‘Holocaust’ memorial appeal judge is wife of leading Jewish politician
Regular H&D readers will know that there has for several years been a plan to build a gigantic ‘Holocaust memorial’ in the heart of Westminster – close to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey – and taking over one of Central London’s few green spaces, Victoria Tower Gardens.
H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton submitted a detailed report in 2019 to the original Westminster City Council planning enquiry, which went on to reject the planned memorial.
However government ministers appointed a central inspector who override the decision of local planners.
Today that central government decision is being challenged in court, reopening the question of whether this monstrous ‘memorial’ will ever be built.
And we shall of course report on the progress of today’s appeal.
However one strange fact is worth pointing out immediately. The judge in this High Court Appeal is Mrs Justice Thornton – better known as the wife of former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband.
In 2015 her husband publicly supported the initial plan for a London Holocaust Memorial – and now Mrs Miliband (aka Mrs Justice Thornton) is sitting in judgment on the final version of the same project. We have no reason to believe that Mrs Miliband/Thornton is anything other than totally honest and unbiased, but can this be right, when justice must be seen to be done?
Ed Miliband’s grandfather Sam was a committed communist who fled to London as an illegal immigrant from wartime Belgium. He had earlier fled from his Warsaw birthplace after betraying his own country to fight alongside Trotsky’s invading Red Army during 1920. See our report a decade ago.
Latest woke insanity sees Shakespeare’s theatre issue ‘anti-semitism’ warning
In the latest pathetic display of woke ‘sensitivity’, Shakespeare’s Globe has issued a warning to theatre-goers that The Merchant of Venice – currently being staged by candlelight at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – “contains antisemitism, colourism, and racism”.
We aren’t quite sure what “colourism” means, but we can be sure it isn’t an apology for the Globe having cast two black men and one Asian women among characters meant to portray 16th century Venetians.
As for “anti-semitism” – can anyone planning to see The Merchant of Venice really be unaware that its central character – the moneylender Shylock – is perhaps the most archetypal Jewish villain in literary history?
If the Globe were really concerned about whether the Shylock image is fair or not, then instead of this pathetic cringe perhaps they would care to sponsor a conference or study day to accompany the production? H&D would be very happy to provide a speaker.
For example we could discuss two statements by one of the greatest figures in British political history, Ernest Bevin, who founded Britain’s largest trade union, took charge of labour relations in Churchill’s government during the Second World War, and was Foreign Secretary for almost six years after the war, when he was the co-architect of NATO.
Bevin told the Trade Union Congress during the 1931 economic crisis: “It is a game of Shylock versus the people, with Shylock getting the pound of flesh every time.”
And at an emergency Cabinet meeting soon after the Second World War, by which time war debt had tightened Shylock’s grip. Bevin said in Cabinet (!) that “we [the British government and by extension the British people] are in Shylock’s hands”. This observation was so incendiary that it was not typed into the official Cabinet minutes, but appears in the handwritten notes of that meeting taken by a senior civil servant.
This was at a time when British soldiers and police were fighting Jewish terrorists in Palestine, and although it took almost three years, ‘American’ pressure eventually forced the British government into acquiescence in the creation of Israel in 1948.
So if the Globe really wants to discuss the question of ‘anti-semitism’ and Shylock in a British context, let’s start with Ernest Bevin and discuss whether his views reflected ‘racism’ or reality.
Or is the Globe interested only in woke posturing rather than scholarship?
Jewish actress Maureen Lipman in race row over film about Israeli PM
The latest politically correct row in the acting profession has come from an unexpected quarter. In issue 96 of H&D, a professional actor and longstanding racial nationalist using the pseudonym ‘Jack Antonio’ wrote about the insidious development of colour-blind casting in an article titled ‘Fade to Black – The darkening of our screens and its part in the theft of our past and our future’.
The reason he had to use a pseudonym is that publicly expressing such views would instantly have ended his stage and screen career, since he would be damned as a ‘racist’.
Yet this week one of Britain’s most instantly recognisable Jewish actresses has expressed equivalent views, objecting to a non-Jewess – Helen Mirren – being cast as former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
Maureen Lipman has a long record of outspoken political activism in support of what she sees as Jewish and Zionist interests, and has regularly used newspaper columns for this purpose. In 2005 she used her Guardian column to attack historian David Irving, and described H&D writer Lady Michèle Renouf as “a well-known racist”.
Is Ms Lipman now indulging in her own ‘racism’ at the expense of a fellow actress?
If so, she might be surprised by the stranger than fiction story of Helen Mirren’s gentile family and its curious connections with secret Jewish history in the mid-20th century.
Just a day after discovering a secret story of Zionist subversion that led to Jews being banned from recruitment to British intelligence, H&D’s Peter Rushton has been sent back to the archives to tell the true family story of Helen Mirren.
H&D target of new legal crackdown
The UK Government is preparing a new threat to online debate – extending the law to cover a wide range of material that until now has been perfectly acceptable.
And Heritage & Destiny is the top target of these new internet censors.
A document submitted to Parliament in September this year, but which we saw for the first time yesterday – quotes H&D as the main example of a website that is presently accepted by existing law as legitimate journalism – but which lawmakers now aim to restrict as ‘harmful’.
The new law intends not to criminalise us directly, but to force internet companies to ‘protect’ users from being offended by even ‘legal but harmful content’. These companies would face big fines under the new law if they failed to comply with instructions, for example to remove our content from their servers or remove us from search engine results.
The main examples of ‘harmful’ articles that in the document’s authors’ view should be restricted include our report on Henry Hafenmayer, the courageous German historical revisionist who died earlier this year at the tragically young age of 48.
Henry would no doubt be most amused to see that his campaigns for truth and justice continue to ‘threaten’ British parliamentarians even after his death, so that his work remains read posthumously in the corridors of UK power! He is most famous for his website Ende der Lüge (“End of the Lie”) and associated social media accounts: H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton and campaigner for freedom of research Lady Michèle Renouf attended his funeral in Berlin two months ago, a funeral which itself made headlines.
During the 2018 trial of revisionist filmmaker and video blogger Alfred Schaefer in Munich, Henry cooperated closely with Lady Renouf so that her daily updates from the trial could reach the Anglosphere via American Free Press. He was a regular speaker at demonstrations in support of German sovereignty and justice. Alongside the late Richard Edmonds, Henry had been due to speak at the Dresden commemoration in February 2018 before police closed down the event and arrested Lady Renouf: an extended legal process fought by German attorney and patriot Wolfram Nahrath ended in Lady Renouf’s victory over Dresden prosecutors who dropped the case days before it was to come to trial in October 2020.
Now it seems that UK legislators are heading (via an indirect route) to the same destination as many European countries, including Germany: attempting to silence normal historical debate and rational argument by means of a legal cudgel. London’s perfidious method will be to avoid outright criminalisation – allowing them to pretend that they still allow free speech, while in practice seeking to gag online discussion.
The influential lobby group Hacked Off – fronted by actor Hugh Grant – has demanded that the government’s draft Online Safety Bill be amended so as to target us. Hacked Off‘s founders include the leftwing Jewish author Don Guttenplan, who attended and wrote a book about the court battle between David Irving and Deborah Lipstadt, having been given special access by Irving during the trial; and former Daily Mirror editor Roy Greenslade, who wrote for many Fleet Street papers while also having a pseudonymous column for the Sinn Fein / IRA newspaper An Phoblacht. It’s quite an honour to be accused of ‘harmful extremism’ by a veteran spokesman for IRA terrorism.
Hacked Off told MPs that we “recently published a tribute to the Holocaust denier Henry Hafenmayer” but that under the draft bill, we “would likely gain an exemption” as a legitimate journalistic website. They also drew MPs’ attention to our US friends at National Vanguard, whom they similarly regard as a ‘harmful’ website that could be exempt from the draft bill.
No-one has ever suggested that the work of Henry Hafenmayer – or that of his comrades such as Sylvia Stolz, Horst Mahler and Ursula Haverbeck – has in any way infringed UK law.
But within weeks of the Hacked Off report, Nadine Dorries – newly appointed Culture & Media Minister in the UK’s Conservative government – agreed with the lobbyists that the draft bill had to be toughened. It is now expected to come before Parliament in March next year.
Mrs Dorries is a notorious vulgarian who in 2012 accepted more than £20,000 to appear on the crass ‘reality TV show’ I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Less than a decade ago, her behaviour was judged so reprehensible that she was briefly suspended from her party, and forced to apologise for a breach of parliamentary standards.
Yet in 2021 British politics has sunk so low that we must accept definitions of journalistic standards dictated by the likes of Mrs Dorries, a woman who abandoned her parliamentary duties so as to earn £20,000 eating an ostrich’s anus in the Australian jungle for the entertainment of television viewers.
For the time being – but who knows for how much longer – H&D readers can judge for themselves whether the articles highlighted in Hacked Off‘s complaint to Parliament are so ‘harmful’ that they justify new laws specially drafted to target us. The three articles they mention (and helpfully link from their document so that MPs and ministers can read them, even if they wish to prevent a wider public from doing so) are:
Henry Hafenmayer – champion of German freedom – dies aged 48
Two very different wings of the anti-Islam movement
and
Did ‘racism’ win on penalties?
Rest assured that whatever the legal obstacles, we will continue – as we have now for 105 issues of the magazine – to reflect a cross-section of 21st century racial nationalist opinion. We remain confident in the survival and eventual victory of our people and their traditional values.
Is Rangers F.C. Still a Loyalist Club?
Many (Glasgow) Rangers FC fans have been moaning on various internet social media forms (Facebook, Twitter, Telegram etc.) that Rangers are no longer a “Loyalist club” and have “sold-out to political correctness”, because all of their players “took the knee” in support of the extreme-left wing group Black Lives Matter (BLM) before their friendly game against Lyon, in France last week, with a couple of players even giving the Communist/Republican/Black Power salute!
Rangers official Graham Provan, responded to the many supporters who disagreed with the clubs new liberal-PC stand by saying –
“So proud of Rangers for doing this and weeding out all the racist scum in our support. Why people think this is political is beyond me. I thought our support was better than that but clearly not. Thank you for doing this and standing up for what is right.”
However, those who know their “Rangers history” should remember that Rangers started to cut their ties with the Ulster Loyalist/Protestant cause way back in 1987, when the club turned down (for the first time) the Orange Order’s request to host its annual religious service at Ibrox. And it was then that steps began to remove the vendors of Loyalist/Orange literature, merchandise and paraphernalia from the areas directly around the Ibrox on match days. In fact, Rangers teams of the past had actually gone to Ulster, there to raise funds for the Orange Order!
Two years later in 1989, Rangers under new manager Graham Souness, signed Mo Johnston, a Catholic who had previously played for their arch-rivals Celtic) and as they say the rest is history.
Back in the May-June issue (#60) 2014 of Heritage and Destiny magazine we published an article/review written by Gil Caldwell of a book entitled We Don’t Do Walking Away, The Incredible Inside Story of a Season in the Third Division. For those interested in the debate as whether or not Rangers is still a “Loyalist club”, this article is well worth reading again.
Goodbye to Hello Hello?
Gil Caldwell reviews We Don’t Do Walking Away, The Incredible Inside Story of a Season in the Third Division – by Lisa Gray.
Published by Black and White Publishing Ltd, 2013. ISBN 978-1-84502-635-6 (Paperback). Available for £8.00 from Black and White Publishing, 29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh, EH6 6JL or online at www.blackandwhitepublishing.com
The tale of Glasgow Rangers’ descent into the lowest, Third Division, of Scottish football and subsequent emergence, thereafter, is a fascinating and, often, an inspiring story. There are, actually, two stories here. One, with an appeal to those with legal and financial minds, is that of the team going into receivership and having to fend off a host of legal and monetary problems. These problems were not of the superficial sort – nor are they, as of yet, completely alleviated. There was a time that the “Gers” were in danger of ending their very existence, which had commenced in March of 1872. The other narrative focuses on the efforts of supporters, players and managers to keep Rangers’ successful identity afloat in the far from glamorous environs of lower tier football.
It is this latter saga which is the focus of Rangers FC: We Don’t Do Walking Away: The Incredible Inside Story of a Season in the Third Division. Essentially, this is the diary of a journalist who attended all the matches, home and away, league and cup, throughout the 2012-2013 season.
However, this is not simply the account of a football season, albeit with the twist of a high-level team competing at a level significantly below them. It is also of some socio-political and religious note. Rangers, have for most of their years, been associated with the Protestant faith and the political cause of Loyalism or Unionism, a cause which has spanned the past century with its focus moving from opposing Home Rule prior to the First World War to preserving the Protestant/British identity of Northern Ireland at present. Underlying all these disputes is the question of religious/cultural/national essence. Does one identify with Protestantism and hence with Britain or with Catholicism and therefore with the Republic of Ireland? Does one wave the Union Jack, the Red Hand of Ulster, St. Andrew’s Cross (with or without inserted Red Hand) or the Irish Republican tricolour?
The reader should keep in mind that the days when this was primarily a conflict of religious doctrine have largely faded. To the extent that Rangers and, their fierce opponents, Glasgow Celtic, represent communities, these are no longer, primarily, orthodox faith communities, professing divergent views of transubstantiation, Papal infallibility, salvation by faith or works or any of the questions, major or arcane, of Christian dogma, which animated Europeans since the Reformation. Rather, we must realize that this, and, to outsiders, somewhat peculiar conflict lies in the hazy realm where religious differences long ago created a gap which is today, almost uniformly, cultural and political. Of course, much of that culture divide makes reference to battles and ideas steeped in religion.
(A brief digression – To a small degree the formerly religious conflicts have been translated into a modern idiom. The covenantal aspects of much of Protestant thought yields a certain modern anti-authority vibe, which might manifest itself in disdain for the supposed subservient (to clergy) nature of Catholics. Many lay Protestants will offer as part of their anti-catholic clichés, their belief that Catholics obey Papal teaching in all areas of life whereas Prods think for themselves. Although an alluring mythology, the notion that Catholics, in other than microscopic numbers still submit to Roman teaching in areas such as birth control and the like is about as true as the notion that a robust Calvinism has nothing to command about bedroom behaviour.)
To those far removed from the history of these struggles, their current fierceness seems surprising and, at this late date in the history of European man, a bit anachronistic. As an American racialist once said to me, “Shouldn’t they all be more concerned with massive non-white immigration and political liberalism?”
In fact, if we may dwell for a moment on whether the feuding supporters really are of differing genetic stock it is worth noting that Scotland, Northern and Southern Ireland are all a part of the areas which at one time spoke a dialect of Gaelic. As to whether the invasion and conquest of what was to become England by Germanic and Scandinavian tribes (Angles, Saxon, Jutes, Frisians etc.) has yielded a somewhat different genetic source for the English is an intriguing question debated among geneticists. But leaving such scholarly matters to the academicians, for the layman, the inhabitants of the once United Kingdom seem largely the same racially, although greatly divided culturally and historically.
(One last point before we proceed, there was and is a school of “radical nationalism”, unable over the years to garner much support, which would like to focus on an Ulster culture which goes beyond the religious divide and seeks complete national independence for that troubled province.)
So, although to racialists of other lands, this conflict may seem like a “fine mess” (as Oliver Hardy used to say to Stan Laurel), to those involved it strikes to the core of their identity and collective memory. If, as racialists assert, that it is moral, healthy and, generally a good thing to have a group identity, then for Rangers/Celtic worlds the question of being a Billy or a Tim should always be part of who one is.
Over the decades the Rangers-Celtic rivalry, known as the “Old Firm” (a cynical view of the rivalry seeing it primarily as a business, dating back to the late nineteenth century) has featured not only a fierce clash of identities, spilling over, time and again, into low level violence, but also features the two best football clubs in Scotland by far. And, although a few of the other teams, of what is now the Scottish Premiership, have had their years or periods of success, at the end of the day, the highest level of competition has always been that of Rangers and Celtic. Each of these teams has had great success in Scotland in both league and Cup play and each has seen moments of glory in Europe. As part of the current self-perpetuating dominance of wealth in football, Rangers and Celtic have built upon their on the pitch talents to acquire the money needed to purchase enough skilled players to maintain their dominance.
Thus, it was a seismic shock when it was revealed in the spring of 2012 that Rangers was deeply in arrears and had engaged into several forms of financial deceit to keep themselves afloat. Faced with the prospect of quite literally going out of business, the players (well, more accurately some of the players), the fans and former Rangers star, now manager, Ally McCoist resolved that the team would not go under. As noted above there is a legal/financial story here as well, but our concern will be the soul of Rangers, not its pocketbook.
When asked, shortly after the news of Rangers’ bankruptcy became public, as to whether he was going to resign, McCoist was quoted, in words that have since become a rallying cry, “This is my club, the same as it is for thousands and thousands of Rangers supporters, and we don’t do walking away.” So, Rangers’ supporters now had a phrase to add to WATP (“We Are the People”). In short order, a graying Rangers’ fan, surrounded by two stuffed bears clad in tartan light blue, would set the phrase to a lively tune on YouTube which tens of thousands would watch.
When the dust had cleared, before the 2012-2013 season had begun, the Scottish Football League members voted 25-5 to punish Rangers by dumping them into the Third Division. Whether this was an appropriate decision or simply the settling of some old scores is best left to future researchers, but the decision was final. In the coming football season, the once mighty Glasgow Rangers would be facing the likes of Annan, Elgin, Berwick (also “Rangers” by the way), Montrose, Stirling Albion. Of the ten teams on this level, only two had stadiums capable of seating over five thousand (Rangers being one of them) and five could not fit four thousand.
The season proved remarkable in several ways, all which are discussed in full in Gray’s book. First, Rangers’ supporters, in fact, did not walk away. They continued to fill Ibrox, as in years past, and did, indeed follow the squad “anywhere” and “everywhere”. Second, although the Third Division managements and their supporters proved most hospitable and savoured the experience, their players proved, almost always, surprisingly competitive. Eventually, Rangers triumphed over both strange environs and inspired opponents to finish first and secure promotion to Division Two. Third, this being the age of Political Terror and Thought Control, Rangers found themselves, even in the relative obscurity of Division Three, twice embroiled in accusations of “sectarianism” and “racism” by rival supporters and ownership, respectively.
We have now arrived at the second focus of this essay. Over almost every contemporary telling of Glasgow Rangers’ history hovers the ogre of the dreaded “sectarianism”. For example, even in the feel good, lavishly illustrated table top history of the team Rangers: The Official Illustrated History by Lindsay Herron, we read concerning Rangers and Celtic: “The religious divide gives the fixture a dimension that few intra-city rivalries have, but the hatred and bitterness it has engendered is undoubtedly unwanted in modern society.” (We ignore for now the implication that “pre-modern” society either would have been okay with these “hatreds” and, thus, evil or, alternatively, just not yet properly enlightened by the wisdom of modernity. This is a fundamental problem for those who accept the feminism, homophilia and multi racialism of the present as irrefutable dogma, what are they to think about their own immediate and long ago, ancestors? Were they all evil folks? Were all the ancestors of European Man, even as recently as WWII, evil chauvinists, homophobes and racists?) The trendy cliché of “sectarianism”, which lacks even a workable definition, as all similar words employed by the Political Terror that dominates the public forum today, is forever without clear explanation. What might it possibly mean? It is arguable that it is precisely the loose definition of these words of social control which enables our would-be Mind Controllers to use them whenever and wherever they wish. Nonetheless, despite the lack of a lucid definition, powerful forces, in media and government were and are on a mission to do away with the demon of “sectarianism”.
An early victory in the move to soften Rangers identity came in 1989 when the team, under new manager Graham Souness, signed Mo Johnston, a Catholic who had previously played for Celtic, to a contract. (Although, in point of fact, other Catholics, less overt in faith or stature, had played for the team, Johnston was the first public signing in recent memory.) For decades the club had an unwritten rule to employ only Protestants. This was now to be viewed as a great evil and its eradication as a long-awaited triumph for righteousness.
Yet, if we turn back the clock a bit further, one discovers that the move to sever the link of Rangers to its cultural and historical roots had begun before the Johnston signing. It was in 1987 that the club management turned down for the first time the Orange Order’s request to host its annual religious service at Ibrox. And it was then that steps began to remove the vendors of Orange literature and paraphernalia from the areas directly around the Ibrox. In its past, Rangers teams had actually gone to Ulster, there to raise funds for the Order.
In fact, at one of these benefit matches held on 10 May 1955 to help pay for improvements on the Sandy Row Orange Lodge in Belfast, the game program featured the following rhyme, from an anonymous “Orange Poet”.
To guard the faith which Luther preached
The rights which William won
The Orangeman relies upon
His Bible and his gun.
(We leave aside whether the “faith which Luther preached” would please the true Presbyterian believer of Scotland or Northern Ireland with his consubstantiationist view of the Eucharist. Whether to follow Zwingli or Calvin on this is a question which, one suspects, intrigues Rangers supporters far less than memories of the 1972 European Cup Winners Cup win.)
Similar ventures in poetry will not be printed in Gers’ programmes today, to be sure.
But was it really the case that the old Rangers identity was evil? Would it be considered a moral crime for a black or a Muslim to wish to employ his co-racialists or co-religionists? I am not an expert in this field, but my initial research has yielded that a Muslim is actually required to employ a Muslim, whenever possible, over a non-Muslim. Do not the same Mind Controllers, who spent decades defaming Rangers, encourage group identity for non-whites and Jews? In fact, the Orthodox Jewish law actually commands Jews to employ and patronize their fellow Jews. Is this wrong? May a man not grant first allegiance to family, kin, community, and ethnicity? One begins to think that it is only certain identities that must never be asserted.
Why can’t a team be part of a larger community? Why may a team not have a cultural identity?
Rangers today seek to render the soul of their supporters as antiseptic and arid as possible. The attempt to offer, over the tannoy, the meaningless Penny Arcade and the, more touching, but still identity-less, Blue Sea of Ibrox in place of many “forbidden” songs of the past is the culmination of this process. In fact, even the seemingly innocent Simply the Best (of Bonnie Tyler and later Tina Turner fame) has slowly been shelved due to the supporters’ proclivity to curse the IRA and the Pope via their own creative chorus response. Indeed, many of the most fervent of young Gers supporters these days seem content to wave vapid blue based flags as opposed to the Red Hand, St. Andrew’s Cross and Union Jacks which all flowed on terraces of the past.
(Let us pause here a moment to ponder the two just mentioned cursings. Is it wrong for a Protestant to wish the IRA ill? Would UEFA punish Israelis cursing Hamas? An organization, which has clearly espoused terror against innocents to achieve political power might seem to be a just recipient of its victims’ hatreds. As to the Pope, well, if one accepts the Reformation view of the Papacy as a monstrous error of doctrine which confused the Christianity of millions for over a thousand years, shouldn’t it be justly resented, especially when this errant dogma was often forced upon Europe by physical coercion? Granted that today’s Rome is a far cry from what once was, but must a people abandon its past pain just because political commissars demand it? More on this soon.)
In recent years, Rangers’ management, as much of the European world, has been called to task by our Mind Controllers. And, following in the footsteps of Mayor Lundy, they too have surrendered. Witness this subservient excerpt from the Wee Blue Book Season 06/07. “What the UEFA directives have done is to make us examine our own traditions and make us more determined to celebrate them in a . . . disciplined manner . . . Please support all the initiatives which celebrate our heritage and culture in a colorful and progressive way.” Specifically, the book demands “sing the songs in the Wee Blue Book” and “Display your legitimate flags and banners.”
What exactly did UEFA say in 2006? Well, among other matters, they proclaimed, “The Billy Boys is associated with an attitude that is strongly sectarian and thus discriminatory” and “the singing of the Billy Boys is prohibited.” What is this horrible song with its “sectarian” and “discriminatory” words?
The music of this evil song was actually composed by an American, Henry Clay Work in 1865. He also wrote its lyrics. However, its title at that time was Marching Through Georgia, and it celebrated the barbarous march of Union General William Sherman across the southern state of Georgia in 1864 to capture the coastal city of Savannah. The pillaging of Sherman’s troops has long been regarded with shame on both sides of the Civil War, but in particular it was regarded with horror in the south. Nonetheless, in the revenge filled aftermath of that terrible war, it became quite popular in the north.
This is a frequent occurrence in Northern Ireland, Scotland and England, as many songs of America’s first century, military, folk and religious have been freely shipped back and forth from the colonies to their Mother Country and vice versa. Not a surprising exchange as the early peoples of the United States were largely from UK stock.
I leave to Rangers historians, of greater acumen than I, to determine at what point the song became the Billy Boys. Common wisdom has it that the “Billy” referred to Billy Fullerton, leader of The Protestant Club in 1930s Glasgow and devoted, as its membership card had it, “to uphold King, Country and Constitution . . . and to defend other Protestants.” Glasgow had many clubs (some called them “street gangs” in that era) and the need to defend one’s co-religionists was no idle matter. Interestingly enough, Fullerton was also a member of Rotha Linton-Orman’s British Fascists during the same period. Others have tried to argue that the Billy means King William of Orange and it was just coincidental that Fullerton was also a “Billy”. Whatever the truth may be the song became a terrace favourite.
It actually has fairly long lyrics with references to the 12th July, “no surrender” and the like, but it is the rousing chorus which really caught on. Here are the offending lyrics:
Hello, Hello, we are the Billy Boys
Hello, hello you’ll know us by our noise
We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood
Surrender or you’ll die
For we are the Bridgeton Billy (alt. Derry) boys.
There are others forbidden tunes such as No Pope of Rome, and The Famine Song, but we will focus our attention on the above lyrics, seeing as almost all major Rangers football victories up till recent years have been accompanied by rousing renditions of this tune. (See the YouTube clip “Rangers Fans Incredible Support Rocks Old Hampden Park” for a brief clip of what used to be.) And now it has fallen as silent as did the Old Orange Flute once “Bob Williamson married Brigit McGinn”.
Whether to demonize these anti Catholic manifestations of Rangers identity depends, at root, on what a people’s identity may rightfully be?
Let us turn to the Bible a bit on this subject. The ancient Hebrews were first exiled by the Babylonians in 587 BC. Thereafter, we read in the 137th Psalm, “O daughter of Babylon thou are to be destroyed. Happy shall be he that repayeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock.” Or, ponder this from Psalm 79, which sounds positively sectarian: “Pour out Thy wrath upon the nations that know Thee not, And upon the Kingdoms that call not upon Thy name.” Similarly, we find in Lamentations 3:66 concerning the Gentiles who waged war against the Hebrews, “Pursue them with anger and destroy them under the Heavens of the Lord.”
Does the above mean that contemporary Hebrews, or Christians who accept the Old Testament, desire to literally smash all Babylonian children’s heads against rocks? No more so than did the thousands who used to assemble on the terraces at Ibrox or Hampden Park wished to actually stride through a deep stream of Catholic blood. And no more than did American abolitionists or 1960s black civil rights’ workers in America who sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic really want to “loosen” upon all white southerners “the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword” or desire that the Lord’s “heel” should “crush” them all.
These are songs of identities and causes, which in time of physical battle may be meant literally, but usually are simply the way a people recalls its buffetings, triumphs and hopes in history. To this day Jews recite the above quoted portions of the Bible at the Passover service. Does this mean that all Jews are vicious folk, chomping at the bit to launch wars of total destruction? Of course not. It means simply that they are a people with a long memory, who cherish their history and are not going to forget those who caused their suffering in the past.
Our Mind Controllers wish that all men (well, all European men, at least, others are called upon to have long and often bitter memories!) should forget their pasts and despise their ancestors. To the degree that they can commercialize football and reduce to the level of entertainment, they will have succeeded in their plan to destroy the faiths and identities of the heritages of Europe.
The struggle of Glasgow Rangers to climb out of the nether reaches of Scottish football and their supporters’ continued loyalty has been an inspiration around the world. It is a shame that this glorious saga must be hampered by censors and Mind Controllers. When and if the day comes that Europe casts off its chains, the walls of Ibrox and, yes, Parkhead as well, will be in full throttle celebrating their past, present and future. And, if the price to be paid for this was and will yet be the singing of tunes that once displeased our current commissars, then, well, so be it.
Gil Caldwell, Trenton, New Jersey
Editor’s Note: After this article was submitted, I checked Andrew Davies’s book City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster, which seems to conclusively prove that “Billy” refers to King William and that the name was used before Billy Fullerton joined the group. The book has many pages on the subject of the original Billy Boys, including the fact that the song itself was actually sung in the streets of Glasgow as early as the 1920s.
RAF decides Nigger’s life didn’t matter
In the latest bizarre episode of politically-correct self-censorship, the Royal Air Force has altered a historic gravestone to remove the name of the most famous dog in RAF history.
Wing Commander Guy Gibson led 617 Squadron’s famous ‘Dam Busters’ raid on the night of 16th-17th May 1943, breaching two German dams with the revolutionary ‘bouncing bomb’ designed by Barnes Wallis.
The story was told in a 1955 film The Dam Busters, which also highlights the strange coincidence of Gibson’s dog – a black labrador retriever called ‘Nigger’ – being killed by a car on the very night of the raid. ‘Nigger’ is portrayed in several scenes during the film. Even by 1955, filmmakers didn’t perceive any problem with the dog’s name.
‘Nigger’ was buried at 617 Squadron’s base, RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire. This month the RAF removed his name from the gravestone.
Politically correct historian James Holland praised the move: “I’m all for it. I think that is sensitive, it’s honouring the fact that the history is still there.”
Mr Holland argued that the name of Gibson’s dog should be airbrushed out of history because “it’s also impacting on how we regard Guy Gibson. Because the accusation is that Guy Gibson was a racist by having a dog called that name. Whereas actually he should be remembered for his heroism in what he achieved, which was absolutely remarkable.”
However local MP Sir Edward Leigh has written to the RAF questioning their decision: “It is perfectly understandable that this is a tricky matter to which there are no simple or easy solutions. I am, however, very fearful of our ability today to erase or re-write history.”
This is yet another indication of Second World War history being turned into a set of fairy tales. The RAF and Mr Holland seem to believe it’s necessary to falsify the image of ‘our side’ so as to pretend that the war was about promoting modern liberal ‘anti-racist’ attitudes, whereas in fact almost all of the combatants in the Second World War – British, French, German, Italian, and above all American – had views that would be judged extremely ‘racist’ by the standards of 2020.
Babyish ‘sensitivity’ on racial matters has led almost all newspapers today either to avoid mentioning the word ‘Nigger’ or to write ‘N****R’ or to photoshop the picture of the previous gravestone.
Wing Commander Guy Gibson didn’t live to see the madness of multicultural, ‘anti-racist’ Britain. He was killed aged 26 on 19th September 1944, when his damaged plane crashed in Holland while returning from a bombing raid on Mönchengladbach.
Fade to Black – The darkening of our screens and its part in the theft of our past and our future
You fly into London on a British Airways plane on which you are shown an animated film about safety. It stars a cartoon Black man with his cartoon White wife and their cartoon mixed-race child. You pass through immigration control and are poked and probed by Brown people wearing hijabs and turbans who jabber at you in an unintelligible version of the English language. Heading for the tube you pass a poster that shows a Black woman dressed in Elizabethan garb beckoning you to the Globe Theatre. On the ride into town you see posters for the latest West End plays. There are productions of Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry V starring Black women in the title roles. (The critics rave that these classic plays finally make sense.) There is also an Asian actor playing David Copperfield and Christmas pantos starring Blacks and Asians as Cinderella, Dick Whittington and Snow White. Next to the entertainment ads are those for mortgages and mattresses all featuring Black men with White women. And, they are almost always blonde women.
You get home, put your feet up in front of the TV and notice that there are an unusually large number of Brown people on the streets of Victorian London as depicted in the BBC’s latest version of A Christmas Carol. And, the villages of Midsomer are teeming with more people-of-colour than your local benefits office. Even Doctor Who is suddenly a Black woman! You channel surf and are confronted by Black Vikings, Black Centurions, Black Tudors and an Asian King Arthur! The news is read by a Brown person. The weather is given to you by a Brown person. Your favourite gardening program is presented by a Brown person. The Brown person presenting your favourite wildlife program explains without a trace of irony the danger of extinction faced by native fauna and flora due to the invasion of alien species.
In disgust, you turn off your TV and browse through the latest brochure from The National Trust. But something is odd – most of the people shown wandering around the stately homes of England are Brown. The mothers of the large, happy families in the photos wear Muslim or Hindu garb. The only White faces are those of blonde women holding hands with Black men and their mixed-race children.
Meanwhile, your teenage son is in his room playing a new computer game set in World War I. But, in this version of the Great War the trenches look like a Saturday night in Brixton and the game’s logo is the face of a Black Tommy. You wonder if you have slipped into an alternate universe or are dreaming. But, you aren’t dreaming. You are living through a waking nightmare. And, I can tell you why.
I’ve been a professional actor for fifty years. I’m also a proud member of that most despised of all groups – old White men. I’m not a star or even a semi-name but you have probably seen and heard me many times. I know the world of advertising and show business. And, I know how, why and by whom our screens are being darkened, I am being denied work and our past and future are being stolen from us.
The answer is BAME. It stands for Black, Asian or Mixed Ethnicity. And, that acronym is now an essential part of every media company’s ethos. When a brand is hiring actors for a commercial or a production company is hiring actors for a play, movie or TV program, they proudly trumpet the fact that they prefer to see or will only see performers who are BAME. (Imagine what would happen if someone advertised with a preference for White.)
The Cultural Marxist octopus has many tentacles and has been at work in all the arts for many decades. As a child in 1950s America, I saw early attempts at “colour-blind” casting. But, in the 1960s, the prominent New York theatrical producer Joseph Papp started pushing it big-time in his Shakespearean productions in Central Park. (You will not be surprised to learn that Papp was a Jew.) I suffered through many productions of Romeo and Juliet with a Black Romeo and a White Juliet. Or, a Black Macbeth and White Lady Macbeth. The audience wasn’t supposed to notice these racial absurdities and anyone who did was a racist. So, most people pretended not to notice and they still do.
Oriental audiences are more forthright in their opinions. They want White heroes. Star Wars films that feature Black actors flop in China – a very important film market. So, the Star Wars producers avoid putting Black faces on the film posters. And, the latest Star Wars had to remove a gay kiss to make it acceptable to Orientals who want their heroes straight, too.
We Occidentals feel the same even if most won’t admit it. We vote in private with our money. The producer of the mega-successful comic-book “cape hero” film franchise let slip at a convention that movies and action figures based on non-White characters don’t sell – worldwide. The sale of dolls, clothing and mugs etc. is a major part of the profit stream for any film or animation. It is a racially revealing economic fact that Black Barbie and Ken dolls don’t sell – even to Black kids. Gay and trannie Barbies and Kens also gather dust on store shelves. White heterosexuality is the go-to choice for everyone.
But, shouting “Commercial considerations be damned”, the Cultural Marxists have doubled down in Britain and are putting propaganda ahead of profit. The British Film Institute (BFI) which bestows crucial funding to film projects fell into the tentacles of one Josh Berger, an American Jew with a long Hollywood history. Under Berger’s malevolent influence the BFI has mandated higher levels of BAME. Any production that does not meet the set levels will be denied funding and thus any chance of distribution or awards. It will be dead. So, producers genuflect to globohomo and grind out the anti-White, anti-heterosexual, anti-Christian propaganda that pollutes our screens. Adding insult to injury, we are paying for this filth because the majority of the BFI’s money comes from the UK taxpayer!
The levels of race and gender-blind casting mandated include –
• At least one lead character must be non-White
• 50-50 male-female ratio in entire cast
• At least 20% of cast must be non-White
• At least 10% must be LGBTQ
• At least 7% disabled
• A large proportion of plot lines and filming locations must be set among underrepresented groups.
With those parameters in mind, try writing a film that should by natural law, reason and historical fact be set in a White, male world. How can you fit that many women, homos, lesbians, trannies, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Blacks and crippled, cis-phobic, bi-curious Eskimos into a Lancaster bomber, a monastery or the Alamo? And, I wonder if these same race and gender targets will apply if an all-Black film company sought funding for a movie set in a lesbian bathhouse in Somalia? Would the screenwriter have to find a way to squeeze White, Christian, hetero males into the steam room?
We aren’t being betrayed by the BFI alone. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts which bestows the prestigious BAFTA awards is equally on-board the globohomo express though it is (small comfort) privately funded. Still, if you want to win a BAFTA you must bow down to the Cultural Marxists who run that outfit.
And British Equity (the actors’ union) promotes and protects every race but White. It cares nothing for the race that only created theatre, film, television, radio, the internet and trade unions! It promotes and protects every sexual persuasion but heterosexuality. My union dues are currently paying for a campaign to ensure that “trans” actors get to audition for roles of any gender including those of the gender they claim to have left. Meanwhile, I can’t get an audition to play an old White guy because it’s being played by a Black female-to-male trannie!
The BBC admitted that its race-blind casting of period dramas is not historically accurate but feels it is important to do it in the interests of cultural cohesion. Well… if this BAME business is not part of an anti-White agenda but just a well-intentioned attempt to make us all race and gender-blind then when do I get to play Martin Luther King or Winnie Mandela?
Meanwhile, for all their disingenuous calls for race-blindness, Black performers insist on race based preferential treatment and love “acting Black” – especially in period dramas. Notice how Black actors in plays by Shaw, Ibsen or Wilde will use a ghetto pose and vocal inflection to get a cheap laugh. They are Black to their bones and they know it and are happy to play the minstrel if it’s to their advantage.
At this point a few questions come to mind. If non-Whites were important personages in what we thought had been a White world then what the hell are they complaining about? If Blacks really “wuz kangz” as the Black Israelites proclaim (including kangz of England) then where was the discrimination? And, if Blacks were capable of achieving so much back-in-the-day then what the heck happened? Did they simply forget how to be physicians, scientists, architects, engineers and, yes, kangz?
Remember those National Trust brochures full of photos of happy smiling Brown people? They are a staged hoax. The National Trust advertised on casting sites all over Britain for BAME models and actors to pose as visitors and staff at stately homes. But, in reality, if you visit NT properties you will see that with rare exception they are delightfully White in both staff and visitors. Still this hasn’t stopped the NT management from pushing globohomo. They “out” and promote queer members of the families that owned the properties. And, they suggest that bent Uncle Bertie was the best of the bunch. The NT even tried to force its volunteers to wear rainbow flags but most refused. Meanwhile, when I speak privately with older NT volunteers, I find they have fond memories of Enoch Powell and Oswald Mosley.
I have starred in many TV commercials for top brands that were broadcast worldwide. I assure you that it isn’t merely fashion or whim that matches so many Black men with White women. In a thirty second commercial every second counts and nothing appears on screen by chance. I have seen directors, clients and cameramen almost come to blows in arguments over the color of my shirt. How much more debate has gone into the colour of the actor’s skin? So, these racial pairings are not accidental but are blatant attempts to break down the resistance to race-mixing from all races. Listen to Black talk radio programs and you will hear Black women weep that Black men are encouraged to get blondes. In fact, Black Nationalists (our mirror image and possible allies) believe that race-mixing is the ultimate sin. And, we know what happens to Asian girls who race-mix. But, as with films, the Cultural Marxists don’t give a damn and plow on sacrificing profits for propaganda.
Case in point: Gillette recently ran an anti-male ad campaign that suggested all men (especially White men) are sex-pests. White men were outraged. This campaign culminated in an ad in which a Black father showed his daughter who had “transitioned to male” how to shave. This time Black men were outraged. This PC campaign cost Gillette a record amount of profit. But its CEO said it was worth it to promote diversity.
Alongside the tribe that foments and feasts off our replacement lives an opportunistic parasite – the Black “race hustler.” The uber-obnoxious Whoopi Goldberg is master of this scam. And, despite being as funny as a fire in an orphanage, Whoopi has made a fortune playing the fat, sassy soul-sista who is the depository of all wisdom. (Sort of an X-rated version of Mammy in Gone with the Wind or a potty-mouthed Aunt Jemima.) You’ll notice that this smart, sassy maid stereotype is a staple of sitcoms. She is always the smartest person in the house she cleans. She’s certainly smarter than the doofus White dad who is the butt of all her jokes. (There is literally a genre of US sitcom called “Doofus Dad.”)
Believing her own BS, Goldberg has morphed into a political pundit. She holds forth daily on US TV on all manner of subjects while injecting the race card into all of them – no matter how misplaced. She gets away with this because Whites are afraid of challenging her lest they be called racist. Believe me, if you think Jews are good at squeezing the holocaust into any discussion you ain’t seen nuthin’ till you see Whoopi at work. (We have the Jewish director Mike Nichols to thank for Goldberg’s rise to fame.)
Another race-hustler is Bonnie Greer, a smug, American negress based in the UK and a poor-man’s Goldberg. Greer is a regular on BBC political chat programs where she is introduced as, “Noted American playwright.” But, I challenge anyone on either side of the pond to name a single Bonnie Greer play. In fact, in America she is entirely unknown. The woman is a fraud. And, like Whoopi, she benefits from Whites’ reticence to call her out. Meanwhile, the BBC loves wheeling her out because it allows them to tick certain boxes on their diversity chart. Foreigner. Female. Black. Greer’s many appearances allow her to shoe-horn the race card into every subject imaginable while demonstrating the stultifying banality of her opinions. But, I gotta give this sassy, soul-sista credit because with no talent (especially no play writing talent) she has become the House Negro of the British middle-class and (wait for it) a board member of the British Museum!
Homosexuals are also useful idiots for their Cultural Marxist masters. They’ll do anything if it gives them the chance to snort poppers and wear frocks. The lesbians get to wear the pants on stage in taxpayer funded all-female Shakespearean productions. It is true that in Shakespeare’s day young men played the female roles. But, this was not transvestism by choice. It was necessary because women weren’t allowed on the Elizabethan stage. And, there was no kissing or touching in the original productions.
Homosexual playwrights, directors and designers rarely miss a chance to demean Whiteness and masculinity and to degrade females. In a recent London production of a play based on Patrick Hamilton’s brilliant WW2 novel The Slaves of Solitude, the queer director and adaptor changed the American GI who was the play’s love interest into a Black soldier. This was impossible casting for all sorts of reasons. But, it allowed the queers to indulge in their own fantasy of having a Black buck ravage the spinsterish English heroine.
There have been many other instances of plays and musicals being mangled by ludicrous race and gender-bending casting. Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward and Rodgers and Hammerstein all forbade such changes. Some of those men were homosexual but they still recognised cultural vandalism when they saw it. Sadly, their estates are managed by their PC grandchildren determined to make their Grandpa’s back catalog hipster-friendly. That sound you hear is of those disrespected gents turning in their graves.
Meanwhile, the hypocrisy of the Cultural Marxists and their apparatchiks in the arts is stunning. They live in the Whitest communities they can find and send their children to the Whitest schools. (The Clintons live in the Whitest zip code in America, and Jewish Bernie Sanders moved from multi-ethnic Brooklyn to Vermont – the Whitest state!) The only contact these hypocrites have with any non-White is with their Black maid. And, if she gets too sassy, they’ll fire her Black behind.
As employers they are anything but progressive. All the major film, TV and commercial producers including the big streaming services film their projects in poor countries. South Africa and Eastern Europe are especially popular. They do this to bust the performer’s unions in the US and UK. This anti-worker behaviour is nothing new. In the 1930s, the Jewish movie moguls who ran Hollywood hired goon squads to bust up organising meetings for the Screen Actors Guild. Meanwhile, British Equity is too busy creating new genders to act as a genuine trade union and fight the media giants.
These media liberals also go abroad to abuse and exploit the local actors and crews. The same producers and stars who cry on the awards shows about Trump and climate change and animal rights allow film extras to be treated like cattle – forced to stand in the cold and wet for many hours (sometimes all night) and given little or no food and very meagre wages. I’ve had extras beg me for food while the loud-mouth lefty stars dined like Meghan Markle. And, the film crews are forced to work round the clock which leads to unsafe conditions. I have seen actors and extras almost decapitated by machinery. I have walked off unsafe sets but most actors are afraid to stand up for themselves.
If I sound angry it’s because I am. And, I’m proud of it. I’m also proud of my history, heritage and culture and I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone degrade, destroy or steal them. My anger is fuelled by the blood of my ancestors that flows through my veins. And, as long as that most precious blood flows through me, I shall do all I can to expose and resist the deliberate genocide of our people. A genocide that is being dramatised and broadcast. On primetime. And, we are paying to watch the spectacle. If you don’t believe me just go to a movie or play. Turn on your radio or TV. Or, open your eyes. It’s happening. It isn’t a sitcom or movie. It’s real. It’s deliberate. And, we can stop it. But the entirely legal means of doing so are best discussed elsewhere. In the meantime – Hail Victory!
Jack Antonio, Brooklyn, New York City
Editor’s Note: this article first appeared in the May-June issue #96 of Heritage and Destiny magazine.For a sample copy please send £5.00 or $10.00 to; H&D, 40 Birkett Drive, Preston, PR2 6HE, England, UK. Or email – heritageanddestiny@yahoo.com
Jack Antonio is the author of Boy Outa Brooklyn – a murder memoir. It is available on amazon as a paperback and eBook and from all major eBook distributors. Or, visit Jack’s blog at http://www.boyoutabrooklyn.com
British History Matters
The assault on British history continues, with Lord Baden-Powell (founder of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides) the latest target. Locals in Poole, Dorset, rallied in defence of the Baden-Powell statue, and the local council announced temporary plans to remove it from the quayside to prevent vandalism.
The scouting movement began on Brownlea Island in Poole Harbour, but its founder is now accused of that most heinous crime – “racism”.
It seems that every aspect of British history is now to be judged in relation either to slavery or the “White supremacism” of the British Empire – in which (by the way) slavery was abolished in 1807, fifty years before Baden-Powell’s birth.
A further prime target (a hundred miles along the Channel coast from Poole) is Sir Francis Drake’s statue on Plymouth Hoe (as well as another Drake statue in his nearby birthplace of Tavistock). Drake was the second man to circumnavigate the Earth – and the first to command such a voyage from start to finish. En route he piratically raided Spanish galleons, and on his return to Plymouth in 1580 handed half his booty to the Crown.
This loot amounted to more than the rest of Queen Elizabeth’s income for the entire year!
Drake is not being belatedly held to account for piracy. Rather his sin is to have been tangentially involved in the slave trade. Together with his cousin and fellow privateer Sir John Hawkins, Drake is believed to have been the first British slave trader – but slaves were simply one of many commodities that Drake and Hawkins stole from the Portuguese when attacking their ships off the African coast.
In fact Drake was just as likely to employ slaves who had escaped the Spanish as he was to trade in them: in the context of Drake’s life and times, the slave trade was a very minor footnote indeed.
Yet in 2020 this is all that matters. Drake’s crowning achievement – the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 – is now held of little account compared to the fact that in his youth he captured some slaves (as part of other cargo) and sold them on. Our entire history – in common with the history of every other White nation – is to be reduced to our relationship with Blacks and other minorities: a relationship in which we White Europeans must now be subservient.
The whole charade is rooted in the cult of Holocaustianity, where history is redefined in terms of victimhood. Women can be cast as eternal victims, so an entire historiography of female oppression spawns a profitable academic industry. Blacks are among the most useful victims for the rewriters and heritage-destroyers, who must however be careful to ignore the tendency for women to be victims of blacks, or blacks to be victims of other blacks.
But the fons et origo of the entire victim cult is the ‘Holocaust’, and Jews are history’s ultimate victims – the ultimate case in which we Whites must confess “we are all guilty”. (The phrase was popularised by the late Michael Wharton – aka Telegraph columnist Peter Simple – as the cry of his satirical ‘great social psychologist’ Dr Heinz Kiosk, but is now literally enforced as the worldwide White catechism.)
This ‘Holocaust’ cult’s pioneers are now, however, in danger of falling into their own trap, as some Blacks develop a new spin-off heresy – Blacks as victims of Jews!
2020’s iconoclasm might yet prove to be the start of White reawakening in defence of our heritage and in defence of historical truth: down with the Victim Cult of Historical Lies!
Social conservative split rocks Irish republicanism
The Republic of Ireland has no electorally credible racial nationalist, or even eurosceptic nationalist party. In 2014 the big story here was Sinn Féin’s success in gaining three MEPs with 19.5% of the vote. This year Ireland’s European parliamentary representation will increase from 11 to 13 MEPs, so Sinn Féin (political arm of the terrorist IRA) will almost certainly retain these three seats.
However Sinn Féin is now being challenged by social conservatives, who take a leftwing stance on economics and remain committed to taking Ulster into the Irish Republic, but are disgusted by their leaders’ new liberal policies on issues such as abortion.
At the start of 2019 a Sinn Féin member of the Irish Parliament, Peadar Toibin defected to set up a new conservative nationalist party called Aontú (which means ‘Unity’ or ‘Consent’). Some see this party as a desperate last stand by a dying Catholic establishment, but it has already attracted a few defections from either side of the Irish border.
Mr Toibin is a business consultant and graduate of University College Dublin, and had been a Sinn Fein activist since his student days. He says that about one-third of the new party’s supporters come from Fianna Fail, Ireland’s second-largest party and successor to the tradition of the country’s first independent leader Eamon de Valera. North of the border recruits have also come from Sinn Fein’s declining rival the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), including a councillor in County Tyrone.
The latest defector to Aontú is Sinn Fein councillor for Central Craigavon, Fergal Lennon, who told the media: “My former party has lost contact with the grassroots and no longer represents the best interest of the electorate, choosing instead to put media sound bites in place of real action.”
Arguably the roots of this split date back to the late 1960s when the Provisional IRA was formed. This rejected the old-fashioned Marxism of the ‘Official IRA’: instead of waiting and building towards a proletarian revolution, the Provisionals were determined to escalate a brutal terrorist war against the hated Brits.
Yet on the other hand these same Provisionals increasingly identified themselves with Third World ‘liberation movements’, and eventually with the entire gamut of trendy delusions ranging from feminism, through abortion rights, gay marriage, multiracialism and no doubt now ‘transgender’ rights.
For many years Sinn Fein / IRA disguised these leftist/liberal affiliations from their American donors, since most of the latter were old-fashioned nationalists with a romantic attachment to traditional Irish culture, and in most cases devout Roman Catholics.
Now the chickens have come home to roost. Emboldened by a decade of scandals that have undermined church authority, militant left/liberal secularists have openly taken control of Sinn Fein’s agenda.
The new Aontú party is an effort to reconnect Irish republicanism with its traditional roots: it will be interesting to see whether Sinn Fein’s hegemony (that has been consolidated over the past half century) will now be challenged.
There is also a new party called Irexit campaigning for Ireland to leave the European Union, but it’s not yet clear whether this will be officially registered in time to contest this year’s elections. In Ireland (unlike the UK) at least 300 registered members are required before a party is officially recognised to appear on ballot papers.
Hoax papers expose academic corruption
Three American academics have exposed the intellectual corruption prevalent among their colleagues, in what Niall Ferguson (writing in today’s Sunday Times) describes as “one of the greatest hoaxes in the history of academia”.
As Dr Ferguson reveals: “In the space of ten months they dashed off twenty spoof articles and submitted them to established journals in the fields of cultural studies, identity studies and critical theory.”
All of these fake papers were “outlandish or intentionally broken in significant ways”, including “some little bit of lunacy or depravity”.
Nevertheless numerous papers were accepted for publication by officially recognised academic journals. For example, an article titled ‘Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon’ written in the name of a fake author called ‘Helen Wilson’ was accepted and published in February this year by Gender, Place & Culture, which describes itself as “a journal of feminist geography”.
Two of this journal’s editors – Katherine Brickell of Royal Holloway, University of London, and Kanchana Ruwanpura of the University of Edinburgh – have research positions at UK universities, state-funded via the Economic and Social Research Council. The editorial board of Gender, Place & Culture includes Professor Patricia Daley, who is ‘Professor of the Human Geography of Africa’ at Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.
‘Gender. Place & Culture’ has now retracted a hoax article, but these and other politically correct journals now have a serious credibility problem.
