The BNP dressed is an ugly sight, undressed it is both ugly and ridiculous. Nice to know what its leader thinks:
The BNP chairman Nick Griffin spoke to the BBC to defend a party leaflet that said black and Asian Britons "do not exist", arguing that calling such people British denied indigenous people their own identity.
"In a very subtle way, it's a sort of bloodless genocide," he said.
Terrific stuff. And subtle to boot. I can see the headlines:
NON-EXISTING PEOPLE COMMIT BLOODLESS GENOCIDE!!
Being British, he says, is not an administrative condition but an ethnicity. A bit like being a Beneluxian then. Beneluxians are an ethnic lot.
Still excrement tends to talk excrement. Shit will out.
Griffin post-shit.
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I am myself a touch tired, what with all this travelling and talking and deadlines and tutoring and trying to keep up with la vie administratif. And C's mother has been taken ill, so she has driven down to spend a night or two with her. On Sunday to Oxford for workshop and reading. On Wednesday to London for readings at The Athenaeum and at Keats's House. Details to follow.
11 comments:
A typical Nazi this fat git.
The whiff of Hitler's boot boys in the early days, dressing up dangerous rubbish with ther nomenclature *British*. Violence clearly behind it, in the yobs and louts after legitimising themselves as intellectuals, who are too thick for it to happen, because if they had any intelligence, they would know that the number of *real* Britons can be counted on the fingers of one hand, metaphorically. A village in Wales somehwere that's been in a time capsule for 1000 years, the rest of Englan stopped being British when Romans left and the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Germanic and Scandanvian peoples came and kicked the orginal Britons into Wales, with the Picts facing their own takeover of ther Goidels (british word for *raider*)
speaking Goidelic, Old Irish, at the time the Kingdom of Dál Riata was established.
I read the Bloody Foreigners: The Story Of Imiigration To Britain (Abacus 2004), by Robert Winder which presents Griffin's world-view for what it is.
"Our national religion is Middle Eastern (via Greece Rome and Germany)...Our langauge is a fluid compund of German, Roman, Greek and French...Mnay of our most popular trees and flowrs are immigrants. After the ice retreated, the land was impoversihed and supported only a handful of plant species. The romans transplanted the sweet chestnut, the walnut the fig and the leek, Normans carried the seeds of french botany..
All the rhetoric that seeks to depict modern immigration into Britian as a hazard, putting at risk a thousand-year way of life, plays fal;se with the historical truth.
Immigration...defines the texture of British life every bit as significantly as our grand heritage of stately homes - many of which themselves have immigrant foundations."
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But Griffin would not be interested in knowing the truth, because he is the shambolic, besuited thug with intellectual pretensions who is not interested in the real Britons, but only a minority of people who like to blame anyone but themselves for the pickles they get in. No job, unemployed, life shit? Must be the immigrants fault.
Classic low-brow limit of people of limited and lazy intelligence, he appeals to the uneducated by fabricating paranoia out of thin air, armed with only words, playing on their fears, stirring it and New Labout and the Tories are partly respopnisble. because the debate on Immigration in Britain is a two dimensional taboo topic, in terms of those who try to raise it are contyextualised as either a racist or wanting to open the floodgates to *foreigners* - itself a fairly pejorative terms, non-national is used in Ireland as the official word for foreigner, as it doesn't carry the same load, whiff of trouble the word foreigner does.
ditie - word ver
I would agree with that, BA, including the stifling of debate on the integration of different cultures and the effects it has on society. However, as much as I hate the trash that is Griffin, he does make some valid points. 'Britain' has, especially in the last century, prided itself on two basic fundamentals: the freedom of speech and a secular approach to religion. Those have been eroded and we're not a better society for it. Who is to blame is the debate. I suspect it's a combination of the integration of a religion that takes few prisoners and a mix of do-gooders who dare not knock a sensitive boat and who think they speak for us all. Well, none of them speak for me and I'll continue the debate with like-minded folk without a trace of racism in my musings.
Fantastic to know this happens east of the pond, too. Maybe it's an import/export issue.
It's another of the strange things about the "posh" "toff" etc. discussion - black and asian people don't often figure: it's a very white discourse on the whole. I'm not saying that to undermine that particular conversation by the way, and I'm not forgetting Damian's writing about chippiness - but it's usually a white obsession.
Obviously I think this should be different... because I think that when questions of relative privilege in UK society come up, the non-white experience is core, surely? And throw in the experience of recent immigrants, here but finding themselves unable to rely on any of the assumptions they grew up with, often not having the language or the family/social connections that e.g. Widnes or Stoke-born white blokes enjoy.
Just to add to what Billy's saying there, my personal experience is that the classifying of criticism of Islam as racism actually insults a good many British moslems, because like Christianity the religion crosses racial and cultural boundaries world over, as any day in Mecca during Haj reveals.
The brazenly obvious thing that comes to mind "when questions of relative privilege in UK society come up" - is the fact that one family - a handful of citizens our of 60 million, are subsidised on lottery sized benefits to fulfill a function with no visible benefits for the 59,999,900 or so Britons who constitute that society, and whose Formal existence and roles in the State, is founded on and perpetuates an inherent unfairness which is not discussed for fear of upsetting one family.
Trying to talk about privilege in the united Kingdom, without being honest about the royal *WE* who is but one family, means millions of pounds spent on fabricating reams of gobble dee gook as the smokescreen that somehow Fariness and Equality is a fundamental principle underpinning British society and culture.
Their Highnesses born into a role, with a right to titles 99.9% of citizens are not, (for the sole purpose of..what exactly, Lord, Sir, etc?) and people must show physical defferal towards in their presence, the contemporary 21C modern mister and ms british people.
The Tory party have no interest in an honest debate and now, neither do *New* Labour, who did make a lot of noise about reform but essentially any changes have been cosmetic.
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And it is only because of the lection of Obama, that any honest debate stands a chance of happening. Not because of him personally, but because he has proved that the old excuses and mindsets, which seek to claim such things are not as easy as common sense suggests, are exactly that. Excuses and blather spouted to keep things as they are, a society founded on the principle of and operating as, a Monarchy.
One person born to sit atop of a social order, Your Highness Desmond Swords. why not me?
I have the pedigree, my family was dispossessed of 800,000 Munster acres during the Desmond Rebellions which kicked of the collapse of the original Gaelic order and 1200 years of Culture down the tubes.
I am blue blooded as Bill and Hal, totally equal, playing by our rules, the we who they are, me.
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Obviously this is only an intellectual exercise, but Poetry in its purest form is granted by the muse to Kings.
Regarding George's original piece, the irony is that the lack of debate and a lessening of the freedom of speech leads more people to the excrement. Some people will never change their philosophy on life. I know, I've met some of them: no-hopers who I wouldn't waste my breath on. But there are many who vote for the excrement or turn to fanaticism out of frustration because, as BA says, they have no other voice, and as James says - "here but finding themselves unable to rely on any of the assumptions they grew up with, often not having the language or the family/social connections that e.g. Widnes or Stoke-born white blokes enjoy."
That's the plus side. The down side is that many of them don't have enough brains to hold their fuffing hat on.
But there are many who could be swayed to turn against the excrement and extremists if viewpoints were not so stifled and there was a fairer society.
I will add a small anecdote which will tell you all what a lovely bloke I am. Today, I gave a small, six-year-old devout Muslim, Asian boy a birthday present. I was rewarded by a wonderful smile from the most beautiful dark amber eyes you have ever seen. Although the gift was not given for this reason, I am hoping it will serve a purpose: to let this very young man know that the path of life can be sweet if he embraces tolerance and understanding and doesn't listen to some of his peers who think I am the devil incarnate because I don't embrace his religion. Prehaps one day I will get my rewards. He might just say to some who think I'm the DI, 'hold on a minute guys, I once knew an old white guy who was a friend of my family and he was a lovely bloke. So put that bomb away or you'll have me to deal with!'
And because this debate has taken an eclectic turn, back to the toffs and the class system, I've been giving it some thought, George. Once-upon-a-time there was a genuine middle class. Which makes you part right. It consisted of those talented and artistic people you defined as belonging to and forming that class. But now things have changed. The middle class has become so tainted that it represents nothing, ergo a state-of-mind.
And onto the subject of the villains who deprived BA of his hereditary landholdings...perhaps you should do as the peasant did in that wonderful tale George related on here...offer to fight the bloke for your lands. Let us know how you go on :)
I wasn't intending to re-enter the toff / middle-class debate with this.
I just wanted to say Nick Griffin was a racist shit and an idiot to boot.
It's not original. It's not brilliant. It's not a point much worth making since it is patently obvious.
So it was just a little aside. Like that.
Desmond! Why don't we fight each for the right to wear the crown of Ruritania? I'll be Rudolf Rassendyl. Unless you want to go for the whole Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Wetlin.
Nothersi - word verification.
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The only English "toff" i have a bone to pick with is the long dead shade-propagandist Karl Marx called "Elizabeth's ass-kissing poet" - Edmund Spenser, who a writer named Trotter, writing in 1814 of a Munster walking tour he took, (under) summed up his reputation in Ireland:
"...the name and condition of Spenser is handed down traditionally, but they seem to entertain no sentiment of respect or affection for his memory.
Spenser appears not to have appreciated their good qualities as they merited; but he spoke not their language, and came to their country full of prejudice against them."
This is a fundamental point, Spenser the Civilizer, was a bit like Griffin the Real Briton, in the way he was full of dangerous rubbish formed from a stance of total ignorance he then twisted into perverse logic exhibited in his prose Trieste: The Present Day View of the State of Ireland, written soon after he first arrived sometime around 1577 with Lord Grey who had been drafted in by Elizabeth in the attempt to bring to heel and order, the Irish Earls who were always having private wars with one another in their own attempts to extend their influence over one another’s’ territories.
The die had been cast when Conn O'Neill, 1st Earl of Tyrone, Prince of Tyrone (c. 1480 – 1559), surnamed Bacach (the Lame), son of Conn Mór, King of Tir Eóghan, after his kingdom was invaded by Anthony St Ledger and left with little choice, "became a Protestant, made his submission at Greenwich to Henry VIII, who created him earl of Tyrone for life, and made him a present of money and a valuable gold chain. He was also made a privy councillor in Ireland, and received a grant of lands within the Pale."
This was the final Gaelic King, who embodied the customary habits founded on the principle of tanistry, whereby Kings and leaders where chosen from a competing pool of males within the royal derbfines, which was the four-generation societal unit the clan based Gaelic culture was founded on.
A fluid entity, as members who were on the peripharies of it, left and joined other derbfines on marrying and others coming in through marriage or birth.
This was the way in much of N Europe till the Normans imposed primogeniture, with its inherent and obvious weakness and failing, that you could have a two foot congenital idiot first born and six foot four genius youngest. The tanistry system was that the family elected who would be leader and who deputy, from the pool of comepting male candidates, which meant the most able leader inevitably rose to the top.
The Gaelic way of life, was the final remnant of Celtic culture that had died out all over Europe with the Roman expansion and closest living example of the Heroic class in Homer, in the sense of the aristocrats had an iron age code of honour and ethics 1000 years out of synch with the rest of Europe, because of geography.
The Gaelic way of life based on the ancient tradition of raiding cattle, seemed chaotic and warlike, to the outsider, and it was, but from the inside the natural rules that seem bewilderingly complex and very easy to misread, had kept it stable for 1200 years in print alone, by the time Spenser came with his advice and wrote in Kilcolman castle.
In 1586, the 34 year old Spenser got 3028 acres of fortified estate near Doneraile, including Kilcolman castle, previous home to the Desmond Earls and the place Spenser wrote his masterpiece, the Faerie Queen by the river "Mulla fair and bright."
This was after the Earl of Desmond dynasty, the Fitzgerald family or Geraldines and their allies had failed to stop the efforts of the Elizabethan Era English government extending control over the province of Munster in what became known as the two Desmond Rebellions, 1569-1573 and 1579-1583.
Munster was divvied up between the pirates and privateers, once the legal paperwork was in order and another poet-pirate, Walter Raleigh got 40,000 acres including Youghal and Lismore, which he held for 17 years before selling them on.
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Spenser lays out his thoughts on the English *Race* Civilisation and Ireland in his prose work, A Veue of the Present State of Ireland.
DISCOURSED BY WAY OF A DIALOGUE BETWENE EUDOXUS AND IRENIUS.
Eudox represents the rational Englishman interested in politics but largely ignorant of Ireland, and the one who asks the questions.
Irenius speaks the answers with the inside knowledge of the recently planted English landowner, going into great detail and digression in a text which has been described as the most *sophisticated* trieste on the Renaissance concept of race and identity by a canonical author, whose main concerns are ethnography, genealogy, degeneracy and cultural formation” - of a new Protestant polity, being planted in Ireland.
The pamphlet, was written and circulated in manuscript amongst the think-tanks of the day, but not published until long after his death in 1633, as it advocated *pacifying* Ireland by first removing its indigenous language and customs by the scorched earth policy he had witnessed being used in the Desmond Rebellions. The second of which, left one third, 300,000, 90% of male Munster, or the entire population of County Cork, dead.
Spenser’s lack of charity in this text drew lost of criticism in its time and today makes a BNP Manifesto read as joyful as a shared lottery winner’s ticket would among the poverty level residents of a homeless shelter.
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Maurice FitzGerald, Lord of Lanstephan (c1100 - 1 September 1176, was the founder of the dynasty that became the Desmonds, who came to Ireland with Strongbow.
He was a son of the Welsh princess Nesta "brood mare" and former mistress of Henry I, both of whom, many European royal houses trace themselves to, and his father Gerald de Windsor, Constable of Pembroke Castle.
A few generations being barons before they became Earls in 1356 with Maurice FitzThomas Fitzgerald, 1st Earl of Desmond, Lord Justice of Ireland and by the time of the third, the poet-earl Gearóid Iarla" (Earl Gerald and another Lord Chief Justice), they had gone completely native and the Latin Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis (more irish than the irish) arose in the Middle Ages as a result of this family.
Gerald was the man who replaced French with Irish as the preferred language of the Hiberno-Norman aristocracy, and his most famous poem - "Mairg adeir olc ris na mnáibh" ("Speak not ill of womenkind") was written in 1370, whilst imprisoned by Brian O'Brien, which was a common hazard and accepted mode in the culture where cattle raiding was all they had ever known.
Spenser's Present Day View of Ireland, deploys the logic of Griffin to imperiously spout racial twaddle, bogusly fabricating exhaustive tendentious *proff* to demonstrate the Irish barbarians had descended from Scythian stock, lowest class the Elizabethan Englishperson could make in their desire for genuine royalty linked to the founding King of the Britons, Brutus, the son of the Trojan Hero and grandson of prince Anchises and the goddess Venus.
This, now wholly laughable myth which originates in the annonymous 9C manuscript Historia Brittonum, (The History of the Britons) which Geoffrey of Monmouth polished up in Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain) and which men like Spenser had as their piece of paper proving a link with the source Culture they so longed to attach themselves to in Greece of the English Renaissance. Comedic now, but then, heresy to claim the truth, that it was all nonsense and their Civilization was built on what is effectively, lies.
The Cambridge Unioversity web-page on him shows a similar regard in relation to the truth:
"Although his prose treatise on the reformation of Ireland was not published until 1633, it showed even then a shrewd comprehension of the problems facing English government in Ireland, and a capacity for political office as thorough as his literary ability. Milton was later to claim Spenser as 'a better teacher than Aquinas'"
Yeats has the most accurate measure of him in his Intoriduction to the Collected Spenser:
"...one regrets that he could not have lived always in that elaborate life a master of ceremony to the world, instead
of being plunged into a life that but stirred him to bitterness, as the way is with theoretical
minds in the tumults of events they cannot understand.
Like an hysterical patient he drew a complicated web of inhuman logic out of the bowels of an insufficient premise there was
no right, no law, but that of Elizabeth, and all that opposed her opposed themselves to
God, to civilisation, and to all inherited wisdom and courtesy, and should be put to death.
When Spenser wrote of Ireland he wrote as an official, and out of thoughts and emotions that had been organised by the State. He was the first of many Englishmen to see nothing but what he was desired to see.
Could he have gone there as a poet merely, he might have found among its poets more wonderful imaginations than even those islands of Phaedria and Acrasia. He would have found among wander-
ing storytellers, not indeed his own power of rich, sustained description, for that belongs to
lettered ease, but certainly all the kingdom of Faerie, still unfaded, of which his own poetry
was often but a troubled image.
He would have found men doing by swift strokes of the imagination much that he was doing with painful intellect, with that imaginative reason that soon was to drive out imagination altogether and for a long time. He would have met with, at his own door, storytellers among whom the
perfection of Greek art was indeed as unknown as his own power of detailed description, but who, none the less, imagined or remembered beautiful incidents and strange, pathetic outcrying that made them of Homer's lineage."
Desmond - Write a book. You probably have enough already.
Poets are not necessarily the best and kindest of people. Cruelties are not unknown among them. Keats was much influenced by Spenser in his use of the open vowel. An arse-kissing poem - ie The Faery Queen in this case - may be a great poem for all that. Eliot uses Spenser's Prothalamion in The Waste Land. The poetry is not in the opinion but in the vision and the command of language. Alas, that it is so, but it is so.
That also makes Leni Riefenstahl's films of the Nuremberg Rally and the 1936 Olympiad rather masterful, indeed, beautiful, and I say that remembering it was the passionate consumers of those films that killed half my family. I don't mean three centuries ago. I mean directly in my parents' time. What this shows is that in the most wicked vision there is enough to persuade some people that it is good, and that is only because some of it is so. It is stirring, lyrical, breathtaking, ravishing, extraordinary, fantastical, and, in transporting people out of their normal condition, it reminds them of noble ideals out of which they extract what they imagine is virtue. Extracting virtue is the fatal flaw.
That, I think is true. The rest is caricature. Resist caricature: resist even vision. Simply resist. Caricature and vision will continue as they were, with the power and charm of each, and it takes skill and grace to produce both. But they are not inexhaustible gold-mines of virtue.
It is impossible to judge people out of their time. Catholic Ireland was a strategic danger to Protestant England - the Pope's knife in the back. And in Elizabeth's time there was always the reign of Bloody Mary to remind people of what that might mean.
Empires and colonies have always been the way of the world. The Hungarians weren't always in the Carpathian Basin - they pushed, fought and tricked their way in. No occupier is secure. That's why they often treat the natives so cruelly.
The problem in Ireland is that it has always known one, and only one, oppressor. European countries have seen waves of them.
You can hate the 'toff' Spenser all you like. But I wouldn't waste all your energy on it. It's only self-harm in the long run. The 'poet' Spenser is to one side of that. He will continue avoiding the hatred directed at the toff.
Nor were all the barabarities on one side in Ireland. War zones are barbarous places. Distrust intensifies and turns poisonous. Ireland's sad fate has been to be the frontline battleground between two realpolitiks (Pope and King), two religious forms (think Shia and Sunni for a second), out of which arose two mutually hostile cultures as much as religions, of Pope and King.
But I'm sorry you are not a landed Desmond. I could have come and stayed on one of your estates.
Griffin is just an insignificant tosspot and has about as much in common with Spenser as a flea on a pig's back with Lodovico Sforza.
Thankks very much george.
by the time i wrote that monster and posted it, i didn't see your own post, hence any whiff of ignorant.
that's the first time i have clarified that so deatiled, the ionfo has been getting read for years.
"I just wanna take my place as King George, do God's will and serve the cause of s/he who made me, Creation."
Now that's a narrator, not me, just a voice, nowt real.
i will fight not you for those kingdoms George, only as a Creator with narrators, they can go head to head and that way we can stay out of it.
It's only this week in class with Carol Rumens the page ten supermodel, i grapsed what you refer to and can seperate the narrators in a poem from the seriel killers who dreamt 'em up, the private individual from the public Poet and so, hurah!
I am off to the magic bookshop now, and to read your own post, see if i can detect any authorial dabs.
Oi Billy. I remember once sitting in a taxi from Nice to Monaco (get us!) with you and the boy Foster, listening as the taxi driver regaled us with tales of what the North African migrants had 'done' to that part of the world. He had a long litany of complaints, some seemed perfectly reasonable, and he thought they justified him in voting for the National Front. What did we say to him?
"Still, You should never vote for Nazis"
Doesn't matter that Nick Griffin may have a point about something. Because he's so very wrong about everything else, there's never enough reason to give them a moment of time.
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