Month: November 2016

Cardinal Nichols, head of the Catholic Church in Britain, is unhappy with us.

Rather than learning “from the vibrancy of the Muslim faith that comes here”, we seem to be apprehensive about the influx of crowds who set us such a good example of piety.

“It does nobody any good,” continued my former co-author (we both contributed essays to the book The Nation That Forgot God), “this somewhat self-indulgent way in which people have begun to express themselves and their distaste and their hatred of people who they see as different. And that is creating a culture of fear among people who have been welcomed here.”

The boot seems to be on the wrong foot, and it doesn’t fit. A culture of fear is being created precisely by those who bring their vibrancy here. Their vibrant faith brainwashes its exponents to fly airliners into tall buildings, blow up buses or indiscriminately spray crowds with bullets.

Such suicidal abandon is prescribed by their scriptural sources, which don’t leave Muslims much free choice. Those whose faith isn’t sufficiently vibrant may be beheaded, stoned to death or, if they manage to escape, hunted down. Fatwa Knows Best is the longest-running Muslim series.

As someone who arrived at these shores late in life, I can testify that the British have none of that “distaste and hatred of people who they see as different”. On the contrary, I was struck by the hospitality with which I was welcomed here.

I was readily accepted not just as a guest to this country, but as someone who belongs here – as British as they come, so to speak.

So I was. I spoke and wrote native-quality English, knew English history, constitution and literature, was up on the folklore (including the part that only appears in unabridged dictionaries), didn’t mind warm beer and drank Scotch as my first preference.

I was still different, but people either didn’t realise that or forgot it after the first few minutes of conversation. I fit in – because I wanted to.

The same can by no means be said about most Muslim arrivals, even those who aren’t professional jihadists infiltrated into this country. They don’t fit in – because they don’t want to.

Considering this, I’d say that the British are displaying remarkable, some will say suicidal, tolerance. Incidents of racial or religious violence are practically nonexistent, unless of course the odd cross word and an askance glance are regarded as such, which nowadays is often the case.

Sometimes one wishes the British weren’t so docile. Consecutive governments, committed to squeezing the square peg of Britishness into the round hole of EU federalism, have deliberately set out to dilute the indigenous ethos with alien admixtures.

Some, such as Blair’s lot, admit this openly. The Tories don’t, but their actions shout off the rooftops. The two top positions in the present government are occupied by politicians who campaigned for keeping our borders open to all and sundry – including millions of those who are doctrinally obligated to hate us.

I suspect that they, along with our judiciary (independent from HMG but not from its EU sympathies), media and much of the ruling elite have decided to defeat (or at least dilute) Brexit by subterfuge. If they succeed, there will be no end to the incoming religious vibrancy that so appeals to His Eminence.

The vibrations will have such a destructive amplitude that the resonance may bring the house down, and the British people are beginning to realise this.

They indeed fear that, even in the absence of Muslim violence (a pipe dream in itself), the sheer demographic shift will reduce them to the status of unwelcome guests in their own country. Britain is in danger of being dominated by millions of those who are at best alien and more typically hostile to everything Britain is.

The danger is so much greater because of what His Eminence calls their ‘vibrant faith’ and I’d rather call ‘ideological fanaticism’. For all their sterling qualities, the Muslims can’t usually boast a propensity for characteristically British moderation. Rabid stridency is more down their alley.

Now, given, at best, acquiescence on the part of HMG, what recourse do the British have to limit the scale of this alien invasion, if not to stop it altogether?

Magna Carta, a document marginally more seminal to our statehood than even the EU Human Rights Act, gave the answer 800 years ago (as repeated by Henry III): “… it shall be lawful for every one in our realm to rise against the government to use all the ways and means they can to hinder until that in which have transgressed and offenced shall have been brought again into due state …”

No one in his right mind would want this to happen. But if it does, it’ll be thanks to our bien pensant leaders, secular or religious, who don’t see the blindingly obvious danger and do nothing to combat it.

We have nothing to learn from the Muslims’ vibrant faith, Your Eminence, or any other type of fanaticism. The strength of Christianity can only come from within, and diluting this strength by multi-culti pronouncements indeed “does nobody any good.”

There’s no denying that High Court lawyers have thrown Brexit into confusion.* Shakespeare must have anticipated this situation when he made Henry VI’s Butcher Dick utter the above words.

Part of the reason confusion reigns is that so many people, including me, clearly prioritise their beliefs. For pious people, God is clearly above any prioritisation, but a pecking order exists for more quotidian creeds. The higher one will always take precedence.

For example, the kind of people who currently insist that Parliament must have its say in not so much Brexit but even the invocation of Article 50 also believe that our sovereignty has to be moved from Queen and Parliament to the EU.

Chaps, don’t you sense self-refutation in your arguments? If you fervently believe in British sovereignty vested in Her Majesty’s Parliament, how can you welcome a situation where most of our laws come from a foreign body unaccountable to king, country or, for that matter, God?

It’s that prioritisation kicking in. Remainers love the EU for whatever reasons, the principal one, I suspect, being the kinship bureaucratic elites everywhere feel for one another, trumping whatever loyalty they may have towards their own people.

Some of them, by no means all, may also quite like our parliamentary tradition, but their affection for the EU occupies a higher rung in the ladder of their pieties. Hence their strategy is to derail Brexit by whatever means. If that involves screaming their previously understated love for Parliament off the rooftops, then so be it.

M’lords on the High and Supreme Court, most of whom are Europhiles, play along. They seem to ignore the issue of the royal prerogative, which actually vests HMG with executive powers. Among those is the power to abrogate treaties, which has been put into effect for as long as I’ve been following British politics.

The very same people who never raised an infinitesimal objection whenever the government exercised this prerogative over the last several decades (not wishing to date myself, I won’t tell you how many), now scream bloody murder about the government wishing to invoke Article 50, thereby acting on its royal prerogative and fulfilling an unequivocal popular mandate.

Actually, I shouldn’t be tossing stones out of the glass house in which I live. For I too am guilty of the same twisting and turning, if in the opposite direction.

For I detest the EU with the same passion that its champions love it. In fact, I detest it even more than some UKIPers do, who seem to be deaf at times to the clearly fascist noises emanating from that vile contrivance. My years in Russia have made my hearing extremely acute in perceiving such sounds, which may be ultrasounds to others.

This detestation of the EU is even stronger than my opposition to direct democracy by plebiscite. I think it’s ridiculous that constitutional issues, anchored as they are in centuries of history, a careful accumulation of precedents and reams of political philosophy, should be decided by a show of hands – which extremities mostly belong to people who don’t have much of a clue about constitutional history, legal precedents and political philosophy.

Edmund Burke, one of our greatest constitutional thinkers, would be appalled by this. He believed that, once elected, MPs should govern according to people’s interests, not their wishes. It was understood that the wise and virtuous people trusted with representing their constituencies knew better than the constituents themselves how their interests could best be served.

If Burke were told that people would decide in a plebiscite the issue of Britain’s sovereignty, he’d immediately retire to his Beaconsfield estate and live a hermetic life thereafter. He might suspect, rightly as it happens, that our parliamentarians solve the conflict between the people’s wishes and interests by representing neither.

Not only am I opposed to direct democracy, I have severe misgivings even about democracy of universal suffrage tout court. When unchecked by the power of other estates, one-man-one-vote democracy first becomes what Tocqueville called ‘tyranny of the majority’, and then the tyranny of a small elite governing in the majority’s name.

Sooner or later, such an elite begins to serve itself, rather than the demos in whose name it supposedly governs. That explains why so much of our governing elite (‘the establishment’ in the popular parlance) are attracted to the EU – answering to a supranational body makes them largely unaccountable to their own people, thereby increasing their domestic power and, consequently, enhancing opportunities for personal advancement.

In case anybody is interested, I’ve actually written a book about this, Democracy As a Neocon Trick. But, having written it, I still agitated for a Brexit referendum, realising it gave Britain the only chance to regain her independence, getting her constitutional essence back on track.

Obviously I’m the anti-EU teapot calling the federalist kettle black. I too seem to prioritise my pieties; I too am prepared to overlook certain inconsistencies, not to say mutual exclusiveness.

And, figuratively speaking, as I hope you understand, I do think Butcher Dick was on to something. How else can we prevent lawyers throwing spanners in the Brexit works?

* My previous post reflected this confusion. I mistakenly attributed remarks made by Lord Kerr of Kinlochard to Lord Kerr of Tonaghmore. My only excuse is that I’m not the only culprit: The Times ran the former’s statements under the latter’s photograph. Also, having visited my ex-neighbour Brian Kerr in his Westminster apartment a few years ago, I assumed, wrongly as it happens, that this was grace and favour. In fact, by contrast to some of our other public servants, Lord Kerr commendably pays for his own accommodation. If my mistake caused any offence, I’m sincerely sorry, especially since I like Brian Kerr very much.

 

 

Muslims murder Christians en masse, mistreat women and toss homosexuals off rather tall buildings.

And yet, in the spirit of Christian forgiveness, a Swedish bishop representing all three groups wants to remove crosses from the country’s churches to make Muslims feel more at home. Eva Brunne, the first openly homosexual bishop in Sweden, got that idea from her wife, who was deeply concerned about the Muslims’ feelings.

Now far be it from me to dispute the legitimacy of the phrase ‘her wife’, even in the clerical, nay episcopal, context.

As founder, chairman and so far the only member of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity and Multiculturalism, I readily accept that a bishop can be a) a woman, b) a lesbian and c) married to another woman. My only regret is that the proposal is so negative.

Why stop the welcoming hand halfway at merely taking the crosses down? Wouldn’t the Muslims feel even more at home if the crosses were replaced with crescents?

After all, making Muslims comfortable has to be what Christianity is all about. In Sweden at any rate.

Reactionaries might suggest that the best way for anybody to feel at home is to stay there, but such a seditious thought undermines the whole concept of multi-culti inclusion and, yes – Christianity.

Didn’t Jesus say “And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand”? In other words, proselytise. Welcome all and sundry. Make them feel welcome, even if it takes removing all visual references to Christianity.

Literalists may argue that he only spoke of “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” as a target audience, but that’s silly. He meant everybody, including Muslims, and don’t tell me they didn’t exist at the time.

Being fully divine, Jesus knew that six centuries later a religion would appear that would encourage its adherents to murder Christians en masse, mistreat women and toss homosexuals off rather tall buildings. God is outside time, isn’t he?

A stickler for historical detail may suggest that so far Christianity has made remarkably few inroads on Islam. Christians are being massacred all over the Middle East, and Eva Brunne’s generosity so far hasn’t been reciprocated. Saudi mosques still proudly display the symbols of their cult, and the number of churches in Saudi Arabia equals, in round figures, zero.

That, however, is no reason to give up on the Swedish version of hospitality. On the contrary, efforts must be redoubled to abase Christianity, thereby doing the Muslims’ job for them.

So yes, the Swedes should definitely replace crosses with crescents. Ideally, in the spirit of Christian proselytism, they should ban Christianity altogether and replace it with Islam as the country’s dominant religion.

That would be jumping the gun, but not by much. The demographic shifts produced by Europe’s hospitality to Muslim arrivals are working towards the same ideal anyway, so why not take the initiative?

Eva Brunne thinks so: the church shouldn’t be “stingy towards people of other faiths”. Even to the point of abandoning one’s own.

The huge potential for heresy built into Protestantism has been fully realised. If, according to Luther, “every man is his own priest”, then it’s but a short step to the notion that every man is his own God.

Hence every man – and woman! – is justified in thinking that Christianity is anything he – or she! – feels it is. In fact, the song ‘Feelings, nothing more than feelings…” should be elevated to the status of a Protestant hymn.

Such solipsism explains the fracturing sectarianism of Protestantism: if everything is open to personal interpretation inspired by feelings, the church will naturally split into numerous churchlets.

“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand” was a prophetic statement. The Reformation is directly responsible for the demise of European Christianity, exemplified by walking perversions like Eva Brunne and the attendant universal atheism.

Yes, Christianity is in the doldrums everywhere in Europe, including its Catholic part. But at least the firm belief still resides at the heart of the Church that doctrine may take precedence over the way people feel.

Politically correct, multi-culti modernity gnaws at the outer edges of Catholic doctrine, biting bigger and bigger chunks out. But the fangs of modernity still haven’t reached the heart.

The Pope made that clear on his recent visit to Sweden, where he was greeted by Antje Jackelén, the female head of the country’s church. Speaking at a subsequent press conference, the pontiff stated unequivocally that the Catholic Church would never have female priests.

He cited his predecessor John Paul II as the utterer of the final word on the issue, but in fact he could have gone even farther back. The Church doesn’t allow female priesthood because Jesus didn’t ordain women.

The popular counterargument is that Jesus felt constrained by the standards of his backward time. Had he chosen today’s progressive Sweden for his incarnation, he’d be consecrating lesbian bishops like nobody’s business. Thus the outdated notion of God’s timelessness has fallen by the wayside, along with Christianity in general.

One suspects that Martin Luther would be unhappy about the direction his church (and other Protestant confessions) has taken. But the law of unintended consequences worked against him. He divided the house – and it didn’t stand.

Let’s start with empirically provable facts and go on from there.

Fact 1: The EU is built on lies, of which the most dangerous one is that it can act as a defensive alliance.

The lie is necessary for the EU to bring all European armies under its command, thereby subjugating nation states even further. Typically for that wicked contrivance, its defence policy pursues nothing but political objectives.

These are the only objectives it can pursue, for EU members are manifestly incapable of defending themselves against the juggernaut of Russian aggression.

Fact 2: Russia is gearing for war. It has amassed 30 motorised divisions on its western borders, with more tanks, by an order of magnitude, than Britain, Germany and France possess put together. The deployment pattern points at a direct threat to the Baltic EU (and NATO) members.

The large-scale civilian evacuation drills, vast army exercises in offensive tactics, surreptitious call-up of reservists, massive deployment of missile forces all cost billions which Russia’s shrinking economy can’t afford to keep up for long. That means the country is looking at some short-term action soon.

This is confirmed by the ratcheting up of war propaganda. Putin’s Goebbelses are clearly priming the populace for war.

All this may just be an on-going effort to blackmail the West into submission. Yet only a fool would ignore the possibility that the threat is real and war is just round the corner. Even a greater fool would believe that the EU is ready to fight it.

Fact 3: Only NATO is capable of matching up to the Russian military muscle. And, for all practical purposes, NATO means the USA.

Since NATO was formed in 1949, its European members have always been assigned the role of a sacrificial delaying force only. They were supposed to hold on long enough for the US to perform today’s answer to D-Day.

It was also mostly the US nuclear umbrella, rather than Britain’s two Tridents or France’s minuscule force de frappe, that has been keeping Soviet, now Russian, aggression in check.

Hence the EU, one of whose declared aims is to nullify US power, is digging a hole for itself. Conceivably it could survive without American economic assistance, but it certainly can’t resist Russia, the only militarily virile European power, without American military protection.

Fact 4: At no time since the Second World War has America been in a weaker position vis-à-vis the potential Russian threat.

The most disastrous election campaign in US history has weakened the country’s spirit and will weaken it even further regardless of who wins in a week’s time.

The Democrats are accusing Trump of being in Putin’s pocket, and their harangues aren’t wholly groundless. Trump’s son has admitted that a great deal of the family income comes from Russia, and persistent rumours suggest that Putin has paid for much of Trump’s campaign.

Even if that’s not the case, it’s hard to see how Trump’s pronouncements on Putin would be different if it were. He regularly makes pro-Putin appeasement noises and has often cast doubt on America’s willingness to come to Europe’s aid under his presidency.

Less publicised is the fact that the utterly corrupt Clinton Foundation has also received vast amounts of laundered Russian cash. Hillary is making tough noises now, to differentiate herself from Trump, but her record as Secretary of State is that of craven appeasement towards Putin.

Her reaction to Russia’s 2008 aggression against Georgia was to present Putin’s Foreign Minister Lavrov with a ‘reset’ button. It was also during her tenure that Obama abandoned the Bush administration’s plan to build a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe, a decision KGB Vlad described as “correct and brave”.

Now let’s use these facts as the starting point of ratiocination leading to a dismaying conclusion:

The US interregnum period between 8 November, 2016 (presidential election), and 20 January, 2017 (presidential inauguration), is by far the most dangerous one in Western post-war history. The combination of a sitting lame-duck president and a freshly elected appeaser may well render America both impotent and unwilling to stand up to Putin’s threat.

The KGB-trained chieftain will doubtless see this period as a window of opportunity. The opportunity to do what is open to question. It may be that he’ll hold a gun to the West’s head and demand economic concessions, which he sorely needs.

Russia’s economy is rapidly contracting, with living standards sliding down even faster. Though it’s impossible to take opinion polls conducted in a totalitarian state at face value, it’s clear that Putin enjoys some popular support – even if it’s in reality short of the notorious 85 per cent. But, should food disappear from the counters, such support may prove brittle.

Since 1917 the evil Russian state has relied on the West to bail it out, which the West has been willing to do, much to its own detriment. But war is another time-proven trick for totalitarians to solve their economic problems.

No one knows which of these stratagems, blackmail or war, Putin will choose. Perhaps he doesn’t know that himself yet. But the only possible explanation of the available facts is that he’ll definitely choose one of them.

Brace yourself for a long, harsh winter.