have never heard anything more ridiculous. The people of Stalybridge can "enjoy their own seaside experience" later this month when the civic hall will be turned into a mock pleasure beach with sand and treasure hunts. This building was once Stalybridge market hall and look at it now - a ghostly empty space.

Labour have controlled Tameside Council for over 40 years. There are now no banks in Stalybridge because they've all been closed and there are no public toilets. Even the fictional French village of Clochemerle, had one public toilet. There's no cinema, no shoe shops, clothing shops, no Town Hall, no furniture shops, no police station, but plenty of betting and charity shops.

Yesterday, there was another 'Street Fest' in Stalybridge. I don't think you can buy anything at that Street Fest for less than £8 or £9, it's a total rip off. Not very long ago they had the Halle Orchestra doing rehearsals in the old market hall in Stalybridge and it attracted quite a lot of people even though I don't remember it being advertised.

We need more of that in Tameside. Brass bands are now very popular and band concerts could be staged in the old market hall in Stalybridge along with other types of live music.

Pro-Palestinian activist accused of profiting from the extermination of Jews.

 

Marlene Engelhorn

The journalist Brendan O'Neill, once wrote for the magazine 'Living Marxism' (LM), that closed after being sued by ITN over a report written about the war in Bosnia. LM magazine which was the set up by members of the cultish Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), denied that genocide had taken place in Rwanda and Bosnia. After LM magazine closed, members of the group set up 'Spiked Online'. Spiked Online is generally pro-Israel, pro-Brexit and anti-climate change.

The U.N. stated recently that 1000 people in Gaza had been shot in the last two months by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), when they had tried to access food aid. Around 60,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the attack on Israel by members of Hamas on 7 October 2023, including many innocent women and children. We've also seen horrific photographs of starving and emaciated Palestinian children in Gaza. Although the International Criminal Court (ICC), have issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Spiked Online denies that genocide is taking place in Gaza.

In this article by Brendan O'Neill, he dismisses this as 'Israelophobia’. This article mainly attacks a pro-Palestinian Austrian activist called Marlene Engelhorn, who is disparagingly called the "Zyklon B Heiress." O'Neill tells us that Ms Engelhorn had inherited money ($27.1 million) from the family coffers that had been acquired partly through the production of Zyklon B gas that was used to gas Jews in the death camps during WWII. What O'Neill doesn't tell us, is that Ms Engelhorn seems to have given most of this money away. She has also campaigned for the Austrian government to increase taxes on the wealthy. Brendan O'Neill says that her family profited from the extermination of the Jewish people and finds it odd that now, "she rages against the Jewish state."

I can't see how Ms Engelhorn is anymore responsible for the extermination of European Jews than is the daughter of Amon Goth, who ran the death camp in the film Schindler's List. Many people profited from that war including English investors who had money invested with the German arms manufacturer Krupp. Ms Engelhorn is a descendant of Friedrich Engelhorn who founded the German chemicals giant BASF. In the 1920s, BASF merged with IG Farben that produced Zyklon B, which I believe was originally intended to be used for agricultural purposes as a pesticide.  

There were that many Jewish directors on the board of IG Farben that the Nazis called the firm the citadel of Jewish capitalism, but this didn't stop the Nazis doing business with the firm or the firm doing business with them. At the end of the war, some of the directors of IG Farben were put on trial at Nuremberg for war crimes.

Trevor Morris reveals secret service smear campaigns.

Box (MI5), likes to portray itself as being mainly involved in counter espionage and doesn't like to talk about how it spies on British citizens who they deem 'subversive' or now, 'domestic extremists' which isn't defined in law. F Section of MI5, spied on some British citizens who were in organisations like CND or the trade unions. These organisations were not illegal or proscribed organisations.

When the former black spy cop, Trevor Morris, who spied on the Lawrence family, gave live testimony at the Mitting Inquiry (see video) into undercover policing, he was asked if he had been tasked with smearing the Lawrence family. He said he'd been tasked by the Met to gather intelligence on the family and that the smearing was done by MI5. He then said that he shouldn't have said that and asked for that comment to be retracted from the record. Then someone pulled the plug on the live streaming.

If MI5 were spying on the Lawrence family in what way were the family a threat to the security of the state? Doreen Lawrence was given and accepted a peerage.

Irish Republicanism & the Germans.

 

The Irish nationalist and Protestant, Roger Casement, accepted a knighthood from the British for his humanitarian work. He exposed the atrocities that were taking place in the Congo that was colonized by the Belgians. Casement was hanged for treason because he collaborated with the Germans during WWI. While in custody, Casement offered to use his influence to get the planned Easter Rising called off. The British authorities declined his offer and let the 1916 Easter Rising take place. I think they saw it as an opportunity to lance the boil.

When the Rising took place, Home Rule for Ireland was already on the cards and James Connolly, a Scottish-born Irish Republican, who was one of the leaders of the Rising, knew that they were going out to be slaughtered. Connolly, who had something of a martyr complex, took his fourteen-year-son, Roddy, with him. Most of the people in Dublin hardly understood what the Rising was about and neither were they sympathetic to the rebels. The 'Allowance Women', who had husbands serving with the British army couldn't draw their allowance because the post office had been occupied by the rebels. Many of the people who got killed during the Rising were innocent Dubliners who got caught in the crossfire or were killed by English artillery.

In WWII, Sean Russell, the IRA chief of staff collaborated with the Nazis and so did the IRA man Frank Ryan, who fought with the International Brigades in Spain. The IRA leader foolishly believed that if the Nazis won the war, Hitler would have given Ireland its independence. I don't think that either Frank Ryan or Sean Russell were sympathetic to the Nazis, but they seemed to have thought that England's enemies were Ireland's friend. I suspect that if Germany had won the war, somebody like the fascist Blackshirt, Oswald Mosley, or William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, would have been put in charge of running Ireland for the Nazis. As for the IRA men like Sean Russell, they would have been sent to the concentration camps.

Eamon de Valera who took part in the Rising but wasn't executed, would later imprison and hang some members of the IRA when he got into political office. Some IRA men died on hunger strike while imprisoned by de Valera's government. On hearing of Hitler's death, Eamon de Valera sent condolences to what was left of the German government. 

Who coined the name Staly Vegas?

 

Armentiers Square Stalybridge

Stalybridge is just about recognisable as a little cotton town and it still retains some of its character. Unfortunately, the town possesses no public urinals now or banks, which have all been closed. It does however, have many charity shops and betting shops. The town is referred to in Benjamin Disraeli's novel 'Coningsby', as being a place of "high pressure" due to its industries.

I remember when they filmed Yanks in Stalybridge. All they had to do was put a few sand bags outside some of the buildings and you felt like you were back in the 1940s. I don't know who coined the name Staly-Vegas but I'm glad to see the back of it.

If J.D. Wetherspoon's (Society Rooms) closed in Stalybridge, the town would go under. The price of a pint in some of the pubs in Stalybridge is ridiculous. Some days you can get a pint of hand-pumped cask beer in the Society Rooms for £2.17 and on most days it's now around £2.72.

David Lammy mastermind

Britain's Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, once appeared on BBC Mastermind. One of the questions that he was asked was who succeeded King Henry VIII to the English throne. He answered "Henry VII." 

Lammy has denied that genocide is taking place in Gaza because he says not enough people have been killed by the Israeli Defence Forces. I don't think that international law or the International Criminal Court (ICC), define genocide in terms of numbers killed. The ICC have already issued an international arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes and crimes against humanity. That's what they accused and hung the Nazis for at Nuremberg and elsewhere.

British colonial rule in India.

 

The British government took direct control of India in 1858 after the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Before that the British government exercised control of India through the British East India Company from 1757.

At no time were there more than 100,000 Britons in India. All the governance was done with the complicit help of the Indians, who helped to subjugate a vast land and its people. There's no doubt that they did this to further and promote their own self interests.

Colonial rule during the British Raj, was made easier because the Indians were divided among themselves by religion, cast and tribe. It was a case of divide and conquer, separate and rule and the British were excellent at doing that. Many Indians seem to have looked up to their British colonial rulers, who they called Pukka Sahib. Hindu culture is hierarchical and many Indians wanted to join the white man's club.

In E.M. Forster's novel 'A Passage to India', Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate in Chandrapore, tells his mother Mrs Moore, that "all Indian's regardless of their caste will always forget their back collar-studs and this is one of the reasons we don't admit him to our clubs." His mother, says Ronny's sentiments are those of a god. Ronny, tells his mother, "Indians like gods."

To this day, many wealthy Indians and Pakistani's send their children to English public schools and Oxford and Cambridge to be educated in the ways of the Pukka Sahib. The British went to India to exploit the country and its people, but the British gave the Indians cricket, railways and the telegraph. When British colonial rule ended in India in 1947 and country was partitioned, the Indians didn't attack the English but attacked one another.  

The dark side of transgenderism.

 

Eddie Suzy Izzard

The transgender comedian Eddie Izzard has received that many awards and honours from British universities that you would think that he'd discovered a cure for cancer. He has received a number of honorary doctorate degrees and he's just received another honorary doctorate degree from the University of Sussex.

This award has been controversial because the University of Sussex was recently fined £585,000 by the Office for Students (OfS) for failing to protect and defend Kathleen Stock, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, from harassment and bullying by a student mob. Professor Stock was hounded out of her job when she said that people who have a penis are not women and that basic sexual biology, was not blasphemy. There were calls for her to be dismissed and even death threats. Professor Stock resigned her position as Professor of Philosophy in 2021.

Why are so many people susceptible to group think and gullibility?

 

Marshall McLuhan

The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, said that education was the best form of civil defence against media fallout. We're all subjected to virtual and semi-realities being constantly flashed before our minds by partisan causes and agencies wishing to sell us something - a product, an idea, a policy, a lie.

The philosopher A.C. Grayling says that the "human propensity for belief and superstition, is readily understood in psychological terms as the desire for explanatory closure in the face of uncertainty."

But it's not just semi or uneducated people that are gullible or who are susceptible to group think. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was the rector of Freiberg University, famously said: "The Fuhrer himself, and he alone, is Germany's reality."

The communist dictator Joseph Stalin, killed astronomers for taking a non-Marxist line on sunspots and endorsed the bogus science of the agronomist Lysenko. The peasant slayer Stalin, created unpersons and expunged others from history. In Stalinist Russia, reality became plastic like Salvador Dali's clocks; dual consciousness and double-think flourished. The Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, said that universal mendacity was the only safe from of existence in Stalinist Russia.

Life in Britain is becoming quite extraordinary. It resembles that final scene in Peter Pan where the children are told that if they don't shout out loud that they believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell will die. The Labour Prime Minister, Sir Ker Starmer, wants us all to collude in a fiction when he tells us the 99.9 percent of women don't have a penis. Most of us think it's 100 percent. Some members of his government can't even define the difference between a man and a woman.

This kind of nonsense upon stilts is now both widespread and endemic in Britain. The political theorist Hannah Arendt, said that what the Nazi and Communist regimes valued most was not the dedicated Nazi or Communist party member, but those people for whom reality had become blurred and who couldn't distinguish fact from fiction. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: "To be effective propaganda must harp on a few simple slogans appealing to the primitive sentiments of the broad masses." 

Lenin's 'useful idiots'.

 

H.G.Wells

The celebrated Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, seems to have seen the Soviet Union under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin as a worker's paradise, but he also expressed favourable views about Mussolini. He seems to have been in favour of the mass arrests, the Gulag, and the show trials, which he seems to have felt were necessary. Hitler is said to have killed fewer Communist than Stalin.

The Webb's, who were fellow Fabian's were obsessed with the Soviet Union. They wrote the pamphlet, 'Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation." The French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, said that the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia, had dressed up a turd and presented it as a caramel. Stalin's socialist experiment or "new civilisation", resembled a vast army of deliberately deprived workers, indentured peasants, and slave labourers, all toiling for the benefit of an unacknowledged political elite.

The peasant slayer, Joseph Stalin, was said to be a "sniggerer and a bad chuckler." In the early days Stalin had been nicknamed "Comrade Card Index" by some of his Bolshevik colleagues. After Stalin's death in March 1953, many later personal reminiscences of Stalin were to record that it was when he was in a genial mood that he was most to be feared.

The English writer H.G. Wells interviewed Joseph Stalin through an interpreter in July 1934. The interview lasted almost three hours. He seems to have found Stalin avuncular - a type of kind, pipe smoking, uncle. In his autobiography Wells wrote: "I have never met a man more fair, candid and honest."

In his book 'Arguably' (2011), the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, wrote: "If we look for explanations for the indulgences shown toward Stalinism by men like G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells, we will find part of the answer in the quasi-eugenic and quasi-anthropological approach they took to most questions. Fabian socialism, in the same period, emphasized the progressive aspects of social engineering in the British Empire."

The eugenicist movement has been described as the "dirty little secret of the British left." Wells, Shaw and the Webb's were all in favour of the selective breeding of man to improve the quality of the nation's genetic stock. They believed in compulsory sterilisation for the enfeebled.

Charles Darwin is said to have asked a man who bred racing dogs (greyhounds), how he got winning dog? He told Darwin that he bred many and hung many. That might be okay for a dog breeder but it's a bit more difficult to do it with human beings. The Nazis abhorred the Jewish ritual slaughter of animals and banned vivisection, but they had no qualms about the ritual slaughter of Jews and other members of the Untermensch.  

School girl banned from making a speech on cultural awareness because she wore a union Jack-style dress.

 

Courtney Wright

I think that young girl, Courtney Wright, from Rugby, deserved an apology from her school. What the school did was outrageous. The school were celebrating 'Culture Celebration Day' and she was prevented from making a speech and put in isolation, because she was wearing a union Jack-style dress, like one of the Spice Girls. It seems that nowadays in Britain, you can celebrate everybody else’s culture but not your own.

Unfortunately, many of the people today who teach in our schools, are politically correct dipsticks and snowflakes. They're more interested in sexual identities than national or regional identities.

When I was a schoolboy in the 1950s, our teachers would show us a map of the world and tells us that everything on the map that was coloured red belonged to Britain. They never stopped talking about Roger Bannister's four-minute mile or Edmund Hilary's ascent of Everest. We were raised as little imperialists and most of my fellow pupils were white.

I don't think being British means a great deal to most people of the British Isles and I think regional identities are probably stronger than national identities. The Scots are known to support any team that is playing against England in the World Cup. Yet as a northern Englishman, I identify more with a Scot than I would a Londoner or a person from Cornwall.

Britain is a deeply class-divided society that is governed by amateurs. In a famous essay, the author George Orwell, wrote: "England is the most class-ridden country under the Sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.” Orwell said that "almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box..." When they used to play the national anthem at an English cinema, everybody used to run out to catch the last bus.

Edwardian English Middle-class families that produced Orwell, Philip Larkin and Stephen Spender, generally looked down their nose at the coloured subjects of the British Empire as well as Jews and the working-classes. Spender wrote about how his parents stopped him playing with "rough" children and Orwell's mother, who was a socialist, stopped him playing with the plumbers' daughter. Larkin's father had Nazi sympathies and supported Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.

Do academic qualifications scare off potential UK employers.

 

When I left school in 1970 aged 15, it wasn't difficult to get a job or an apprenticeship and most people were in work. If you got on a bus in a morning, the buses were packed with people going to work. Most people of my generation will tell you the same thing.

It became far more difficult to get work after 1979, with the election of a Conservative government and Margaret Thatcher. Between 1979 and 1983, unemployment doubled from 1.5m to 3.0m. There was also a great deal of deindustrialization as Britain moved from being a manufacturing country to a service economy. Many jobs were exported overseas where unit labour costs were cheaper. Courtaulds closed many textile mills and moved to the Mauritius. Most Royal Enfield motor bikes are now made in India. A large factory in my area that made cigarettes and paid very high wages, relocated to the North of Ireland after being given financial inducements at the time of the Conservative government of John Major. This occurred because the Major government used financial incentives in order to get the political support of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), to stay in power. In many parts of the north of England, factories that had employed thousands were closed. The north of England never really recovered from this.

They introduced something called the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), to train young unemployed people. It became known as the Youth Training Swindle. Over the years, I have known many highly qualified people who have spent years in unemployment. A friend of mine who has two science degrees including a Masters, and had spent two years doing a PhD, told me that she found it extremely difficult to get work. It's likely that she was considered over qualified for the type of bum jobs that were available. Another friend told me that he was told by his DWP Jobcentre adviser, not to mention that he had a University Degree because it might scare off potential employers.

Two tier politics and the case of Lucy Connolly.

 

"Keyboard Warrior" - Julie Sweeney

I have no time for Sir Keir Starmer-oid but he had nothing to do with the case of Lucy Connolly. He has said that he supports the police and courts in the way they treated Connolly who was convicted for inciting racial hatred and jailed for 31 months after the Southport attack.

But why are people like Jeremy Clarkson, Conservative MPs and the Daily Torygraph, talking about the case of Lucy Connolly. There were other "keyboard warriors" who were jailed for online comments after the Southport attack but nobody has spoken up for them.

Julie Sweeney, a 53-year-old carer from Church Lawton, in Cheshire, was jailed for 15 months for inflammatory language. She called for Mosques to be firebombed on social media.The Tories haven't taken up her case because her husband isn't a Conservative councillor like the husband of Lucy Connolly. That sounds like being "two tier" to me. Both Connolly and Sweeney pleaded guilty to the charges made against them.

When Essex police visited the home of the Daily Torygraph columnist Allison Pearson, after a complaint of "inciting racial hatred" on social media and alleged racism had been made against her, both Pearson and the newspaper castigated the police and said the visit to her home had been an affront to free speech. They declared that the police should "police the streets not our tweets."

Boris Johnson, the former Conservative Prime Minister, has said that up to 10,000 people a year are being arrested by the police for comments they have made on social media, but neither the press or politicians are likely to take up their cases. Are their cases not an affront to free speech? 

Karl Marx thought British imperialism had brought modernity to India.

 

Marx & Engels

Many Communist regimes including the Soviet Union in Russia and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia claimed to have been inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx, but they were hardly free countries. Both countries built a society on a mountain of corpses.

Well before the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Russian socialist, Alexander Herzen, had called Communism, Russian Tsarism turned upside down. So-called freedom in capitalist societies is something of a sham. It's freedom for the pike but not for the minnows. In one sense, political equality is rather meaningless when you have economic inequality. There's not a great deal of direct democracy in the workplace, and most people are just one wage away from the gutter. But some do argue that economic inequality is of great importance and even in some respects highly desirable, because it acts as a spur to incentivise people to strive to do better. It's rather a case of sink or swim.

Soviet society was notable for a lack of incentives and the wide levels of economic equality between citizens and the political elite. I don't think that Karl Marx believed that we're all endowed with the same equal abilities because he wrote, "From each according to his ability to each according to his need." To impose equality on people of unequal abilities certainly restricts freedom and liberty and this is why they talk about "equality of opportunity" which is also rather nebulous, because our opportunities are certainly constrained by our economic circumstances and the social class that we're born into.

Marx was certainly aware that people pursuing their own personal greed had transformed the world and this is clear from reading the Communist Manifesto that he co-authored with Friedrich Engels. Marx thought that the British had brought modernity to India - printing presses, railways, telegraph, and steamship contact with other countries. Marx didn't believe that the British had done this out of the kindness of their hearts. Until 1858, British rule in India was administered by the East India Company. Marx wrote:  

“England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan was actuated by the vilest interests...but that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the state of Asia.”

For Marx, conquest furnished an alternative to serfdom and stagnation. Creation could take a destructive form. In 1700, Britain banned cotton imports from India and by 1835, Lord Bentinck of the East India Company, declared: "the bones of Indian textile workers were bleaching the plains of India."

In the 1940s, when Bengal was under British colonial occupation, tens of thousands of people starved to death in areas that had overflowing granaries. It wasn't a shortage of food that led to the disaster, but a lack of information and proper administration.

Marx and Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality. Marx supported both Lincoln and the Union during the civil war and helped to organise a boycott of southern slave-picked cotton among British workers. Marx never called himself a Marxist, but from a Marxist point of view, revolutions were more likely to occur in countries like Britain and the USA which had attained a high level of capitalist development. They were not supposed to occur in peasant societies which has largely been the case. 

Film producer accuses BBC of trying to gag him on Gaza documentary.

 

Ben de Pear

I used to watch Al-Jazeera because it was one way of finding out what was not being reported on British TV about the genocide taking place in Gaza.

One of the people on the Board of Governors at the BBC, is Sir Robbie Gibb, who was part of a consortium that bought the Jewish Chronicle. I remember Max Keiser saying that he left the BBC because he was instructed by the BBC top-brass not to mention Israel in any context.

The suspended Labour MP Zarah Sultana, has accused the Labour Party of being complicit in genocide in Gaza. The Labour Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer-oid, has said publicly that he supports Zionism without qualification.

A film producer called Ben de Pear, has now accused the BBC of trying to gag him when they dropped a documentary he'd produced about the bombing of hospitals in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces. The documentary called 'Gaza: Doctors Under Attack' was broadcast by Channel 4 on Wednesday. Over 400 media personalities have written to the BBC calling on them to sack Robbie Gibb.

The BBC prostate themselves before the Israeli government and are afraid of offending the Israeli lobby. They're not worth the license fee. The International Criminal Court (ICC), have issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was what got the Nazis hanged at Nuremberg at the end of WWII.

Labour promised to make people better off but data suggests disposable income is falling as prices spiral.

 

The Temple Bar Dublin

We know that the cost of living is going up in Britain and that disposable income for many people, is falling under Labour because of higher prices for rents, food, council tax, energy and water.

I was recently in a pub in Marsden, West Yorkshire, when I saw one customer at the bar, charged £90 for a round of drinks. He didn't bat an eyelid. He was probably one of those commuter middle-class blow-ins who have settled in the quaint little leafy villages of Saddleworth and West Yorkshire and work in high salaried jobs, in local government, the NHS, and the BBC. They've driven up house prices in most of these areas along the Huddersfield line and have made housing unaffordable for many local people in places like Greenfield and Uppermill. Some people on state welfare benefits, don't have £90 a week to live on.

I was recently shown this bar bill given to a customer in April in the famous Temple Bar in Dublin. I knew that pub prices in Dublin were expensive and in Ireland, in general, but I wasn't quite prepared for this. A pint of Heineken €11.45, two Malibu, €22.70, a Coke €4.95, and six baby Guinness, which isn't Guinness, but a shot of Tia Maria and Baileys, came to €68.10. The total bill came to €107.20.