So Tommy Robinson is getting sent to prison for 13 months for standing outside a courtroom where a grooming case trial is proceeding and talking about said grooming case. Or, more specifically, breaking the conditions of a suspended sentence, which he had in turn gotten for reporting on another grooming case, which barred him from reporting on any further grooming cases until the conclusion of the original case.
Supercharging this impressive recursion is a ban on reporting Tommy Robinson’s reporting bans, to which end many articles have been scrubbed of the affair:
It would have been cool for, say, RT to violate the ban and dare the Britbongs into shutting it down. But RT is full of cowards (Error 404). In fairness, Breitbart was no better.
What I find amusing is that in principle Tommy Robinson is a moderate with views that mostly align with Western and British establishment interests. He likes free speech and invites trannies to sing at his rallies (ok, they’re not so cool on the former, rhetoric aside). He’s a staunch supporter of Israel. He counter-signals against ethno-nationalists. As he wrote in his book Enemy of the State, he considers Putin to be a dictator. Ultimately, his only problem is that he doesn’t share the elite’s Islamophilia, but that is more than enough for those vengeful ideological maximalists, which is why he is getting sent down to prison where he has a bounty on his head.
PS. Good Twitter thread on the UK’s abuse of reporting restrictions:
The judge in Tommy Robinson's case, Denise Marson, pulled a neat trick today.
She threw him in jail for 13 months, and banned anyone in the UK from talking about it.
A thread on how she did it. (h/t @nickmon1112)#FreeTommy #FreeTommyRobinson pic.twitter.com/an8elg3OlB
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) May 25, 2018
I wonder if anybody has done comparative studies about “hate speech” trials and the like. Britain nowadays seems like one of the most authoritarian Western countries in this regard. Which is odd, given that tradiontally it was always presented as being much more liberal than the continent.
I find it strange that in the UK a judge can prevent the press from reporting on her own judgment. I guess similar things did happen in the USSR or other communist countries, but how did a free country get to the point where it’s even legally possible?
Why were the articles that were already written deleted? I thought the British legal system (even despite their stringent restrictions on ‘hate speech’) frowned upon ex post facto situations.
Priceless!
I am quite sure that i read an interview with some liberal journalist shrill during the first Ukrainian imbroglio (neither the first nor the second deserve to be called “revolution”) that Ukraine was a dictatorship because media was given a spreadsheet each week what to not report about….
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/united-kingdom
“UK Press Freedom: 1(the best)
Political Rights: 1(the best
Civil Rights: 1(the best)”
On the upside, I think that Mr. Karlin has specifically mocked Freedom House before.
By the way, does anyone know why Britain lacks a significant nationalist movement despite being similar to other Western European countries in most aspects?
It seems like after Brexit and UKIP falling apart (not that they didn’t have serious cuck-outs at times) all the nationalist energy in Britain disappeared.
http://gardendrown.com/content/images/2017/01/unperson.jpg
British commenter Randal explained it.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/absolute-state-of-britbongia/#comment-2330698
Historically Britain has had one of the larger post-war nationalist movements in Northwestern Europe.
It is currently at a low ebb becasue of Brexit, while German nationalism has gone from very little to a high point with the AFD becasue of Merkel’s refugees. The German (and similarly I believe in the Netherlands and Scandinavia) PR system also advantages the AFD, meaning that they can get many seats in parliament now while UKIP, which had at least as much support at its peak, could get only two MPs.
Most of those features don’t explain the divergence with other European parties though. The only ones specific to the UK are the English/British distinction (which is a significant issue for virtually no-one) and Europe (which has side-tracked British nationalism, despite leaving the EU obviously being good in itself).
US political (although not cultural) influence has very little to do with Britain’s current cultural and mass immigration problems (if you disagree with this, then please actually point to instances of how it is instead of making vague, allusive assertions).
Thanks. From my (albeit limited) knowledge of the history of British nationalism it seems that while some issues are old and been festering for a long time other issues have recently either only emerged or become significant.
What’s the basis for that, were National Front and BNP ever more than fringe movements?
Agree about the voting system, that’s a crucial difference and a big obstacle for any nationalist movement in Britain.
Well, I was thinking more in a recent timeline. After Brexit it seems like UKIP ballooned and the Tories have become even more liberal even though the influx of at least part of UKIP’s base should have had the opposite effect.
I don’t know how many in the US remain of pure English stock, but what I would do is try to find a young woman like Brittany Pettibone – preferably a young couple like her and Sellner – but of pure English stock – perhaps with a family tree connecting them to some culturally eminent English person. Shakespeare’s line died out, but perhaps someone else.
Find them and arrange things so they have a profile which causes them to be denied entry into the country of all their ancestors.
I guess the modern version would be a shitlord being purged from a picture of gamers.
Robinson ought to have been flanked by two singing trans bodyguards; that was his mistake.
It is remarkable how many people are under the illusion that free speech is widespread. There is a Pinkerian psychosis today.
The NF was always fringe but was still relatively big in the late 60s and early 70s. The BNP also won several council seats and got an MEP in the early 2000s, which I believe is more electoral success than any other Western European party of similar extremity (since it was a notch to the right of the FN). Not much in absolute terms, but a lot for ethnic nationalist parties, especially given how small nationalism was at the time in most of Europe (I may well be underrating this in the rest of Europe becasue of a lack of knowledge).
Then there is UKIP’s success since the late 2000s, peaking with getting the largest share, 27.5%, of the vote in the 2014 Euro elections and 12.6% of the vote in the General Election.
It’s not surprising; the threat of UKIP on the right was what forced them to tack harder to the right on Europe and to a much lesser extent on immigration. Now that the threat doesn’t exist, they have no need to even make rightward gestures.
The primary distinction in Great Britain is known to be social classes.
The national question was probably historically less acute as higher classes would view the rest as some indistinguishable cattle that plough the island.
They are playing areal hardballs. And it seems they will get away with it. To fight it you need a team of good lawyers plus media exposure. Who will show outrage? Anybody in Parliament?
Is Brexit really the only thing people care about? Despite the disappointing Tories it seems like all the attempts to create any kind of ‘NEWKIP’ electoral coalition have been floundering?
No, British people have generally cared about immigration as much as elsewhere (although Islam per se has been less of a political topic) but Brexit has been the focus of politics since the Referendum in a way that’s distracted from any other issue. I think winning the Referendum also led to complacency among many less engaged potential nationalist voters.
A lot of the problem with UKIP is also due to its long and tedious leadership struggles since Farage selfishly stepped down as leader.
This is obviously retarded. The 19th British ruling class showed more concern for the working class than in other large European states. Britons were at least as nationalistic as any other people (although not as much as in the 18th century) in the sense of prioritising Britain’s interests. The reason that ‘British nationalism’ per se didn’t exist as a movement is that the existence of Britain as a nation was simply assumed rather than being an important subject of political discussion, since Britain wasn’t divided like Germany or Italy or part of a larger empire like Ireland, the Czechs etc.
Even having said that, around the turn of the 20th century there was a movement led by politicians like Joseph Chamberlain for greater unity among the white colonies, which was something of a nationalist movement.
I’ve wondered a bit whether one of the problems with European monarchy was the history of international marriages, based on class. The Windsors actually took the name “Windsor” some time around WWI to hide their German descent. Odd as it seems, even with the palaces, there is a kind of rootlessness in European royalty compared to the Japanese Imperial Family.
Of course, all that is probably placing too much importance on weak monarchies, but it is kind of interesting as a thought experiment. If there was a 2500 y.o. tradition of marrying British peasants (meritocratically) but from the four corners of Britain, I think the royal family would have been much better stalwarts of tradition.
The problems with European monarchy were rarely to do with monarchs lacking a sincere concern for their people (which almost all of them had, from what I’ve read) but with them making misjudged decisions. The best thing for them to do was let competent elites rule.
I suppose the Protestant German princes were generally married to other Protestant Germans and ended up (as far as I know) being more reactionary than average (although generally in a detrimental way).
The early Romanovs had something like that (but with beauty pageants). It’s probably a good thing that British monarchs weren’t more protective of tradition, sinceas the Stuarts and George III show it tended to go badly both for them and tradition.
We might say that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are following early Romanov tradition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=87&v=irhQtamQ6Mo
The elite of the UK were geniuses in “the sense of prioritising Britain’s interests”. Most countries would dream to have the successes – in terms of national interests – of the UK of the early 19th century.
But the 19th century nationalism of other countries, came not from lack of prioritizing of interests – but from injustice-sense of occupied, disunited and oppressed peoples, which (at least) English part of UK was not.
The British imperialists were obviously aware of the different strengths and characteristics of the many nationalities they ruled in their empire. They were aware of the differences and behaviours of other nationalities, which they categorized in encyclopedias.
But in the island itself – the complex structure of social class distinction was the dominant obsession.
This is my impression also reading any English literature or novels of this era – social distinctions condition everything, and the existential project of many characters seems simply to be differentiating themselves from lower cattle. But national question is rarely discussed in English literature and seems not to be considered very interesting.
Maybe you are aware of historical English novels discussing national questions.
I have not read so many English novels yet though, so I could be missing some one.
Two I have not read yet:
Daniel Deronda – is focusing on national questions (the Jewish question)?
Kim – has some focus on the Indian Question?
Hate laws are liberticidal. How else to stop men from speaking ..
The UK didn’t have much nationalism because they were so successful. I cannot think of an important nationalist demand which Britain lacked. They had their own country, the official language was their own language (not Latin like in early 19th century Hungary), no foreign oppression, no national disunity, no serious problems with the border (problems like Alsace for France), no backwardness (like in almost all other countries), no humiliating military losses, nothing whatever. They were the strongest and richest country on the planet. Also one of the freest. No immigration to speak of until maybe the last few decades of the century.
It does not sound like that they are more successful than the German NPD which is more right than the AfD and won seats in state parliaments and got a MEP too.
It was part of a larger empire. It is just that British were at the top.
Well, that changed in the second half of the 20th century.
Besides, nobody takes European elections seriously anyway.
I am not understanding the RT removal of the story, how is a Russian news site in any way subject to the authority of a British judge???
The NPD only got 1% of the vote, the BNP got 6%. They even got similar results in regional elections and about 2% of the national vote.
Our ruling parties do, hence repeated attempts to re-introduce the electoral threshold in European election in order to shut out the smaller democratic competition.
https://jungefreiheit.de/politik/deutschland/2018/bundesregierung-will-neue-prozenthuerde-bei-eu-wahl/
In 2009. Afterwards, UKIP stole their thunder. AfD does the same to the NPD.
1,9% in 2010, comparable to the NPD’s 1,6% in 2005.
Don’t know what you would count as historical, but “A Passage to India” (1924) would be a pretty famous one. I myself would not recommend it, nor in particular “Kim.” But take that with a grain of salt, for I dislike most books which appear on regular lists of literature.
originally to protect pedophile politicians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSMA-Notice
they still don’t understand their political class is consciously betraying them and believe (wrongly) that Brexit was the start of fixing the problem – i imagine it will bounce back quite rapidly after a lull.
he’s been putting quite large (relatively speaking) crowds together recently – in particular getting the soccer hooligan element to behave nicely so they don’t put off the middle class UKIP types.
that’s probably why the UK govt are trying to get him killed in prison.
Free speech is an American fetish. The British like our First Amendment even less than our Second. At least the latter has some roots in their country.
Britain has a long history of parliamentary democracy, a system designed to keep power safely in the hands of the Establishment. It’s a system that inevitably breeds a nation of cucks and cowards.
The British people have been trained over the course of centuries to do what they’re told. They’re very obedient.
Yep. There’s no British nationalism because Britain was an imperial power. They were the ones crushing other people’s nationalist aspirations (including the Welsh and the Cornish).
The problem is that the British are too dumb to figure out that their Empire is gone and that they’re now subject peoples of the American Empire. They’re now the oppressed instead of being the oppressor. But they just won’t accept it. They still cling to their sad little imperial dreams. They still cling to the pathetic Churchillian delusions of the Special Relationship and the partnership of the English Speaking Peoples.
The British are going to get a taste of their own medicine, of the humiliation they inflicted on other nations. Hopefully they’re going to get it good and hard.
I thought the social question was way more acute in Britain.
This is laughable, or do you think that Trafalgar and the Peninsular war was won by cowards?
These people haven’t had any national aspirations since at least 1500. Their language and cultural associations were never banned. This contrasts to almost any ethnic and linguistic minority in continental Europe.
The only nation that could possibly have anything to complain about with relation to Britain is Ireland.
The “judge” in the case,
is – not surprisingly – an ambitious woman QC (“Queen’s Counsel,” i.e. senior court attorney).
QCs are sometimes allowed to preside over trials on a probationary period to show that they have what it takes to become one of Her Majesty’s judges: i.e., unprincipled submissiveness to political masters and PC fashions du jour, agility in the art of corrupt expediency arrayed in mellifluous rhetoric, and utter lack of principle.
Family or sexual connections to senior office holders are indispensable at the higher reaches of the judiciary.
The other “judge” involved in the current phase of the Tommy Robinson persecution is:
Surprisingly (not), another judgette.
Connoisseurs of 20th century tyrannies will be familiar with the archetype of the vicious, hyper-loyal female functionary, typically at the lower reaches of the hierarchy.
Typically, these WOMEN commissars avenge their under-endowment in the looks department by vicious thoroughness in persecuting “enemies of the revolution/the people/the working class” etc.
The tweeter was mistaken. The judge in the case is actually Geoffrey Marson QC.
Probably a relative – Marson is not a particularly common surname.
https://theukdatabase.com/councillorspolitical-party-affiliated/mp-sir-cyril-smith-police-interview-transcript-child-abuse-allegations/sir-cyril-smith-is-accused-of-being-a-paedophile/
https://theukdatabase.com/councillorspolitical-party-affiliated/jimmy-saville-witch-hunt-or-paedophile/jerseychildren-were-loaned-to-rich-paedophile-yachtsmen/
https://yournewswire.com/ted-heath-fixed-it-for-jimmy-savile-to-receive-obe/
Same difference.
Another brown-nosing QC (senior attorney) trying to “earn” a judgeship by doing the bidding of his masters, the law and principles be damned.
Before she was found “reliable” enough to be a judge, Heather Norton once prosecuted “Boy George” and saw fit to crack a somewhat lame joke at his expense.
http://www.kentonline.co.uk/kent/news/lawyer-heather-norton-who-prosec-a65294/
In 2017, the probationary “judge” behind the Tommy Robinson scandal, Geoffrey Marson QC, handled part of a child porn case against a former Lord Mayor of Leeds, England. The final sentencing was handled by another judge.
The defendant, Neil Taggart, had been a city councillor for more than 30 years and was also at one time chairman of the West Yorkshire Police Authority.
Taggart’s professional profile suggests that he may have been part of a local pedophile group – as chairman of the local police authority, he would have enjoyed virtual impunity for all but the most egregious crimes.
Pedophilia appears to be highly addictive, hence the desperate need for addicts to secure senior positions in police forces or in politics to gain some degree of personal immunity.
The conviction of child porn possession may mask participation in rather more serious offenses.
Was Geoffrey Marson QC assigned the Tommy Robinson case because his “sensitive” handling of the earlier Taggart case had demonstrated to higher-ups that Marson is a “sound chap” who can be relied on to protect establishment figures?
https://theukdatabase.com/2017/06/06/neil-taggart-garforthleeds/
Churchill and his cult are a major reason for it.
https://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/953594248707956736
https://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/964136002154565632
That should not be 404 but 451
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7725
The sentimentalism about Churchill is nauseating, but, unless Hitchens thinks that Britain should have allied with Germany (which I doubt), I fail to see how Churchill made Britain a vassal of the US.
The fact that Hitchens thinks that the US destroyed the British empire is just embarassing; in fact the gigantic loans made to Britain by the US were the only thing that allowed the empire to keep going after the war. His belief that the empire contributed to British national strength is also incorrect.
Googling
“Tommy Robinson arrested for ‘breaching the peace’ outside court during grooming trial”
brings up quite a few Brit Papers (including The Independent, The Metro and The Sun) dishing out the info now. Has the court order been rescinded?
E.g.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tommy-robinson-arrested-leeds-court-child-grooming-trial-edl-founder-latest-a8368821.html
‘I haven’t said a word…I’ve done nothing,’ far-right figurehead pleads as he is detained by officers – Lizzie Dearden Home Affairs Correspondent – @lizziedearden – 2 days ago
The Mirror
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/english-defence-league-founder-tommy-12594167
still 404s (OOPS) though even through search. Maybe there is no-one in the office. Apparently they have had the Mother of all Thunderstorms on Saturday evening on the Isles.
There is nothing at the Torygraph either: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/search.html
That is what he did. That he did not have much of a choice does not change that.
https://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/880099246262939648
On behalf of America which it means it was not much of an empire anymore.
Why do you think so?
https://twitter.com/GrahamWP_UK/status/1000684809474269184
I’m not sure what you mean by that. In any case it was more of an empire than without the American loans, in which case it would have simply not existed, so America can hardly be blamed. But saying that it existed ‘on behalf of America’ is too vague to be able to properly respond to. The only instance in which Britain significantly sacrificed for American purposes was in Korea, but that had little to do with the Empire. It’s main Cold War purpose was to exclude Soviet influence from the Middle East, which Britain would have done anyway and was consistent with a hundred years of British policy.
It required a huge investment of resources in defence and maintaining the Sterling area, but provided virtually nothing in return. The only economically significant area by that time was Malaya. It was kept alive for so long only because of the British elite’s sentimental attachment to imperial prestige. Correlli Barnett explains it very well in his ‘The Collapse of British Power’.
RT reports: UK wants to unlock century-old secret fund to pay off national debt
pennyless_pepe.jpg
Looks like they have no real wealth to buy those F-35s to equip those two carriers they are building.
It could be worse.
Imagine what would have happened if they had joined the Eurozone.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/italy-without-the-euro-would-not-be-argentina-or-turkeyit-would-be-the-u-k-1527078883
in various proportions, non-elite English, Scots, Irish, Spaniards, and Portuguese.
Hey DFH, if you object so much to Pakistanis, Nigerians, and Chinese, what were you guys doing in Pakistan, Nigeria, and Hong Kong?
No establishment person will condemn this, media, academic or political.
Alison Chabloz is going to prison for holocaust denial, which is not illegal, but she’s going anyway.
It’s getting quite scary here.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/police-trade-unions-latest-special-branch-blacklist-support-group-ipcc-construction-industry-a8270036.html
The police ignored Rotherham and countless other similar scandals, but have infiltrated the environmental protest movement and even construction unions. They find it very much easier to control movements like the EDL because of the quality of its membership and leadership. In the old telly series about an MI5 like department, Callan, there was a Red File for those to be killed and a White File for “those to be put out of action by sending them into divorce courts, bankruptcy, prison or mental homes.”
Unfortunately people like Robinson and (C) company usually already have a record of failed marriage, gaol, unpaid debts and instability. Far right organizing is their only source of income, and hence police can make a tempting offer to keep them on top. Even if the mark refuses to play ball, Special Branch can easily neutralise anyone they don’t control with court cases or by formenting internecine conflicts, (or threats from thugs given tacit permission to mete otut beatings to the far right) so leadership inevitably falls into the hands of police informers. If still heading the EDL he would certainly be working for Special Branch, but I would not be very surprised if he was anyway, because this stuff is his full time job now.
yep
not sure about the court order but iirc the d-notice system is technically voluntary and it seems the independent ignored it
as the news got out on the internet maybe they gave up?
Remind me – what were those “gigantic loans” FOR?
That’s right – for (then) “Great” Britain to get involved in a massive war on the Continent that did not implicate real British interests. The “lights went out” all over Europe in 1914.
Churchill’s World War II spectacle was just a repeat performance. The unadmitted truth is that in many ways, Great Britain LOST World War II in a much more profound sense than did Germany. The destruction of British traditions in WW I precipitated the slow slide into ruin that started in the 1940s and 50s and has proceeded through different phases ever since.
Exactly. This is how the British Secret Service (MI6) controlled the neo-Nazi/revisionist “far-right” party in post-war West Germany, then de facto controlled by the Western Allies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_von_Thadden
I was actually talking about the vast loans after the Second World War. But anyway, it is ridiculous to suppose that German expansion did not affect British interests. Stopping the creation of a hegemonic power on the continent had been a goal of British foreign policy since 1688.
‘In a profound sense’ = not really
Britain lost the peace by frittering away its money and industrial advantage after the war creating the welfare state and keeping a pointless empire for another two decades instead of reinvesting it in British industry and infrastructure.
The fact that an almost identical process happened in countries which were neutral in the World Wars (e.g. Sweden) indicates that it wasn’t Britain specific.
Jealousy is such an ugly emotion.
Interesting point.
Certainly, similar forces of anti-Christian totalitarianism were at work in both cases, but Britain’s headlong rush into TWO pointless wars greatly increased the vulnerability of its society and institutions.
Anti-Christian totalitarianist movements go back at least to the French Revolution, especially the Vendée massacres. In the 19th century, Hegel, Marx, Bakunin and the whole ménagerie of power-hungry characters refined the message and linked it to other causes of social discontent.
POWER was always in the foreground, and SEX was never far in the background with these paragons of altruism.
You have a very sober and realistic view of it. Police forces had centuries to develop techniques of how to control ‘troublemakers.’ I wonder if somebody wrote a book about it. There are many interesting examples from 19 century France and 19/20 century Russia you sometimes encounter in literature and memoirs form that period about revolutionaries and anarchists.
Sometimes it backfires like in Germany when they could not prosecute Neo-nazis for real violent crimes they committed because judges refused to try cases where basically everybody was a police informant. Apparently in Germany they still hold traditional view on entrapment, aiding and abetting. By German standards most convicted terrorists and mafia cases in the US would walk free.
You are entirely correct.
Is it your habit to break into conversations at random with general platitudes?
I don’t think this is a bad habit at all and I will continue: “Pride goeth before a fall.”
Hitler did not have intention to bring down the British Empire but Roosevelt had. In the Lend-Lease program the ‘Lease’ part was the first hint of it. Hard to say if Stalin had similar bold vision as Roosevelt but certainly after the WWII the USSR hand in hand with the US proceeded with the decolonization. Certainly the UK government was instrumental in starting the WWII but it seems they were strongly egged on by the US government even though Joe Kennedy was an ambassador in London during the most critical period.
I’m sorry, but screw this peaceful protest BS. Britain is a tyranny now, and it’s time for every unemployed* nationalist to march down to where he’s being held, and bust his ass out.
*If you don’t have a job, they can’t take it away from you. And I’m sure there is already no shortage of unemployed nationalists in England.
It became a branch office of the American Empire. Which it still is. A wholly owned subsidiary.
Britain did make one feeble attempt to maintain a semblance of independence (the Suez adventure), but the US made it clear that such disobedience would not be tolerated in future.
I blame Chamberlain. In 1939 he abandoned his own very sensible foreign policy in favour of reckless adventurism. The guarantee to Poland was a blunder of epic proportions. Chamberlain’s folly started the war. Tens of millions of people died just because Chamberlain thought that Hitler wasn’t a gentleman.
Churchill on the other hand played a major role in dragging Britain into the First World War, the war that started Britain on the path to decline and eventually to becoming a US vassal.
But they must have those carriers and those F-35s to defend the Empire!
Britain’s fate was sealed soon as they tried to destroy Sati.
History will not mourn its passing,
In concert with the Israelis…..
And Anthony Eden was flying high on benzedrine the whole time……
syonredux:
Peter Hitchens has mentioned how serious America was to reign in England’s Suez misadventure. Namely that a US admiral was willingly eager to do battle against and wipe out the English fleet.
Those definitely were the days my friend!
There may be something to this thesis.
Dunkirk certainly did not evince any deep-seated urge to destroy Britain. FDR certainly never seemed to have any particular fondness for British culture and traditions. (Nor should he have.)
FDR was a lifelong scam artist (as even Conrad Black’s sympathetic biography admits) who desperately NEEDED a war to justify his third and fourth term in office.
Without the importance of office, psychopaths like FDR typically die within months.
In the context of the Cold War, and in light of the later power of the Israel lobby, its pretty incomprehensible.
reiner Tor:
I agree that in light of later history it’s hard to believe that America would act in such a resolute manner.
BTW, Arleigh Burke was the US admiral who was eager to confront the British navy.
Not everyone on the right thinks Robinson is genuine. Many think that he is an agent provocateur, used by the security services to get ever more restrictive laws on freedom of speech passed and precedents set.
In fact, just like “Jez” Turner. See the May 17 article in TRAD NEWS about the latter.
https://trad-news.blogspot.com/
FAKE WHITE NATIONALIST JAILED FOR MILD COMMENTS TO SET SOFT TYRANNY PRECEDENT IN UK – Trad News
Seems highly unlikely this would have involved a D-notice.
Seems pretty implausible to suggest the security services would need to use an agent provocateur in order to get someone convicted. Why not just pick any one of probably hundreds of examples of similar speech by anyone holding views taboo-ised and disapproved by the pc lobbies (and in particular the jewish lobby, which appears to be the main driving force on censorship at the moment, in view of the convictions for speechcrime in just the past couple of months of Turner, Alison Chabloz and the dog training buffoon)?
And why would it matter if they were agents provocateurs anyway? Why not address their convictions as the outrages they are without trying to undermine resistance to the rising tide of criminalisation of speech by muddying the waters? (I like mixed metaphors – sue me).
Seems to me we need two things to be campaigned for in the UK right now. First is an equivalent to the US First Amendment that makes clear that freedom of speech is not to be “balanced” against other people’s supposed “right” not to be offended or upset or any other such nonsense. Second, we need to start campaigning about special treatment and conditions for genuine political prisoners such as Turner and Chabloz (once they are actually inside).
Turns out they were worrying about the wrong continent.
Circumstances and context change, and by the early C20th if not before the old concern with preventing a hegemonic power in continental Europe was clearly out of date, and indeed (as the conflicts with Germany proved) counterproductive. In trying to prevent the domination of Europe by Germany, Britain ended up creating a world dominated by two implacably hostile (to the British Empire) superpowers in any case, and in which Britain was no longer a superpower because it had exhausted its resources and its energy fighting Germany for the benefit of the US and the Soviet Union, and the lobbies that supported them.
That a different political course could have changed the outcome is obviously true to some extent, but it is implausible to suggest that any remotely plausible different political approach in Britain after WW2 could have significantly changed the reality that the world in 1945 was run by two superpowers and Britain was not one of them.
The twin catastrophes of WW1 and WW2 clearly smashed the old orders right across Europe and contributed hugely to the triumph of radical politics and policies. That the trivial minor neutrals on the cultural fringes were swept up in the current is hardly surprising.
Just to highlight one of the issues I mentioned previously, I nowadays tend to think of myself as English at least as much as British.
That said, I’ve just spent a week with friends in Scotland including in the very beautiful Ardnamurchan and Mull areas, and happened to have a very enjoyable chat with a retired Scottish couple from Perthshire whose political opinions made mine look like those of a politically correct socialist (and who by the way hate the SNP with a vengeance), so that tends to push me back towards Britishness.
National identity is complicated.
Not true. Imperial Germany was powerful enough to attempt to challenge British naval supremacy, which would have left Britain at Germany’s mercy if it had been succesful, and Hitler tried to invade Britain. If either of them had controlled the entire continent, they would have been able to coerce Britain into doing anything they wanted.
The USSR controlled parties in Britain were actually against Britain joining the Second World War.
The First and Second World wars of course weakened Britain, but the alternative of a German-dominated continent would have left Britain relatively more powerless.
Britain not being a superpower anymore was because she had a population several times smaller than that of the other leading powers, and was in the long-run inevitable once she lost the industrial headstart over the other European nations and the US decided to exert herself.
The USSR’s contribution to the destruction of the British empire was very trivial, and at most can have only marginally exacerbated a pre-existing anti-imperialism in native populations. The USA during the Cold War was not ‘implacably hostile’ as you suggest, but in fact prolonged the British empire for a couple of decades after the Second World War, since the vast loans and financial aid supplied to Britain were the only thing that allowed Britain to pay for it.
By that time the British empire was a net drain to Britain’s strength anyway.
I would reccomend Correlli Barnett’s quartet, in particular ‘The Collapse of British Power’ on this subject.
A German imperium completely dominant in Europe – if they could have achieved it and sustained it against the forces of European nationalism – would certainly have been a strong rival to British power, but the idea that it would have “been able to coerce Britain into doing anything they wanted” is just silly, and typical of the kind of alarmist propaganda routinely used to scaremonger people into confrontations and conflicts.
The German decision to try to challenge British naval supremacy was a clear error on their part, since it pushed them towards conflict with their British rivals rather than defusing the risk of such conflict, and was always likely to fail, since it left them competing against Britain’s main strength. The response by Britain with hindsight should better have been to just continue to outcompete them in that area, rather than to try to defeat them in Europe itself. It’s arguable that a British distancing from continental affairs in the late C20th might have led to defeat by a unified European power, but it also might not have, whereas the policy of fighting Germany in Europe certainly led to disaster and the end of British power.
Britain’s naval supremacy was ultimately overturned by the US anyway.
This would appear to have no relevance to the point to which it is ostensibly addressed.
There is no evident reason to accept this assertion.
Britain was no longer a superpower because Britain was in effect no longer the British Empire. That was a result directly of WW1 and WW2. It can be argued that it would have happened anyway, but it is by no means certain that it would have.
The US was absolutely implacably hostile to the existence and power of the British Empire so long as the term had any meaning (which does not mean they were not willing to cooperate with British power where it was to their benefit to do so). Of course, once the remainder of the Empire was merely another means by which US global power was maintained via a subordinate UK state, that US hostility was largely reduced to theoretical and emotive hostility with little practical relevance or application and mostly overruled for reasons of realpolitik.
Suez was the final end to dreams that the UK could any longer act independently in any meaningful matter.
As I noted, it was the twin catastrophes of WW1 and WW2 that ended British power.
Whether British power could have been sustained by choosing another course than fighting Germany over Europe is open to question, but it’s clearly possible, whereas we know what the outcome of fighting Germany over Europe was – the end of British power.
Things were more fun without so many smartphones.
Do you think that weaker powers without useful allies and on the doorstep of much larger powers (especially those like Imperial or Nazi Germany which had a history of coercing weaker neighbours) usually have much independence?
Don’t know what you mean by this. The fundamentals of British/American/Russian economic power I mentioned weren’t affected by the World Wars. The Second World War cost the USSR far more, yet didn’t affect her standing as a great power.
I will repeat again, the British empire was only kept going by post-war American loans. Without American loans, Britain would have been unable to pay for the empire (which was a huge drain of resources). If America had been opposed to the British empire’s existence, they could have made the loans conditional on decolonisation.
Also the British empire (the parts which were directly ruled, not the dominions) was a drain on British power by the time of the First World War
blaming the US for the UK’s decline is dumb
the banking mafia betrayed Britain to the US as part of moving their base of operations from London to New York
and the banking mafia are currently betraying US to China as part of moving their base to Hong Kong
the banking mafia are a parasite and they behave like a parasite: horizontal transmission with virulence
it’s what they do
Conditions were not necessary because decolonisation was going to happen, anyway.
Losing India, one of the pillars of the Empire meant that most of the rest was going to be lost as well.
Loans ensured that Britain could not even keep a more limited independent empire.
India was a net drain?
Also, by the time of WWI the dominions were still parts of the British Empire.
I agree, that is why it’s bizzarre to blame America which kept the empire going for an additional couple of decades.
Indian independence had been inevitable since at least after the First World War when the Indification process was started. I don’t see how the loss of India itself made the rest of the empire any more unsustainable though, although it might have made it (even more) pointless
By that time it had no effect on the budget in itself, but it required a huge amount of resources to defend. Nor did it serve as a captive market for British goods at that time, which had largely been displaced by Japanese, or for investment, since there was less private British capital invested there than in Argentina. The only useful area of the empire was Malaya. In The Collapse of British Power there is a lot of information about this.
I didn’t mean they weren’t, but they are a separate issue from the non-white areas and the relationship with them didn’t depend on the non-white empire.
Germany was not in 1913 a “much larger power” relative to the British Empire, and the latter was protected by being a sea power. Certainly the idea that Germany would become sufficiently more powerful than Britain to reduce it to satellite status in the way you suggest is fanciful at best. The far more powerful US did indeed manage to do that, but it was enabled in doing so by the devastation of two world wars and an already largely dual loyalty business and cultural elite (such as Churchill).
The idea that the “fundamentals” of British/American/Russian economic power weren’t affected by the world wars seems, again, fanciful. As far as Britain and the US are concerned, Britain spent itself into near bankruptcy which it avoided only by desperate measures – massive, sustained deficit spending financed by debt and liquidation of wealth, and US assistance that itself carried heavy pricetags – to say such action could somehow not affect dramatically the economic fundamentals between the two powers is simply unreasonable. Russia is a rather different case, because of the dramatic changes wrought by the revolution and post-WW1 industrialisation. But in 1913 Tsarist Russia was still regarded (rather grudgingly) as a great power, but was not seen as a superpower, whereas in 1945 the Soviet Union certainly was viewed as the latter.
Reading Churchill’s own account of the runup to Lend-Lease and his pleading letter to Roosevelt in December 1940 gives a good indication of the scale of desperation involved.
This is based upon over-simplistic economic analysis that misses the fact that the British Empire was British power. It was Britain’s control of India, primarily, but also huge swathes of admittedly relatively primitive and undeveloped lands literally all over the world, that made London still the centre of world power rather than the rising American alternative. It’s not just a financial matter of profit and loss in a particular version of the national budget, but rather it was manpower, access to resources, bases, trade issues (such as Imperial Preference that the US was so keen to see ended as a quid pro quo for their support), experience, influence and information.
There’s a lot of diplomatic obfuscation of the inconvenient truth (in the light of later Cold War priorities), but US pushing of self-determination reflected Roosevelt’s (and many others’) ideological hostility to British Imperial power. Enoch Powell recognised this basic truth from meeting Americans in WW2, and had an unusually clear-eyed view on the issue, as on certain other issues.
It’s one thing to argue that Britain is better off without the Empire, quite another to try to claim that the loss of the Empire did not equate to a loss of British power.
Loss of the Indian army was a major blow, it meant that there was no prospect of using Indian troops to suppress independence movements in other parts of the empire, e.g. in Burma the British had to just hand over power to the very people who had collaborated with the Japanese.
And in an ideological sense the Americans were clearly opposed to British colonialism (iirc the Atlantic charter of 1941 is generally seen as an important milestone in this regard, giving renewed hope to anticolonial movements), even if after WW2 they decided to prop it up for a time due to the communist threat. But the end goal always was decolonization for them.
That being said, you’re probably right, the empire wasn’t worth much, it would have been better for Britain if its elites had given up earlier and more decisively on it.
Implausible to some, but that’s what Jack Sen and others think about Jeremy Bedford Turner. You don’t seem to have read the article, which I found convincing.
I totally agree with you. They are outrages and must be overturned.
I agree with you. This has been obvious for a long time.
Also, completely outrageous are the Fake News stories by Western Governments and the MSM, from WTA 800 to WTC 7 to the Skripal Case to “Assad’s Chemical Warfare”. to name but a few. These must be challenged and disproven. Likewise, the use of Security “actors” like Turner and, I strongly suspect, Robinson. Chipping away and exposing these actors is not only good for Freedom of Speech, but also exposes the utter depravity of those who control the state and the media. It is not a trivial matter, but very important on its own.
Half German Reader, You obviously haven’t read the Correlli Barnett series. Only Malaya, Ceylon and New Zealand made a profit pre-war. India did not make a profit and could not defend itself. Barnett would have got rid of India and nearly all other colonies pre-war. Result: more troops to defend Britain, and no War with Japan.
Jack Sen is the most likely of all to be a state agent, since he came out of nowhere, uses various aliases, and exists to attack other nationalists. Having said that, Jez Turner is ex-military. The fact that Tommy seems to have actually gone to prison would suggest that he isn’t, since that doesn’t happen to actual state agents like David Myatt.
That’s true (and I didn’t claim otherwise), but Indian troops were the backbone of at least Britain’s Asian empire. As I wrote above, without them Britain simply lacked the means of coercion to keep other places like Burma under British control.
As for India not being able to defend itself…I don’t know, Indian troops were certainly pretty important at Imphal and Kohima.
That makes sense.
Personally I’m not familiar enough with the individuals or the scene to judge them or to judge allegations against them. It just seems to me we that in the case of actual convictions of those broadly on the conservative/nationalist side for speechcrimes we should be simply condemning them without qualification.
I suppose given the known predilection of government security agencies for fielding agents provocateurs in conservative/nationalist organisations, some mutual suspicion is inevitable, but instilling that is of course one of the motivations for using such agents. It correlates interestingly for me with Karlin’s comments about the low trust tendencies of those on the conservative/nationalist side.
India did not make a profit for Britain. However, India produced plenty of profit for certain Britishers. This is the key to understanding British colonial policy.
I’ve always felt that we should learn from the successful tactics used by our enemies back in the 60s and 70s, but there is a problem with that. Back then the cultural left already had considerable elite support and considerable support within the media. That allowed them to use all sorts of very effective tactics such as provoking over-reactions from the authorities. They could rely more often than not on sympathetic media coverage, and at the very least they could rely on getting publicity.
Today we have zero elite support and zero support within the media. It’s not clear what kind of tactics we can use successfully in such a situation. We can organise protests but if the media ignores the protests then they might as well have not happened.
It looks to me as if a certain British activist who must not be named is trying to use provocation tactics that would work very well in a sympathetic media environment but just won’t work in today’s Airstrip One. He also seems to think that sucking up to Israel will work. It won’t.
I’ve used up my Agree button ration for the moment but I totally agree with this postr.
Get rid of the Empire in Asia, and you don’t need troops to defend it. With no empire in Asia, there would be no war with Japan.
Roosevelt and his clique wanted to provoke war with Japan. Let them deal with the consequences of their actions.
Sure, that probably would have been more rational. By the 20th century the empire was probably mostly a burden on Britain and not very beneficial to Britain.
18th century empire with its utter ruthlessness and exploitative attitude was much more efficient and profitable.