Wednesday 31 May 2017

European Outlook # 42, June 2017

All articles are by Bill Baillie unless otherwise stated. The opinions of guest writers are entirely their own. This blog is protected by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19: "We all have the right to make up our own minds, to think what we like, to say what we think, and to share our ideas with other people."
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George Orwell



The publication of John Sutherland's biography "Orwell's Nose" and the news that the BBC are erecting a statue of George Orwell outside Broadcasting House have revived interest in the man and his ideas.

He is best remembered for his classic novel "1984" which described a totalitarian state, but he was not always so pessimistic, in 1947 he outlined his vision of a Socialist Europe in his essay "Towards a United Europe." 

Barbara Amiel, wife of the disgraced owner of the "Daily Telegraph", shared her husbands antipathy to the EU. In 2004 she wrote an article that compared the EU Constitution to Orwell's grim dictatorship. She wrote: "On a practical level, I worry about the doors a United Europe closes: having the historical memory of a European Jew, I prefer a Europe of sovereign nation states with distinct legal and political systems as opposed to the EU's proposed 'legal identity'. In the event of a bad virus attacking one country a diversity of 'legal identities' pretty much assures escape routes." 

Martin Webster agreed with her. He issued his bulletin, "Electronic Loose Cannon" No 24 in May 2008, to denounce my appraisal of George Orwell as a European federalist. This can be read on the Northwest Nationalist website at: http://northwestnationalists.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/electronic-loose-cannon-no.html

Martin will be pleased with the referendum result but I agree with George Orwell that our best hope for the future is a Socialist Europe. The referendum was a victory for the "Daily Mail" and the right-wing of the Tory Party but the voters of Austria, the Netherlands, France, and North Rhine Westphalia did not follow our example. The EU is growing economically faster than the United States and the pro-Europeans are regrouping. Only time will tell.

George Orwell was a remarkable writer who understood human nature as well as history and economics. Here is an extract from his book "The Road to Wigan Pier:"

"One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature-cure quack and feminist in England.

We have reached the stage where the very word socialism calls up on the one hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik Commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), or earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics, and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers.

If only the sandals and pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller and creeping Jesus sent home to Welling Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents."


Policies

When I first took an interest in politics in the late fifties half of Europe was under Soviet domination. The Red Army crushed the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1968. I never thought that Eastern Europe would be free in my lifetime but the Poles rose up in the eighties, the Romanian dictator Ceausescu was executed in 1989, Germany was reunited in 1990 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Another issue was the recruitment of West Indians by London Transport and the National Health Service. There were Jews and Chinese in the East End but we knew little of them in South London. We were used to foreigners but the West Indians were the first blacks we had seen. We hardly notice black people now but in the fifties we used to touch them for luck.



My generation was unashamedly imperialist. We supported the colonial wars in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden, and
our ill-fated invasion of Egypt. And when Harold Macmillan made his "wind of change" speech in Capetown it was regarded as treasonable. He was only telling the truth but we thought that the sun would never set on the British Empire.

Europe became an issue in the sixties when Harold Macmillan's application to join the Common Market was rejected by President Charles de Gaulle. We eventually joined under Ted Heath in 1973 but a dedicated band of insular nationalists started a forty-year campaign to get us out.

Today, Communism has disappeared in Russia and turned into state capitalism in China, the British Empire has gone except for the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar, the West Indians have been followed by millions of Africans and Asians, and we are about to quit the European Union.

Britain has always been a low wage economy and our capitalists have always preferred to invest overseas instead of at home. We are still pretending to be a great military power despite being chased out of Suez by the Americans in 1956. We are still weighed down by class distinction and the dead hand of tradition, and we still think that foreigners will understand us if we shout loud enough.

The British people voted to leave the EU but the French did not. "Free West Media" reported on 12/05/17: "Jean-Marie Le Pen believes his daughter Marine, who lost the French presidential election on Sunday to Emmanuel Macron, should have focused on unemployment and immigration instead of the European Union. The EU is still popular  in France, even among Front National voters despite its problems."

Populist parties such as Ukip and the Front National are right about immigration but they don't understand economics. Only the power of a united Europe can defend our jobs and heritage. We really are better off together.

The Siege of The Alcazar

The Alcazar fortress of Toledo was besieged by Republican forces from July to September 1936. Col Moscardo and his Nationalist forces held out against the Reds until they were relieved by Gen Franco's Army of Africa. During the siege the Reds phoned the Colonel to say that they would shoot his son Luis if he didn't surrender. He told his son: "Commend yourself to God. Shout Viva Espana and die like a hero - a last kiss." Unmoved by his courage, the Reds killed Luis and his brother.



                  Roy Campbell photo Counter Currents

Roy Campbell was one of the finest poets of his generation. He was born in South Africa in 1901 and was killed in a motor accident in Portugal in 1957. During the Spanish Civil War he served as a war correspondent with the Nationalist Press Service. He was a regular contributor to "Action" and "The BUF Quarterly."


The Alcazar by Roy Campbell

The Rock of Faith, the thunder-blasted -
Eternity will see it rise
With those who (Hell itself out-lasted)
Will lift it with them to the skies!
Till whispered through the depths of Hell
The censored miracle be known
And flabbergasted fiends re-tell
How fiercer tortures than their own
By living faith were overthrown;
How mortals, thinned to ghastly pallor,
Gangrened and rotting to the bone,
With winged souls of Christian valour
Beyond Olympus or Valhala
Can heave ten million tons of stone!

Anne Brock Griggs  



Anne Brock Griggs was born in 1906 and died in 1972. She was a gifted speaker and writer who rose to become Women's Organiser for the BUF. When she was interned under Defence Regulation 18B, in 1940, Special Branch noted that she was "an ardent British National Socialist." Oswald Mosley stated: "My movement was largely built up by the fanaticism of women; they hold ideals with a tremendous passion . Without women, I could not have got a quarter of the way."

Food or Usury by Anne Brock-Griggs - from the BUF Quarterly  

Several years ago, a Scottish scientist worked in a country laboratory. He was investigating the relationship between health and the amount spent by the people on their food. He came to certain remarkable conclusions, which went almost unnoticed at the time. Now, after years of unemployment and undernourishment  among the people of Britain, Ministers have awakened to the fact that starvation is a serious matter. Ministers of Agriculture for England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland set up the Market Supply Committee. At the same time the Advisory Committee on Nutrition was appointed "to enquire into the facts, quantitative and qualitative, in relation to the diet of the people, and to report any changes therein which appear desirable in the light of modern advances in the knowledge of nutrition."

In 1935 the Rowett Research Institute, of which Sir John Orr is the head, was asked to coordinate the various evidence available. Hence the brilliant survey, "Food, Health, and Income" (Report on A Survey of Adequacy of Diet in Relation to Income, by John Boyd Orr: Macmillan & Co, 2/6 net). This startling yet constructive document has created a stir throughout the country, even causing a draught in the vacuum of Whitehall.

Here is indeed a challenge to the Nation to improve the health of the rising generation. "The rapid advance in the science of nutrition in recent years," says Sir John Orr, "has shown that the influence of diet upon health and physique is profound. It has been proved that much of the ill health that afflicts human populations can be attributed to deficiencies in diet."

As family funds rise, so expenditure increases on exactly those food products which are vital to health. This is shown by a series of excellent graphs. The amounts bought of meat, butter, cheese, milk, and fruit (especially these last two) all increase with the size of the budget. Consumption of bread, potatoes and flour, the cheaper energizers, are practically stationary at all income levels. Condensed milk and margarine dropped sharply in consumption , with the rise in income.

Thus Sir John Orr vindicates the housewife but indicts a system. One reaches the conclusion that the housewife knows what to buy in the way of food when she has the money. While dietetic ignorance can be blamed for some of the undernourishment and ill health in the country, the first cause is shortage of money.

More staggering still, according to Sir John's investigation, twenty million people - nearly half the population - have a diet which is lacking in some of the health-giving constituents necessary to perfect physique.

Again I cannot do better than to quote Sir John Orr: - "It should be kept in view that the standards with which the above comparisons are made are those compiled for the maintenance of perfect health, which is a standard very different from the average health of the community. The fact that the average diets of the lower income groups are inadequate according to these standards does not mean that these people are starving or even suffering from such a degree of ill-health as is recognised in the term disease. These diets may be sufficient to maintain life and a certain degree of activity, and yet be inadequate for the maintenance of the fullest degree of health which a perfectly adequate diet would make possible."

Youth is our future, yet one fifth of the Nation's children come from homes whose income is in the lowest group. Their diet is lacking in all vital constituents. "Owing to ... new tissue formation in growth the evil effects of poor diet are accentuated in children." These children grow more slowly and are susceptible to disease. Sir John Orrs patient investigations took him among the poorest children in the cities of Scotland. He found rickets, bad teeth and anaemia, characteristic signs of malnutrition, were widespread among the children of the poor. Exhaustive experiments proved that by giving these children additional milk - nature's own remedy - he increased their rate of growth by as much as 20%. Resistance to infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, is greater with a diet including enough milk and fresh vegetables.

Only just over one pint of fresh milk is drunk weekly per head in the lowest income group. Many homes therefore, often those with children, are entirely without fresh milk, the first of the protective foods. How much longer are our future citizens to be undernourished, stunted, racked by disease, growing to warped manhood for lack of a constructive policy of government?

To bring the consumption of the poorest groups up to the level of group six (which has a superabundance of all foodstuffs), means high increased percentages in consumption of various foodstuffs; as much as 80% in the case of milk, and 124% in the case of fruit.

Experiments would seem to indicate that we can, by scientific diet, and abundance of good food, breed a race several inches taller than at present. The data are not yet sufficient to be positive. At all events graphs illustrating the growth of children from different age groups show that at 13 years of age boys from the higher income are 2.4 inches taller than those from the lower. At seventeen the difference is 3.8 inches. At manhood it is as much as four of five inches. Allowing for the limits of heredity, it would seem to be not beyond the power of man to breed a super-race. Finally, says Sir John, "a review of the state of health of the people of Britain suggests that, as income increases disease and death rate decrease, children grow more quickly, adult stature is greater and general health and physique improve."

Undoubtedly we can produce the extra foodstuffs necessary for health from our own soil. By raising the purchasing power of the people the demand for farmers' produce can be increased. The extra foodstuffs necessary for the health of the people would mean the annual consumption of another £200 million worth of agricultural produce.



The same MP tactlessly asked whether the Prime Minister would consider setting up a Committee to ascertain what proportion of our Food Supplies could be home grown. "The matter is an extremely difficult one", said Stanley Baldwin. "in view of the consideration that has to be borne in mind in connection with our great export trade...It is an extraordinary difficult subject and we have it constantly under review."

The Prime Minister reveals by his answers that dividends for the financier are the first concern of Government, the last is the food of the people. The Unemployment Insurance Committee's Report accepts the continuation of unemployment and calculates the disposal of the "surplus" from the fund, while setting aside a sum for the increased unemployment they expect in the next 8 years. Surplus milk, millions of gallons, is sold to business combines, and withheld from the needy mothers and children, to whom before the election Baldwin promised his help. We see a Government held fast in the web of the financier without plans to safeguard our food supply, even in the event of war. We see the total failure of marketing boards to increase production, even penalizing the farmer for his output.

Sir John Orr's survey raises problems beyond those of nourishment alone. If we are to wait on the dictates of finance we shall go under as a nation to the standards of the East. The problem is one to solve by our own standards, those of the White Races.

Dean Inge has reminded us of the comparatively recent and precarious ascendancy in history of the White Races. Now this ascendancy and all that it means to the future of the world is threatened by the evil force of finance, which flourishes as weeds do in the garden they destroy. "Will the final victory," asks the Dean, "fall to the high-standard races or the low-standard races? That is the question which only the future can answer."

It is a question which only Fascism can answer. Our people cannot wait ten or even five years whilst ministers debate, but their united will can eradicate the corrupt and sinister force which undermines our civilization.

The Manchester Atrocity

The bombing of the Manchester Arena was the latest in a series of Wahhibi terrorist attacks throughout the world. Salman Abedi, the British-born suicide bomber had fought in Libya and Syria but he was not picked up by the security forces. They are now deploying armed police and soldiers but it's too late for the victims. We need stricter border controls, intelligence-led policing, and maximum cooperation with our neighbours. But we are not likely to get them under a penny-pinching Tory government.
  

British Guardian
http://britishguardian.blogspot.co.uk

Nation Revisited
Our sister blog is posted on http://nationrevisited.blogspot.co.uk



  






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