On Saturday it was Bonfire Night in Blighty. Yes, that spectacularly English version of the traditional festival at the onset of winter. While the rest of the world has Samhain, Hallowe’en, the Day of the Dead and others, the English celebrate a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament, otherwise known as the … Continue reading A Bonfire of English Vanities
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I was reminded that it was the Day of the Dead by that delight, Google Calendar. There is something deeply disturbing about social media; the dead live on through it. It turns out that the dead never really die nowadays; they live on in virtual reality, their pictures and their words floating forever in cyberspace. … Continue reading Day of the Dead: A time to remember
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When I was a child, madness was the most terrifying affliction I could imagine. The idea that I might not be able to control my own life was bad enough. But to think that I might be controlling it, yet in ways that my conscious mind would never allow, was enough to give me nightmares. … Continue reading Irrational Unknown: Fear of Madness
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Just to go over some ground regarding the thorny subject of non-trans autogynephilia again, (AGP) I thought I’d illustrate it with this charming chappy. Let me introduce Dave Muscato. As you can see, Dave is a man, and a dapper one at that. But Dave wants us all to believe he is a woman and … Continue reading Dave Muscato: a non-trans autogynephile
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Autogynephilia is the primary stimulus for all non-homosexual male-to-female transsexualism. The original Blanchard definition was ‘a man’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman.’ Others have defined it as, ‘love of oneself as a woman’. But not all men with autogynephilia present as women. They exhibit non-trans … Continue reading Non-trans autogynephilia- a vital clue.
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I have begun wearing kilts again. I used to do this years ago but, erm, passage of time rendered them, uh, too small. Alack, the Fleming waistline now oscillates between 36 and 40 and those distant days of 32waist/32leg are long since departed. However, last year I bought a few more and now I wear … Continue reading The English Don’t Wear Kilts
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Well, it’s been a fucker of a week, folks. I split up with my girlfriend last weekend. That train had already signalled its impending departure though. Also in the Philippines, the Half-Wit Prince has announced his intention to emulate Hitler and murder three million citizens. Hilary Clinton looks likely to be the next President of … Continue reading Cursing and swearing: an art form.
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If the Popes believed that their God intended to keep them in control of Jerusalem, or indeed, in such high esteem at home, then they were to be rudely disabused. Central to Islam is the notion that the entire world not under its control is Dar al-Harb. (This is the second chapter of the book … Continue reading Dar al-Harb: The Islamic stimulus for war.
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Identity Politics (IP) is a development of the thinking that gave us Political Correctness, which operates by denying an opponent the language needed to present a case, and thus preventing that person from doing so. It is intellectually lazy and morally bankrupt, because it is directly contradictory to free speech. You cannot speak freely if … Continue reading Identity Politics — the secret oppression
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World War Three has been much talked about in the seven decades since World War Two ended. At that time, almost all of Europe and large parts of Asia were in ruins, scourged by years of brutal, mechanised, industrial war. Since the beginning of that peace, war has raged incessantly throughout the world. It has … Continue reading
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I was asked today if I was a ‘liberal’. Now in all honesty, until quite recently, I would just have said ‘yes’ and moved on. Simple, easy, checks the right boxes. But the world is not as it was; liberalism has become infected with some appallingly bad ideas that we have to stand up to … Continue reading Socially aware, libertarian, scientific, secularist
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Western feminists, for over half a century, have argued that gender itself has been the fundamental agent of women’s oppression. But very few have considered the consequences of matriarchy. I suggest that matriarchy in the Philippines offers an alternative. In ‘Why Men Made God’ we pointed out that powerful, high-status women in the patriarchy were … Continue reading Matriarchy in the Philippines
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Few clinical definitions, established by obscure researchers in obscure institutions, referring to an obscure subject, can have caused more brouhaha than Ray Blanchard’s definition of autogynephilia as ‘a man’s paraphilic propensity to be sexually aroused at the thought or image of himself as a woman.’ But what does it actually mean? ‘Paraphilia is any intense … Continue reading The thought or image of oneself
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Social division into ‘men’ and ‘not men’ groups, together with a domestic matriarchy, explain why transsexual expressions in Asia differ from the West. Male to Female transsexuals are normally categorised as homosexual or nonhomosexual with regard to their birth sex. I use the term HSTS for the former. Blanchard explained the latter in terms of … Continue reading Not Men: bekis in the Philippines
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‘Islamic extremism is a danger to society and a threat to public safety. It must be defeated wherever it is found’. Well it should be no secret that I think this is wholly true. Anyone who reads my posts on Islam knows that I consider it to be a sick, depraved cult based on male … Continue reading Islam: a danger to society
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Arbroath January 1972 . I was living in the house at 9 East Grimsby. My Dad had died the previous year and I was still struggling with it. But I had a few things going for me: music, a camera and my books. It wasn’t a lot … Continue reading Arbroath January 1972
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Autogynephilia is a self-reinforcing, narcissistic sexualised self-reward system. It is stimulated by a man’s desire to be, or appear to be, a woman. It is satisfied by achieving this. Although there are other rewards, the main one is by having sex as a woman. Because it is self-reinforcing, the more often the satisfaction is achieved, … Continue reading Autogynephilia: Sex as a woman
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Last week we had the first wedding in Molinot for five years. The Bride and groom have been together for years and decided t make it all official. It was a lovely event, very redolent of a rural France that is fat disappearing. Yes folks, la France Profonde is contracting. Soon it won’t be there … Continue reading Wedding in Molinot — a photo essay.
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The UK’s official Opposition is the Labour Party, though on present showing you might not guess that. On one hand it has at once been utterly and indefensibly useless at challenging the Government over the EU referendum. On the other, internecine fighting and political blood-letting over its own leadership has gone out of control. These … Continue reading Labour’s moral authority
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The Brexit mirror cracked from side to side under the weight of simple, sheer reality this week. The fissure in the Brexit mirror began to appear when Norway’s Foreign Minister told the world that no, the UK could not re-enter the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) just because it fancied the idea. The UK was … Continue reading The Brexit Mirror — cracked from side to side
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Theresa May, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has said, several times now, that ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ The problem is that nobody is quite sure what that means. It would appear that even Ms May is somewhat vague on what Brexit means. Does Brexit mean what the likes of Redwood and Cash mean, … Continue reading Brexit means Brexit
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In an oral culture — one that is not written down — mythology evolves as it is passed from storyteller to storyteller. The Jesus myth was created in exactly this way, pasted together from earlier sources. This process is called ‘syncretisation.’ There is no fixed record of an oral tradition, by definition. In an oral … Continue reading Inanna and Jesus
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In the past walls were rendered and plastered with lime. Lime is a truly wonderful material that can be bent to a whole series of uses, but as a render on stone it is unsurpassed. It ‘breathes’, allowing moisture to escape and suppressing damp walls. This is because it is very porous. So why are … Continue reading Damp Walls–How to get them dry
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The first signs of widespread panic amongst the UK’s hard-right, swivelly-eyed Brexiteers have begun to appear. In our last Friday Politics we pointed out that Brexit, as promised by the triumvirate of swivelly-eyed-ness, Johnson, Gove and Farage, is dead. It can’t happen. Now that realisation has got through to those whose eyes are usually so … Continue reading Swivelly-eyed Brexit panic.
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The Hadith constitute the third pillar of Islam, on which the ‘religion of peace’ is based. They are the ‘commentaries on the life of the Prophet.’ They are second in authority only to the Qur’an itself. The other pillars are the Qur’an and Sharia. Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the literal word of Allah. … Continue reading The Hadith: Sahih al-Bukhari
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Male to Female transsexualism was classified by Ray Blanchard into 2 different types: HomoSexual Transsexual and Autogynephilic.* In the West generally, these two types have presented with different characteristics, most notable being their primary sexual orientation: HSTS are uniquely attracted to men, whereas AGPs have a complex array of sexualities. These are all based on … Continue reading Which type of transsexual?
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Less than a moth ago, the UK went to the polls and voted to leave the European Union. It was called Brexit. Today, Brexit is dead. What on Earth happened? The reality that Brexit could not be delivered became apparent even in the hours after the result. Why did David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, … Continue reading Brexit is dead.
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The Philippines has become very important to me over the last four years. It’s now the focus of much of my life and I want to spend more time there. The winters in France are just too cold for me now. When you visit a country for longer periods, months at a time, as I … Continue reading Philippines 2016: Markets and Mountains
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Brain Sex? What is that? Some sort of cyber-intercourse? No. ‘Brain sex’ is how many transsexual activists explain how their condition came about. They specifically say that, ‘Transsexualism occurs when an individual of one sex has certain sex-related structures in the brain that are typical of the opposite sex.’ In other words, according to this … Continue reading Brain Sex?
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The unique mechanism by which photography distinguishes itself from every other visual art is something I call reflex-reflection. Photography, although shunned by the establishment in its infancy, became the quintessential, defining art of the twentieth century. This was not simply because photography’s roots were in the five decades immediately preceding the year 1900, nor that … Continue reading Reflex-Reflection: Photography’s Genius
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Sexual transformation from boy to girl has always been hot. Enter the girly-boy: the transsexual or TS. The oldest records we have prove the early existence of TS individuals, often priestesses or shamans. Their direct descendants are in the hijra of India, the kathoey of Thailand, the bakla of the Philippines, the travestis of the … Continue reading Girly-boy beauty
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In August 2010 Charis and I went on a road trip up the West Coast of Scotland. As usual it pished with rain but the gale-force winds at least kept the midges at bay! Rod Fleming on Google+
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A prominent Pakistani Facebook personality, Qandeel Baloch, has been brutally murdered by her own brother, in an ‘honour killing’. To be an independent woman in an Islamic place is to invite your own close relatives to kill you. Not only was Qandeel killed by her own brother, her parents, who were present, did nothing to … Continue reading Qandeel Baloch: killed by Islam.
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We wake to a morning of black tragedy in Europe as it has, again, been scourged by a Muslim terror attack. This great continent with its myriad and vibrant culture, that has given so much to the world, is on the long march to its final Calvary. And all I can say, my heart breaking, … Continue reading
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Transsexualism is high profile these days. But what actually causes it? Who are transsexuals? Since there is clearly a deal of ignorance over this, I’m going to go over the explanations again, in a short series of articles. Women trapped in men’s bodies? Many people are familiar with the idea that male -to-female (MtF) transsexuals, … Continue reading Explaining transsexualism
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In 2009 Dr Charles Moser entered the discussion about Blanchard’s Typology of transsexualism. It is worth revisiting Moser because his mischievous intervention not only hindered the progress of the science of transsexualism, but damaged some people, while favouring others. As you may know, Blanchard separates male-to-female (MtF) transsexuals into those attracted to their own sex … Continue reading Moser’s mischievous intervention.
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In the little white-painted town of Santa Westminstera, havoc had broken out. The town was ruled by two gangs of ruthless bandits. But both of these had begun fighting amongst themselves. The rule of the bosses had collapsed and anarchy reigned. In an adobe house in the main street huddled one of the last remaining … Continue reading Scene from an Imaginary Western
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The internationally known UK law firm of Mishcon de Reya has moved to block any unconstitutional attempt to trigger the UK’s early departure from the EU. In a piece by Owen Bowbott, The Guardian newspaper today reports that Mishcon de Reya ‘has retained the services of senior constitutional barristers, including Lord Pannick QC and Rhodri … Continue reading Mishcon de Reya moves against early Brexit
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When is a referendum not a referendum? Answer — when it is a politically convenient device used by a slippery Prime Minister in trouble with half his MPs. The EU Referendum held on the 23rd of June was phony. It has no legal consequences. That in turn means that it has no effect. Whoever becomes … Continue reading Cameron’s Phony Referendum
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Who governs Britain is the question we must now answer. One week ago, the British people voted, by a slim majority, in favour of leaving the European Union. The voters gave their opinion. That is all they did. But by doing so they provoked a Constitutional crisis for the United Kingdom, which may yet turn … Continue reading Who Governs Britain?
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In the UK, Parliament is the ultimate authority. All power is held by it. While technically, sovereignty resides with the people, in the UK this is ceded to and implemented by a group of elected representatives called Members of Parliament. The UK is NOT a plebiscitary democracy; it is a representational one. Elected Members of … Continue reading Parliament is Sovereign in the UK
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The British Project was — and is — simply this: to make the world England. To profit from it and get rich on the military colonisation of other, weaker people, yes, that was its stimulus. But its philosophical motivation was to make the world England. When I was at school, we had maps on the … Continue reading The British Project: the sun goes down
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Finesse might be David Cameron’s middle name. He was a long-time and successful PR man before entering politics, and, having been one myself, I can assure you that this is a training that makes you grasp every opportunity to show how good you are. And of course, how stupid, incompetent and generally just bad your … Continue reading Finesse: Cameron’s booby-trap
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Captain of the UK ship of State, Dave ‘Mine’s a Pint’ Cameron nailed his colours to the mast and finally had the worm-eaten hulk torpedoed from under him. And what did it? His own insufferable Tory hubris and his barrow-boy addiction to gambling. Thanks to Cameron, the end of Europe as we know it has become likely. The voters in Britain just pulled out the props and the sky fell in.
Well, that was what it felt like this morning as I turned on my pc and suddenly realised that the UK had altered the course of history. The sky has not actually fallen in, of course, but apparently it is dark with the bodies of money-men throwing themselves off tall buildings in the City of London. They will soon be joined, I should not wonder, by the corpses of Tory grandees caught on the wrong side as the traditional ‘Night of the Long Knives’ is enacted.
We have just seen the biggest single political event since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Not just in European, but world terms. The echoes of the cataclysm are booming through the corridors of power from Washington to Moscow. Vlad ‘The Slayer’ Putin must have chuckled in his morning bath of chamomile leaves as his aides brought him the good news.
Wot no pint Dave?
Having narrowly escaped being the PM who oversaw the end of the UK, Mine’s a Pint Cameron looks likely to be the one who oversaw the beginning of the end of both the EU and the UK. Capital effort, old boy. Spiffing.
Certes, rarely has luck conspired against a politician to the extent that it has Cameron, but we are reminded of the old saw: ‘those who live by the sword, die by the sword.’
Cameron chanced his arm on Scotland and only just got away with it. He gambled again, that he could offer a meaningless promise of a referendum on Brexit when it looked like he would have to share power with the Liberal slimy-say-anything party.
That whole disgrace to politics has not enough spine between its entire membership to complete one functioning vertebral column. Nevertheless, Cameron knew it could be relied on, after a couple of quiet phone-calls promising ministerial posts to incompetent Liberal dishrags, to kybosh the idea of a referendum. Oh dear no, against our ‘principles’, that is. Home Office, Dave, I think we just earned that.
But Cameron’s own party, the Conservatives, actually won the 2015 General Election outright and guess what? Its voters remembered that little thing about the referendum.
Which, by the way, is what being ‘hoist by one’s own petard’ means, children.
So now, because of his big floppy opportunistic mouth, Dave ‘Mine’s a Pint’ Cameron becomes a laughing-stock of an ex-Prime Minister, while some very ugly people whoop and cheer his long-deserved defenestration.
Nobody knows. This is the quintessential leap in the dark. Nobody actually thought it would happen; even I believed it would be a narrow ‘Remain’ victory. I don’t think anyone was prepared either for the decision or the strength of it.
In fact the decision is not legally binding and will have to be ratified by Parliament. Then the procedure for leaving the EU — called, bureaucratically enough, a Section 50 process — will have to be put in motion by the UK Government. But woe betide a Parliament that tried to overturn such a clear indication of popular will.
Then, the EU is not monolithic and consists of a spider’s-web of treaties. While the 1972 Treaty of Accession — which subordinates the UK’s sovereignty to the EEC and its successors and formalises membership — will be repealed early on, there are literally tens of thousands of words in myriad subsequent treaties and accords that will have to be gone through line by line.
Wildly optimistic estimates suggest that it will take two years to complete the exit process; more sober ones five; those familiar with the EU might suggest, ‘try ten.’
For the immediate future then, nothing will happen; it’s business as usual, quite literally. But major changes are a-coming and people need to prepare themselves.
However, this is not the end to the shenanigans. The UK is not the only member state of the EU that is fed up with its relentless centralisation and the way Germany in particular has used its apparatus to silence all opposition. There may well be calls in other EU states for referendums.The EU itself looks distinctly queasy this morning.
The Euro, that painted sepulchre of its hubris, is now on far shakier ground than it was yesterday, which is probably why the pound, at time of writing, was holding against it — and both were plummeting against the US dollar.
We should be prepared for a spate of calls by pro-EU stooges in the UK and also from other nations — and yes, I do mean the Germans — for a re-run of the referendum. After all, the standard EU method of dealing with referendum results it doesn’t like is to coerce the relevant nation into holding another one, while large numbers of snarling goons, er, ‘senior politicians’, promise every calamity from simooms to plagues of locusts, should the voters make the same mistake again.
Domestically, things have got very confused. England voted overwhelmingly for Brexit but Scotland, by an even bigger majority, to Remain. The Scottish Government, which is nationalist and seeks a new referendum on Scotland’s membership of the UK, has already stated that it is bringing forward plans for just that.
In 2014, the Scots voted, by a fair margin, to stay in the UK; but they voted last night by an even larger one to stay in Europe. This difference between the two primary partners in the UK may well cause their divorce. We do have to say that none of the potential candidates for Mine’s a Pint’s job look even remotely like they could persuade the Scots to stay, in a future Scottish independence referendum. Meanwhile the pox-raddled old hoors of the Labour Party that played Unionist poodle last time are laughing-stocks, after every promise they made turned out to be as empty as Balliol’s cloak.
The Damoclean Sword of Independence has two edges and it cuts both ways. Last night it may have been unhitched from the rafters to plunge relentlessly down at the British State, while slicing a chunk off the EU on the way.
What interesting times we do live in to be sure.
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On Thursday this week, the people of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will vote in a crucial referendum. For the first time in over 40 years, they will have the chance to express a view about the European Union (EU). To decide, in fact, whether they wish to remain a part of it or not.
In 1973 a referendum led to the UK joining the European Economic Community, as it was then called. Then, because Harold Wilson was unhappy with he membership terms, after the Labour Party that he led came to power, a second referendum was held in 1975.
Many people, like me, voted ‘yes,’ in both referendums. Under the same circumstances, given the same choice, I would vote the same way again now; but the circumstances have changed beyond all recognition.
In order to avoid the accusation of blinkered thinking, I will state that I actually live in France. I have, in total, lived here for 9 out of the last 23 years; and I have loved most of it. I love France, I like the French and I like the place I live in. I am fluent in French and I have profited from the arrangement, there is no doubt.
Nevertheless, my vote is to to leave and I strongly advise everyone else to do so too. Let me explain why.
At root the question being asked in the referendum is this and only this: do the benefits of being a part of the EU count for more than the loss of sovereignty that it has entailed? Has it delivered democracy, powerful economic growth and security in sufficient measure to make up for its centralisation of power?
The UK has a Constitution formed by several discrete documents, of which the earliest and most important is the 1707 Treaty of Union between Scotland and England, which brought it into being. However, neither Scotland nor England themselves have written Constitutions and they have completely separate legal systems. (All laws applicant in both jurisdictions are effected by two separate Acts, one for Scotland and one for England.)
Within these separate jurisdictions, the individual national Constitutions depend on two things: jurisprudence and Acts of Parliament. In other words, court decisions under Common Law form one part, while specific Acts approved by the Parliaments form the other. One function of an ‘Act of Parliament’ is to change, modify or repeal existing laws which no longer, in the collective opinion of Parliament, represent the view of the broader society or a fair and reasonable position in the light of present knowledge.
While countless thousands of words have been written about the British Constitution, it may be summed up like this: within a structure of partner nations defined by treaty, an extremely flexible, transparent and accountable structure of Common Law and Parliamentary Acts established through the courts and by public Parliamentary debate, defines the civil state of the people.
If this sounds like what you imagine the EU to be, you may be in for a nasty shock.
The most powerful body in the EU is the European Commission. This has the sole right to draft and propose laws. It negotiates treaties between Europe and other nations or supra-national bodies and it represents the EU at international level. The Commission also enforces EU Law upon member states. Commissioners are appointed by the Council of Ministers (the Heads of State) by qualified majority voting and the Commission as a whole must then be ratified by the European Parliament (EP). The Commission serves for five years, with no further accountability.
In essence, the Commission is the Government of Europe. But not one single elected politician sits on it. Every Commissioner, including the President, is an appointee. There is no democratic sanction on or requirement for accountability on any of them. No European Commissioner, ever, has been called up in front of their nation’s own Parliament and required to publicly explain themselves.
Laws are passed by national politicians acting out of role; the Council of Ministers. None of these campaign, during the domestic elections that select them, on their performance on the Council; so there is no accountability for their actions there.
The ‘European Parliament’, is but an expensive talking shop; it is an advisory body with limited powers of examination of and regulation over the Commission, the bureaucracy and the laws being passed. The EP may not propose Laws, as that is reserved to the Commission, although it may scrutinise them. However, no one nation may block any law through the EP; it always requires multinational cooperation. Most of the laws that the UK’s European Parliamentarians voted against over the last five years were passed anyway.
So while the British peoples are used to and have over centuries developed, a system of Parliamentary democracy that does provide transparency, that does provide accountability, that does protect minorities and which is able to minutely scrutinise and, ultimately, have democratic and public sanction over the Government, in the EU this is far more the ideal than the reality.
The ‘democratic deficit’ produced by this is the consequence EU’s origins as a trading bloc. It was never intended to be a super-state, which is what it now is.
As if this were not bad enough, successive enlargements of the EU have removed an already distant decision-making apparatus ever further from the people it governs. From the six original members of the EEC, which were France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, the EU has bloated to twenty-eight. In part, this was the fault of successive British governments, which saw enlargement as a foil to deeper integration.
Unfortunately, we got expansion alongside deeper integration, just without the democracy. All the British rejection of the so-called ‘European Constitution’ — which did propose some democratic control over the runaway behemoth — did, was to exacerbate the problem. This delighted the European bureaucrats, who had been shaking in their boots in fear that the prospect of a democratic Europe might actually become reality. The 2009 Lisbon Treaty, the cobbled-together surrogate for it, contained all that was bad in the proposed Constitution and little that was good.
As well as this, the dreaded ‘two-speed’ Europe has, likewise, come into existence. The Euro project has provoked rapidly greater integration between the nineteen countries of the so-called Eurozone. This has led directly to an explosion in laws, regulatory structures and, of course, because this is the EU, bureaucracy.
Worse — if it could be — because there is a legally-binding presumption that all member states will eventually join the Euro, those laws, structures and bureaucracies affect all the non-Eurozone EU member states too, including the UK — despite the fact that it has an ‘exemption’ from ever joining.
The democratic crisis has finally come home to roost in this last year. Greece, a sovereign nation, has collapsed in all but name and must now dance to the tune of money-lenders in Berlin. Italy is not far behind and could fail at any time.
These nations have been ruined because they are part of the Eurozone. Were they not, their currency values would have fallen, their goods and services would have therefore been cheaper and they would have seen inflows of money, leading to jobs and wealth. But the powerful German economy keeps the Euro too high for this.
At the same time the presence of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain in the Eurozone keeps the Euro lower than it would otherwise be. Were it not so, Germany would today have priced itself out of competition, especially with Italy, a formerly (pre-Euro) successful manufacturing nation. So the Euro drains money from the southern European countries and gives it to Germany and the northern ones.
The EEC and its successors, the European Community (EC) and the EU were never designed to deal with a re-unified Germany. For the first decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany sought economic assistance from its European ‘partners’ to help with the reconstruction of the bankrupt former East Germany. But those days were over fifteen years ago and today, the economic power of a unified Germany has once again destabilised Europe.
That Britain was right to avoid joining the Euro is now crystal clear. Southern Europe will soon be bankrupted by it, with the exception of Greece, because it already has been. What was not clear, fifteen years ago, was the extent to which the European bureaucracy would proliferate on the back of the introduction of the common currency. If it had been bloated before — and it was — today it is beyond even Orwellian nightmare. This phantasmagorical monster is the result of a failed dream. And, yes, the EU has failed.
The promise of a Europe run by transparent, representative government and elected politicians is dead. We — through our national governments — said we did not want elected European officials. We did not want a proper European Presidency. We rejected the so-called ‘European Constitution’ that was at least an attempt to lay the foundations of a democratic Europe. And now we must drink the sour milk that we are left with.
The moment of reductio ad absurdam has arrived. Without an elected and transparent supranational government, what we have is the Soviet Union, German Capitalist version. The EP may, as happened in 1999, vote ‘no confidence’ in a Commission, but, crucially, it cannot choose the replacement.
It is not, now, a question of a ‘democratic deficit’. The EU is a democratic vacuum. And just as happened in the Soviet Union, the cumbersome behemoth we have created is dragging down the European economy. Its flagship, that painted sepulchre of hubris, the Euro, has already ruined one member state, as others teeter on the brink.
This is not what we were promised; Thursday’s referendum gives us the chance to correct that.
The economy was not the only thing we had in mind when we voted to join the EEC, however. Then, the Cold War was at its height.
We lived under the rules of three: the three minutes between the air-raid sirens going off and our being incinerated and the three days it would have taken the Red Army to cross the Rhine. At that fateful point we would launch nuclear Armageddon ourselves and be likewise vaporised. We were on the cusp of the final conflict; batteries of Bloodhound missiles looked east along the coast like grim sentinels, painted, incongruously, angelic white. European war was both recent and imminent.
In the 1970s, joining ‘Europe’ was the only sensible choice, not just in the interests of the UK, but in order to preserve and promote the Europe we believed in from external threat.
It is not like that any more. Anyone who thinks Vladimir Putin, for all his faults, desires to see Russian tanks on the streets of Berlin or Paris is delusional.
Today, the threats are different. An unprecedented wave of sexual assaults on women is sweeping Europe right now, and the perpetrators are incomers who not recognise, indeed even despise, our culture. ‘Security’ is not just defending against nuclear war or terrorist attack; it is also making the streets safe and, while policing is a national issue, the EU has signally failed to coordinate an adequate policy to address uncontrolled migration from outside. Germany, indeed, has broken every protocol of Europe by negotiating directly with non-EU states over the migrant crisis an, by doing so, drastically worsened the plight of the other EU states. That was why the protocols were in place; and Germany need not pretend that it is a ‘good European’ now.
While the German behaviour is inexcusable, the EU’s ‘response’ to the Syrian migrant crisis has been piecemeal and positively counter-productive. Its agreement with Turkey means that the most educated and qualified individuals leaving the Syrian conflict zone are resettled there, while Europe has to take those who are of least use to us and who cost the most.
While this is happening, the very states that are bearing the brunt of the assault of economic migrants, are left floundering, bankrupted and completely unable to resist.
On security, then, as on democracy and economic management, the EU has failed.
There is a possibility that a referendum vote for the UK to leave would lead to the collapse of the EU. Today it has pauperised whole nations and spawned a bureaucratic monster that even Joseph Stalin could not have dreamed of. One would have to say that its demise is long overdue.
The EU has shown that it cannot contain German economic power; rather it has become the instrument of it. Without the EU, European nations would be free to make new international agreements that would allow them to redress the imbalance, just as free nations always have. For example, the southern nations, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, might form one such bloc. The former Communist nations, which also share a common cultural heritage, might form another. Nations would be free — as they should be — to negotiate agreements where they desire and not to, where they do not.
Such initiatives would help to counter German economic dominance and, with the termination of the Euro project that would be a pre-requisite, allow such new blocs to develop and operate economic policy in their own interests. This would be a good thing, not only for Europe in general but also for Germany, which can have no long-term interest in seeing its neighbours go bankrupt. Yet this road is blocked by the simple existence of the EU, lying like a monstrous pile of scrap in the way.
My late brother, who had a pithy way with words, would describe something so ruinously clapped-out as to be unrepairable as needing to be ‘rubbed out and drawed in again’. That is exactly where the EU now finds itself; but it will not do the necessary deed alone. Someone has to pull the trigger. Somebody has to let the curtain fall on the farce that it has become.
Referendum voters in the UK just might strike a blow for liberty and fairness. They might deliver the shock that puts an end to the insanity, like the crazing of a car windscreen penetrated by a single pebble. They might even be the saviour of a free and democratic Europe; and lest we forget, not for the first time.
To do that, they must use their referendum vote to leave the EU.
At its best, Europe is a collection of fiercely independent but interdependent states. This dynamic is what gave us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. Our culture is at once flawed and disparate but beautiful. Europe is more vibrant, diverse and colourful than any other continent. European is what we are, but it is our differences that make us who we are.
By contrast, the Kafkaesque monstrosity of the EU has made a Europe with all its anarchic liberty and zest excised. It propels us, inexorably, towards a grey, anodyne, ersatz pseudo-Europe with no colour and no life, because it absolutely intends to remove all the very differences that make us who we are. It cannot do otherwise; that is what it was set up to do and, like a driverless juggernaut, it will not be deflected from its path. We have to ask ourselves, urgently, if what it has been designed to achieve is really what we want.
By voting, in this referendum, out of an EU that has failed to deliver democracy, failed to deliver strong economic growth across its territory and failed to deliver security, Britain could, as it has done before, give Europe the opportunity to realise its potential.
Therefore we must vote to leave in the referendum, for while it may be cathartic in the short term, by doing so we might rekindle the flame of European freedom in the longer. A little revolution from time to time is a good thing, don’t you think?
The post EU Referendum: UK Out appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
Outside Pulse nightclub in Orlando on the night of the Islamist shootings.
Islam is locked in a war with secular democracy and moderate Muslims themselves.
Ten days ago a Canadian, Robert Hall, had his head hacked from his body in a brutal public murder. Two days later, over 100 people were gunned down in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida; forty-nine died. Two days after that a married couple, both police officers, were stabbed to death in their home outside Paris and their infant child held hostage until the killer was shot by police.
There is nothing whatsoever to connect these victims, on the face of it. Nothing. A middle-aged professional, young people in a nightclub, serving police officers. They died in equally unrelated
Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his partner Jessica Schneider, murdered in the name of Islam. Pic: Reuters
locations — the Philippines, the USA, France.
But they are connected all the same: they were all murdered in the name of Islam.
These are but the tip of the iceberg; all over the Middle East, Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, in the same time, hundreds of innocent people were murdered — in the name of Islam. And most of them were Muslims.
Robert Hall (left) prior to being murdered in the name of Islam
These victims join the tens of thousands of others who have been murdered, raped, or enslaved in the name of Islam, just since 2000. If we go back to the 20th century, we find that millions were murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of Islam. When we call the roll of violent, murdering ideologies of that century, we always forget one; Nazism, Communism — and Islam.
Yet we may not speak a word against this. We may not name what we see, what is manifest, what is plain as day — that Islam perverts men into monsters who kill, rape and enslave in its name and expect a heavenly reward of unlimited, unending sex with 72 perpetual virgins for doing so. (The Orlando shooter was homosexual and we wonder what he imagined his reward might be; 72 Christians, perhaps — the porn star, not the religion.)
Despite the blindingly obvious truth about Islam, we are not allowed to say a word against it. Why? Because Islam is mainly practised by people who do not have white skin. And the intellectual fascism of ‘identity politics’ insists that no-one of non-white skin colour may ever be criticised for anything.
This of course reveals the excruciating irony that ‘identity politics’ is itself a form of racism; but then, you have to have some intelligence to divine that. Bill Maher calls it the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, and Bill is right on point.
Well, enough is enough. Identity politics is indeed a form of racism and fascism, and a spade should be called a spade.
This war began a long time ago and we ignored it. We misnamed it, pretended it might go away. We vacillated, imagining that our trinkets and compromises, our cavilling appeasement, might quench our enemy’s thirst for blood. But all that failed long ago.
We are not ‘at war with terrorism’ — or rather that is too tautological a euphemism to let pass. All states, everywhere, are perpetually at war with terrorism. That is why a state exists: to protect the people from terrorists. But nobody says ‘the King of France gave land at the mouth of the Seine to the Normans so that they could protect the country from terrorist attack’. They say, ‘from the Vikings.’
To be at war against terrorism is a permanent and necessary part of a state’s very reason to exist; to use this term to describe our current crisis is to deliberately deny the real name of the enemy.
We are not at war with a people, or a ‘race’. We are at war with a Dark Age socio-political ideology that promotes injustice and is based on a pack of barefaced lies. This war is no different from the war against Communism. It’s not about people. It’s about ideas.
Islam is just a religion; just a set of ideas. It is an ideology invented to make some men rich and powerful by controlling women, children and all the weaker men. It’s just our old enemy, the patriarchy; and it is no less hideous, oppressive or murderous for being a version mainly promoted by men with non-white skin.
Islam stands against literally every single value that Western democracy believes in. Every value that European democracy — and that includes the Americas and parts of Asia and Africa, for better or worse — has fought for centuries to develop and preserve.
Islam hates women and gays, considers that children have no rights, animals have no rights. I insists that anyone who does not accept it as the literal truth should be killed. It hates art. It hates poetry. It hates music. It hates science. It hates secularism. It hates democracy.
Anything that could be considered civilised, Islam hates. It would rather turn the world back in to a desert nightmare of brutality and discrimination where warlords do as they like. Where women are personal chattels of men to be raped when they are nine, or burned alive when they break its rules about marriageor for refusing to be whores for jihadists. Where they have acid thrown in their faces for not covering them. Where homosexuals are thrown from rooftops then stoned till they die. Where the ‘crime’ of having an opinion is punished by death.
The last war that European civilisation fought against Islam — a defensive war, just as this one is –lasted for a thousand years. This time the enemy is ahead of us. We now can see that there was no victory before the Gates of Vienna in 1683; just an armistice and we did not seize the opportunity it afforded us to smash the enemy forever.
Instead of striking the head from the serpent, we took our boot from its neck and let it go. We allowed it compassion — which is a part of our culture. But it is not a part of the enemy’s and anyone who thinks that jihadists will spare the sword, should the world ever be unfortunate enough that they do seize the advantage, is barking mad.
Surely, if Islam is indeed a religion of peace, then no blasphemy could be greater than murdering, raping and enslaving in its name. Where, then, are the screaming hordes who protested against cartoons of Mohammed and called for the artist to be killed — for blasphemy? Those who called for the death of Salman Rushdie for the same? These men killed no-one, raped no-one, enslaved no-one; yet their ‘blasphemy’ was such that it merited death.
Why are the same people who called for this not out on the streets right now, demanding that the atrocities committed in the name of their religion must stop?
Such protesters are nowhere to be seen. One might even be forgiven for thinking that murder, rape and slavery are not ‘blasphemous’ at all, and that could only be because Islam — the religion of peace — actually condones them.
Do they, then, Muslims all support the jihadists? No, of course not, but the fact that the majority of Germans were not Nazis did not prevent the Holocaust; and the fact that the majority of Muslims are decent people, who do love peace, has not and will not prevent more killing.
If moderate Muslims are to neutralise the jihadist threat, then they need our assistance, because they too are under threat — indeed, they are under the greatest threat of any, since, after all, they live with the jihadists in their midst.
We need all the support we can get from moderate Muslims, yet this is confounded by Political Correctness. Partly, this is our own fault. We have allowed the Regressive Left to set a picket line around Islam, so that it may never be criticised, even by Muslims; just look at how they treat Maajid Nawaz, Ayan Hirsi Ali or Salman Rushdie.
This very ring-fence helps to muzzle moderate Muslims and to deliver them up to the jihadists. It isolates them from their natural allies — non-Muslim moderates — and pretends that this is ‘defending a culture’. It is more important , for the ‘identity politics’ airheads, that This attitude — promulgated by the regressive left, those ‘useful idiots’ — is pure racism in itself. It is, as Maher says, the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. After all, how could we possibly imagine that people of brown skin could do better? And not only that, they must be allowed to do their worst without a word of protest.
Well if Islam, as a culture, has value, it is not in its ability to murder the innocent. Peaceable Muslim communities have already proven themselves to be rich recruiting grounds for jihadist murderers who have but rarely been turned over to the authorities and who, rather, are all too often hidden instead.
If there is a solution — other than massive ‘ethnic cleansing’, which nobody wants to see, even if it were possible — then it is in mobilising moderate Muslims to denounce extremism and violence. It is in standing with them against the jihadists. It is by funding their organisations and helping them to counter jihadism within their own communities. It is in protecting them from the threats they surely receive and ensuring that their voices be heard, by Muslims.
Furthermore, Islamic apostates — threatened with death by Islamists — must be protected and their voices must be heard. The Council of ex-Muslims of Britain, according to this article in the UK Guardian, assists about 350 people a year to leave Islam in the UK, ‘the majority of whom have faced threats…either by their families or by Islamists.’
The ghettoisation of Muslim communities turns them into pressure-cookers where violent extremists dominate. This is exacerbated, not hindered, by the politically correct Regressive Left.
In its towering conceit and racism, the Regressive Left considers it better that moderate Muslims be terrorised in their own communities by extremist Muslims, than that they be helped by non-Muslims. After all, goes Regressive thinking, they all have brown skin; they should be allowed to get on with killing each other undisturbed by white colonialists trying to enforce Western mores. Meantime, the Regressive Left gets on with really important things, like whether a man with a beard can legitimately ‘identify’ as a woman.
Why is it that public debate is always between an Islamic extremist, or a barefaced apologist for extremism, and someone of the political right, usually white? Because to expose the schisms within Muslim communities is to confuse the all-important message — white bad, non-white good. So what if moderates are sacrificial lambs? The Regressive Left couldn’t care less.
Our strategy must therefore be twofold: on the one hand to completely disgrace the Regressive Left and its intellectual fascism of ‘Identity Politics’. On the other we must massively support moderate Muslims, politically and financially, wherever they live, while denying any support or platform to Islamist extremists.
There is no certainty that we will win this war, even with the best of our efforts. What is certain is that if we continue to refuse to recognise what is happening and do not take immediate steps to counter it, then we shall lose it. Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ may yet come true; and none of us will be the better for it.
The post War with Islam: ideology, not people appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
Most people know about the activities of so-called Islamic extremists, operating in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and, most prominently and gaining the most attention, in the Levant conflict zone, principally Syria and Iraq. But how extreme are they? Do they have justification for their behaviour from the Qur’an, as they repeatedly claim to?
Just this week, new reports arrived of how the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh) murdered 19 Yazidi women by burning them to death in steel cages because they refused to become sex slaves. In Pakistan a mother burned her daughter to death for marrying without consent. These are but the tiniest tip of an iceberg of atrocities that never stop.
Naturally, any thinking person must be repulsed by such evil; but not a week goes by now without some example of completely intolerable behaviour, carried out by Muslims, frequently on women, somewhere in the world. In fact, hardly a day passes.
Yazidi women captured as sex slaves under Qur’anic authority
Saudi Arabia, which has gained for itself the reputation of being the most sadistic and barbarous legally constituted state on the planet, routinely carries out ‘punishments’ — better described as tortures, many ending in death — all the time. We now know that at least 14 million Africans are held as slaves by Muslims. 14 million. In 2016.
But many of us in the West know Muslims; we eat in their restaurants, shop in their convenience stores. Clearly, these Muslims are good, decent people. So the bombers, the beheaders, the immolators, the lapidators, the slavers and kidnappers must be misunderstanding Islam, right? They must be misreading the Qur’an?
Wrong. They are doing EXACTLY as the Qur’an insists they must, to be good Muslims. If they do not do so, then they will receive no reward in the afterlife. This is why the poison of Salafism — which advocates strictly following the letter of the Qur’an — is so effective and why moderate Muslim states so quickly collapse before it. Salafism — founded in and exported and funded by Saudi Arabia — perverts decent people into monsters by persuading them that if they do not follow the letter of the Qur’an, they are not ‘true Muslims’.
Unlike other Abrahamic faiths, there is no contradiction in Islam, although there appears to be. However, once you understand the Qur’an’s structure and the ‘Doctrine of Abrogation‘, which states, with Qur’anic authority, that only the last verse on any given subject has authority, the apparent contradictions disappear. Unfortunately what is left is the most savage and violent creed amongst the major religions.
On June the 8th 2016, a Christian blogger called Dom the Conservative posted on her site an analysis of ISIL’s behaviour which showed, again, that the vile acts they perpetrated are absolutely in line with the Qur’an’s instructions. Every single atrocity that comes to light, carried out by groups like ISIL, Boku Harum and many others, is mandated in the Qur’an and not only that, the specific method of killing to be used is described, in detail.
Dom and I would surely disagree about many things; she is a Christian and I am an atheist. But she is an excellent and erudite scholar and she makes her case with passion and rigorous fairness. There is no disagreement between us that the fundamentals of Islam are contained in the Qur’an, along with the Hadith and Sharia, and that so-called ‘extremists’ — whose behaviour is indeed extreme — are just doing as the Qur’an tells them.
Yet in the comments to her post I saw the usual depressing litany of apology and dissembly from Muslims and their helpful idiots. ‘Oh, Islam is not like that.’ ‘Islam means peace.’ (It doesn’t; it means ‘submission’.) Well, all I can say is these people have never studied the Qur’an, have been misinformed about what it says or are lying. (Taqqiya.)
There is only one answer to this; you have to read the Qur’an. So I have uploaded translations of it, in English. I have placed links to these below. Please download, my apologies for their size, and distribute them widely.
Before you read the Qur’an, there are a few things you should know. In the first place, it at first appears resolutely self-contradictory. On any topic, there are peaceful verses and those of appalling violence. It is almost as if there were two writers, hopelessly at odds with each other.
It is entirely possible that there was never a living Mohamed and that the Qur’an was indeed made up by several authors. It wasn’t written down until 80 years after his putative death in any case; but that debate is for another day.
If we go with the standard narrative, Mohamed spent the first part of his life in Mecca, where he was weak and subject to the authorities, and so his preachings were peaceful and calm. After he and his followers had finally caused so much trouble that they were evicted, they fled to Medina, where they discovered highway robbery as a profession and soon moved on to large-scale banditry and genocide. The verses from this period are much more violent than the earlier ones.
Islamic scholars call these the ‘Meccan’ and the ‘Medinan’ verses respectively, for obvious reasons.
(Now you should read this post about the Doctrine of Abrogation, if you have not already.)
Briefly, Mohamed’s followers were aware of the inconsistencies so the Prophet (allegedly) asked Allah, who explained that when he gave a verse that contradicted an earlier one, he ‘took back’ the original so that he could substitute it with ‘something better’. The earlier verses were not to be forgotten, but they no longer had authority. So only the later verses of the Qur’an remain ‘in force’ — which means, these are the ones that ‘true Muslims’ must follow. This is called the Doctrine of Abrogation, and its effects, when understood in the context of what the Qur’an actually says, are chilling.
But how do you know which is which? The books (Suras) of the Qur’an are not ordered chronologically, but by length. Well, there are clues. The Medinan (violent) Suras are longer than the Meccan ones. The explanation is that the Prophet had more time by then. Secondly, while there are some peaceful verses in the later Suras, there are almost no violent ones in the earlier; so, if you are reading a fair few horrific verses, it’s likely to be later. Then there is geography. If the verses discuss Medina or areas close to it, then they are Medinan.
Many Islamic Scholars believe that Sura 9, which is the most violent, ‘abrogates’ or overrides all earlier Suras. It would do no harm to begin your reading there, in view of this.
Quran – Saheeh International Translation (‘Saheeh’ or ‘Sahih’ just mean ‘reliable.’) This is an approved translation.
Quran by M.M.Pickthall (A solid version made hard to read by the use of archaic English.)
The Koran translated by N J Dawood (This is the most readable version, by one of the greatest Orientalists of his era; but it is rejected by Islamic scholars because Dawood was not himself a Muslim.)
Quran by Yusuf Ali (Another authorised version.)
Word by Word Quran (Relates the Arabic text to specific English words; not really a readable translation but useful for those learning Arabic.)
Quran Transliteration (This is not a translation but an attempt to let the non-Arabic speaking reader have some idea of the sound of the words.)
Finally, you should read this appraisal of the ‘Doctrine of Abrogation’. This doctrine is essential to understanding Islam and how it behaves in the context of the Qur’an. PIG_abrogration_naskh
The post Qur’an: Read It Yourself appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
