RosieBell

The mythical beast

I read this article on Nick Griffin in the Scotland on Sunday:-

At one stage he talks about how if the party had a more Aryan leader "who's 6ft 2in and whose two eyes are blue … then they'd probably take the party further on".

If politics is show business for ugly people, white supremacy politics is fantasy for even uglier people.

Fantasy BNP Leader

 

Actual BNP Leader

Careful! Book may be inflammable

 About a year ago I did a post on Verso’s refusal to publish Does God Hate Women? by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, a book about various religions’ attitude towards women.  Verso (mission statement:- “Books with a critical edge” ) brought Jeremy Stangroom in for a discussion.  They had no problems about any of the religions mentioned and their attitudes towards women except for Islam.  The reason?  Well, Verso has a soft spot for Islam, which, they think, is a buttress against American imperialism.  All part of the creepy regard some sections of the left have towards theocracy.  Let’s hope that the recent revelations about how theocracy works against the most helpless in society – Ireland in this instance – might get them to reconsider this peculiar stance.

The church and the state in cahoots
The children lie under their boots.

For entertainment the comments thread under that post is worth reading.  People are desperate to prove that Ophelia Benson is a liar rather than that a famous left-wing publisher should be such a craven clerical arse-licker.

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom found another publisher, Continuum.   Now a week before publication date Continuum are getting cold feet.   Read it over here:-

About this non-ecumenical book that Jeremy and I wrote, that is due out at the end of this week. Yes, what about it, you're thinking, all agog. For reasons which I will explain another day, the publisher became nervous about it last Friday. The publisher phoned us on Friday, and talked of changes, or delays, or would we like to drop a chapters. We would not like to drop a chapter, and if we had liked to drop a chapter, the time to discuss that would have been several months ago, not now, a week before the book is supposed to appear. The publisher sent the can-we-drop-it chapter to an ecumenicist to get his opinion.

The publisher sent the chapter to an ecumenicist to get his opinion.

The ecumenicist will not like it. The ecumenicist will hate it. The ecumenicist specializes in Muslim-Christian relations. This book is not about Muslim-Christian relations, and it did not set out to improve Muslim-Christian relations, and it was not shaped in such a way as to improve Muslim-Christian relations. That means the ecumenicist is the wrong kind of person to be vetting our chapter.

It look like the publisher is doing what Random House did about the Jewel of Medina. They send the manuscript to someone to vet in case of offence to Islam, which they would not care much about except that they fear that some of the offended will turn violent. What Kenan Malik calls the “internalisation of censorship” comes into action.

Inayat Bungawala has said that when he was a lad in Bradford protesting about Rushdie’s Satanic Verses he thought that books should be read by a board of clerics before they were published.   He has since recanted from that opinion.  Nowadays publishers don’t send the books to clerics but to people who can do some second guessing about offensiveness and the effects on community cohesion etc, and more crudely, whether they could suffer the same kind of response that murdered translators and distributors of The Satanic Verses and firebombed the publisher of The Jewel of Medina.

So books critical towards Islam will not be published.  Censorship by governments (Lady Chatterley, for instance) has been faced down in courts in this country.  We have censorship by our appalling libel laws.  We also have censorship by freelance censors with petrol bombs in their pockets.  The angry mini-cab driver becomes the publisher’s reader.

This will hid hardest not writers like Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, who view Islam from the outside, but those who write from within – the liberalisers, the reformers, the feminists, the novelists, the historians.  They will write and no-one will dare to publish them.

If you want to put some put pressure on Continuum to publish and damn all the offended, you could pre-order the book from Amazon. 

Update:-

This has been on Butterflies and Wheels and I’ve just read about it in Private Eye. 

No Muslim nor anyone else had said anything about the book.   However, Caroline Toomey of The Sunday Times called the publisher, Continuum, and told him that this book might cause offence. The publisher then called in the “ecumenical adviser” who said the book was okay.  Then Caroline Toomey spoke to rent-a-gob for reliable foaming, Anjem Choudary, asking for his response, and of course he said that that there could be “a huge backlash”.  This controversy was in fact created by The Sunday Times, which could then report it as a controversy.  All my fulminating about internalised censorship was off the mark in this instance.

Day by Day

One website that I greatly enjoy is Orwell Diaries, which posts George Orwell’s diary of 1939 entry by entry, if his lungs had permitted him to write one, on the same date in 2009.  1939 means only one thing in British history, and so we are waiting for the outbreak of war, while he observes the progress of his garden and the countryside, always taking delight in the physical and practical.

16 May 2009-05-23
London: Weather for the most part showery, with fine intervals. In Greenwich Park, chestnuts, pink chestnuts (but not Spanish ones) in flower, also lilac, hawthorn.

I check my own observations against his.  The horse chestnuts are well out and after work on Friday I cycled along the canal through a corridor of fresh greenness and white hawthorn and cow parsley.  In the woods along the cycle path to Balerno the wild garlic was out and the beeches in full leaf.  Honesty in pale lilac colours as well as white on the path by the Water of Leith, while the lilac is past its best. The weather has been similar, very heavy showers and some sunshine.

8 May 2009

First peas 1/2”- 1” tall. First beans 3”. Second beans not showing. Rhubarb growing but not good (? Protection necessary here for good crop; Mr A. [1] has all his in tubs). Strawberries in flower. In last three days main crop potatoes, onions, carrots, turnips, second peas & radishes sown.

Four nestlings in thrush’s nest in hedge.
In flower: wallflowers, tulips, pansies, arabis (full out & decorative), yellow alyssum, aubretia, forgetmenots° & a few narcissi. Roses not in bud. Gooseberries mainly taken by frost or birds.

Except for my rhubarb, which crops very early, his garden is doing better than mine, but he lived four hundred or so miles to the south, and would have had a warmer aspect than my northern one, since he had a cottage in the country, not a flat in town.  

I planted a vegetable called pea bean at the beginning of April and it still hasn’t shown.  Ditto courgettes on the same day. 

From experience I know the following can happen:-

1. I sow the leftover seed in the same rows, then find that the seeds I planted earlier then come up after all and cause competition and crowding.  I am not a ruthless Darwinian and find it hard to thin out and chuck away healthy plants.

2. I plant the left over seed in pots in my south-facing window, then end up with vigorous sprouting plants, and nowhere to put them, as the tardy plants will have sprung up..

3. I leave it, hoping they will germinate and only rocket, which self-seeds will come up, also a crop of weeds, which are already doing very well.
   

The Brooker Man

Charlie Brooker’s article on the BNP has received praise all over the net:-. 

He'd fought in the second world war, he told us. Our village had a memorial commemorating friends of his who had died. Many were relatives of ours. These villagers gave their lives fighting a regime that looked down on anyone "different", that tried to blame others for any problem they could find; a bullying, racist regime called "the Nazis". Millions of people had died thanks to their bigotry and prejudice. And he told us that anyone who picked on anyone else because they were "different' wasn't merely insulting the object of their derision, but insulting the headmaster himself, and his dead friends, and our dead relatives, the ones on the war memorial. And if he heard of anyone - anyone - using racist language again, they'd immediately get the slipper.

Corporal punishment was still alive and well, see. The slipper was his nuclear bomb.

It was the first time I was explicitly told that racism was unpleasant and it was a lesson served with a side order of patriot fries. Or rather, chips. Our headmaster had fought for his country, and for tolerance, all at once. That's what I understood it meant to be truly "British": to be polite, and civil and fair of mind. (And to occasionally wallop schoolkids with slippers, admittedly, but we'll overlook that, OK? We've moved on.)

I’m with him, that the best weapon to fight the racism of the BNP is enlightened patriotism.  Don’t let those bastards decide what is “British”.   Charlie gets the tone right – the humour, the hipness, and good for him.

He goes on:-

The other day, the BNP had a political broadcast on the box. I wasn't in my beloved homeland at the time, but I heard about it, via internet chuckles of derision. Fellow geeky types tweeting about the poor production values. I looked it up on YouTube. Sure enough, it was badly made. No surprise there. Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can't afford decent computers - these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile - but because anyone who's good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest. If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they'd have the greatest British designer working for them - Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they don't. They've got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours.

But there's more to the advert's failure than its hideous use of colour schemes. Every aspect of it is bad. The framing is bad. The sound is bad. The script is bad. For all their talk about representing the Great British Worker, when it comes to promotional material, the BNP can't even represent the most basic British craftsmanship.

The advert is bad, it is amateurish, but it’s clever.  These female councillors looking like your nice aunt and the friendly woman in the print room stumble out what they have been doing down at the grass roots.  Any voter could imagine approaching them and getting a helpful answer.  It looks “real” – the kind of video ordinary people take themselves on holiday. The party hasn’t wasted money on a slick presentation and it may be that some voters will see that as honesty and a change from the rich and distant politicians and their PR machines.

I’ve been going into remember the thirties mode of late.  In the Weimar Republic the anti-Nazis had the best minds and produced brilliant cabaret.  Mein Kampf is very badly written.  You know when a BNP supporter is on a thread because they can’t spell, use grammar or punctuate.  So what?  You don’t need much literacy to scribble a cross in a box.

Unsecret Seven

Norm has tagged me to:-

List 7 things I love
Tag 7 other people

This is an easy one so:-

List:-

1. Family & friends
2. Being at home
3. Cycling
4. Gardening
5. Reading, essays especially
6. Blogging
7. Playing music with other people

I don’t do “7” at the moment and miss it badly.

Tagged:-

Jim,  Bob,  Alec, Mod,  Brigada, Andrew,  Coatesy

I wonder if anyone’s job will be on the list of seven loveable things.  Lucky them, if it is.

Playing the System

Well, as manipulating the system is the fashion at Westminster now, I’ve come up with a great scam after the BNP takes power. 

Hope not Hate gives a handy list of what would happen if the BNP ruled Britain.

The BNP would kick out all those people who were not born in Britain. What if every other country in the world kicked out the Brits? A staggering 5.5 million people would be sent back here – far more than would leave our shores. This includes 800,000 from Spain, most of whom are pensioners.

I wasn’t born in Britain.  I’m looking with apprehension at my heaps of books, mostly got from the excellent second-hand local book shops, and wondering how I will ship them home.  Will there be room for them in the cattle truck?

However a chap in a thread over at Pickled Politics clarifies the situation:-

“The BNP would kick out all those people who were not born in Britain” - not true. The BNP would stop any further immigration, remove immigrants here illegally and offer generous cash payments to people who wish to return to their lands of ancestry. If “every other country in the world kicked out the Brits” that would be a problem for those countries because, unlike third world immigrants to the UK, our immigrants to other countries are an asset.

The “lands of my ancestry” are England, Scotland and Ireland.  I’ll be able to claim a “generous cash payment” to return to where my great grandparents came from, which on my father’s father’s side is  lowland Scotland, the place where I live now.

There are several hundred thousand Australians and New Zealanders living in the UK whose ancestors, often their parents or grandparents came from here.  Hey listen youse jokers, we can make a fast one.  Choice or not, eh?

You're a nationalist, it's not okay

A while ago I posted on the song Tomorrow Belongs to Me from the musical Cabaret.  It had come into the news after the death of Jorge Haider, whose acolytes used to sing it on country excursions.

So now when someone searches for Tomorrow Belongs to Me my post turns up in the Google list.  Other sites turn up as well, and this caught my eye:-

The German folk song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" that predates the nazi era was adapted and slightly altered for that movie. I have a German version of the song. Most know of the version made famous by the band Skrewdriver from his album "hail the new dawn". If you want the Cabaret version they do sell the original musical score. The song is about nature, optimism and faith.

From a piece of rhyming slang on Stormfront.  I’m not going to link to the exchange but there’s some debate about whether it is a German folk song or not – obviously the preference is that it should be so rather than it should be written by Ebb and Karder (American Jews) in the 1960’s, for Cabaret, a film which the pieces of rhyming slang of Stormfront hate. 

Another Stormfront ascribes the song to Mussolini’s fascists:-

Actually, as far as I can remember this song is Italian, originally 'Il domani appartiene a noi', which I think originated with the Italian troops fighting in the Alps in WW1, and then had its lyrics changed somewhat and was then used by Mussolini.

Excellent translation! In truth, I prefer the Italian lyrics to the English ones...the song is being cleansed...we are making it our own. Salve!

So white supremacists and nationalists can’t even make up decent songs for themselves and have to pretend they are “cleansing” other people’s songs?  That is so uncreative.

I had a look at some BNP songs on YouTube.  There was one, called Don’t Unpack Your [sic] Going Back

Someone in the comments thread points out:-

The lyrics betray a mindset of a teenager, the music is cringeworthy, and NOBODY I have ever come across that supports the BNP can spell !

You all love England so much that you don't learn your mother tongue ?

Someone else says:-

Why can nobody in the BNP write music? They're all just covers with new lyrics...

(I don’t recognise the song myself but I’ll take it that that commenter knows what s/he is talking  about).

There does seem to be a dearth of good BNP songs.  So here’s an offering for them, especially now they are trying to look like a nice normal patriotic party.  It is written in the tradition of setting lyrics to someone else’s music and it’s an easy three chord tune that everyone knows:-  

I’m a nationalist and I’m your man,
I love my mum and I love my gran
(He’s a nationalist and he’s our man
He loves his mum and he loves his gran!)

I win local elections
I’m not a fascist creep
I go to Council meetings
And there I fall asleep

(He wins local elections
He’s not a fascist creep
He goes to Council meetings
And there he falls asleep)

I’m a nationalist, I’m not a thug
I haven’t spent much time in jug
(He’s a nationalist, he’s not a thug
He hasn’t spent much time in jug)

I aim to look respectable
And not a violent cock
The last time when I wore a suit
Was standing in the dock

(He aims to look respectable etc)

I’m a nationalist, I’ll take no shite
I want this country pure and white
(He’s a nationalist, he’ll take no shite
He wants this country pure and white)

I wear a shirt with clean long sleeves
To hide Nazi tattoos
I wish I could kick Asians,
And blacks, and wogs and Jews.

(He wears a shirt etc)

 

What you find under the suit - ex Lincs BNP Organiser and Bodyguard to Nick Griffin Mick Holmes

If you’ve watched the Monty Python video imagine the mounties as deluded supporters listening with dawning concern and outrage and the young ringletted woman wailing, And I thought you weren’t a racist!

It’s all yours, guys.  Feel free to sing it.  Take it away. 

And remember:-

You’re a nationalist and you are thick
You make folk puke and you make folk sick.

Ask a stupid question

Outside bringing in the washing.  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, so the sheets dry very quickly, but then there’s a heavy shower and they get wet again.  From the Murrayfield Stadium's sound system I can hear Travis singing:-  “Why does it always rain on me?”

Well being fra Glesga may be one answer.

Beech and Bluebells

On Sunday an old friend and I went for a walk in Dalkeith Country Park to see the bluebells growing in the woods.  My friend was born in Britain but her parents emigrated to New Zealand when she was eleven.  We talked about the difference between the scenery of the two countries – how here it is man-made and of a human scale, how in New Zealand it is splendid but in an inhuman, alienating way.  In this planted beech wood we felt we belonged, in New Zealand bush you can feel you're an intruder.  The wooden houses look like they were parachuted in.  The light is harsh instead of soft, and the very ground is unstable and volcanic.  Another explosion of the sort that tore out a giant lake at Taupo may one day destroy half of the North Island.

 

  

Show of Hands

I had this conversation with an English friend, about how at Scottish dos they will play folk as well as pop and when you go to a bar the live entertainment will often be rocked up Scottish folk. People will know the words. Folk is not a specialist interest here and he said he wished it was the same for England.

So do Show of Hands:-

After the speeches, when the cake's been cut
The disco's over and the bar is shut
At christening, birthday, wedding or wake
What can we sing 'til the morning breaks

When the Indians, Asians, Afro-Celts
It's in their blood, below their belt
They're playing and dancing all night long
So what have they got right that we've got wrong?

Seed, bud, flower, fruit
They're never gonna grow without their roots