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Sunday 19 April 2009

A Note on Terminology and National Identity

One topic that in recent years has never been far from the headlines has been a preoccupation with Britishness and the question of what it means to be British today. This debate of course has nothing to do with a putative “crisis of national identity”, for we native Britons do not possess an identity crisis, as we are perfectly well aware of who we are. No. It is only those who are UK passport holders but self-consciously not native British who are experiencing anything resembling a crisis of identity, together with our political leaders who claim not to understand the nature of the British and Britishness.

Jonathan Wynne-Jones, a religious affairs correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, last Friday penned a short piece entitled “How does Britain solve its identity crisis? ” The occasion for its writing was prompted by this week’s forthcoming debate on British identity being held by the Islamic Quilliam Foundation. As has become standard practice in the mainstream media when mentioning Islamism, Wynne-Jones attempted to stigmatise patriotic Britons and accord them a pariah status equivalent to that of the Islamists by stating: “It could not come at a more opportune time - right-wing extremism is on the rise and the threat posed by Islamic radicals is persistent and real .” [1]

The numerous comments left in reply to his piece made clear the preponderant opinion of his readers: multiculturalism and mass immigration are to blame for this mess. Correct.

However, this understanding of the situation is not permitted to be articulated by mainstream political and media figures. Gordon Brown himself stated in a Radio 4 programme entitled “Britishness” on 31 March this year that in the past too much emphasis had been placed upon institutions, race and ethnicity. For him, “tolerance, liberty and fairness” are the vagaries upon which modern British identity should be constructed. If we were to define ourselves by “race and ethnicity" he claims, "this would be a disaster” because of the multiethnic composition of the country [2]. Surely, by Brown’s own measures of “tolerance, liberty and fairness” he has sorely failed to live up to his own definition of Britishness?

A standard argument of relatively recent provenance employed by advocates of multiculturalism and mass immigration has been that there is no such thing as the British or the English because “we are a nation of immigrants.” This specious assertion is based on the fact that the country has experienced multiple waves of immigration over millennia. What the proponents of this argument conveniently overlook is that these separate streams of people have become organically fused into a set of indigenous national communities: the English, the Welsh, the Scots, the Cornish and the Irish.

Although Daniel Defoe rightly noted that the English are "a mongrel race", one salient fact about this "mongrelism" is always overlooked by the exponents of multiculturalism: the native English (excepting a few scions of the Norman aristocracy) know not whether their forebears were Angles, Saxons, Danes, Jutes, ancient British tribes or Romans etc, because all of these intermarried and fused to produce a common culture. The peoples who contributed to this fusion shared a number of civilisational and genetic commonalities, so to equate this native organic national development with the politically-directed demographic change that we are experiencing today is fundamentally flawed and dangerous. It is unlikely that these isles have ever undergone such a rapid transformation of their cultural and genetic stock since they were repopulated by humans at the end of the last glaciation.

Ask a Pakistani UK passport holder what they are and they’ll tell you that they’re a Pakistani. They like the UK passport though, because it gives them access to a better standard of living than they'd be able to access back in their true homeland. They, like many of the immigrant groups that have surged into the UK over the past 60 years, have been encouraged to retain their separate identities both from without (by British politicians and state agencies), and from within (by religious and social norms regulating exogamy and attitudes to people of other belief systems and races). Although there has been some intermixing between the indigenous population and the incomers, generally speaking we have witnessed the growth of de facto colonial outposts of external cultures and national groups. Those who have successfully assimilated have been from closely related peoples and cultures such as the Poles, Serbs, Ukrainians, Hungarians, etc who fled from Communism and Nazism.

As can be seen from the above, the traditional "mongrel nation" is something completely separate and distinct from the multicultural ersatz Britishness for which the Labour Party, the BBC and their ilk are constantly questing. Given that we are forever being force-fed multicultural Newspeak by the mainstream media and politicians, we need to be able to articulate a clear and unambiguous position that refutes the pseudo-concepts through which they wish to refashion public consciousness. The following are therefore some suggestions as to objective terminology that can be used in their stead:

Briton
A native inhabitant of Britain and its associated smaller isles, or one who has become fully assimilated culturally and biologically through intermarriage. A native inhabitant is a member of one of the native peoples of Britain, these being: the English, the Welsh, the Scots and the Cornish. Britons may also be resident overseas temporarily or permanently.

Britishness
That which is characteristic of native Britons and their territory, i.e. cultural, genetic and geographical

British Stock
This is defined through descent: the Britons and their direct descendants elsewhere in the world such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Britain
The island of Britain, excluding the island of Ireland.

The United Kingdom
The legally defined political union of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The British Isles
Britain, Ireland and the associated small islands comprising this archipelago.

UK Citizen
Anyone who is entitled to hold a UK passport.

Colony instead of “Minority Community
The preferred term for so-called “minority communities” that are geographically concentrated outposts of peoples and associated social and ideological structures not traditionally found amongst Britons, e.g. Pakistani colonies in Bradford, Dewsbury and elsewhere. Colonies seek to recreate the external national homeland or an idealised version of it in the UK. To this end, chain migration encourages the genetic expansion of established colonies and the displacement of Britons.

Population instead of “Community
In the case of immigrant populations such as the recently arrived Poles and Lithuanians who do not wish to create colonies, the term ethnic minority population should be used instead of community, because “community” carries implications of permanence and group membership, leaving the way open for the articulation of group specific rights. Members of immigrant populations should possess individual rights, but not rights as legally recognised lobby groups.

Ethnic Minority instead of “BME – Black and Minority Ethnic
This term is preferable to that of BME (black and minority ethnic), as it is the one employed in more objective scholarly literature dealing with such matters. BME is a New Labour neologism freighted with baggage, as it has emerged from the activities and ideology of ethnic minority political agitators. Ethnic minority can also be legitimately employed in those areas or cities (such as Leicester) where Britons are being threatened with ethnic minority status. In Leicester we will therefore shortly be able to speak of the English as an ethnic minority.

Familial Homeland
For Britons, this would be Britain. For UK passport holders descended from immigrant populations who have not fully integrated and assimilated as described in the definition of “Briton”, this would be whichever country their family had originally inhabited, e.g. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, etc.

Asylum Claimant instead of “Asylum Seeker
Not all of those who claim asylum are actually seeking asylum, thus the suggested change in terminology to provide an objective appraisal of all who state that they are “asylum seekers” before the veracity of their claim can be ascertained.

Sectarian Affiliation rather than “Faith Community
The former individualises a person’s choice about which faith or none they choose to affiliate to. The latter, containing as it does the term “community”, like the instances of this term mentioned above, carries within it the assumption that by dint of its existence its members should be accorded certain recognition. Take away the term “community” and we are left with a group of people agitating (e.g. Muslims) for special treatment, which can then be dismissed more readily as we will not have accorded them the dignity of a collective personality.


Sources:
[1] How does Britain solve its identity crisis? -http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/jonathanwynnejones/blog/2009/04/17/how_does_britain_solve_its_identity_crisis

[2] Gordon Brown in “Britishness”, Episode 1, Radio 4, 31 March 2009 - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jcjjp

Friday 17 April 2009

The BBC and Overpopulation: Stupid, Ignorant or Deliberately Misleading?

This week, Sir David Attenborough, a man of great integrity who has done so much to bring natural history to the British public through his enduring love and knowledge of the subject, announced that he was joining the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). Rightly concerned about the unsustainable rate of global population growth he told the Times: “I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more. Population is reaching its optimum and the world cannot hold an infinite number of people.” [1]

Sir David’s patronage of the OPT, which promotes a voluntary maximum of two children per family, is very much welcome. As Edward Wilson has noted, we are currently experiencing one of the most, if not the most, rapid mass extinction event in the history of life on Earth [2]. Its root cause: the explosion of global human population which entered its current phase circa 1750 and, as Sir David notes, has trebled within his professional lifetime.

Thomas Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), long ago predicted that without checks and balances on human population growth (either voluntary or involuntary) we would as a species eventually outstrip the land’s capacity to support our pullulating species. Critics of Malthusianism have stated that his predictions have been repeatedly falsified, as to date food production has always stayed one step ahead of demand. Mass starvation has thus been averted. It must be conceded that thanks to a number of developments such as the eighteenth-century agricultural revolution, the mechanisation of agriculture, the introduction of new methods of food preservation (canning and freezing) and the later Green Revolution, we have indeed as a species managed, with a few localised famines here and there, to feed ourselves. To suppose that this can be maintained indefinitely, or that this is even desirable, is folly.

Before moving on to explaining why Malthus will ultimately be proven correct, I will deal with a frankly irresponsible article written for the BBC website by Michael Blastland entitled “How can a graph be so very wrong?” [3]. Seemingly prompted by Sir David’s patronage of the OPT, Blastland’s article seeks to demonstrate that the OPT’s concerns are essentially baseless, using past projections of the UK’s population growth to demonstrate that population prediction is not an exact science. True. This is undeniable. He then goes on to state that the average number of children born to families in Bangladesh has reduced from circa 7 in the 1970s to 3 today, noting that this “changed in a way that took the rich world 200 years.” He also mentions a potential UK population of 78 million. This prospect does not seem to bother Blastland, despite the fact that the OPT notes that the carrying capacity of the UK is circa 20-25 million.

Our current global, and indeed national, population levels have only been able to reach their existing scale thanks to energy-intensive agriculture, i.e. oil-based fertilizers, mechanised systems of production, processing, and transit. Without relatively cheap oil, the entire system collapses. Our civilisation is predicated upon the availability of this vital commodity. Last year, a few bad grain harvests in different parts of the world such as Australia, coupled with rocketing oil prices and increasing consumer demand in China and other developing economies, led to the current spike in food price inflation. For all the talk of potential “deflation”, the price of food in the UK continues to track upwards, and as global demand grows and our currency depreciates (thanks to the devaluation of Sterling euphemistically termed “quantitative easing”), it will continue to do so.

With current population levels the UK cannot feed itself sustainably. With the mass immigration promoted by our mainstream political parties we could be confronting the very real prospect of national starvation at some point in the future as the global economy realigns and our economic purchasing power declines relative to that of other nations. This is why Blastland’s article, presumably endorsed by the BBC, is reckless. We should be aiming for a balanced demographic policy, with the goal of reducing our national population to circa 20-25 million over the next century or so. This is readily achievable without any draconian or inhuman measures. For this to succeed, mass immigration needs to be halted and reversed.

We should seek to take a less anthropocentric perspective, and acknowledge that there is intrinsic worth in the rich biodiversity of our Earth. With the loss of each species, our own lives become more impoverished.

Globally, it will be the business of other states to deal with their internal demographic issues, but we should not provide a safety valve for their domestic pressures. Either states and individuals can choose to regulate their populations voluntarily, or the age old checks and balances which, as Jared Diamond noted, brought about the collapse of the Maya, the Easter Islanders, the Greenland Norse and others, will engulf us all [4].

Sources:
[1] 'David Attenborough to be patron of Optimum Population Trust', http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6087833.ece

[2] Edward O. Wilson, 'The Diversity of Life', Penguin, 2001.

[3] 'How can a graph be so very wrong?', http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8000402.stm

[4] Jared Diamond, 'Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive', Penguin, 2006.

What Really Underlies the “No Platform” Policy?

The recent cancellation of hustings in the Wanstead by-election thanks to the refusal of the Labour candidate to share a platform with the BNP candidate once again brings to the fore the “no platform” policy that has been adopted towards the BNP. Although Labour candidates are the most likely to adopt this stance, representatives of the other two mainstream political parties frequently advocate and use this tactic. The “no platform” policy has also been officially adopted by the National Union of Students (NUS). Furthermore, whenever and wherever a public platform is afforded to BNP members, organisations such as Searchlight and UAF turn up in an attempt to prevent their views from gaining a public hearing.

The justification adopted by all of the aforementioned advocates of the “no platform” policy is that they object to the BNP as a fascist organisation that denies the historicity of the Holocaust and incites hatred of ethnic minority groups and homosexuals. If indeed it were the case that the BNP possesses this set of beliefs, it would get nowhere, as very few sane members of the electorate would support such a party. Contrary to the seemingly Anglophobic sentiments of the “no platformists”, the English electorate (for it is the English specifically whom they appear to fear) is not imbued with latent genocidal urges which can be activated to catastrophic effect by the simple act of exposing them to the ideas of the BNP. What they are really afraid of is affording the public the opportunity of discovering that the BNP are not as they are portrayed. What the “no platformists” truly fear is the potential popularity of what the BNP actually say, rather than that which they are said to say.

The BNP is the only political party in the UK with potentially broad appeal that unequivocally rejects globalism, free-market fundamentalism, multiculturalism, Islamisation and EU membership. It is the only party that opposes untrammelled mass immigration. Contrary to the mainstream media’s negative propaganda about the BNP, it is a party that possesses a broad range of policies that put to the fore the interests that should be at the forefront in any true democracy: the well-being of the people and the representation of their stated interests and concerns. When a political system purporting to be a democracy actively works against the interests and wishes of its native electorate in favour of a narrow political class acting in tandem with a transnational financial oligarchy, it ceases to be a democracy, and becomes a sham.

Today, the mainstream compass of permissible political debate is so narrowly defined that large swathes of the indigenous population feel alienated from the political process. The BNP can provide a solution to this alienation through acting to ensure that the core concerns of electors are finally acknowledged and acted upon. Just as the advent of the printing press generated intellectual ferment and liberated early modern society from the ideological diktat of the Church, so the internet is affording ordinary people the opportunity to access alternative viewpoints which are not controlled by the dominant media and economic interests within society. Despite the increasing powers of surveillance employed by our Government to police cyberspace, we are still currently free to debate alternatives to an increasingly discredited ideological hegemony which is beginning to crumble in the face of an increasingly ugly reality.

Friday 10 April 2009

Another BBC Blindspot

It is interesting to see that the BBC yesterday ran an online story on Dr Mary Boulsted's bemoaning of the fact that traditional English lessons were "dying out" and instead being replaced with regimented lessons in "literacy". Two primary reasons were noted as underpinning this shift: Ofsted's rigid insistence that this should be the focus of attention, and the fact that children today lack the attention spans necessary for reading literature rather than mere extracts. The latter is said to arise from their immersion in the world of computers which, it has to be said, does not as yet seem to have lead to the emergence of a proliferation of erudite young bloggers.

There is of course one other extremely pertinent factor that was completely missing from the article and which goes much further towards explaining this 'mystery': our changing national demography, viz, the rapid growth in the number and proportion of children from largely monoglot immigrant groups for whom English is not a mother tongue. Teachers as a matter of necessity have to expend considerable time and effort in ensuring that many children acquire the basics of English before being able to move on to inculcate (if they are then left with sufficient time) a love of our language's rhythms and rich literature. If therefore you are a parent of indigenous stock who has a child that attends a school with a significant admixture (or indeed majority of) non-English speaking children, your child will receive an inferior education to the one that he or she would receive in a traditional British school where the pupils are English native speakers.

That the BBC chooses to ignore this highly salient fact is unsurprising, for this jars with their insistence that all immigration by definition "enriches" our culture and makes society more "vibrant".

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7992662.stm

Monday 6 April 2009

Obama Urges the Islamisation of Europe

Following a week of savouring the fawning lickspittle attention of various EU leaders, Barack ‘Bob the Builder’ Obama today displayed his crass ignorance and overweening arrogance by telling the EU that Turkey should become a full member of the fledgling super-state. Two Obama quotations from this evening’s BBC News at 10 demonstrate the danger of this man’s thinking: “Turkish membership [of the EU] would broaden and strengthen Europe’s foundation” and “[w]e maintain our deep appreciation of the Islamic faith.” Presumably, he has never heard of Balkanisation and the bloodshed that it has engendered? What, moreover, is the nature of his "deep appreciation of the Islamic faith"? These words chilled me to the marrow. He, like our mainstream politicians, is in thrall to the lies propagated by the “diversity is strength” mantra. This is pure doublethink.

Given that the UK unfortunately remains a member of the EU and that the citizens of member states have the right to live and work where they wish within its borders, we know that our already unsustainable flood of mass immigration would turn into a deluge should Turkey join. Furthermore, a very high percentage of these immigrants would be ‘devout’ Muslims. This new wave would be radically unlike the culturally compatible East Europeans who have arrived in recent years, and would have an entirely negative effect upon our country.

The UK’s Muslim population is already growing at a rate ten times faster than that of any other group in society [1], and the accession of Turkey would rapidly accelerate this process. Given the disproportionate chilling influence that the population of 2.4 million Muslims currently exerts on our national lives and liberties, I fail to see how admitting hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) more would lessen social tensions and safeguard our freedoms. It would in all likelihood lead to intense political repression of those who object to this process, and a burgeoning confidence in the Muslim colonies that have effected this change. Our children are already taught lies about Islam being a 'religion of peace' which soften them up for later conversion or subjugation. If Islamisation is not halted and reversed, it will lead to the extinction of individual liberties, independent thought and the rights of women in the UK and other European countries.

Kemal Atatürk may have done his best to build the Turkish state upon secular nationalist foundations, and many Turks still share and vigorously support his vision, but Turkish society is deeply cleft between the defenders of Atatürk’s legacy and the proponents of Islamic reaction. Chief amongst the threats to the secular Turkish constitution is the APK led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who in recent years stated that “[d]emocracy is the train that we shall ride to our destination.” Just which destination is that? A sharia-governed Islamic state of course.

David Miliband has made it clear that not only would he like to see Turkey join the EU, but he would also like the states of North Africa and the Middle East to become members. If this were to happen, our last vestiges of freedom would be well and truly snuffed out, as Europe’s population and political institutions would be overwhelmed by the Islamic demographic tide. It would be a case of submit, fight or flee. No wonder Miliband has his very own propaganda unit within the FCO, which, according to one insider, was established "to combat the negative stance taken by sections of the UK media towards the EU [2]." As the Russian saying has it, "a fish rots from the head down", and the stench of decay under the Labour administration stinks to high heaven. We are living under a Government which appears to be intent upon the self-liquidation of national sovereignty.

Obama’s attitude towards Turkey underlines the urgency of the need for the UK to leave the EU. Contrary to what Obama says, Islam and the West do not possess “common values.” More Muslims in Europe will mean more intimidation of, more violence towards and more displacement of indigenous Europeans.

We have seen what happened to Serbia. Would the US and its allies at some future date be prepared to destroy a nationalistically inclined UK or other independent European state that sought to break away from the Islamising nightmare that Washington and Brussels wish to unleash upon us? In the EU elections on 4 June this year, there is only one option: vote BNP to preserve national sovereignty and halt Islamisation.

Sources
[1] Muslim population 'rising 10 times faster than rest of society', January 30, 2009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article5621482.ece

[2] Confidential personal communication.

Sunday 5 April 2009

North Korea's Damp Squib Excites Presidential Ire

President Obama is not pleased with North Korea. Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il has been a very naughty boy, for he has been caught playing with rockets. This morning’s failed satellite launch demonstrates that North Korea still has some way to go before it becomes capable of producing its own nuclear-armed ICBMs. That it is seeking such a capability is certainly not welcome news, but then again, we have some rather more tangible threats closer to home.

Not only is there Iran, which is developing nuclear weapons and has demonstrated an effective missile capability through the recent launch of its first satellite, but also there is Pakistan, which possesses both warheads and delivery systems. Pakistan is also developing an IRBM capability that would enable it to deliver nuclear weapons over a distance of 4,000 km or more. Pakistan is deeply unstable, and as population pressures grow, so will the appeals of an already strong militant Islamism. In all likelihood, it is only a matter of time before an Islamist regime takes power in the country. Muslim millenarianism equipped with such modern technology would be a truly fearsome prospect; at last, Islam would possess the means of ushering in its own version of the apocalypse.

Even if an Islamist regime does not establish itself in Pakistan, sympathetic elements within ISI could enable Islamists to acquire their own nuclear materials for deployment against non-Muslim nations. This to me is a rather more terrifying prospect than an ICBM-equipped North Korea. Admittedly, for the Japanese, things must look rather different.