Thoughts on America on an October Morning

The author of this tome is a generation younger than yours truly and his words reflect the angst of many his age.  He is the father of two children.  The title is from a great Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin, after the passage of the 1787 USA Constitution. - GNH

"A Republic if you Can Keep It"

by Chris S. Holliman

Lately the news from D.C. has been coming at us like water from a fire hose.  But today seems to stand out to me for a number of reasons.  I thought that I might put down some thoughts before going to bed.

I awoke this morning to the news that the great statesman Elijah Cummings had passed away.  His death reminded me of a time 50 years ago when our nation was tearing itself apart over race.  And so we are again today.  Perhaps much has changed from the 60's, but white fear is still alive in 2019.  

I also noticed in the news that picture from yesterday's meeting at the White House in which House Speaker Pelosi is standing up and pointing across the table at the President.  I love this picture because she is the only woman in a room of white men (some of whom are looking at the table) and she see appears fearless.  

Later in the day, the news broke that Trump had awarded next year's G-7 summit to his resort in Doral, Florida.  I was shaken by this brazen violation of the public trust, of this flagrant self-dealing on the part of the President. This is an escalation in Trump's violation of the emolument’s clause and a test of loyalty on the part of Senate Republicans.  

Finally, Chief of Staff Mulvaney's press conference in which he admitted a quid pro quo with Ukraine was another stunning development.  The last defense of the President and the Senate Republicans ('no quid pro quo!') came crashing down.  Mulvaney's delivery was taunting, "So what?"  he said.  

So what indeed?  "Nice republic, if you can keep it." I thought.

I hold little illusion that the Senate GOP will ever remove this man from office.  A multi-billion-dollar info-tainment industry and white fear will keep Trump in the White House. I can only count on a shaky Democratic Party (Hamlet-like in its rabid doubting and self questioning) and the average voter in November 2020 to set some right to the Executive branch.

I suspect that my feelings of hurt, confusion, abject bewilderment, and cynicism regarding the state of the country are only a small part of what marginalized people throughout history have felt.  I am a cis gendered, middle class, college educated, white male.  I possess a great amount of privilege in society, little of which I have earned.  

It has only been since 2016 that I realized that the perception of myself and my country was naïve and flawed.  Through the United States flows a strong, dark undercurrent of racist and sexist poison.  It took Donald Trump to show me that.   

Hopefully as I move through my middle age, I will be more willing to listen to the voices of people who have been on the periphery.  I want to hear how people of color view the world, what it's like to be an immigrant, etc.  In Donald Trump's America, listening may be the greatest form of resistance. - CSH

Radical Violence in Paris

Last week four Parisian policemen were stabbed to death by a 45 year old computer operator in a police headquarters.  This surprise attack by an employee of 15 years radicalized by Islamic extremism, staggered law enforcement and government agencies in France.  Terry Field, an Englishman who summers in Normandy and winters in Florida, reflects on this tragedy and the French President's reaction. - Glenn N. Holliman

Desperation

by Terry Field

In the courtyard of the Prefecture of Police, the rain is freezing and driving like needles into the unmoving faces. There is no sun. The square used by the French State for all such obsequies to murdered police and others is surrounded by high buildings whose blank windows are like dead eyes. In the square, the ranks of police, fire fighters and other ‘first responders’ are at attention. Nobody moves.

In the shelter of one of the colonnades, two past Presidents of the Republic stand in fragile sadness.

The families of the victims to be honoured are clustered around protecting groups of those unable to speak.

A drum sounds - hard, spare, separate from life.

As it beats its dreadful observation, the four coffins of the dead are brought to their prepared places, tenderly laid upon biers, and their medals given in life are laid on them upon cushions. An empty cushion sits at the front of each, soon to support the state’s final and most distinguished honour.

The Minster of the Interior approaches the line of coffins and offers to each the posthumous Legion D’Honneur. He lays each gently on the waiting cushion. His face is sphinx–like. He is coping; but only with obvious difficulty.

He repeats the same action before each of the coffins.

He retreats to his place. During this part of the obsequy there is an accompanying  trumpet. There is majesty in the tone. Not appropriate here, but the Legion D’Honneur is ordinarily offered with rejoicing and happiness at a celebration of a life well lived and deserving in that life of the accolade.

Today they is bestowed upon the memory of people whose boxed corpses are all that is present to receive them.

The parade remains silent and does not move for some minutes. The rain cuts the air but nothing else moves at all. Then President Macron appears. He is holding up well. He has his task to perform, and he must represent the state. At this point I wonder at his nature. 

I am moved beyond words. I am dumbstruck. I am old. He seems to be so young, clear-eyed, strong and possessed of that clear face that makes one think immediately of France. The jaw is set. The eyes roam but he has his task. I am put in mind of the painting of Napoleon retreating from Moscow, on his white stallion. He must get through this. Now there is only survival. The eyes burn with determination. All else is dispensed with. Now  M. Macron, the man, must speak.

He must talk to the nation; he must talk to those present. He must place a marker in the ground concerning how the French cope with what has happened, what must happen, and who has responsibility for the direction of the future.

His address is not what I anticipated, but because of this it far more disturbing.

Firstly the immediate context. The faces he sees as his eyes survey the square before him. All there express a similar condition. One that is rarely seen in such people. There is the desperate sadness of a camaraderie whose members are slain. Some knew the dead, most did not, but there was another image written on the faces. The anger and knowledge of the loneliness of their dangers were everywhere to be seen.

As President Macron spoke, all stared ahead with resolution. One appeared to faint and was gently carried off. No others moved.

The shock from the President’s address was electric. He firstly, as one would expect, held the families of the dead close to him. For (to me) a still-young man, he looked both powerful but in real pain. He made me connect to the pain all the watching French felt at that moment. After this he referred with urgency to the universally offered supposition that the killer believed in a variation of Islam that was a ‘death-cult’. But then he said something truly shocking, that transmitted the awareness of desperation from the head of state to the people.

After saying the State would look to deal with the danger expressed in these killings, he suggested that the threat of this form of terror could not be solved by the State. That had not been said before by any statesman I have listened to in Europe. He suggested forcefully that the entire population must engage in extreme vigilance in identifying the ‘radicalised’ Muslim.

He appealed for the people to cling to ‘Laiceite’ or secularism, the over-arching rational response of the intellect and logic to problems, that is the wonderful inheritance of the ‘social intellect’, the Republic preserved from the enlightenment and its physical manifestation, the French State and people.

This was a bombshell. The result has been a collective nervous breakdown of the commentariat, the intellectual backbone of the country. Why? Because the secular state has proceeded upon the clear understanding- for over two centuries- that the power of its ideas could contain irrational dissent, marginalise personal religious belief such that it would never again drive divisive social attitudes in any significant group of the population. That such a strong continuing statement of Republican values would always triumph to make for a connected and mutually supporting population of all French men and women.

But President Macron said that this was no longer possible; that the majority should spy on the minority, indeed on each other, searching for dissent and worse.

He could only be suggesting, for no other meaning was possible, that out of Islam – within the number of many more than ten million Muslims presently living in France – the vigilant population must expose the potent danger to the country before the French again faced slaughter. The ‘conversion to Islam’ of the killer who murdered these police staff came out of the population of believers. This reality was accepted by Macron, simply by it not being denied by him.

The exchange of many pious emails between the killer and his wife was the backdrop and framework to his slashing knives.

Of course M. Macron said there must be more ‘education’, more ‘prevention’, more ‘anti-radicalisation,’ as all heads of state do on such dreadful occasions, but there was, in truth, no conviction, no real belief, no real expectation that this would or even could be effective. Rather he accentuated universal oversight and spying.

He in effect admitted that within the French nation, a very large group – too large for the French Sate to be able to ‘oversee’ or even identify - of potentially violent alien minds lurked, and from this root of alien thinking many were likely to act unpredictably in future.

The media immediately asked how it was possible to ‘spy’ on ‘fellow citizens’ without junking the now resultant clearly threadbare pretense of ‘social inclusion’, ‘anti-discrimination’, ‘anti-racism’ and all the other constructed shibboleths the last thirty years of reality-modifying political preconceptions has spawned across Europe.

The requirement, he suggested, was for an engaged total population of ‘watchers’, looking for any and every sign of ‘radicalisation’. It was no longer intellectually convincing that radical killers came from other than the body of Muslims within the nation. The assertion that such people should be ‘watched’ by all others implicitly accepts that the ‘radicalised’ Muslim springs from, and is intimately connected to, the core religion that many millions of French people adhere to, whatever the individual’s point of origin may be.

The internal threat is clearly defined by the speech of the president. NO longer is ‘radicalisation’ a disembodied thing. Now it has a root. And the root must be uncovered by the nation of the ‘watchers’

In the time of the last incumbent, President Hollande, the then Prime Minister M. Valls stated that he was offering the Muslim community the ‘last chance’ to integrate and fully connect to the rest of France. He observed that a number of prior attempts to ‘reach out’ by the state had been rejected, and his offer was the last that would be made.

This latest slaughter, following on Bataclan and the dreadful earlier atrocities in Paris, and under a subsequent president, questions where on earth the society goes from here.

That angry confusion was written powerfully on the drenched faces of the brave policemen and women in the forlorn square. As an observer, that is what struck me most forcibly. The police looked vulnerable in a way I had not seen before.

A new President has confirmed that the problem is now so vast as to require an auto-police state of all citizens. 

I am reminded of the dress of Elizabeth 1^st in England, where eyes and ears where painted all over the fabric of her dress to assert that the State is always listening to and guarding against Catholic danger.

Macron went far further. He draws ‘eyes and ears’ on the clothing of all the citizenry.

Am I now my Brother’s Watcher??? It would seem so.

The UK Supreme Court Rules

A Good Day for the British

by Terry Field

Yesterday, in a landmark judgment, the British Supreme Court upheld the judgment of the Scottish courts and overturned the English court of Appeal. In landmark cases subject to judgment, Lady Hale, speaking for all eleven justices stated that the Prime Minister had acted to prorogued Parliament with the intention of inhibiting the capacity of Parliament to act and to perform its function. 

Stopping short of stating that Johnston had lied to or misled the Queen, they did go on to say that because his actions were intended to stop proper parliamentary scrutiny, they offended against the relationship between Parliament and the executive, since the former is the senior of the two estates of the realm.

Left, Terry points the way to a better day for Britain!

Parliament was there for not prorogued, the actions of the Prime Minister were void and of no effect. The representatives of the monarch approached Parliament with nothing more than a ‘blank sheet of paper’.

The Speaker has stated that Parliament will reconvene tomorrow at 11.30 Wednesday.

This is a beautiful day for Britain, for the Union, for Parliamentary sovereignty and for a slow return to rational behavior and the evaporation of the psychotic condition that has afflicted so many in Britian when they regard Europe through the bloodshot lenses of the worst rabble rousers.

Readers may here recall I have talked of the power of the fascistic method. Of the way it can, when used by skillful political functionaries possessed of powerful assertive personalities and simple repeated arguments coerce the minds of the disengaged, the previously relaxed and the confused and unaware. You may recall I said it would be applied with more and more force in coming months. We must be aware of its dangers as we see what it does to the relaxed and quite vulnerable institutions that function, routinely, by gentle consensus and group agreement whilst regarding minorities always.

The actions of the referendum political operators has been to try to both remove the representative nature of Parliamentary democracy and replace it with rubber-stamp attendees, whilst continuously working at the extreme margins of the composite constitution Britain has functioned under since the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

This extra-parliamentary activity has in some measure resulted from the perturbations seen in sections of the populations following on the great increase in difficult living conditions for many after the 2008 financial collapse, and the great increase in perceived excess wealth resulting from the economic forces I have discussed at some length before in these blog notes.

All this unhappiness has laid many people open to the blandishments of street rabble rousers.  Open to the suggestions of people selling certain solutions to complex problems, and to those identifying Europe as the causative factor in the trials of the newly and permanently dis-advantaged. The latest data suggests that the concentrations of ‘leave’ voters were NOT found in the centres of poverty. 

They were found in such as Essex (east of London), and in Wales, Cornwall, other English counties. The Welsh people were not of a composite mind to leave, but the vote was ‘swung’ by large numbers of retired, older English voters who has moved to Wales to live where real estate is less expensive, but who were otherwise not financially uncomfortable.

The Welsh, the metropolitan areas, Scotland, Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. Scotland is quite poor when compared to England. Yet its population voted by a large margin to remain.

Why did this strange split of desires occur?

If it was not the much vaunted ‘poverty factor’ that propelled it, then what was the causative factor or factors?

Of course, in many working-class areas, irrespective of comfort, ease or the lack of it, there is in every country an elevated sense of the value of the ‘local’, of the ‘national’. That in itself does not explain the vote. It explains the tendency to susceptibility to vote leave, but there is another factor. That factor is the fascistic method and demagogic authority with a repeated simple and certain message, that causes those people to vote for something they were previously relatively unconcerned with.

I have lost count of the number of people I have seen on British video media who have stated a strong, indeed burning and yearning desire to ‘leave the EU’ and not one of these people, when challenged could give a cogent, powerful and convincing reason to do so. Why could they not do so?

Because they felt only the need to repeat the strong message the demagogues had rammed into their minds. NONE of them could suggest what they or their country could do which it was prevented from doing whilst being in the EU. I never heard a single cogent reason.

The worst was the repeated message, created by back-office marketing men in the service of the radical leave politicians, that Mrs. May’s deal is the sort of deal a country would agree to ‘if it had been defeated in war’. This was then parroted by people who had no concept of what her agreement contained, had no concept of what ‘defeat in war’ could ever mean. They were in effect the dupes of thought managers. The techniques used on the streets are Goebbels-like in their simple repetitive drumming, laced with conflicted rage at ‘Europe’ and topped with a contempt for Parliament that is ‘frustrating the will of the people’.

The sum of all this is to rip thinking out of the structures upon which parliamentary democracy depends. The street becomes the place where confused people are corralled.

Brexit as a subject does not matter in itself. Any number of other matters could have been propelled to become an obsession. The thing that matters is that the fascistic method has such immense power and can destabilise so comprehensively. It is the choice of the autocrat. It is now employed not just on the street, but within the heart of the executive. That is entirely new.

As to the Brexit matter, well, one might as well ask people what they think the colour pink looks like and to hold up a card with their version painted on it. There would be 67 million different cards. The matter at hand is that a set of deeply self-interested private individuals have said  ‘this colour of pink is the right one! Follow me and ALL of you can have MY LOVELY PINK COLOUR!!!.

Statistics being what they are, and the bell curve being normally distributed, the effect of the demagogue is to skew the curve in automatic favour of the offered, ’official’ pink colour. The addition of the worst and continuous excesses of ‘social media’ accentuates the need to form ‘tribes’ and leave the common political space.

Thus, in a ‘western’ world that is quickly retreating from the ordered discipline that wise government backed by and scrutinized by a fully functioning representative parliament, the Supreme Court gave Britain two wonderful gifts today.

One with a direct effect; and one with an indirect effect we should act upon if we are wise and love our lives as our ancestors have lived them. The first gift was that Parliament will sit today and the executive has been again been confirmed as being the junior partner of the Parliament Assembled. That was argued by Lord Pannick QC for the appellant and was confirmed in the judgment. A most important re-affirmation of the supremacy of Parliament Assembled.

The second gift is to calm our fever, to remove us from the sweaty clutches of the political violence of the demagogue street-vendors. This gift can make decent people look at their support for this shameful lying destructive weak little man Johnston who acts to look like and behaves like an anti-democratic South-American-style autocrat in thrall to the extra-parliamentary  political grouping.  That is in effect removing the governing party entirely from both parliament and people, in order to try to recover the voting block they fear Nigel Farage’s party holds in his grasp.

The Supreme Court can and should, in its judgment, make honest British people abandon a government whose Prime Minister has acted in a way not seen before and which must never be seen again. Reflection as to what is decent, and to what is indecent is a requirement of the electorate if it is to benefit from the continuation of the vigour and authority of its Parliament. The Supreme Court has offered us all a way back to where we were. It is up to all of us to grasp it. We are not a rich and powerful country; we are beset by problems and dangers. Yet we can be a great and enduring democratic society. All we need to do it to want that, and act upon our best instincts. Our democracy is an inheritance beyond price. It eclipses all else. We need to rediscover the awe our ancestors felt for it.

Of course, today is about the constitution, but the battering ram applied was the demagogue and the Brexit fantasy.

The bubble of mania and psychosis against the European Union will NOT be lanced, however, if the street offers liars a chance to lie unchallenged to the gullible in a second referendum should it be offered.

Since we now live with the politics of the street, as a result of the actions of the weak Prime Minster Cameron who was rightly described by President Obama as being ‘a lightweight’, then there needs to be introduced into law serious penalties for being shown to lie to the people in order to procure their vote. Alternatively, the referendum vote should take place with no permitted comment from the time the vote is announced outside of Parliament or by Members of Parliament during the canvassing period. Accountability should be framed in terms of parliament and it should exclude all others. That way, the second referendum could only be the servant of and the advisory statement directed to Parliament, where authority must lie.

Parliament must reassert its authority. The actions of the street should be crushed where it subverts political conversation on the matter at hand. Failure to do this is a liars’ indeed a fraudsters’ charter.

It is hard to do. But it must be done.

Finally, it is wonderful to see that, given Britian functions via its unwritten constitution, which amongst other things regards common law, precedent, statutory authority and established procedure as key elements in cementing proper behavior, which in turn facilitates the effective functioning of the branches of government, the Supreme Court has acted with unprecedented vigour and unanimity, from eleven Justices, in asserting with certainly and clarity that the structures that protect Parliament, and which in turn guarantee the people a full response from power to their representatives are to be jealously guarded and protected.

All in all, a good day to be British.

Social Disorder Possible in the UK?

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our regular corespondent, Terry Field, takes to the keyboard to express further dismay of the unraveling, in his eyes, of political discourse and social conventions in his homeland. - GNH

An Accurate Representation of Reality in Britain

by Terry Field

The retired judge from the British Supreme court very recently suggested that British institutions and political conditions had degraded to the point where violence and social disorder could be the next stage.

This sounds to some outside the country as an extreme observation, but for the writer it seems to be an accurate representation of the local reality.

The fractures in British society are represented by unshakably held extreme positions on the matter of Brexit. When one hears people describe their attitude to the European Union, often expressed using the language of conflict, often explicitly invoking the remembrance of war between the nations, such is usually spiced with an attendant arrogant loathing and hatred that is dissociated from the reality of Europe. Many of the people expressing such hatred have never or almost never visited Europe. Were they asked in any sort of detail why their hatred was so profound, they would – and when they are asked do – flounder, bluster and repeat the slogans other political manipulators have put into their blanc-paper minds.

In every social collapse, every revolution, every war, hate dissociated from experience, becomes the common currency underpinning sequences of increasingly deranged, violent and inhumane actions. - Terry Field, pictured left

It is not a given that such a trajectory must be repeated in Britian, but it has become far more probable. The ‘left’ has worked to stop the actions of the Johnston government to prosecute a no deal exit from Europe whilst pretending it is not doing any such thing. The moderate wing (often with 35 or more years as party members and Members of Parliament) of the Conservative Party has been cut off like a gangrenous limb, and the remaining element that constitutes the Conservative Party has emerged as a radically different hard-as nails thing and one not seen in Britian in the last full 119 years.

Now we have a party of government that has created a condition it knows can drive the Celtic fringe of Scotland Northern Ireland and even pacific Wales out of the union and out of conquered province status, to join the EU again after the impeding rupture.

The Corbyn left postures and wishes to fill the streets with objectors. The usual marshmallow-soft virtue signalling that the left never seems to understand is entirely ineffective and barren.

The left is not the primary danger here for the moment. But only for the moment. It wishes for electoral power, but is as soft as butter whilst not directing the levers of state control. The British government as directed by the new nationalist zealots treat Europe as an unstable weak entity to be dictated to, and particularly Ireland as a wayward colony to be shaken into compliance. They seriously consider Europe to be so weak as to be readily intimidated by Britain threatening to withdraw its military protection offering security to Europe.

An outsider would simply laugh at the propositions contained here. They would not believe a country could be so captured by such Ruritanian lunacy, but with England, there is a class of people who have always thought like this; they have always lived the desired continuity of the nationalist/imperialist reality. For them there is a presumption of the magnificence and exceptionalism of the British – and particularly the English – state. For them, the hard reality of their power-imperative derives from a semi-mystical perception of what it is to be English/British.

They now have, after the referendum, smashed the parliament they see as incorporating degeneration and ineffectiveness, replaced with a focused certainty that they will not be stopped from leaving Europe, constructing a distinct and naturally aggressive English nation state, and gathering the rebellious Celts to their feet in supplication since for them the idea that the EU is a viable alternative for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is something they both loathe and entirely reject.

So far so unpleasant, but nothing more.

Far more radical, dangerous and unprecedented in England is the changed attitude of much of the hard right, and the hard left, to the sovereignty relevance and desirability of the Westminster parliament. Many in the hard Brexit group see their function as the replacement of the sovereignty of parliament with the ‘sovereignty of the people’, This was explicitly stated by the leader of the house, Rees-Mogg, where he stated Parliament gains its legitimacy from the people, and thus the referendum of the people trumps and replaces parliamentary legitimacy and freedom of maneuver other than to deliver the ‘decision to leave Europe’. Note that Mr Rees-Mogg and his colleagues ‘understand’ the meaning of the referendum vote. They and not others are empowered to ‘achieve’ Brexit, and all those in Parliament unwilling to offer a hard Brexit or the style of exit designed by this regime are ‘betraying the people’.

Well, there it is. They appeal to the sovereignty of ‘the people’, and they know what the ‘people’ wanted and vilify all others who would dare to defy their divine comprehension. I recall this from The Caudillo, from Hitler, from Mussolini, from Stalin. Every dictator invokes ‘the will of the people’. Always the same.

‘The people are held in my heart, I know their needs, I will deliver what I know they want and need, I will protect them from their enemies’. In this case, Parliament Assembled if it has a will of its own.

Accordingly, anyone who stands against this within the Conservative Party are to be purged, removed, expelled. Made nothing in the political firmament of the righteous. Thus the will of the people will be met.'

All this in Britain.

The world sees it.

Why am I not surprised? Well, unlike foreigners who look on and think inevitably of the England of the past, a state of Churchill, Atlee, brave wartime, resistance, post war gentle chaos and benign eccentricity, the kindness of a sophisticated people, I have seen a much darker reality over the last half a century or so, and one that has expanded like Styrofoam in the post war period.

The key here is economic failure together with profound social fracturing that has profoundly hurt the poorly educated, and the vulnerable poor. Britain is fragmented, rich and arrogant on the one side, vast numbers of the all-but dispossessed and ignored on the other. The easy comfort of a declined ex-Empire that offered the people a dreaming of dreams after the 1939-45 catastrophe has given way to a ratcheting up of poverty, misery, anger, and hopelessness, particularly with the 2008 evacuation of wealth, and all the while the very rich getting much richer.

At the same time, the society has inverted all its values, financial and social, from a structured conservative (small-c) serious-minded monoculture to a free-flowing multicultural ethnography, living in all reality in mini-ghettos,and accepting sexual variation in a way never before considered even slightly tolerable.

Mass deindustrialization has replaced self-respect and good incomes with suppressed eternal sadness, poverty, mass drug-taking and hellish depression in the council estates and worse. In the country at large now, there is an explosion of severe violence, damaging and killing large numbers. Gangland violence completely unknown a lifetime ago are expanding across the counties outside the old worn-out inner cities.

Fear, uncertainly, political coercion and un-natural enforced compliance with the new values   This further reinforces the sense of anomie. The country is described as being one of the most toxic in the advanced- and indeed in much of the developing world – for children to live in.

There is a developed crisis in housing that shows every sign of becoming even more corrosive. The healthcare system is pathetically inadequate – only a week ago, it is reported that the state monopoly healthcare non-provider has failed to diagnose hundreds of thousands of people with cancers in anything like the time needed to benefit from effective treatment. I accent here the dread reality. The NHS is a soviet-style monopoly provider. Without it working effectively, for the vast bulk of the people there is NO alternative. Their choice, if they are treated too late, or otherwise ineffectively is a simple one, and it is simply to die.

The multi-faceted failures are of such a degree as to ensure that people know well that their lives are directly threatened as to quality of life and even longevity.

Such failure is endured. The British can be kicked hard in the guts, and all they do is stand up and take it.

Not now they do not. They are utterly enraged.

The hate fest against Europe is pure displacement. They do not even know why they hate as they now do. I hear local, ill-educated folk rail against the EU. I doubt they have been to Europe short of a week on a beach, I bet my fortune that they know absolutely relevant or significant nothing about Europe, it’s history or the functions of the EU and its relationship to the European nation states. 

It is a striking feature of these highly manipulated, hate-filled people that their hate is dissociated. Of course it is! They have been programmed by radical clever right-wing people recently (and by left wing radicals over the last forty years) that the EU is the centre of all evil. They know not why. They have no knowledge, less awareness, and parrot slogans to a degree that I am reminded of Mao and the little Red Book, and the hordes in Germany raging against alien groups to assuage their pitiable condition after their state collapsed in 1918.

We are right back to the world of the early 20^th century, and it is expressed most forcibly in England. A once-immense power, now a husk, but with a cold, determined, super-arrogant would-be ruling autocracy who see the present circumstance as their golden chance to do so.

The world sees all this.

It now disinvests. It removes more and more of the timezone City-of-London functions to Paris, Germany, Holland and Ireland. The car plants and so much more will leave fast even though the Japanese have invested 165 billions to pump their cars into Europe. To have to trade on WTO terms -with the EU, compounded with the EU /Japan trade deal, absolutely kills their UK viability and need to be in Britain. The same applies to pharma, aviation technology and so much else. So much dislocation. More severe, more caustic, more dreadful, a deep-seated cultural rupture. English people are isolated from Europe at the emotional and aspirational-cultural level, to a degree that recalls the periods of the wars that so destroyed social intercourse from the 18^th century until 1945 with short breaks of fractured rationality.

The sinister reality – the Tory right embraces all this as they hope fervently to leave on their or no terms. For them, this is a matter of recovering the New Jerusalem. It feels like a John Bull version of zealous Zionism. The sacred wonder of the free nation-state shrink-wrapped and newly virginal after escaping the Ghoul of the EU will usher in an Age of Gold.

To get this, I doubt that the British Parliament would survive for five minutes if it really got in their way. Johnston is their creature; an emotional, absurd Mussolini-style comedic yet vicious figure.

I believe that we are FAR closer to violent failure and irrecoverable marginalization from the world than most people understand.

 If you doubt that, look at what waits in the wings. Trotskyism.

The fat has been burned. The body scrawny and lean. Imagine what can follow. - Terry Field

What Yet Could Be

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our regular corespondent, Terry Field of England, France and Florida, seems to have taken a lead from the Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge in this epistle, perhaps having awaken from a restless sleep to pin the following vision of what yet could be. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, above, awoke in 1797 from a dream and quickly recorded Kubla Khan, an imaginary world of a massive Pleasure Dome.  

Understanding Mr. Field's vision does require an extensive knowledge of British and European politics and history.  And a willingness to let one's imagination float a bit under what, a 'Pleasure Dome'?- GNH

Let’s be chipper about Brexit. It COULD all work out well !!! by Terry Field

The dream of success goes something like this.

The mechanisms for leaving the European Union have been prepared in advance with care and cool deliberation by highly talented political operatives. It is probable that there will be a declaration of a general election on the day in October that offers an election date of 1^st November.

In the count-down to that election, there will be no Brexit intervention by the government. None. The clock will tick down, since it was set in motion by the May Government and ratified by parliament. In the interval of 25 days between declaration and election, only the clock will act, The Johnston Junta – for elected by 100,000 unrepresentative Antiquities, makes it just that – is driven by a considered response long ago structured by the very talented Mr. Cummings and a small number of others. Most of them in Trumpies in Washington.

There will be attempts to stop this. In the courts. In the Parliament. Perhaps involving the functioning of the monarch.

BUT

If this process is stopped half way through the election period ending on the 1^st November, then the entire body of the Brexit Party, the present Conservative Party voters, a proportion of the Labour vote, and the DUPers will all vote to reinstate the exit process. And they will all vote within the framework of and directly for the ruling Conservative Party. 

No other choice offers the prospect of effective exercise of power.

 The Greens, the communist party aka The Labour Party, the assorted lost folk of the ‘no-particular party but I am ever-so Politically Correct’ voters will fragment into their little tribes, and proceed to wipe each other out in the election – this is a first past the post system. Ruthless and effective in dumping the duds and no-hopers. Only focused strength and tactical voting will win. And the Tories have that in their grasp. Farage will be the only one voting Brexit Party.

Johnston will walk it.

Then, here will be a real choice, and it will be his to make.

At that point he needs nobody at all. He dumps Dominic Cummings; he has served his purpose.

Does he need no-deal?  Not at all. The election is his. He commands the stage like a colossus.

But then, even though Britain is weaker than America, that slow moving behemoth wakes up to the fact that Perfidious Albion HAS NOT LEFT YET!. It was stopped by the heroic opposition of left-leaning Tories in the last parliament.

Britain therefore still functions in the EU, as the process was stopped, by order of the courts and by Parliament taking control of the agenda in the last moment and executing legislation via its control of  the business of the house. The naïve folk who stopped it thought they were thwarting Johnston, but they were in fact giving him electoral success and  the future. Johnston did not try to stop them.  He was secretly banking on it.

In a flash, they won him the election, smashed the Brexit Party, neutered Lib Dems, marginalized the communists aka The Corbyn Labour Party.

Now, in early November, he is a man with infinite possibilities.

He has a comfortable majority. He is clear of the flatheads from the DUP. He sees an eviscerated Labour Party before him on the opposite benches. He sees a bunch of- as ever- infinitely malleable Lib-Dems – gushing rage and impotence – and the odd Green from the never-never-land of Brighton and Hove. The ERG simmer and bubble, but his parliamentary majority of the fully corrupted consign them to insignificance.

In America, the Plan cobbled together by Trump and the man he thought he could control, Johnston, for smashing The EU via the British trojan Horse has entirely unraveled. Britain – those perfidious swine – they have NOT LEFT!! And they show no sign of so doing.

Johnston, being an Oxford Educated classicist, read Cisero and the fate of Catilina – he knows JUST how fast things can change. And when he sees an American  ‘friend’,  arrive from Washington, he well knows the short sword is there to one day open his political viscera when his guard is down. And leaving the EU is not just dropping one’s guard to America, it is helping them point their sword at the British jugular and pulling the blade to the national neck for them.

When compared to the United States, outside the EU Britain has in real effect the fire power of Zimbabwe on a bad day now. He thought of that when the American mustachioed lunatic Bolton (a man who makes Herman Kahn look cuddly) visited offering ‘sector by sector’ deals in the twinkling of an eye – just as long as the UK dumps its entire foreign policy and inserts the Foreign Office into a cobwebbed annex of the State Department.

Now the fully empowered and totally unencumbered Johnston looks benignly on Brussels, and EVERY Tory MP short of the headbanging ERG needs HIM in another five years’ time!!! He is electoral gold. He is their pimp. They will do what he wants, where he wants it, when he wants it. He OWNS the Tory Party.

They – the Tory MPs - all know the moment of nationalistic madness has passed. Farage has left the country and taken up a roll in Mississippi running a radio station  called Darkbart. The Tory ranks now all look to five years’ time and a re-run of the gravy train.   

Below Nigel Farage, a Brexit leader

They will follow Johnston ANYWHERE!!!

Even up and into the Berlaymont Building and never leave it!!!!!! Oh those Crepes Suzette!!!

SO NOW the real agenda begins. Europe is stuffed. Deflating and shrinking, very fearful, assaulted by both America and China, full of race competition violence, full of mutual suspicion, trying to form a European Army but incapable of forming a brigade, with NO direction, run now by a clearly somewhat deranged blond female German failed political nonentity with a nice line in power-haircuts and hordes of children by NO political sense at all.

Thus now Johnston then approaches his real target. NOT powerful, always-dangerous Washington keen on using Britain to smash the rival EU; no, he approaches both Russia and Brussels via Berlin at the same time to forge the only rational European structure and one that should have been done LONG ago. Meanwhile Germany and Russia have taken about all they plan to from Trump. They are open to offers. Any offers. And Johnston has the offer of the millennium for them. Which they accept as though it is Christmas. Which, happily, it actually is.

He invites Europe – in reality Germany (The Frogs always do what they are told) - to reconstruct its democracy with looser outer ties to the stragglers – the lazy latins and the dreamer British. BUT he also invites Russia in. IT oozes raw materials, space, brains and many good Germans there since the 18^th century pretending to really be Russian. Germany wanted to do this for decades, but it had and has NO political legitimacy to propose this. IT thought Britain opposed it, as indeed it did, before America went away and Trump cut the mooring line for the British once ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’. Germany of course  also  risked American anger with French rage were it to openly contemplate Russia as a part of the European scene.

Yet now all has changed.

America is gone to Trump Heaven, China is run by a new Stalin-like figure, and Johnston is free to re-forge the European Great Game. He alone can do so. He can bring ALL the parties together in the European continent including Russia – now to be fully together and unified in a grand bargain. Remember; Britain has NOT left the EU yet. France sits in the corner steaming. China is mad as hell with Russia at this unanticipated development,, but in one bound Russia is now free of both the fear of China in the Pacific east; and it can relax entirely about America.

Johnston has recreated 1913 all over again.

Only now with a love fest between Russia and Germany that will endure and grow. 

The REAL Europe, of Britain, Russia, Germany fully co-operative  -  are united as was always the dream and ALL others are out of the picture.

Above, Terry and his wife, Fina, spend their summers in Normandy, their own Pleasure Dome not far from the sea.

The United States is where it was before the First World War. Nowhere at all. Just very big, isolated and self- obsessed. It really has become a nowhere in the new Johnston-designed now. It can buddy up to Japan, suffer from the Yellow Peril for all of eternity, but the action – the real action - is once again in the full and complete Europe. The vitality of 19^th century Europe is here once more. The concentration of synergies commands the world.

Britain of course will then have returned to be itself. A political free-radical, doing its own thing. There is no transaction charge in the capital markets in London. It sails free and vigorous to endless commercial opportunity. In a flash, across Europe, socialism, the infection of the 19^th century injected into the twentieth, is now dead, buried, and gone. Germany and Russia command Poland far more profitably than they did when they tried it with tanks and there is no mess to clean up. Indeed, there has never been a better time to live anywhere between the Rhine and Moscow.

And Johnston, the lightweight, reviled liar, cheat, leaver-of-wife man-we-love-to-hate, has changed the world entirely.

And with no help at all from Dominic Cummings. who now passes his time in an asylum in Surrey, where through the haze of drugs he wonders just what happened to his version of reality. - Terry Field

Teresa May Steps Down

by Glenn N. Holliman

This afternoon I received the following email from a leading member of the legal profession in Pennsylvania.  I wonder if some of you all are having the same or differing thoughts than Dan? - GNH

Glenn,  Today  on CSPAN I stumbled across Theresa May's last Prime Minister's Questioning session in Parliament on Wednesday.   I got to see the last 30 minutes and the entire 30 minutes almost made me cry.  

Here was a woman whose civility, honesty, decency, compassion and knowledge of the details of government were obvious to all (except the front bench of the Labor Party who did not ask any questions and who did not rise to give her a standing ovation at the end).  Theresa May was praised by the speakers from all the various parties and it was obvious that she is greatly respected for her human qualities.  

I suppose historians will rate her as a less than average Prime Minister, but the affection in Parliament for her today should be emphasized, particularly at a time when such qualities in political leaders are in very, very short supply.      

It is so sad that the two leading English-speaking nations in the world  have political leaders who display none of Theresa May's human qualities and will be perceived by historians as con men devoid of any principles and as clowns and buffoons.

Feel free to transmit these sentiments to Terry and all your friends in Europe. - Dan whose picture is above

COMMENTS:

From a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in Tennessee: 

"The Economist months ago made the best commentary in its indirect, snarky way when it mentioned surprise May was managing to stay afloat and then added parenthetically, "although wooden objects tend to do that."

From a businessman and political observer in Jerusalem:

"What is the alternative? It seems that there were 2 choices and the lesser of 2 evils was chosen through 

political maneuvering. The deeper question is how and why Britain, the home of civil people got to this point

 with 2 such people at the top. 

The next question is whether we need street fighters today to counter the sophisticated street fighters 

who are leading those nation's trying to attack the civilized world. Can civil leaders do the job today?"

Terry Field in his Garden

Becoming Unhinged 

by Terry Field in France ruminating in his garden

Watching Britain change from afar is an unpleasant experience. It is hard to watch the failure of the political structures to both represent and be themselves modified in order to reflect the needs and expectations of the society. 

A prime minister will be elected by about 160,000 members of the Conservative Party to, by all accounts, remove Britain from the European Union with no agreed treaty, thus removing the country from all its global trade agreements, and disconnecting it from, quite literally, thousands of legal structures that support and facilitate all the international and many internal national functions and actions on which the population depends.

In addition, even at this stage after three years of social psychosis and ineffective government, the poor of the country have become relatively and absolutely poorer to a degree not seen in the last 58 years of recorded data.

In my last blog, I referred to the potency of the fascistic method, defining it quite closely. I consider present events to be a full justification of my suggestion that it is the dominant political method and force found in present politics inn Britain.

I repeat my warning made some time ago. States can and do fail, and from that failure, recovery in the current global condition may become not possible. I consider that Britain is in real danger of experiencing this dreadful reality. The mania that drives this isolated and deluded lunacy will dissipate when catastrophic failure results. But recovery will then be extremely difficult. NO rational, skilled informed person possessed of real knowledge that I know of, and I seek for one with zeal, feels that what Britain is doing is other than deranged.

Racism is tiresome and infantile. But so is the cult of the false victim.

Many of us have watched the appearance of the small number of new, radical, very culturally and socially challenging members of the House of Representatives with amusement as foreigners, and with stressed concern of one is an American citizen. It has been interesting to see persons described as ‘black’ or ‘of colour’ ‘beating up’ their democratic party ‘colleagues’ for not being sufficiently ‘supportive’ of their needs. It has been a curiosity to see some large numbers of Americans on the ‘left’ of their local politics demanding vast ‘reparations’ for damage done to them over and since the period of slavery. 

Watching a woman try to demolish the quite harmless Mr. Biden for not fully and supporting the attack on local state senators when she considered he should have done so raises the question in the mind of this, and I suspect very many observing foreigners.   ‘Why and when did this hysterical rage and sense of unsatisfied entitlement appear when there was no such sense expressed in prior generations, during the time when injustice was, by any measure, far more severe and painful than it is now?’ Adults never used to behave like this. But where are adults now?

This writer suggests it is a false mania, a false rage, an inauthentic sense of victim hood. It seems to be all of a piece with the free untrammeled ability of people in the Anglo-Saxon world to express personal pain simply because the social mores make such personal expression permissible.  Excess personal liberty born of the particular socio-economic cultural and economic circumstances has fed into, and been amplified by, the poison of universal social media. The collapse of work and its replacement by work-posture behavior adds to the sense of personal free choice and isolation from consequences. All this feeds the personal Ego, and infects it with a mania of unhappy isolated grievance.

In such a condition, and where political responses to new socio-economic states have in the past taken a century to develop (an example, industrialization began around the start of the 19^th century, but the Labour Party only appeared as a political force in England in the early 20^th century) one can only conclude that the claims of oppression, of ‘racesim’, or any other silly ‘ism’ and all the other white noise of enraged accusation is simply displacement for the real problem. 

The problem that the physical and cultural condition of the old advanced world has changed out of recognition, together with the shattered environment, but whose political and social ideas of how to live are redundant and irrelevant.

In a world where AI removes all work after the coming fifty years, referring to socialism, Marx, Das Capital and Engels is a little like an engineer referring to the wooded wagon wheel as a solution to linear induction train systems.

We are like children in a playing ground. We do silly things, of no worth, and why? Because outside the wire fence of the playing field the real world of which we seem to no nothing at all is racing ahead.

I am living in a time of social infantilism. With men largely de-sexed and emasculated, whilst in much of the West, a good proportion of them, in some countries almost half of them are infertile, and women are behaving with such detached pain and silliness  as to make one weep.

And all the time climate change offers a now unavoidable and very rapid return of ages when we had no means of surviving at all.

Vote Democrat; Vote Republican. Vote Labour; vote Tory, Vote Le Pen; vote En Marche.

With 76% of global insect life gone in less than 40 years, a blink of the eye, and reducing by 2.5% PER YEAR – who the bloody hell cares!!???

The British Ambassador Resigns

By Glenn N. Holliman

David Collingwood, British educator and keen observer of the human race, emailed the following from his holiday villa in southern France with permission to post.   

"If you feel that you’d like to publish this, you have my full authority.  Here, in la Vaucluse, it is a comfortable 30 degrees Celsius: I write in the shade of olive trees at the table in our Provençal garden; ahead is the unmistakeable outline of Mont Ventoux; around, thousands of cicada chirrup merrily; above is the cornflower-blue sky beloved of Cézanne; and by my right arm is a glass of chilled rosé. What could be better? No wonder I wax lyrical today.  Warmest good wishes and bisous." - David

The high profile story here, as, one would hope it is over there, is the maliciously-leaked (confidential) correspondence of Kim Darroch, the British Ambassador to the USA.

Left, David, wordsmith and 
intellectual of the Midlands, shares an insight.

He did what all ambassadors do: he assessed state and actions of foreign governments and advised his government accordingly. As an ambassador quite rightly expects his correspondence with his government to be confidential, he must be blunt and honest, rather than diplomatic.

Right, Ambassador Kim Darroch. 

That a potential British Prime Minister - Boris Johnson - would refuse to give his full support to a British ambassador, beggars belief. 

Right, the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson?

That a nation’s leader - President Trump - would lower himself by resorting to social media to question the judgement of any ambassador is shocking. 

No gentleman would admit to reading another’s correspondence: he would distance himself from such behaviour. Thus, the best, and correct, response to Sir Kim’s (leaked) reports would have been not to respond at all. The alternative would have been for Mr Trump to have condemned the criminal and treacherous behaviour of the perpetrator of the leak.

Without naming specific prime ministers and presidents, I look back with nostalgia to times when the leaders of both our nations at least made a pretense of dignity and courtesy, behaving in a manner befitting their high office. - David Collingwood