Thursday 28 February 2013

Christianity and the Yearning for Matriarchy

Here is the famous passage from ‘Men and Matriarchy’ in which Mary Malone first expounds the theory that Christianity is essentially a call for the return of Matriarchy.

The first patriarchal societies, like modern patriarchal structures were founded on servitude and violence, and came into existence around six thousand years ago in such places as Egypt and Sumer. A pyramid of  tyranny lorded it over the peasants, a hierarchy of priests provided the organization and the ideology.
But throughout the ancient world there were still many places where matriarchal egalitarian societies held sway, where the dehumanising obedience of patriarchy was an absurdity.
Violence created empires of patriarchal authority which came and went, but the matriarchal principle was never totally crushed.
The Roman Empire was a super empire. It was multi national, and controlled vast areas and huge populations. It was a military bureaucratic complex the like of which the world had never known.
Within the Roman Empire the gift economy of the matriarchy was pushed aside. Taxation and military occupation was the lot of the subject peoples of the Empire. To raise the taxes a money economy was encouraged and the principle of buy and sell (reward and punishment's twin) spread over the world.
Yet, somehow the matriarchal principle survived. In the cult of Artemis at Ephesus, the followers of the goddess didn’t merely consider themselves equal to men - they considered themselves superior.
The memory of the Amazons lived on in the cult of Artemis.
So where does Christianity belong in all this?
The early Christians were vehemently anti state. They had to be reminded by the apostles not to get drawn into conflict with the state, not to be defined by opposition, not to become their enemy.
Christians would not fight in the army. They would pay their taxes because money belonged to Caesar, not themselves. But they would not worship Caesar. They could not serve two masters. Christ was King, not the Emperor of Rome.
To each according to their need was the Christian motto. No exchange, no extortion, no taxation. Just keep on giving.
Christ’s teachings seem other worldly and unnatural to we modern people, used to the worship of the I, the economy of exchange, the polity of compulsion, but for those who heard Jesus in the flesh, He was simply recalling them to a better time, a time before the Fall, before patriarchal authority, the time of Matriarchy.  

Totalitarian England?

According to the Narrative we live in a free society, but as capitalism develops and all things are numbered and all actions become things and all people become Human Resources at the service of the Economy, more and more people are beginning to question just how free they are.
Initially they believe their own experiences to be unique, that the Narrative is right and that their experiences are an aberration of the system.. Indeed they may even think theirs is a problem of Perception and seek help in psychological drugs so they may become Normal once again.
But then they might accidentally talk to someone whose experiences also defy the Narrative.
And when two lunatics are together they are the Normal.
When we think of a totalitarian state we think of a state that uses torture chambers and secret police  and which maintains control through extreme violence.
However, that is to confuse the word authoritarian with the word totalitarian.
For instance, the Baathist regime in Syria is authoritarian. It is not free, but it is not totalitarian either. Before the current war Syria was a country where people were free to worship as they wished, to eat and drink what they wished, and I have heard that they paid no income tax. But if you got the wrong side of the regime you were in big, big, trouble.
England, on the other hand is not authoritarian. It is unlikely that the police will torture you, although they might stitch you up. And you are free to insult the government to your heart’s content.
However, England is a much more totalitarian country than Syria. Every aspect of life here is the government’s business.
Not only is sport funded by the government, but so is ‘culture’, your children are ‘educated’ by the government, what you drink and eat, what you do with your house, what you say, is all the business of Government.
Not only are your earnings monitored by the government through income tax, but every economic transaction is monitored too, through a sales tax.
From the moment you are born in a government hospital, to the moment you die in a government hospital, your business is the government’s business.
Regulation is the stuff of everyday life.

Tuesday 26 February 2013

A Fall In Recorded Crime

The Metropolitan Police sex crimes unit 'Sapphire' refused to take action over reported rapes. Tough cases make poor detection rates so women were encouraged to withdraw their allegations.
It must be difficult and distressing enough for rape victims to make a complaint in the first place. Yet the Met routinely trashed distraught women, made them out to be liars and recorded their shattering experience as ‘no crime’.
Only a few weeks ago the Office for National Statistics reported that the Police have been exaggerating the fall in crime by the simple expedient of not recording crime when it occurs.
It appears that the Police have been regularly dismissing crimes against the person, such as harassment and anti social behaviour. It seems violent crime is frequently ignored by our tick box happy police.
Indeed, I was told by Victim Support of a case in a nearby town where a taxi driver had been attacked and put in hospital by a customer. The Police refused to take action against the thug!
Too many Police Officers, maybe most of them, are more concerned with their own benefit than yours or mine.
Judging by the ONS survey of  40,000 households, over the past five years the police recorded 400,000 fewer crimes than were reported.
Your humble peasant can only report that his own experience bears this out.
It is with great reluctance that I contact the forces of Authority, or indeed any government official, but when some yobs menaced me a couple of years back, I decided to call the police. The alternative was to sort them out myself, or do nothing and get sorted out by them at a later date.
The sensible option seemed to be to let the police know what was going on.
The policeman I spoke to suggested that I might not want to make a complaint lest I ‘antagonize’ the thugs.
I pointed out to him that it was his job to make sure they did not antagonize me!
With great reluctance the Police did something, as little as they possibly could.
Clearly each new police inspector is under pressure to record a fall in crime.
What easier method is there than not recording crime at all?
The Police are acting not as public servants but as self servants.
Like in the town halls, the hospitals, the Revenues and Customs, the Social Services, the Schools, all areas of the Civil Service, there are millions of so called public servants who will serve you only if it suits them, and are quite happy to screw you if it is to their benefit.
And if you are put in physical danger, if you have to die to free up a bed, if you lose your money or your property, if your children are snatched, if they are not taught reading and writing and arithmetic, millions of public servants don’t care.
They tick the boxes, they get promotion, a pay rise and a pension and to hell with you and me.      

Monday 25 February 2013

Wandering Hands

There is a lot of talk in the press about inappropriate sexual behaviour, whether it be from professionals who care for youngsters, or Catholic priests or celebrities from a by-gone era.
When I hear that some of the alleged victims are claiming thousands of pounds in damages I am always a little sceptical. And when I hear, as in the case of Cardinal O’Brien, that these incidents took place thirty years ago I am even more sceptical. 
There are times when our body space is invaded, and women in particular have their space invaded by men.
Some men are ‘touchers.’ Mercifully, they are few and far between. There is one well known local figure I know who is a ‘toucher,’ and I’m amazed that people put up with it. How someone didn’t knock his teeth out years ago, I’ll never know.
But other cases are not so clear cut.
Many many years ago I knew a girl quite well.  She told me about her best friend, whose music teacher gave her a lift home.
According to the best friend, the music teacher ‘made a pass’ at her. He must have been about forty and she would have been over the age of consent, so there was nothing illegal in what he did. There was no suggestion that he was persistent, or forced his attentions on her.
Indeed, it may be that his action was misinterpreted.
It may have been spiced up by a little teenage imagination.
Whatever happened, no harm was done and the girls had a laugh about it.
Yet, what if she made a complaint now, 35 years later?
Well, yes, as her music teacher he should have behaved. But so? Presumably the girl made it clear that she was not interested.
Most sexual activity starts with some form of touching. This is not the same as being a ‘toucher’, patting women’s bums and such like.
I have some sympathy with the Catholic Cardinal. Being a priest must be hell, like being in prison.
So he made inappropriate advances to other priests! Who cares! There’s no suggestion that he persisted or forced his attentions on them. The advances were only inappropriate because those who received the advances did not want to reciprocate. 
If the allegations are true, I am sure Cardinal O’Brien has spoken to his Maker about this matter, and I am sure he has been forgiven.
Given that he was recently named Bigot of the Year by the tax funded Authority pressure group Stonewall due to his opposition to abortion, euthanasia, and the normalization of homosexuality, and given the time gone by since the alleged incidents, it would appear that these allegations, true or not, are part of a smear campaign to discredit the Cardinal.
Such things have been done before.

Sunday 24 February 2013

Power and Social Class

Most people see social class as a matter of rich and poor. The upper class are rich and the lower class is poor. This correlation between wealth and class is more apparent than real.
It is power that defines class.
The Queen is rich because she is Queen. She isn't Queen because she is rich.
The ruling class have wealth, and the wealth is a result of its power.
Nowadays we have a political class who rule us. Following them we have the totalitarian class of bureaucrats and managers with their rules and regulations and self serving morality. Finally there are the people like us, people who have no power over anybody.
Working class people are not defined by poverty. They may earn more than a teacher or lower manager, but they have no power, so they are still working class, while the teacher and the lower manager are middle class (or overseer class), because they control the expropriated power of other  people.
A person with petty power favours his own kind, people who know better than us. They talk the talk, read the same anti Semitic newspapers, worship their own reflection, think should and shouldn’t, preach their own prejudice as virtue. They support Progressive movements like New Labour and the Nazis and the Fascists and the Bolsheviks. They love the psychologist, the doctor, the teacher.
They like to punish.
The working class person is told what to do all their lives. A working class child is taught regimentation, conformity, passivity. And if he doesn’t fit in to the system he is disciplined, medicalized, destroyed. When he grows up he has a boss. He gets to know the authority of the lawyer, the policeman, the doctor. He turns on his television to hear the voice of the expert. He is brought up to live and to die in passivity, to know his place, to do as he is told, to doubt himself, to see himself as inadequate, ignorant, that his experiences have no value, that his music is popular, that his books are pulp, that culture, knowledge and God all belong to the powerful.
It is power, not wealth, that differentiates us. The ruling class are the robber barons of today; the overseer class are the collaborators, teacher types, police of various assortments who keep us in check, and the lower orders get by as best they can.    

Saturday 23 February 2013

David and Jonathan - Sundays with John Ball

David and Jonathan are a well know example of good friends.
Indeed, when Jonathan died, David said, ‘Greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.’
Such was the intensity of David’s love for Jonathan.
Some people like to claim that this love between men was homosexual, although there is no evidence of this. I can honestly say that this possibility never occurred to me until I read it one day a year or two back.
Homosexuals are two males who rub each others genitals together, sodomites, and mutual masturbators. Why anyone should want to do that is beyond me, and why David and Jonathan should have wanted to do this I do not know.
The proponents of the gay theory seem to think that a man’s relation with his wife is the  most intense of his life, and love is linear and that at its peak it gets all….oooh….genital! And indeed the sexual love between man and woman is a very close relationship. But there are other very close relations, loving relations between parents and children, for example, that have nothing to do with sex. Restraint in the use of genitals is not a sign of indifference.
In our childhood days many of us have ‘best friends.’ These best friends are nearly always of the same sex as us. We continue to have close relationships throughout our youth and into our adult life.
David Beckham, the footballer, has said that he only has four friends. What he means, of course, is not that he only has four friendly acquaintances, but there are four people who are not his wife, or his children , or his parents, but whose heart beats as his does, and whose death he would mourn like they were his own brother.
A non sexual friendship is often close and often intense, but happily relaxed due to its lack of physical passion.
But the Homosexualists seem to want to redefine friendship as well as marriage.
The state, by normalizing gay sex is undermining friendship. Children are indoctrinated with this sexualization of friendship in their so-called-schools.
It is part of the agenda of isolation, the atomisation of society. The Authority wishes us all to run on parallel lines that never meet, to be people who never look to the side, only upwards to the hierarchy.
The homosexualist agenda, which is an agenda of state-subsidised pro- bureaucracy pressure groups, is part of the policy of atomisation, part of the war on autonomous society.
By sexualizing all friendships, by presenting fellow human beings as commodities, to be used and consumed and then thrown in the dustbin of tired experiences, by indoctrinating children with genital imperialism, by telling the children that love is not a gift, but a deal, the totalitarian bureaucracy seeks to isolate us all.
To confuse children by equating the beauty of friendship with the selfishness of sexual desire is wicked and perverse

Friday 22 February 2013

Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich was a crazy dude with too much spunk on the brain. My old lady, Revoltina, thinks he was a dirty old man. All the same, he was not totally wrong in believing that love and intimacy are important to mental health.
Here are three pithy quotes:

‘In the strictly Marxist sense, there is not even in Soviet Russia a state socialism but a state capitalism. According to Marx, the social condition “capitalism” does not consist in the existence of individual capitalists, but in the existence of the specific “capitalist mode of production”, that is, in the production of exchange values instead of use values, in wage work of the masses and in the production of surplus value, which is appropriated by the state or the private owners, and not by the society of working people. In this strictly Marxist sense, the capitalistic system continues to exist in Russia. And it will continue to exist as long as the masses of people continue to lack responsibility and to crave authority.’

‘Under the influence of politicians, masses of people tend to ascribe the responsibility for wars to those who wield power at any given time……The responsibility for war falls solely upon the shoulders of these same masses of people, for they have the necessary means to avert war in their own hands. In part by their apathy, in part by their passivity, and in part actively, these masses of people make possible the catastrophes under which they themselves suffer more than anybody else. To stress this guilt on the part of masses of people, to hold them solely responsible, means to take them seriously.’

‘Only the liberation for the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.’

Thursday 21 February 2013

Aiding and Abetting War

David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister, has declared that more of the Aid budget needs to be siphoned off to provide ‘security’ in foreign parts.
Apparently there already is a ‘conflict pool’ of monies donated by the Department of International Development, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of War.
This ‘conflict pool’ has already been used to support our Al Qaeda allies in Libya and Syria in their aim to trash those countries, murder thousands of people and enable Western and Gulf government/private corporations walk away with some very good deals indeed.
Now we have Mali and, even with War Office resources stretched, it is still very important that gold and uranium is protected to the best humanitarian standards.
It will certainly encourage the Algerians, whose oil company, Sonatrach, is the largest company on the African continent. They will be hoping that humanitarian intervention is not required to encourage them to give away Algerian resources at knock down prices, as happened in Iraq and Libya.
I am glad that David Cameron has come clean.
I realize that government Aid and the charity industry do some good work in places where people are poor and unhealthy.
All the same it is clear that there has always been a down side to the Aid industry.
There is the business of Tied Aid, where projects have the not-so-side effect of helping foreign business. A lot of Chinese Aid appears to be of this sort.
But Aid has often found its way into the pockets of tyrants, ‘our’ tyrants protecting ‘our’ business.
Much Aid money, and charity money too, is only loosely accounted for.
The African continent is awash with corruption.
Aid fuels corruption. Siphoning off Aid is one of the most profitable businesses in town.
For instance, until last year the  Kagame regime in Rwanda was receiving £21million a year for 'general budget support'. One can only guess what that means or where the money went.
The energy and guile of Africans, which could be used in creating wealth, is siphoned off too.
Like in the UK, working the system pays the highest dividends.
David Cameron regards the clothing and provisioning soldiers a legitimate use of the development Aid budget.
Arming the soldiers is only a step away.
But at least we must thank Dave for his frankness

Wednesday 20 February 2013

Scottish Independence

Aye, the damned English will gain from the European Union budget cuts, while the poor bloody Scots will lose out! So the Scottish Nationalists, those pedlars of resentment and hate, would have us believe.
Nobody knows for sure if Scotland would be richer if it were separated from other British countries or richer if it remained a part of the United Kingdom.
From my own point of view, I would be glad to see the break up of the United Kingdom if it led to the end of military adventures and bombs of shock and awe.
It seems sensible for the different areas of the United Kingdom to decouple from both London and the European Union, and to trade with the world instead. Membership of the European Union centres the entire British isles on the South East, an area which has long historical links to Northern France, the Low Countries and Germany. 
Unfortunately, Newcastle,  Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, Leeds and so on have become provincial backwaters, the moribund hinterland of Great London.
Though there are very good reasons to break up the United Kingdom, it would be sad to see the frontier guards at Gretna Green. After all, my distant ancestors in Yorkshire were the same people as the ancestors of the people of Edinburgh, a city that has always been English speaking.
The Scots, like most modern nations, are a created people, a variety of tribes and cultures that happen to live under the same government. In the fourteenth century there was a larger split between the Gaelic Highlanders and the English speaking Lowlanders than between the Lowlanders and the northern English.
And in modern times there was a larger split still between the Protestant Scots and the Catholic Scots, who were often seen as intruders, bringing their Catholic culture from Ireland.
Indeed, if anything cemented the United Kingdom together over the three centuries of Union it was the common Protestant heritage, with its heavy low church emphasis both in Scotland and in the manufacturing parts of England and Ireland.
But the Protestant culture that distinguished us from the Europe of Catholic despots is all but destroyed.
The glue that stuck us together has gone forever.
In its place we have been left with nothing. If we have no gods, we have no culture to call our own.
Indeed, England and Scotland are more similar than ever before, but it isn’t a shared culture that keeps us together, but an absence of culture that lets us fall apart.
Scottish nationalism is the petty spiteful ideology of  a managerial class that is terrified by its own uniformity. It is a negative self pitying nationalism, an absence of pride.
In the desert of uniformity they look for a mirage of identity and yearn for their own military bureaucratic complex.
People who have lost the identity that work or religion or region once gave them have become one homogeneous blob. They can only identify themselves as ‘not English’, the Other that they hate.
They yearn for a Big Mother of their own, the tired response of a dying culture

Tuesday 19 February 2013

The Descent to Man - by Mary Malone

The natural economy of womankind is the gift economy. It is natural to give the fruits of your activity. To give is an affirmation of life.
The women's economy is the economy of trust, not fear.
Although rapidly declining, there are still many examples of the gift economy in everyday life, despite the best efforts of patriarchy to control, quantify, monitor, regulate, and tax the gift economy.
It is the exchange of gifts that is the cement of social life, gifts of time, effort and goods. So when every action is a deal rather than a gift, society descends into a collection of warring individuals.
The most obvious example of the gift economy is traditional women’s work. This is the most important work of all.
Society can exist in large measure without men. They can go and kill themselves in wars. But it cannot do without women, and the work they do in the home, in the garden, the kitchen and the nursery, sewing, mending, growing, nurturing, tending to the sick and the old.
In recent decades women’s work has been absorbed into the patriarchal economy. Some may claim that women have been liberated by this expropriation of their power, freed from  tiring and thankless giving. This is no doubt true, but women have lost their independence. Instead of being mistresses of their domain, they now work for the boss.
Instead of men working for women, as is right and proper, women work for men.  
Women have lost their purpose.
They have descended to the level of men.
Until recently, women have been largely protected from the unclean world of reward and punishment, of buy and sell, of the humiliation of working under orders.
But not now.
Even our young are taken from us. Once we were free to look after our young, by feeding them, clothing them, giving them vast amounts of our time and effort.
But increasingly childcare is a matter for professionals, by definition people without love, people who are not ‘amateurs’,(that is ‘lovers’),  but collaborators with the patriarchy, quislings who presume to educate our children in so called schools, who denigrate Woman and exalt the male power structure.
These days our children belong to the patriarchy first, and to us as an afterthought, on sufferance.
Through school and a bombardment of propaganda our girls are taught to despise themselves and  control is maintained, exchange is advanced, expropriated power is enhanced, the gift economy is destroyed, our gladness is gone and the whole meaning of being a woman is lost.      

Monday 18 February 2013

More Docking

Down at the alehouse my friend Dick has been subjected to a lot of criticism since his post on the subject of gay marriage, some of it in jest, some a little more serious.
He would like me to point out that he is neither homophobic, nor sexist, nor thick, but extremely broad minded, the sort of person the modern political establishment would call a ‘bigot’.
Indeed he would like me to tell you that he is very cultured!!!!
Apparently, on the sly he is a fan of Arabic poetry. One of his favourite Arab poets is a lady from Kuwait called Souad al-Sabah. One of her books of poetry is called ‘In the beginning was the Female’.
This is one of her poems from a different collection. Here it is.


                         Free Harbour  

Many ships have asked for sanctuary
In the harbour of my eyes
I refused asylum to all of them
Your ships alone
Have the right to take refuge
In my territorial waters
Your ships alone
Have the right to sail in my blood
Without prior permission

Sunday 17 February 2013

The Phony Revolution

Most of us think that working class movements are socialist and that socialism means the state direction of the economy.
However, early working class movements were not so in love with the state. They saw private conglomerations of wealth and state power as two heads belonging to the same monster. Landlords and government figures were often interchangeable.
The defining characteristic of the working class and the peasantry is powerlessness. Only in very limited spheres, perhaps in their families or their immediate localities can most people exercise the remnants of natural authority. Otherwise a working person is powerless throughout their lives.
The overseer class and the ruling class possess the expropriated authority of the working class and the peasantry, like the officer class possesses the expropriated power of the poor bloody infantry.
In the late nineteenth century socialism split. Marxists decided that somehow the ‘working class’ would take over the state, that somehow the oppressed could be the oppressor and the oppressed  at one and the same time.
Of course, many did not buy this line.
Lenin and his gang went further, deciding that, since the working class themselves were too primitive and childlike to be responsible for their own actions, a ‘vanguard’ would have to take over the state for them. If ordinary folk showed any signs of independence they were to be slapped down, or shot.
Of course, the ‘Vanguard’ were members of the bureaucratic overseer class. They weren’t the powerless workers at all. They were part of the class that had expropriated the power of the workers.
These phonies claimed they had acquired working class consciousness!
Yes, they were more working class than the working class itself, so they took upon themselves the right to lead the working class to the promised land.
But what Lenin really brought about was a Bureaucratic Revolution where the People Who Know Better Than Us extended their control into every aspect of our lives.
The bureaucrats are still at it today. They expand their business at every opportunity, stealing our power whenever they may.
The bureaucrats claim to be for the people, but every bit of natural authority that an ordinary person possesses, as a parent, as a spouse, as a son or a daughter, as a prominent figure in a club or church, as a tradesman, as a skilled worker, is under attack from the bureaucrats who wish to monitor, to regulate, to take control of every aspect of our lives.
In that way ‘the economy’ grows and the centralization of expropriated power marches onwards.

Saturday 16 February 2013

Atheism and the Pursuit of Happiness - Sundays with John Ball

A Christian friend once said to me, concerning a mutual friend who had converted to a different religion, ‘the trouble is, he sees nothing beyond himself.’
In other words his religion was focused on himself . He was trapped within the prison of his self.
Self-centredness is a malady of the atomised anti-society of modern England. In a land where the necessities of life are bought and sold, or applied for from the bureaucracy, selfishness is inevitable.
Back in the fourteenth century the whole idea of self sufficiency and ‘independence’ was an absurdity. If we did not each give from our strength we would all die.
Although our friend professed a religion, Buddhism in this case, he was to all purposes an atheist, that is, an idolater of himself.
Like many other people, what concerned him was his happiness.
His own happiness was the project of that great commodity, ‘My Life’.
There are many people of many religions who are concerned about their happiness, whether in this life or the next. This is not an unreasonable concern considering the wretched trials that many people endure.  
But if you look only for your happiness you end up trapped in yourself, not a very nice place to be.
Everything revolves around you like the sun revolves around the earth.
Modern moralistic versions of the great monotheistic religions tend towards atheism. They encourage self examination and introspection, the aim of which is not to discover where they have strayed from the path of Righteousness, but where they have strayed from the path of Happiness .
When Jesus fulfilled the Law on our behalf he lifted from our shoulders the dead weight of condemnation, and with His resurrection He lifted us up to the heavens to look at God, not at ourselves.
By looking for happiness, all too often we fall into the jaws of hell.
We make ourselves the measure of all things.
Paradoxically happiness can only be achieved by forgetting about happiness, by seeking Who is beyond ourselves.

Friday 15 February 2013

Christian Aid and Anti-Semitism

After the horrors of the Second World War you would have thought we would never experience anti-Semitism again, much less imagine that it would become mainstream.
Now and again in Britain people blame the ‘Jews’. Most likely they will not be so crude. They will blame the ‘Zionists’ or the ‘Israelis’
Many, if not most United Kingdom churches support Christian Aid. These modern day mainstream churches are frequented largely by the bureaucratic classes. Many church members are people who ‘care’ and they are paid for caring.

If you type ‘Christian Aid Middle East’ into your search engine you will get a page that has twelve headings. Eleven of these twelve headings concern Israel and the Palestinians.
This is eleven out of twelve.
Yes, eleven out of twelve.
So we can forget about the disappearing women of Arabia, and the persecution of Gays in every country in the region except Israel.
We can forget the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from sanctions, bombing and invasion (our sanctions, our bombs, our invasion).
Yes, we can forget about our crimes.
We can forget about Christians being driven out of Iraq, we can forget about Christians being murdered and forced out of Syria.
We can even forget about the disappearing Christians of Bethlehem.
We can forget about the crimes committed by our allies, the Islamo-Fascists.
We can forget about the crimes committed by ourselves.
Instead, we can hate the Jews.

Next door to Israel is a country called Egypt. There are several million Christians in Egypt, many of whom feel under threat from the new breed of Islamo-Fascism. Egypt is a country that is on the point of economic meltdown.
Unlike this country, that does not mean cuts in services. It means rationing, malnutrition, even starvation.
There is plenty of charitable work for Christian Aid to do if it so wishes.
Instead it prefers to hate.  

Thursday 14 February 2013

Inheritance Tax

The United Kingdom government has decided to freeze the limit for Inheritance Tax over the next few years. Taking inflation into account, the limit has effectively been lowered, bringing many working people who are not especially rich into the scheme.
The excuse for this measure is that it will help pay for state provision of care for the elderly.
Once again, money is taken out of ordinary people’s hands and placed in the power of the bureaucracy.
Once again we are weakened, and they are strengthened.
Instead of looking after ourselves we are robbed and then, when impoverished, invited to apply for state assistance.
The Inheritance Tax is an attack on society. It is an attack on the remains of the gift economy and an attack on the family.
All peasants work not just for ourselves, but for our children too. In a family, work is a round of rights and obligations, and our greatest joy is to nurture future generations.
But the bureaucrats want to destroy our peasant self sufficiency.
They want to destroy the link between the generations.
Already, our children are taken from us and indoctrinated in their so called ‘schools’.
Now they want to steal the material gifts of one generation to another. They want our deaths to be final, that nothing of our sweat and toil can be passed on. They want our children to be left orphans, with no link to their families or their ancestors.
The bureaucratic vision is a few years of senseless consumption, and then endless oblivion.
But to be human is to want to live on in our children, in our children’s children, and failing that, in our nieces and nephews and our friends’ children.
To give is to live, and we want to give to our children.   
But the bureaucrats do not want us to have dealings with family, friends or neighbours.
They want us to be dependent on Authority.
Wealth and independence is sucked out of society to feed the cancer of the state.
The Inheritance Tax has nothing to do with government finances, social care, or indeed, ‘fairness’.
It is an attack on each person by the state and its worshippers, whose only aim is to isolate and control.

Wednesday 13 February 2013

Daisy Sobs

It'sValentine’s Day!
From The Great Gatsby; one of the great love scenes.

‘After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.
Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.
"I've got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall."
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher-shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such-such beautiful shirts before."

Tuesday 12 February 2013

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent.
Metaphorically, at least, we cover ourselves with the ashes of mourning.
For forty days we can happily indulge in introspection, retrospection, regret, and repentance. We can purge ourselves of our sin, and turn our faces to God.
In the wasteland of late winter there is nothing better than a good bit of contemplation.
After all, there isn’t much else to do till Spring comes around.
But here in Post Society England, there is no fasting, and no feasting either, just all year round gluttony.
It is wasteland all year round.
There are no festivals, nothing that strikes at the heart of the ordinary person’s life, just arbitrary Annual Regulated Fun Days.
There is no rhythm to a regulated and regimented existence.
Even the day of rest has been abolished.
Every day is equal.
In a world of no meaning all that is left is appetite.
Moses spent forty days and forty nights with God, but when he came down the mountain he found the Hebrews worshipping the Golden Calf.
The people had given themselves over to the senseless hedonism of slavery, the irresponsibility of servitude, the animalism of self worship, the freedom of crime, the indulgence of self righteousness.  

Monday 11 February 2013

Shrove Tuesday

As winter nears its end and the supply of food that we have laid in for the cold barren months is running low, we peasants make a virtue out of necessity, by fasting and praying in the cold hungry months to come.
Summer is the time of work and there hasn’t been much to do in the winter months, with the short days and the cold and the rain, the snow and the ice. There has been precious little to do except laze around by the fire, drinking ale, telling tales, and chewing hemp.
So Lent, which starts tomorrow, on Ash Wednesday, is a time of cleansing, both physical and spiritual, a preparation for the full blooded living we engage in between Easter and Martinmas.
Nowadays, in Post-Society England, Shrove Tuesday is more commonly known as Pancake Day, a minor Annual Regulated Fun Day.
But in my day, back in the fourteenth century, we would have a last binge of winter gluttony, before confessing our sins to the local priest (if he wasn’t sleeping it off somewhere) who would then absolve us and we would be all set for Lent.
We would turn our minds to our own sins, but also to the sins of our society. So we would repent of our own anger and lust and greed, but we would also repent of crime that is done in our name.
Unfortunately, here in the twentieth first century, there is little concept of sin.
The nearest approximation is the idea of fairness.
Unless everything is equal, unless the mountains and the valleys are flattened, then it is unfair.
You are not sinners, you are the victims of unfairness.
There is no need to repent of being unfair.
It is always the Other who is unfair.

Sunday 10 February 2013

Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves


This an excerpt from an Oscar Wilde poem; it is used extensively in Fassbinder’s marvellous film Querelle,  based on the novel by Jean Genet.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
by each let this be heard,
some do it with a bitter look,
some with a flattering word,
the coward does it with a kiss,
the brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
and some when they are old;
some strangle with the hands of lust,
some with the hands of gold:
the kindest use a knife, because
the dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too long,
some sell, and others buy;
some do the deed with many tears,
and some without a sigh:
for each man kills the thing he loves,

A little while ago I read a commentator who stated that the Germans killed the Jews because they loved them! Because the Jews had a covenant with the Living God, and they, the Germans, were moribund, the Germans hated, yet loved and envied the Jews at the same time. They sensed what they had lost and what the Jews still had.
Germany, in the later nineteenth century and the early twentieth century was the most advanced and Progressive state in Europe.
The modern education system originated in Germany. The modern welfare state originated in Germany. The military bureaucratic complex had progressed further in Germany than anywhere else.
The hierarchical Fuhrerprinzip, so beloved of the bureaucracy, had become the receptacle of the love and emotion of the obedient classes.
Knowing that they had traded their freedom for slavery, they loathed themselves, and they hated those who remained free.

Saturday 9 February 2013

Men and the Church - Sundays with John Ball

Look around any church or chapel these days and you will see more women than men.
Why is modern Christianity so feminine?
To many people, Christianity appears to be soft and girly rather than virile and vigorous.
No doubt there are many reasons for this phenomenon, but here are a couple of suggestions.

Christianity is about giving, and the gift economy is fundamental to women’s lives. A woman usually cares for her family, the young and the old, her husband, her home, in her free time and without pay. A large amount of a woman’s self identity comes from this giving and her success in doing so, even in these liberated days of begrudged toil.
On the other hand men do the dirty work, the work of reward and punishment, of buy and sell, of bargaining and expropriated power, of hierarchy, obedience and denial. To give freely in such a competitive environment is seen as weakness, as foolishness.

Secondly, not so long ago a man’s work was valued. These days it is not.
Nowadays when English Christians talk about working for God they usually mean going off to help foreigners or working for the institutional church.
But not so long ago a man who worked hard for his family was regarded as a good man. He didn’t have to cycle round Timbuktu to raise money for some so called charity.
But these days his hard work is often regarded as selfish egotism. It is assumed that he must be working to his own greater glory, that he must be oppressing some poor woman and preventing her from taking her rightful place in the world of regimented drudgery, that he is a bully and a tyrant, treating his wife as no better than a skivvy, some kind of a cheap servant.
For behaving like a good Christian man, he is damned by society, or at least by the state. A good man is a public enemy and his work is counted as nought.
And saddest of all, many churches, because they are dominated by the bureaucratic class, also scorn the work of men.
When a man gives his sweat, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, giving his heart and his love to provide for his family, does he too not live as a Christian, does he too not do work that is pleasing to God?

Friday 8 February 2013

Guy Debord quotes

One of the most remarkable features of the modern age is how even our dreams are passively received. Even our thoughts are colonised. Our private experiences are just one more space to be invaded, one more commodity to be exchanged, bought, sold and passively consumed.

'In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of 'spectacles'. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.'

'Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non living.'

'The spectacle is not a collection of images: it is a social relation between people mediated by images.'

In all its particular manifestations - news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment, - the spectacle represents the dominant model of life.

'In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.'

(The spectacle) is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity.

The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already subjugated them. The first stage of the economy's domination of social life  brought about the evident degradation of being into having - human fulfilment was no longer equated with what one was, but what one possessed.

Thursday 7 February 2013

Co-opted

The saddest aspect of the whole Gay Marriage malarky is the death of a once radical movement. In the old days the word 'straight' meant boring, conformist, moralist, establishment loving, inhibited, and 'gay' was meant to be joyous, unrestrained, amoral.
But now the Gay movement has been co-opted into the power structure it once sought to overthrow.
Gone are the gay orgies, the cruising, the flamboyancy, the challenge, the walk on the wild side, the defiance of free love.
Now, the word 'gay' is used to mean crass, shabby, bogus, kitsch, cheap.
Gone too is the political lesbianism of the1980s, whose participants refused to engage in relationships with men on the terms laid down by patriarchy.
In those days being gay was a lifestyle choice, not a matter of dull biological imperative. Being gay meant choosing freedom.
Now homosexuals just want acknowledgement of their place in the rainbow of victims. They don't want people to be horrid to them. They want to be loved by Big Mother.
They are weary.
They want to be normal, poor loves!

Wednesday 6 February 2013

The Centralization of Violence

Mary Malone, the well known political, social and religious theorist has kindly agreed to write an occasional guest post for your humble peasant. Here is an excerpt from her book ‘Men and Matriarchy.’

“One of the consequences of the rise of  patriarchal society is the centralization of power by Authority, through the hierarchical distribution of resources, achieved mainly by the invention of property rights and the introduction of a money economy through taxation, which is used to pay for armies of violent men under central control.
Thus we find that the most advanced partiarchal states are also the most violent, possessing weapons so extreme they can destroy the face of the earth.
In less advanced societies, in terms of capitalist development and capital accumulation, violence is yet to be centralized to such an extent. And so, for instance, in the relatively less developed countries of the Middle East violence is often carried out by individuals or families or tribes without the sanction of the state. As long as matters don’t get out of hand the state does not intervene.
In the advanced West violence has been increasingly centralized over many centuries. Any perceived injustice must be reported to the Authority. Any autonomous violence, carried out without state sanction is strictly prohibited.
Violence is garnered by the state and harnessed to inflict damage on dissidents and foreign states. If the violence is not used by the state, violence and power may return to the individual.
Thus it is true to state that war is the health of the state, and that every government’s true enemy is its own people.
The consequences for the individual in an advanced patriarchal society are psychological dysfunction and passivity.
A noticeable result of this passivity is that the more advanced capitalist societies suffer from a falling birth rate and a catastrophically low sperm count amongst their male population.”

Tuesday 5 February 2013

The Doctrine of Palestinian Exceptionalism

Some political problems, those where two tribes share the same land, appear intractable. One such problem is Northern Ireland. Another such case is Israel, a country the size of Wales, the butt of the venom of the bureaucratic class.
One unusual aspect in this case is the artificial nature of the two tribes. The so called Palestinian people are South Syrian Arabs and the Israeli people are a nation created out of a religion.
The Palestinians claim to be refugees. There are many millions of refugees in this world. Tuaregs are escaping Mali right now. Twelve million Germans were ethnically cleansed after the Second World War. Several million white Africans were ethnically cleansed in the 1960s and 1970s. The Turkish governments of the twentieth century expelled the Christian Greeks and Armenians.
Many Lebanese and Jordanian and yes, Palestinian Christians, who have been pressured to move on, now live in the Americas or Australia.
But the Moslem Palestinian Arabs are an exception. The governments of the region will not give them or their descendents proper citizenship rights. The UN gives them hereditary refugee status, unique in the entire world.
You can be a Palestinian refugee in a way you can’t be any other refugee. You can be born a refugee, live your entire life as a refugee and die a refugee from a land you have never been to, just because the racist governments of Europe and the Middle East want to create a shadow population for Israel, a replacement population for when the second Holocaust comes, the second Holocaust they are preparing.
The political establishment discards the truth. Secular and religious moralists unite in anti-Semitic lies. They ignore the expulsion of the Jews from every country of the Middle East. Where are the Jews of Baghdad? A century ago half the population of Baghdad was Jewish. Where are the Sephardim of Turkey, who were invited there when the Catholic Kings expelled the Spanish Jews? Where are the Jews of Yemen, who lived there since the time of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba? Where are the Jews of Iran, who lived there since the time of Esther? Where are the Jews of Alexandria, the Jews of Libya?
What about their right of return?
Israel isn’t Palestine, it isn’t even a homeland for the Jews. It is a ghetto, ever vigilant, waiting for the next pogrom.
The state, the hierarchy, the bureaucracy is turning on them again. The Jews are the ultimate scapegoat. Those who are slaves to the military bureaucratic complex can only envy them, the ones who stand apart, those who have their own society, their own values beyond the blind obedience of the undead. 
In this crisis of the welfare warfare state we can only expect more and more anti- Semitism, from the official press, from the servile politicians, from the half dead hierarchs.
The voices of hate and blame and self pity grow ever more strident, a mirror of their own self loathing.

Monday 4 February 2013

Docking

I am reluctant to discuss the issue of gay marriage for fear of offending people over a matter which does not excite me over much.
However my old friend Dick has begged me to allow him to say a few words.
I have known Dick for many years. When we were young we spent a lot of time in each company supping ale, and when not drinking, we ploughed the fields and scattered our good seed on the land.
Dick lists his hobbies as beer and women! His favourite band is the Macc Lads.

‘It’s hard to believe there are guys out there that don’t like shagging women. But there really are some who are like that! I even know a bloke over near Buxton who has a meaningful relationship with a sheep.
You see, to me its all about docking. One person has a boat and the other person has a harbour.
The guy with the boat needs to park his boat sometimes, for rest and repairs. He likes to wander and roam the oceans, and he likes to give the girl with the harbour the things he has come across. That is his purpose.
The girl with the harbour likes the guy to park his boat and to receive his gifts. She likes to repair his boat. While he is in dock they can make some new boats.
But a harbour without a boat? Or two harbours and no boats? It doesn’t make sense.
A boat without a harbour is sad. Two boats without a harbour is very sad.
You can have a wedding between two harbours, or a wedding between  two boats, but you can’t ever have a marriage between two harbours or between two boats.
It’s the docking that makes a marriage.
No docking means no marriage.’

RP says:  Thank you Dick for enlightening us with your wisdom.

Sunday 3 February 2013

Rosalia de Castro - Into the Tomb

RP says: after yesterday’s fiery rant from Mr. Ball here is a sombre verse from Rosalia, loosely translated by your humble peasant.
Rosalia is eulogising an English soldier who died in battle against the French on Galician soil.



Into the Silent Tomb.    

Cuan lonxe, canto, das escuras niebras,
Dos verdes pinos, das ferventas olas
Que on nacer viron! …..dos paternos lares
Do ceo da patria que o alumou mimoso
Dos sitios, ai! Do seu querer, !que lexos!
Viu a caer, baixo enemigo golpe
Pra nunca mais levantar, coitado!
Morrer asin en estranxeiras plaias,
Morrer tan moxo, abandona-la vida
Non farto ainda de vivir e ansiando
Gustar da  froita que coidado houbera!
I en vez de ponlas do loureiro altivo
Que do heroe a testa varonil coroan
Baixar a tomba silenciosa e muda!



How far, far away from the dark smothering fogs,
Far from the green pine trees and the wild foaming waves,
That witnessed his birth!….far away from his father’s hearth,
Far from England’s grey sky, that cradled him with its gentle light,
To come here to fall beneath the foe’s merciless blow,
Never to rise up again, poor fallen hero!
To die like that, on our foreign shore,
To die so young, leaving behind his life,
Not him, worn and weary; still eager
To taste the fruit he would have husbanded,
And instead of placing upon him the victor’s laurel wreath,
That proudly crowns the hero’s manly brow,
He is lowered into the silent speechless tomb.

Saturday 2 February 2013

The Degenerate - Sundays with John Ball

The gift economy is the economy of the healthy and the strong, those who donate their power from their vitality and love.
We are told that the soldier is strong, the armed thug is the king of this world, that bureaucratic gangs are the rulers of the earth, with their quenchless thirst for the power of the healthy. 
But these heroes of the take economy are the sick and the unhealthy of the earth, and their aim is to endlessly expand their Reign of the Death.
The man and the woman of violence acts from weakness.
The truly strong, the giving people, they already inherit the earth.
The bureaucrats, the thugs in uniform, those without faith come to plague the giving people.
They come with their regulations and their rights and their numbering and their expropriations, devils in human form, faithless and depraved.
They come to enslave the giving people, to tax them and chain them, to take away their access to God’s earth, to make them landless, to turn the giving people into beggars and wage slaves.
These strangers to God, they live on the ladder of hierarchy, strangers to their brothers and sisters who live in peace in the Garden.
There is plenty for everyone, but they must take more and more.
They think they are above us, because they steal our power.
But however much they take they will have nothing.
On their ladder, looking down on us to spit on us, looking up and licking the arse above them, they take it all. Yet they have nothing.
They have no love, no give.
They only know reward and punishment, they only know slavery.
Secretly, they envy us. They hate us because we are what they can never be, free!
We, the peasants, the common people, how they hate us! How they hate the Jews and the Gypsies too, those who step outside of their control, people who live in their own societies, the ones who have non authorized values.
These hierarchs, these slaves, these degenerates, with their ought and ought not, with their authorized thought, with their race, class and gender prejudices, reading their anti-Semitic (anti Zionist ?) newspapers for their five minutes hate, they look in the mirror to see their god. Their resentment is their religion, their spite is their morality, their whole day a toil of exchange, reward and punishment, a snivelling, grovelling joyless half-dead hierarchical day without love and giving.
Never envy the bureaucrat, never aspire to be an overseer, never wish to be degenerate,

Friday 1 February 2013

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine was an Englishman who emigrated to America a couple of years or so before the Declaration of American Independence. His pamphlet ‘Common Sense’ set out the ideology of the American Revolution, for it was a revolution, not simply a war of independence. Europe, and the Americas, which were ruled from Europe, were ruled by tyrants, so called benevolent despots, those who know better than us.
The people of the Thirteen Colonies decided that there would be no taxation without representation, that they needed no king and no bishop to watch over them.

Here are a few quotes from Thomas Paine.

“That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord and cultivate prejudices between nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.”

“Government, like dress, is a badge of lost innocence.”

“….taxes are not raised to carry on wars, but that wars are raised to carry on taxes.”

“We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretences for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute.”

“Society, in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”

“That government is best which governs least.”