society – Page 6 – All Things Considered

27 Jul

Is it weak to keep your trap shut?

Prince Harry says: “It is OK to suffer, but as long as you talk about it, It is not a weakness.”

I sympathise. He has had a an emotionally tough start in life since his mother was killed in a car crash when he was only twelve. I’m sure that sometimes it is helpful to talk about one’s sufferings, though I’m suspicious when it comes to the various “talking therapies.” I was once in a drinks reception in a livery hall in the City of London and found myself in conversation with a Freudian psychiatrist. He asked me what it was like to be a priest and I answered as honestly as i could. I said, “But it must be difficult to be a psychiatrist and have to sit there listening to someone’s outpourings for hours.”

He replied, “Who listens!”

It’s good to talk, they say. And perhaps the buttoned-up heart and the stiff upper lip are not always the best responses to our troubles. But over these last few decades we have swung so far in the other direction with our armies of agony aunts and counsellors. There’s something sickening about all this emoting, letting it all hang out.

I remember an accidentally hilarious, and very telling incident, from 1994. A posse of journalists was taken across to Normandy to report on the commemorations of the D-Day landings of fifty years earlier. The commemorations included some re-enactment of the battle. Upon their return, the journalists were offered counselling.

An eighty-year-old veteran commented: “I was there for the real thing in 1944, and we weren’t offered any bloody counselling! We’d have told ‘em where to stick it!”

I cannot stand the way we medicalise human pain and misery.

Actually, I try to take my guidance from a quite different source:

“He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” (Isaiah 53:7)

10 Jun

Don’t mention the civilisation!

Amnesty International yesterday published a report into racist incidents in Germany. Amnesty’s spokesman Marco Perolini said.”With hate crimes on the rise in Germany, long-standing and well-documented shortcomings in the response of law-enforcement agencies to racist violence must be addressed,”

You have to admire his self-confidence in his assumption that his international pressure group – not without its own political and sectional interests – has the authority to say what must happen to political and social policy in a sovereign nation state.

So far as I know, no Germans voted for Amnesty in state elections in that country – for the very good reason that Amnesty put forward no candidates to stand in the democratic process.

“The number of racially-motivated attacks has never been as high as now in the history of post-World War II Germany,” according to Selmin Caliskan, Amnesty International’s director in Berlin.

Perolini says, “Racist violence must be addressed.”

But how is it to be addressed? I suppose it depends what we mean by racist violence. This becomes pretty clear if you read further into Amnesty’s high-minded, and high-handed, report. The pressure group is complaining that Muslim immigrants into Germany are being roughly treated by some native German people; and they add that this is compounded by institutional bias against immigrants by the German authorities.

It is as well to get this clear from the start. Otherwise, you might think that Amnesty were referring to the racist violence perpetrated by Muslim thugs and rapists against German women. But no, they don’t mean that at all.

Perhaps they were referring to the institutionalised racist violence which Angela Merkel has committed against the whole nation by her encouraging a million Muslims to take up residence in Germany last year alone – and with the promise of many more to come?

Europe has historically fought wars to keep these aliens – these foreigners with a religion, culture and way of life at odds with and a threat to – Europe’s traditions and practices. To invite very large numbers of such aliens to come in and take root is to do racist violence on the grand scale to the whole country and, by extension, to the whole continent.

But of course, Amnesty are not talking about this either.

At present, Germany is not being defeated by alien foes. Germany, under Frau Merkel, is committing national suicide.

This is leading very speedily to the destruction of 1000 years of European civilisation

08 Jun

The Father of Lies

Has the Archbishop of Canterbury now descended so far into the realm of unreality that his utterances disqualify him from the holding of his high office? He does not speak out of Christian conviction but from a Panglossian mess of evasion and political-correctness.

Yesterday he declared Nigel Farage’s warning that European women are increasingly in danger of being raped by migrants to be “absolutely unacceptable.”

But Mr Farage spoke the truth.

Where has the effete and absurd Mr Welby been living these last few years?

Did he not read about the wholesale rapes and assaults by migrants in Cologne at the New Year? Does this pusillanimous buffoon, cocooned against reality by his own fantasies and wishful thinking, not know that, owing to the influx of Muslim migrants, Sweden is now second only to South Africa in the number of rapes?

I hesitate before intruding into the Most Reverend idiot’s hermetically-sealed conscience to offer a few contradistinctions:

Sexual violence in Germany has skyrocketed since Angela Merkel allowed more than one million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East into the country. The crimes are being downplayed by the authorities to avoid fuelling anti-immigration sentiments:

“The moment they [male migrants] see a young woman wearing a skirt or any type of loose clothing, they believe they have a free pass.” — Restaurant owner at a mall in Kiel.

“Every police officer knows he has to meet a particular political expectation. It is better to keep quiet [about migrant crime] because you cannot go wrong.” — Rainer Wendt, head of the German Police Union. “We, the police, are warning about a potential breakdown of public order this summer, when women who are lightly dressed are confronted by young male migrants.”

I could bore you with a score of such reports, including our own shameful refusal to acknowledge the rapes and other sexual assaults, similarly perpetrated over many years, on young girls in a dozen English towns and cities.

If it is the duty of every Christian to try to discern the truth and proclaim it, how much greater does this responsibility belong to a Prelate?

But this risibly inadequate man, this dissembler and false prophet, studiously refuses to notice what is staring the less distinguished among us in the face?

Outraged as we must be, we are yet reluctant to speak the words of Oliver Cromwell to Justin Welby:

“You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing lately… Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

07 Jun

O brave new world that hath such people in it

There is nothing more heavenly than a summer day spent at a county cricket match. The only problem is that you may have to go through purgatory and halfway through hell to get there.

Yesterday I took the train from Eastbourne to Hove to watch the Sussex-Essex game. Opposite me sat three obese, shouty, fully tattooed and trashily bejewelled representatives of the underclass. I should say they sat only intermittently, for they kept getting out of their seats and running about in pursuit of their offspring, a lad aged six or seven.

To say that the boy was unruly would, I suppose, be an insult to what his minders would describe as his right do just as he bloody well liked. Or rather they would surely have said, what he f****** well liked, for the F-word was the predominant feature of their social intercourse: the carriage was, for instance, “…too f****** hot and too f****** crowded.”

The boy expressed his freewill and exercised his right to do as he f****** well pleased by running up and down and kicking passengers randomly. He had clearly been taught the merits of inclusivity and non-discrimination, for he was perfectly non-selective in those he chose to kick: old ladies, that posh-looking young woman trying to read The Guardian, other of his contemporary oiks – and me.

He even poked a nearby baby in the eye.

His minders were hugely entertained by his antics and cheered him on vigorously. The three of them and their kick-boxer offspring ate noisily, endlessly, crisps, chocolate bars other slimy, runny sweet stuff and some provender which I couldn’t identify but which smelled of sick.

Only their latitude concerning the boy’s foul conduct was not consistent. From time to time their approval would be withdrawn and, in their robust and stentorian vernacular, they would rise up – or rather waddle up sweatily – and assume the proper dignity of responsible parenthood, as in, “Cum ’ere you little f*****! Why woz you kicking that Mrs?”

Then one of the minders would smack him. The next minute another of them would say, “You’re your mam’s little prince, int yer!”

It was the boy himself I felt most sorry for. Alternately doted on and reprimanded, caught between cloying sentiment and sheer brutality, there was no possibility of his learning how to interpret human responses to his behaviour.

A little boy already facing a life totally demoralised.

Lurching from indulgence to terror and back again inside two minutes. And this pattern repeated, world without end.

What would he be like in fifteen years’ time? Like his parents, of course: his fat-legged dad, his savage, loud-mouthed mam and her chav of a sister – if it was her sister.

The whole carriage knew they weren’t underprivileged or socially-excluded or deprived – or, as we used to say, poor – for they announced several times to the whole carriage that they were going on a fortnight’s seaside holiday.

No, they weren’t poor. They were the products of our secularised educashun and welfare system.

06 Jun

Bishops are no laughing matter

You have to laugh…

THE Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, and seven other bishops are among 37 faith leaders who have signed a letter warning EU referendum voters against “undermining” the international institutions charged with tackling the great challenges of the day.

“Faith is about integration and building bridges, not about isolation and erecting barriers,” they wrote, in a letter to The Observer, published last week. “As leaders and senior figures of faith communities, we urge our co-religionists and others to think about the implications of a leave vote for the things about which we are most passionate. . . So many of the challenges we face today can only be addressed in a European, and indeed a global, context: combatting poverty in the developing world, confronting climate change and providing the stability that is essential to tackling the current migration crisis.

“We hope that when voting on 23rd June, people will reflect on whether undermining the international institutions charged with delivering these goals could conceivably contribute to a fairer, cleaner, and safer world.”

Surely it would be rude to laugh at these noble sentiments?

It would – if they were noble. And even if there was a smidgen of truth in them.

But the bishops are wrong to claim that leaving the EU would mean “isolation and erecting barriers.” Getting out of the EU customs union would tear down barriers between Britain and the rest of the world – with countries with which presently we are not allowed to trade, unless we pay prohibitive tariffs.

But more serious even than this – so perhaps we shouldn’t laugh after all? – is the bishops’ reference to “the things we are most passionate about.”

And what are these things? The Gospel, the Creeds, the Sacraments, Christian mission? Of course not. These men are bishops, after all. Their stated passions include “combatting poverty in the developing world.” Yes, but this is best achieved by free trade – a thing which the EU explicitly forbids.

Oh yes, and the episcopal fancy of the moment: “confronting climate change.”

The words “God, Jesus Christ, forgiveness, redemption” appear nowhere in the bishops’ letter to The Observer.

The bishops seem not to notice that the EU is not a Christian polity. In fact it is hostile to Christianity. It does not reproduce Christian symbolism in any of its documents, publicity, logos etc. Its political morality is not based on The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, but derived from the doctrines which appeared at the French Revolution, particularly the atheistic doctrine of universal rights.

The EU is militantly secular.

But then so are our bishops

31 May

Darkness Visible

We have a terrific capacity for producing trash: nearly everything in Tate Modern, so-called Britart, “poetry” so banal it wouldn’t even serve to be adapted for the chorus in a happy-clappy “worship song”; voyeuristic nuts ‘n’ sluts shows and such as Britain’s Got Talent and Strictly Come Dancing for pleb telly; and, as a constant backdrop – like a toothache – to daily life, ubiquitous audible filth in the form of amplified electronic pop music; and everybody in thrall to self-promoting narcissists such as Prince and David Bowie.

All this is bad enough, but what is truly satanic is our penchant not just for producing wall-to-wall muck, but infiltrating work of outstanding quality and perversely appropriating it to the general junk culture. This is the gesture – akin to sprinkling a Rembrandt painting with bleach or pissing in the chalice – which turns out a version of Don Giovanni with a cast of leather-clad punks and druggies in a New York skyscraper apartment or importing pop and rock into The Promenade Concerts.

Here, for example, are a few extracts from a review by Vicki Power, The Daily Telegraph’s TV critic, of a recent BBC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“The director has re-invented the play as a children’s action adventure full of scary fairies, chase scenes and rousing Indiana Jones style music…Theseus is rebranded as a dictator and the warrior Hippolyta is his prisoner rather than his willing bride…he has also taken a scythe to the text and reshaped lines…the action fizzes along…the verse-speaking is uneven…”

Now what I find interesting about this review is that the Telegraph’s critic doesn’t conclude: “So it’s crap then – an atrocity.”

She entirely approves of this scurrilous travesty: “It is a production that might well direct a younger generation to the Bard.”

How could it possibly do that, except by false pretences? Ms Power thinks that we might be attracted to Shakespeare by what is not Shakespeare; by something to which Shakespeare is the antidote.

This sort of corruption is everywhere perpetrated by those who think it clever – charlatans who, being unable to appreciate and give thanks for the wonderful creations of artistic genius, resort to doing dirt on them instead.

Waste and void, waste and void. And darkness over the face of the deep.

22 May

“Mind your manners, St Paul!”

Archbishop Justin Welby has told Christians firmly that we should not “proselytise” or talk about our faith to non-Christians until they invite us to do so.

It is a pity that St Paul didn’t have the benefit of the Archbishop’s guidance before he set out – without being asked – on his three missionary voyages in which he founded churches among the pagans in such as Philippi, Ephesus and Corinth. The presence of the finger-wagging, politically-correct Mr Welby on the quayside before St Paul boarded his ship would have saved the Apostle a great deal of trouble: the thirty-nine lashes he received (five times), an attempt to stone him and his shipwreck.

How ironic that Welby should choose the season of Pentecost to issue his injunction for, according to chapter two of The Acts of the Apostles, this was the day when the disciples of Jesus experienced the rushing mighty wind of the Holy Ghost and tongues of fire upon their heads and immediately rushed – all uninvited – out into the Jerusalem streets to preach to members of every race under the sun: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia, Cretes and Arabians and all the rest.

If only the wise, admonitory and well-mannered Mr Welby had been there to say, “Never mind the promptings of the Holy Ghost, St Peter! Mind your P’s and Q’s! Wait till you’re asked!”

And if we go back a little earlier to the life of Our Lord himself, we can imagine – if only Welby had been there to quieten Jesus’ enthusiasm – his command “Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” would never have been given. Or at the very least Jesus would surely have toned down his command to something more polite such as, “Go and ask those pagans if they’d like to join an Alpha course! Tell them there’s red wine and pizza afterwards!”

Christian history would have turned out quite differently, if only Jesus had minded his manners.

But Welby’s verbal facility is not limited to the occasional sound-bite, such as “Don’t proselytise!” He is capable of quite extraordinary prolixity. How’s this for an example of what Humpty Dumpty called “Impenetrability”? In his Pentecost speech, he went on to say:

“I draw the line in terms of respect for the other; in starting by listening before you speak; in terms of love that is unconditional and not conditional to one iota, to one single element, on how the person responds to your own declaration of faith; and of not speaking about faith unless you are asked about faith.”

That is an utterance so syntactically obscure that Welby’s predecessor, the Great Obfuscator, Rowan Williams himself, would have been proud of it.

21 May

Is the Pope a Catholic?

Some words from a recent interview given by Pope Francis to the French newspaper La Croix make me wonder. He said:

“Today, I don’t think that there is a fear of Islam as such but of ISIS and its war of conquest, which is partly drawn from Islam. It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam. However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest.”

The Pope also said he “dreaded” hearing about the “Christian roots of Europe” because they take on “colonialist overtones” and he called on European nations to “integrate” Muslim migrants into the continent:

“This integration is all the more necessary today since, as a result of a selfish search for well-being, Europe is experiencing the grave problem of a declining birth rate,” he stated. “A demographic emptiness is developing.”

What is the range of possible interpretations of these bizarre utterances? First, that the Pope has lost what marbles he had in the first place. Secondly, that he only joking. Thirdly, that he is the Antichrist. Finally, that he has spoken the truth.

I shall consider the last interpretation first. Did Pope Francis speak the truth?

No. There is not a shred of truth in any of his statements.

Jesus did not send forth his disciples “In terms of the same idea of conquest.” He said, “Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” (Matthew 28:19)

Is the Pope’s “dread” of hearing about Christian roots derived from “colonialist overtones”? Of course not. Christianity did not colonise Europe: Christianity created European civilisation, culture, art, literature, music and its fundamental social and political institutions.

What about his injunction to “integrate” Muslims into European society? Has the Pope not noticed that Muslims do not wish to be integrated into Europe: they desire only to conquer Europe, destroy it and recreate it in the image of the age old Islamic shambles.

My inclination, in the interests of trying to be as charitable as I can, is that Francis was only joking, or that he has indeed lost his marbles – though I wish I could rule out the third possibility: that he might be the Antichrist.

18 May

A world fit for narcissists to live in

I was, as my custom is, doing not much purposefully, when I stumbled across the end of an exciting film on TV. It was called Safari (1956). It seemed to have everything: a rugged, intelligent hero – a white hunter – Victor Mature, and a pretty female lead, Janet Leigh who wore a variety of glamorous costumes; elephants, lions, giraffes, crocodiles and hippos; and, of course a murderous cad with a blackly beautiful alcoholic mistress. A terrific adventure. The whole panoply of the Masai Mara before my very eyes.

I pressed the information button on the TV remote to find out a few more details. These were helpfully supplied. There was also a health warning: This film shows scenes of hunting and colonial attitudes.

And a useful warning it was too! Who, turning up a film from sixty years ago about a white hunter in deepest Africa would have expected to come across hunting and colonial attitudes emanating from colonisers! I could easily have been offended. In fact, we are all these days at risk of being offended all day long and so we require the provision of “safe spaces” – hermetically-sealed cultural hideouts where we can be assured no one will upset us

What a wonderful civilising innovation is the concept of the safe space – quite the best thing to happen since the invention of health and safety and universal political correctness!

It is particularly important that our elite – the university students – should never have their ideas and prejudices challenged. They could easily burst into tears , for instance, if a speaker turned up to suggest that global warming is not going to bring about the end of the world, and very soon. Or, if some evil, insensitive chauvinist came along and declared that gentlemen who have their willies cut off and pump themselves full of oestrogen do not thereby turn into ladies – why, it would be more than enough to produce a panic attack in our young people, or to bring on an episode of their fashionable eating disorder.

On no account must our universities become places for the exchange of ideas.

But back to Safari. There is no reason at all why a film about a white hunter should actually feature hunting. And there is no excuse for showing wild animals on the Masai Mara – which ought to be revealed only in its full vegetarian splendour. They could have done without the cad. The femme fatale was an example of sexism at its worst. And to cast her as an alcoholic might encourage viewers to exceed their permitted daily allowance.

Persuaded of these principles and their extension to cover all aspects of our lives would improve our quality of life immeasurably. Anything by Ken Loach, for example, might carry the warning: Beware: scenes of excessive mawkishness. Or the European Song Contest: Consists of limitless puerility. Or Strictly Come Dancing: Caution: relentless vulgarity

Won’t you join me in my task of trying to create a better world in which can all enjoy our infantilisation from the cradle to the grave?

09 May

Hold very tight, please…

Coming soon to a bus near you: SUBHAN ALLAH – GLORY TO ALLAH. That slogan will be written on the sides of busses in London, Manchester, Bradford and Leeds. This outbreak of idolatry will be paid for by the charity Islamic relief – the organisation which recently had its HSBC account removed after suspicion that some of the donated funds were destined for Muslim terrorist groups.

Anyone left in any doubt about which religious group alone receives deference and preferential treatment in Britain today should reflect that, while the Muslim buses get the all clear, the established Church of England – Supreme Governor Queen Elizabeth II – was forbidden to screen a one minute advert for the Lord’s Prayer in cinemas.

The chief executive of Islamic Relief, Imran Madden, said he hoped the buses bedecked with these slogans would help start a “conversation” in Britain but he did not comment on the supremacist nature of the phrase “Glory to Allah” – often mistranslated as “Glory to God” by Western media outlets. This slogan is in the same tradition as “Allahu Akbar” which, rather than the meaning usually given, “God is Great,” actually means, “Our God (Allah) is greater than yours.”

Imran Madden certainly maddens me. The “conversation” he claims he wishes to start began rather more violently on 7th July 2005 when Muslim terrorists slaughtered fifty-two people on London transport.

How preposterous then that London buses are to be emblazoned with a triumphalist slogan which glorifies the religion of our murderers.

It is more than preposterous: it is blasphemous.

This is only one of the most blatant – so far – examples of the Islamic colonialisation of our country.

I go to London from time to time, so now I shall have to ponder whether I ought to ride on one of these idolatrous buses. For I am a Christian and the Ten Commandments – given by Moses and endorsed by Jesus Christ – are at the heart of my faith. The first of these Commandments – and they are Commandments, not suggestions – says, “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

Such gods were and are no gods and that is why their worship is described in the Bible as idolatry.

The Christian religion is no mere matter of preference and whim. It is a matter if truth. What would it mean for a Christian to say the Christian faith is only partly true or only probable?

The Christian God is the only true God: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

To Him, the only God, Christians are commanded to bear witness. The old word for such a witness is martyr.

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: society