Faith under siege.

On Monday, having read an article in the Guardian about the BNP - Click here to read Charlie Brooker’s article. - I decided to adapt Sunday’s blog and send it as a letter to the Grauniad. Click here to read my letter. This, I felt, would be an excellent opportunity to prove my solipsistic beliefs: I know lots of people in the UK who read the Guardian, including my elder son, younger daughter and best friend. If none of them contacted me after reading the letter it would confirm my belief that they are all figments of my imagination, incapable of independent action. In accordance with the best scientific practice, I set up a control group - let’s call it ‘Dave’. I texted ‘Dave’ to ask him to keep a copy of the Guardian for me. If ‘he’ responded and no one else did my experiment would have worked.

    For most of yesterday all went well. Then at around half-past seven in the evening CET disaster struck. Idly checking my emails in the orto whilst waiting for the watering-can to fill I found a message from ‘Graham Brown’, one of my creations from the late seventies whom I haven’t activated for months. ‘Graham’ not only claimed to have read my letter but to have just returned from holiday in Spain, not something I would ever have considered programming ‘him’ to do. My faith was severely tested. However if Christians, barring the lunatic fringe across the pond, can reconcile their faith with a heliocentric universe, Darwinism, and in the case of some Anglicans a disbelief in the resurrection or even a transcendent deity, why should I let a few inconvenient facts shake my faith? Yes it merely proves that my imagination is even stronger and more complex than I had given it credit for.

Sorry, Nick.

In the heat of the moment I did Nick Griffin a grave injustice yesterday. I suggested that his party might like to adopt the slogan ‘An Anglo-Saxon England for the Anglo-Saxons’. Having read History at Cambridge, Nick will know that the Anglo-Saxons themselves were a bunch of kraut immigrants coming here to sponge off the welfare state. So rather than re-organising the country into the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established when the Romans left we should return the country to the 20 indigenous British tribes - the Iceni, Belgae, Dubunni etc - who lived here before and during the Roman occupation. 

    I think Nick’s  party lacks its leader’s historical expertise, though, when it claims on its web-site:  ‘On current demographic trends, we, the native British people, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within sixty years’. I’m afraid they’ve been a minority for the last 1,500 years, ever since those invading Saxons arrived with their innate sense of rhythm and enormous john thomases to seduce our women and produce a nation of  half-breeds. There is of course an area of the UK where ‘indigenous folk’ are still a majority. So here’s your new slogan Nick: ‘British jobs for Welsh workers’. Should go down a bomb with the slope-skulls who support you. 

P.S. A final word from someone far more eloquent than I, Daniel Defoe:

‘I am far from thinking it is a satire upon the English nation to tell them they are derived from all the nations under heaven—that is, from several nations. Nor is it meant to undervalue the original of the English, for we see no reason to like them the worse, being the relics of Romans, Danes, Saxons, and Normans, than we should have done if they had remained Britons; that is, than if they had been all Welshmen. But the intent of the satire is pointed at the vanity of those who talk of their antiquity and value themselves upon their pedigree, their ancient families, and being true-born; whereas it is impossible we should be true-born, and if we could, should have lost by the bargain.

      ‘ These are the heroes that  …       

       rail at new-come foreigners so much, 

       Forgetting that themselves are all derived 

       From the most scoundrel race that ever lived; 

       A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones, 

       Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns, 

       The Pict and painted Briton, treacherous Scot, 

       By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought; 

       Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes, 

       Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains, 

       Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed 

       From whence your true-born Englishmen proceed. …

       ‘Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, 

       That heterogeneous thing an Englishman; 

       In eager rapes and furious lust begot, 

       Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot; 

       Whose gendering offspring quickly learned to bow, 

       And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough; 

       From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, 

       With neither name nor nation, speech nor fame;’

Click here to read the whole of Defoe’s poem The True-Born Englishman. http://www.luminarium.org/editions/trueborn.htm

Bossi by name, nazsty by nature.

The campaign for the European election is under way. The poster pictured above, promoting the Northern League led by Margaret Beckett look-a-like Umbert Bossi, was the first to appear. It sent a shiver down my spine. At least in the UK the law prevents scum like the BNP peddling such obnoxious opinions so blatantly. Until comparatively recently Italy was much more relaxed about immigration than the UK: indeed it’s only now that a law is going through parliament making illegal immigration a crime. In other ways Italy has been ‘ahead’ of Britain. In England for most of my life ‘immigrant’ was a euphemism for a black or brown person. In Italy, despite the large numbers of poor souls who arrive by boat on her shores from Africa, the immigrant who bears the brunt of  local prejudice is the Romanian or the Albanian. Not helped by the fact that one Italian word for gypsy ‘rom’ easily elides into ‘rumeno’, Romanian. The UK is of course catching up: Wisbech when I first lived in the Fens was inhabited by people who rarely ventured as far as King’s Lynn, 15 miles down the A47, and who had never seen a foreigner or non-white Englishman in the flesh. They had to vent their prejudice on the gypsies who turned up for seasonal work on the local farms, a large number of Fen pubs having ‘No Travellers’ notices displayed on their front doors. Now its market square is thronged with people from eastern Europe, and the locals don’t like it: ‘fucking immigrants’ are no longer just black people from Birmingham but the Poles and  Lithuanians who work for local gangmasters at slave wages.

   But Bossi is way ahead of the game. It’s not just blacks and eastern Europeans who are despised: it’s anyone hailing from south of the Po. ‘Roma ladra’, thieving Rome, is seen as the chief enemy, taking the North’s wealth to distribute to the ‘nigger’ inhabitants of Campania, Calabria and Sicily. And here of course we see the ultimate absurdity of the racist’s and xenophobe’s position. Following their logic one might well ask why Milan, a wealthy and prosperous city, should be compelled to inhabit the same province as the inhabitants of some impoverished village in its hinterland. And to push it even further why should the inhabitant of a prosperous Milanese district be made to inhabit the same comune, Milan, as those living in its slums?

  One of the arguments employed by eurosceptics against the greater fiscal and political integration which might save us from declining into a collection of third world statelets is that economic conditions across the EU are too diverse. Do these prats think that economic conditions are  - or ever were - homogenous across the UK. That London and the North-East are economically comparable? So now that Labour, Tory and LibDem MPs have been caught with their hands in the till and Nick Griffin’s opportunity has arisen, here’s a slogan: ‘An Anglo-Saxon England for the Anglo-Saxons’. Mercia for the Mercians, Northumbia for the Northumbrians. Bring back the miserable little squabbling Saxon kingdoms which shared  Britain for half a millennium after the legions left!

Sumer is icemen in.

Suddenly, on the 7th May, the UK gave Italy its weather back. The second half of April had seen Italy subjected to a continuous downpour, while England basked in sunshine. Now things are back to normal: it’s raining in Manchester while I’ve been able to swop my ‘pistolero’ outfit of Dryazabone drover’s coat, field boots and leather hat for tee-shirt, sandals and jeans. We no longer have to light the fire and can eat on the loggia. As a quid pro quo for having its pilfered sunshine returned, Italy had to agree to let the UK have a big dollop of its political corruption, so giving the press something to write about now that they’ve flogged swine-fever to death. ‘Girl catches cold’ shock horror headline is replaced by ‘Male MP claims for Tampax on expenses’. Now I could have understood if it had been Lillets: stuck under his armpits they would have been useful to soak up the sweat engendered by the recent sunshine. But Tampax?  Maybe he wanted to shove one up his bottom to stop himself talking so much.

Aloe, Aloe!

‘When Adam delved and Eve span.

Where was there the gentleman?’

Once again I turned out for the annual walk from Smerillo to Montefalcone which has been held for the last six years on the first Sunday in May in support of the ALOE missionary organisation. Click here to see a video of the walk. It begins with various entertainments in the piazza in Smerillo, then through the woods, with stops en route for more entertainment, to Montefalcone for lunch al fresco, and finally back through the woods to Smerillo for mass in the piazza. This year was rather different. Firstly, the weather has been awful. (I think the lager-swilling, Diana-worshipping, ManU-supporting, beer-bellied, tattooed, xenophobic and flag-of-St George waving English lumpen-proletariat have persuaded Brussels that until the UK can escape from rule by ‘unelected EU bureaucrats’ European weather should be standardised to conform to the British model.) Consequently, it was decided that walking through the woods would be too slippery so we would walk to Montefalcone via contrada Conche instead. Which is rather like setting A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Oxford Street rather than in a forest glade: the poetry readings and music lose half their charm. Secondly there was no Fra Mago this year. Fra Mago is a jolly franciscan friar, straight from the pages of  Robin Hood, who performs conjuring tricks. A larger than life character, but engaging in a David Bellamy sort of way. Instead we had the flag wavers. Performing acrobatic feats with flags whilst dressed in renaissance costume, accompanied by drummers similarly garbed, is the Italian equivalent of morris-dancing. When it’s done skilfully - as it is at Ascoli Piceno’s Quintana - the flag-throwing is pretty impressive; often it’s not.

   It sometimes feels as if every comune in Italy has its ‘authentic’ tradition hailing from the quattrocento. Most of course are 20th century inventions: supposed revivals of earlier customs. Even Siena’s palio dates from the late 17th century, not from the Renaissance as its participants’ costumes seek to imply. In The Return of the Native, Hardy’s narrator claims that ‘A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from  a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival  is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all.’  I think his point is  borne out by religious processions in Italy. These go back in an uninterrupted line for hundreds of years - and, in contrast to the Renaissance revivals. are usually performed in a sloppy and lackadaisical fashion reminiscent of a parade by Captain Bertorelli’s ‘Italian war ‘eroes’ in ‘Allo, ‘Allo. What is interesting is that Italians today like to identify themselves with the Renaissance rather than, as they did under Mussolini, with the Roman Empire. Neither, of course, apart from the archeological remains, has any real connection with modern Italy: it’s no longer the political, philosophical, cultural or technological centre of the western world. Under the Romans it was all four, under the Medici the last three. Unlike the British, the Italians have had the sense to realise that they have no political clout and so the self-image projected through their folk revivals limits itself to a cultural illusion. 

    And what of our English self-image as mediated through our projections of the past? I find the Arthurian legends instructive. In The Noble Tale of King Arthur and Lucius, Malory has Arthur say: “That truage to Roome woll I never pay. … For this muche have I founde in the cronycles of this londe … dame Elyneys son, of Ingelonde, was Emperour of Roome; … And thus was the Empyre kepte be my kynde elders, and thus have we evydence inowghe to be the empyre of hole Rome.’  So we have the irony that Arthur is transformed from a Romano-Celt fighting to preserve Roman civilisation against the Saxon invader into a truculent Little Englander. And here we see the beginning of the fundamental change in attitude to continental Europe, one which has bedevilled England ever since. Three years after Rome withdrew its last legions from Britain in 407 the inhabitants appealed to the Emperor Honorius to defend them against the barbarian invaders. Far from wanting to see an end to continental interference the British were desperate for the Romans to stay. And who can blame them? Who would willingly swop being a citizen of a superpower with access to modern amenities such as central-heating, mains drainage, the rule of law, public baths and a decent road network, for living in a mud-hut surrounded by warring tribesmen sporting excessive facial hair and non-existent personal hygiene? Swop living in Surrey for living in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe? For a thousand years western Europeans were bitterly aware of what they had lost with the collapse of the Empire. 

    By the late 15th century, however, things began to change: people had previously defined themselves in terms of their local community and christendom, now a new and exclusive identity was promoted: the nation state. Henry VII had succeeded in establishing a strong central government state. He named his eldest son Arthur to cash in on the legend that the ‘Rex quondam rexque futurus’, as Malory put it, would return to save the nation. Miraculously, the ‘original’ Round Table turned up and can be seen hanging in Winchester cathedral (carbon dating has established a 15th century origin). His second son, Henry VIII, increased the power of the state further by severing England’s ties with the one institution surviving from the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church¹.   The support of the nobility was ensured by selling off plundered church land to them at knock down prices. The support of ordinary people was accomplished by the extraordinary feat of representing the Church as a foreign ‘un-English’ institution and all non-apostates as traitors. As  the Jesuit priest, Edmund Campion, martyred by Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth,  put it at his trial:  ‘In condemning us, you condemn all your own ancestors, all our ancient bishops and kings, all that was once the glory of England.’ Henry’s son, Edward, introduced Calvinistic protestantism  promoting, as Fielding’s Parson Adams put it, ‘the detestable doctrine of faith against good works²’ The Church which had provided a career for bright lads from humble backgrounds became the ideological arm of the state³; its most lucrative livings reserved for the younger sons of county families. The universities, which had enabled bright young peasants to train for white collar jobs, were gradually turned into finishing schools for the upper classes. Having seized the Church’s lands, the wealthy moved next against the ordinary people, enclosing common land thereby reducing them from self-sufficient peasant farmers to landless labourers. And all the time the refrain was and is: ‘hate the foreigner; he’s your foe.’ Your enemy is the Lithuanian for taking a job you wouldn’t want, for wages you couldn’t live on. Not the gang-master exploiting him, not the banker robbing the shareholder he’s supposed to be serving by paying himself a king’s ransom whilst doing his job with breathtaking incompetence. Your enemy is the EU, not ‘Good Old Maggie’ who decimated British industry and cut taxes for the rich and services for the rest of us. 

   Where’s the Al Gore to stand up and spell out these - to the ‘robber rich man⁴’ -  inconvenient truths?

Notes.

1. As Hobbes put it: ‘the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.’ Leviathan

1. Adams continues: ‘… surely that doctrine was coined in hell, and one would think none but the devil could have the confidence to preach it. For can anything be more derogatory to the honour of God than for men to imagine that the all-wise Being will hereafter say to the good and virtuous, “Notwithstanding the purity of thy life, notwithstanding that constant rule of virtue and goodness in which you walked upon earth, still, as thou didst not believe everything in the true orthodox manner, thy want of faith shall condemn thee”? Or, on the other side, can any doctrine have a more pernicious influence on society, than a persuasion that it will be a good plea for the villain on the last day: “Lord, it is true, I have never obeyed one of thy commandments, yet punish me not, for I believe them all”?’ Joseph Andrews I xvii
2. In the 18th century, the then Lord Chancellor, Thurlow, told a deputation of nonconformists: ‘I’m against you, by God. I am for the Established Church, damme! Not that I have any more regard for the Established Church than for any other Church , but because it is established. And if you can get your damned religion established, I’ll be for that too!” Quoted by T.H. White (1966) The Age of Scandal Chap. 11.
3. ‘No brand of Cain e’er stamped his brow/ No widow’s curse had he/ Only the robber rich man feared/ The coming of Ben Hall.… For ever since the good old days/Of Turpin and Duval/ The people’s friends were outlaws then/ And so was bold Ben Hall.’ Traditional Australian ballad, Lament for Ben Hall.