RESIDENTS of the historic town of Buxton in Northern England have overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to house foreign migrants in a former student residence at the University of Derby. The university, which would have profited from the deal, canceled its plans due to the backlash.

Not only that, but townspeople are insisting the building be used for inexpensive housing for local residents who are poor.

They apparently reject the idea that it is “racist” to protect the organic diversity of one’s own community, defend it from crime and use taxpayer funds to aid actual citizens.

“FAR BACK in ancient times we were the first to cry among the masses of the people the words ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ words many times repeated since those days by stupid poll-parrots who from all sides round flew down upon these baits and with them carried away the well-being of the world, true freedom of the individual, formerly so well guarded against the pressure of the mob. The would-be wise men of the goyim, the intellectuals, could not make anything out of the uttered words in their abstractness; did not note the contradiction of their meaning and inter-relation; did not see that in nature there is no equality, cannot be freedom; that Nature herself has established inequality of minds, of characters, and capacities, just as immutably as she has established subordination to her laws; never stopped to think that the mob is a blind thing, that upstarts elected from among it to bear rule are, in regard to the political, the same blind men as the mob itself, that the adept, though he be a fool, can yet rule, whereas the non-adept, even if he were a genius, understands nothing in the political—to all these things the goyim paid no regard; yet all the time it was based upon these things that dynastic rule rested; the father passed on to the son a knowledge of the course of political affairs in such wise that none should know it but members of the dynasty and none could betray it to the governed. As time went on the meaning of the dynastic transference of the true position of affairs in the political was lost, and this aided the success of our cause.”

— Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, transl. Victor Marsden

“WOMEN, I contend, are not men’s equals in anything but responsibility. We are not their inferiors, either, or even their superiors. We are quite simply different races. We live by an impulse separate from that of men. A separate tide beats in our blood. Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working-out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point. Yet, for the first time in history, society takes no cognizance of it.”

— Phyllis McGinley, “The Honor of Being a Woman,” The Province of the Heart; Viking Press, 1959, pp 13-14

“A MAN who governs his passions is master of the world. We must either command them or be enslaved to them. It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.”

— St. Dominic

FROM The Plot Against South Africa by Klaus D. Vaqué (Varama, 1989):

The first phase in the long march to power was the adoption of the ANC and its incorporation in the socialist world revolution. For the second stage many “useful idiots” were enlisted: churchmen, liberals and socialists, who could not see what was afoot in South Africa. The controlled mass-media saw to the rest by softening up the country with a constant barrage of propaganda in readiness for the final charge and driving it into world-political isolation and economic ruin.

A whole army of Eastern agents who had been training for their task for decades was dispatched to South Africa. One of them. Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, the senior naval officer in Simonstown, had kept the Russians informed for over twenty years about modern Western weapons systems and the South African “ear to the world”, the communications centre at Silvermine in the Cape. Read More »

FROM “In Defense of Monogamy” by George Gilder (Commentary, 1974):

The sexual liberals purport to be the “open,” the “creative,” the “genitally liberated” facing the “repressives,” the “paranoids,” the “anal compulsives.” The liberals are against power games and for the sharing of love. They are for “universal kinship,” in Alex Comfort’s phrase, and equality.

Why then is there such a disparity between this hopeful vision and the reality of the single “liberated” life? The reason is that the removal of restrictions on sexual activity does not bring equality and community. It brings ever more vicious sexual competition. The women become “easier” for the powerful to get—but harder for others to keep. Divorces become “easier”—but remarriage is extremely difficult for abandoned older women. Marriages become more “open”—open not only for the partners to get out but also for the powerful to get in.

Monogamy is central to any democratic social contract, designed to prevent a breakdown of society into “war of every man against every other man.” In order to preserve order, a man may relinquish liberty, prosperity, and power to the state. But if he has to give up his wife to his boss, he is no longer a man. A society of open sexual competition, in which the rich and powerful—or even the sexually attractive—can command large numbers of women is a society with the most intolerable hierarchy of all. In any polygamous society some men have no wives at all; denied women and children, they are in effect deprived of the very substance of life. Read More »

THE answer to this question is yes.

Here’s why. Read More »

Christ in the Storm, Rembrandt

“THE essence of perfection is to embrace the will of God in all things, prosperous or adverse. In prosperity, even sinners find it easy to unite themselves to the divine will; but it takes saints to unite themselves to God’s will when things go wrong and are painful to self-love. Our conduct in such instances is the measure of our love of God. St. John of Avila used to say: “One ‘Blessed be God’ in times of adversity, is worth more than a thousand acts of gratitude in times of prosperity.”

Furthermore, we must unite ourselves to God’s will not only in things that come to us directly from his hands, such as sickness, desolation, poverty, death of relatives, but likewise in those we suffer from man—for example, contempt, injustice, loss of reputation, loss of temporal goods and all kinds of persecution. On these occasions we must remember that whilst God does not will the sin, he does will our humiliation, our poverty, or our mortification, as the case may be. It is certain and of faith, that whatever happens, happens by the will of God: “I am the Lord forming the light and creating the darkness, making peace and creating evil” From God come all things, good as well as evil. We call adversities evil; actually they are good and meritorious, when we receive them as coming from God’s hands: “Shall there be evil in a city which the Lord hath not done²²?” “Good things and evil, life and death, poverty and riches are from God.”

— St. Alphonsus de Liguori, Uniformity with God’s Will

IN LIGHT of today’s well-funded, Communist-style, racial rhetoric and the violence it engenders, the 1966 movie Born Free, based on a true story, is a shockingly positive portrayal of kind and humane white settlers in Africa. How things have changed.

ANNEKE Claassen (73) and Hennie Claassen (77) were tortured and burned alive last month in a surprise attack on a farm in Limpopo, South Africa. Another couple was killed on a farm the very same weekend. More than 20,000 people are murdered every year in South Africa so this violence is no surprise. What separates these murders from many others is their brutality and the innocence of the victims. Last year, 89-year-old Elizabeth Lee from the farm Breeland was bludgeoned to death with a chair by a 15-year-old. Thousands of similar farm attacks have occurred in the last 30 years, with hundreds of white farmers killed by black assailants. (Statistics here.)

This past weekend Julius Malema, head of the opposition party Economic Freedom Fighters, nevertheless sang the song “Kill the Boer” at the party’s tenth anniversary gathering. ‘Boer’ is the Afrikaans word for farmer, and for the white Afrikaans population in general. (Translation of lyrics can be found here.)

An estimated 100,000 party members packed a stadium and cheered Malema.

The Equality Court in Johannesburg ruled in August last year that the song was not hate speech or incitement, after AfriForum took the matter to court.

The court held that the song was freedom of speech and had to be left in the political arena.

The court said the lyrics of the song – “Shoot to kill, kill the Boer, kill the farmer” – were not to be taken literally. (Source)

The BBC offered a somewhat positive piece on Malema in response to the gathering and there was no international outrage by any major government, agency or the U.N. No U.S. news outlet reported the story of Malema’s song at the event.

Read More »

                                            Beach Scene, James Hamilton; 1865

“GOD never changes; He never becomes better or worse; He never breaks His word (Numb, xxiii. 19). Creation made no change in God; from all eternity He had decreed the creation of the universe. God changes His works, but not His eternal decrees. By the Incarnation humanity was changed, but the Godhead underwent no change, just as the sun is in no way changed when it hides itself behind a cloud. Our thoughts are not changed when they clothe themselves in words; so the divinity was not changed when it clothed itself in the nature of man. God does not change when He punishes the sinner. When the heart of man is in friendship with God, God shows Himself to him as a God of infinite love and mercy; when the heart is estranged from Him, the sinner sees in the unchangeable God an angry and avenging judge. When the eye is sound, the light is pleasant to it; but if it is diseased, light causes it pain: it is not the light that is changed, but the eye that looks upon it. When an angry man looks in the glass he sees a different reflection from that which he saw when he was cheerful and in good-humor; it is not the glass that has changed, but the man. When the sun shines through colored glass, its rays take the color of the glass; the sun does not change, but the light is changed by the medium through which it passes. So when God rewards, it is not God Who changes, but man, who performs different and better actions, thereby meriting the grace of God. When in Scripture we read that God repented of having made man, that God is angry with the wicked, the phrases used are accommodated to our imperfect comprehension.”

— Rev. Francis Spirago, The Catechism Explained: An Exhaustive Exposition of the Christian Religion, with Special Reference to the Present State of Society and the Spirit of the Age, Benziger Bros, 1899; p. 117

A tattoo design by George Burchett

GEORGE BURCHETT is an important figure in the oft-cited history of tattoos.

Born in 1872 in Brighton, England, he was drawn to etching skin from an early age after seeing tattooed performers at the Royal Aquarium in London. He practiced on his brother and his classmates.

He joined the Royal Navy as a young man and traveled to parts of the world where tattoos were already common. He returned to London and eventually opened up a tattoo shop near Waterloo Station. His early business was mostly sailors, but eventually he found work among European royals and the monied. King Frederick IX of Denmark, King George V and King Alfonso XIII of Spain were among his clients. Tattoos started to become fashionable.

His work included the usual dragons (influenced by Japanese tattoos), flags, warships and eagles, but also delicately-rendered nature butterflies, flowers and other natural objects. On paper, his designs showed a high degree of artistry, as in the image above. While we cannot see any of George Burchett’s tattoos in person (he died in 1953), we can see photos of those who had them. All of his tattoos, no matter how skillfully rendered, faded with time, much more dramatically than works on paper.

Burchett in his London studio

Burchett might be astonished at the popularity of his craft today. The idea that has fueled much of the normalization of tattoos is, however, something he would surely deeply support. That idea is the notion that tattoos are art. They are now called “body art” and extolled as a form of personal expression.

That tattoos involve artistic skills is beyond question.

The medium is living tissue. The process involves pain, blood letting and weeks of healing. But most tattoos involve drawing skill and through the dissemination of images, even highly detailed designs are available to greater numbers of people. A small and expensive number of tattoos involve great originality and craftsmanship.

But are tattoos truly art?

The answer is, people say, in the eye of the beholder. I would like to make the case against.

This idea that visual works rendered in ink injected into the second layer of the skin is “art” is a bit of pretentiousness that has unfortunately captured the minds of some very talented graphic artists, as well as the general public. With some serious consideration, we can see that this idea is false. Tattoos are never truly art, however much visual pleasure they may give. They do not qualify as art because the essence of art is the creation of beauty. Given the essential beauty and magnificence of one of the greatest works of art — the human body — a tattoo, which is by definition a nearly indelible mark on the body, is always a form of defacement.

Skin, even marred by common, natural imperfections or anomalies, is an organ of such miraculous inventiveness and artistry that it is almost impossible for us to appreciate all its facets. It encloses the watery, gelatinous, messy contents of the body. Who but the greatest of artists could conceive of such a container — so soft, so washable, so easily repaired?

But it’s more than an enclosure. It enables one of the five senses. Through touch we know our way around us, accomplish millions of tasks, feel the pain necessary to survival and experience indescribably intense pleasure.

It is impossible to go into any but a small part of the wonders of skin here, but there is one rarely-mentioned aspect of its awesomeness I would like to mention and that is relevant to this subject. On a visual level, the skin’s (almost) blankness is another stroke of divine genius. Imagine if we were checkered or striped. It works for animals and insects; not for human beings. Why is that so?

Without the relative blankness of this canvas, we could not so much appreciate the face, its amazing originality and expressiveness, especially in the eyes and the mouth. The face conveys a personal language of its own — even the face that is not conventionally beautiful.

The skin grants expressiveness to the entire body. We notice the personality in body movements, the way people walk and gesture, and the skin does not distract from this visual appraisal. This is why the body does not work as a moving billboard. When you see a billboard on a meadow, do you notice the meadow or the billboard? It is the same with tattoos.

The tattoo can only be a distraction and a detraction, in the same way that graffiti on the side of a building, even an ugly building, is never an improvement, no matter how artfully executed.

Tattoos are depersonalizing and therefore cannot be art because we are art.

Rather than being a form of individual expression, tattoos distract from what is truly original  — the face, the physical manner and bearing. I have never seen an uninteresting face. Even uninteresting people have interesting faces, some fascinatingly bland.

Is it any surprise that the Romans and Greeks, with their famous idealization (and sometimes worship) of the human body, rejected tattoos except for slaves and criminals? They were not unfamiliar with the techniques of tattooing, but they also understood skin and its beauty. Imagine a tattoo on the man who posed for this first-century AD, Roman bust. It would be not body art, but body anti-art. It would distract from what was already there, what had formed from infancy through the mysterious impressions that thoughts and emotions make on the surfaces of the skin.

Think of all those magnificent Greek and Roman statues of athletes and warriors. Yes, they were idealizations, but the ideal was beautifully blank. Skin was so beautiful that only the finest marble could capture its suppleness.

Only people who have lost the sense of their inherent individuality and lost an appreciation for this sublime artistry of nature would find themselves in the hands of the “tattoo artist.”

All of George Burchett’s tattoos, no matter how skillfully rendered, faded with time, much more dramatically than works on paper. Such is the nature of ink injected into the skin. And all tattoos are destroyed before long. This canvas is indeed more ephemeral than the canvases of conventional painters.

It is just as well Burchett’s famous works are gone. They in no way made the world a more beautiful place.

Read More »

EVEN those who are not white can be white supremacists, provided they are evil.
 

“THE whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have the two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not so say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance or mutual check, in our Constitution.”

— G. K. Chesterton

ALAN writes:

“Where were the teen-agers?,” Mr. John T. Stewart asked after he attended a performance of Shakespeare by the Old Vic Company at the American Theater in downtown St. Louis in the 1950s. He was writing about his 52 years of memories of theatergoing in St. Louis from 1906 to 1958.  [John T. Stewart, “Golden Days of the Theater in St. Louis”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 12, 1958, p. 3H]

He continued: “Do they have no feeling or regard for the living stage? Do they really believe that what they see and hear on television is worthy drama? The student whose only impression of the art is taken from the movie screen or television set could not even imagine what was offered in the ‘good old days’…..”

Of course the answer to his questions was that concerted efforts were being made in the 1950s to separate the younger generation from the older, a project made easier by three cultural factors:  The “youth revolution”, firmly in place by the 1950s;  the increasing presence of television in Americans’ daily lives;  and the promotion of a peculiar form of noise aimed at the young and called “rock and roll music”.

Those things were more than enough to eclipse any likelihood that teenagers would be able to understand the magical appeal of live theater.

“Television was hard on the little theater groups,” a woman said as she recalled her days in the 1940s-‘50s with the Trinity Dramatic Club, a church group in south St. Louis.  It had the same effect on professional theater life. From our vantage point 75 years later, it is easy to see that canned entertainment readily available by turning dials and pushing buttons had the effect of softening up an entire generation. Read More »

                                                        Blue Boy, Winslow Homer

“IF we contemplate the provident action of God as it moves through His creation, we everywhere see the signs of His divine patience, sustaining what is by nature feeble, upholding what left to itself must fall, enduring evil and disorder for the sake of final good, providing for all things according to their needs, and conducting all things to their destinies according to His eternal designs. If we contemplate the ways of God in souls, with what a sovereign patience He endures their wayward follies and ungrateful crimes, to bring them from their evil to His good.

[….]

“As a divine attribute of God patience is infinite and eternal. In His divine benignity He exhibits that patience towards us in bearing with our offenses and ingratitude, and in waiting for our repentance and return to His love. As He has made us to His image that we may be formed to His likeness, He sends to us the grace of patience through the gift of charity, that through its faithful exercise we may imitate His patience. This virtue is the tonic medicine of our enfeebled nature; it fortifies the will, soothes down the irritabilities that derange the soul, braces the powers into unity, and gives stability to all the virtues. It secures the mind from dissipation, the will from perturbation, and enables us to preserve our self-possession. It is the pith and marrow of charity, strengthening the love of God in the children of light, that it may persevere under every cloud of tribulation and adversity. Read More »