Tony Blair was a prime minister of post-Thatcher Britain for 10 years (1997-2007).

As such, he was a prime member of the leftist elite that has done so much harm to the world. They call themselves the “globalists”. They expected to extend their rule over the whole world, modeling their new world order on the corrupt undemocratic European Union.

But the first and only genuine workers’ revolution in history has brought a patriotic capitalist, Donald Trump, to power in America. And the British people voted to leave the European Union. And now the days of the globalist cabal are numbered.

They won’t go quietly. They are beginning to make a clamor. They think that somehow they can mount a serious threat to the new US government and all the new patriotic governments that will soon be elected in Europe.

They call the rise of the people against them “populism”. Well, so it is. It could also be called democracy. The demos – the people – have voted, or soon will vote, to reclaim their countries and their liberty.

So it’s “populism” against “globalism”.

The weak outgoing US president, Barack Obama – a globalist – is promising to be the leader of an American resistance movement against the Herculean incoming president, Donald Trump.

And Tony Blair is setting himself up as Obama’s counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic.

Nick Hallett at Breitbart reports:

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is to invest £9.3 million of proceeds from his lobbying business in a new institute that he is setting up to fight populism.

Mr Blair said last month he was creating the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) aimed at combatting populism and “making globalisation work”. On Wednesday, he confirmed he has given £9.26 million net assets of his company Windrush Ventures limited to the new institute …

Mr Blair said last month the TBI would be a “platform” offering “thought leadership” on anti-populist, pro-globalisation policies.

He added it would “build a new policy agenda” for what he called the “centre ground” of politics, as well as allowing “a reasonable and evidence based discussion of the future which avoids the plague of social media-led exchanges of abuse.”

Oh, those pestilential social media, which ordinary people use to spread their opinions – and information that the globalist-supporting mainstream media do their best to keep hidden!

In terms of actual policies, he hinted it would champion the continuation and strengthening of the European project, and also open borders.

He said:

Part of its focus will plainly be around the European debate; but this will not be its exclusive domain. It has to go far wider than that since in many ways the Europe debate is a lightning rod for the whole of politics.

Mr Blair has said several times that Britain should consider holding a second referendum on Brexit, just in case the public change their minds and want to remain in the European Union.

In October, he said:

If it becomes clear that this is either a deal that doesn’t make it worth our while leaving, or a deal that is so serious in its implications that people may decide they don’t want to go, there’s got to be some way, either through parliament, through an election, possibly through a referendum, in which people express their view.

He is a true believer that the globalists’ new world order is the only way for the human race to go if it wants to save itself from “serious implications”. To him, Brexit was a disaster of the same order as Trump’s election was for Obama and his party.

They both seem to believe that because they once had the power of government, they themselves are intrinsically powerful.

We expect they can be little more than a nuisance, and that only for a short time, and then – no more of Obama and Blair.

Political parties in the Western world are undergoing dramatic and permanent change.

In America, Donald Trump has changed the Republican Party. It will not go back to being what it was before he became its most popular candidate for the presidency.

The Democratic Party was always a racist cabal, and now it’s a criminal racket under the dictatorship of the Clintons. They have been “nudged” towards the wilder shores of Leftism by the surprising popularity of the  “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, who stood against Hillary Clinton for the presidential candidacy – but was not allowed to win, of course.

The Libertarian Party’s support is growing. There is even talk of it replacing the Republican Party. In any case, the Libertarians want the two-party system to fade away and new parties – chiefly their own – to enter the competition for power with a fair chance of winning.

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s nominee for the presidential elections, says: “I think 30 million people here are up for grabs that are probably Libertarian; it’s that they just don’t know it.”

In Europe, new parties are emerging and old ones re-emerging in new forms and with new policies, in response to the governing elites’ disastrous immigration policies, by which millions of Muslims have poured into the continent from the Third World, bringing their customs of violence and misogyny with them.

In Britain, the established political parties are showing signs of disintegration and possible re-alignment.

Our British contributing associate, Chauncey Tinker*, writes:

Jeremy Corbyn, the present unpopular leader of the Labour Party, will cling on to power until he feels a suitable loony leftie has appeared who can replace him. Corbyn is not having a great time being the leader but he cares about the loony left’s future in politics and he is not going to hand power back to the centrist Blairite arm of the party in a hurry. He repeatedly says he has the mandate of the “party membership”, and he actually really seems to feel duty bound not to disappoint them. I do think winning general elections is not the biggest priority in his mind, its much more about representing the real loony left. 

The former leader, Ed Miliband, made a disastrous decision to open the membership to anyone with £3 to spare, so changing the party membership, allowing the proper lefties to take over (and there are suggestions that some mischievous Tories also pitched in) and I don’t think they can easily undo this, without splitting the party in two. They are still joining at an astonishing rate apparently, even though the membership fee has been increased to £25 to try and stop this. But it looks as if it will ensure a majority vote for Corbyn.  

Could the party split in two? There has been quite a lot of speculation about it. The Blairite / loony left ideological split has been going on since Tony Blair arrived on the scene.  However I can’t help feeling that the Blairites have just lost faith in their own cause. Corbyn’s chief rival for the leadership, Owen Smith, seems in many respects to be not really that far away from Corbyn; but – so far at least –  without the tendency to seem like a supporter of Islam. And I have yet to hear him suggest that the government should print money and give wads of it to poor people. As such he maybe doesn’t deserve to be thought of as a loony leftie, just a normal leftie. There’s a short clip of him talking in the Telegraph (see here). He would certainly win the votes of the “always voted Labour, always will” types, and might even stand a chance in a general election – although apparently he has hinted in favour of a second referendum on Brexit, which might well be a vote loser considering at least 52% voted to leave the European Union.   

If they did split Labour it would be a huge breath of fresh air for UK politics, and give the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) a chance to get a foot in the door with more MPs. I think UKIP’s chances right now would be good if it were not for the fact they are also in disarray. Nigel Farage has resigned the leadership, and I don’t find the frontrunner Steven Woolfe impressive. But maybe he will improve.  

Overall its just deeply uninspiring on all fronts, and the new Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May,  looks almost unshakeable with this rabble of an opposition.

It seems possible that she could even reunite the Conservative Party after the deep divisions within it over Brexit. But for how long?

—

* Chauncey Tinker was a computer programmer for many years.  He writes: “I had always had a keen interest in current affairs but around 2012 my interest turned to real alarm.  I began to read about the Islamic religion and became increasingly troubled by what I learned, especially in view of the ever increasing presence of Islam in the West.  By 2013 I was beginning to realize just how much the mainstream media is dominated by a certain warped and narrow way of thinking (far away from my own fairly libertarian views), how freedom of speech was being eroded and stifled by “political correctness”.  More alarmingly still I also began to notice how governments were beginning to pass laws that could actually criminalize views that dissented from theirs. Determined to challenge this trend, I left my computing career and began to study current affairs full time. I began my blog late in 2015.”

In September 2015, Sanders’s presidential campaign received the support of the former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, who wrote: “I believe that among the Sanders supporters there are thousands who are dissatisfied, who are disgruntled, but who do not have a coherent left analysis, who therefore are open to our ideas as they weren’t before they got involved in the Sanders surge. … So, why don’t we join a Sanders local campaign or go to a mass rally? … We could have lists of places and projects where anarchists and others are working with people in projects that are using anarchist and community participatory ideas and vision. Places where Bernie supporters might get involved once they knew about them.”

That paragraph and the following come from Discover the Networks:

In his first public speech as a presidential candidate in Burlington, Vermont, in May 2015, Bernie Sanders broadly laid out the major planks of his campaign’s agenda:

• He declared that financial inequality “is immoral, it is bad economics, it is unsustainable”. 
• Vowing to send “a message to the billionaire class”, he said: “You can’t have huge tax breaks [for the rich] while children in this country go hungry … while there are massive unmet needs on every corner…. Your greed has got to end…. You cannot take advantage of all the benefits of America if you refuse to accept your responsibilities.”
• He pledged to enact “a tax system that is fair and progressive, which tells the wealthiest individuals and the largest corporations that they are going to begin to pay their fair share”.
• He claimed that “the current federal [hourly] minimum wage of $7.25 is a starvation wage and must be raised … to $15.00 an hour”.
• He described the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) as a “modest” step in the direction of rightfully forcing the U.S. to “join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all as a right”.  “And we must do it through a Medicare-for-all, single payer health plan,” he explained.
• He called for “pay equity for women workers”, and “paid sick leave and guaranteed vacation time for every worker in this country”.
• Describing the rising costs of a college education as “insane”, he vowed to “fight to make tuition in public colleges and universities free, as well as substantially lower interest rates on student loans”.
• He pledged to “expand Social Security benefits” and mandate “a universal pre-K system for all the children of this country”. 
• Asserting that “there is nothing more important” than fighting global warming, he said: “The debate is over. The scientific community has spoken in a virtually unanimous voice. Climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is already causing devastating problems in our country and throughout the world.” He elaborated that in the absence of government intervention, America would inevitably see “more drought, more famine, more rising sea level, more floods, more ocean acidification, [and] more extreme weather disturbances”, in the absence of government intervention.
• He called for the government to use taxpayer dollars to rebuild America’s “crumbling infrastructure” by repairing “our roads, our bridges, our water systems, our rail and airports”.
• He would begin this process by working to advance, in the Senate, a five-year, $1 trillion bill that he himself had proposed, claiming that it “would create and maintain 13 million good paying jobs”.

Bernie Sanders has an older brother, Larry, who says that Bernie is a “genuine socialist”.

We know about Larry from Nico Hines, who writes a quite sympathetic – even affectionate – profile of him at the Daily Beast:

[Larry Sanders is] a soft-spoken man, who has been calmly explaining his little brother’s sudden political success from his sun-drenched kitchen table in Oxford [England]. …

If Bernie is able to ride the recent surge in support all the way to the White House, Larry says he would go big — no matter what Congress, the usual conventions or even the majority of the Democratic Party might say.

“He’ll flex his muscles,” Larry said. “I mean this is not cowboy stuff, there are very intricate constitutional discussions, [but] he won’t hesitate, if he thinks he’s got the constitutional power to do something—he will do it.” …

If that’s a warning to those who think President Obama has been guilty of constitutional overreach, he also has one for Democrats who would try to moderate a Sanders presidency. … Bernie wants to revolutionize politics, but he also specifically wants to revolutionize the Democratic Party. …

There is no doubt that Larry was a formative influence on Bernie, who is six years his junior. When Larry was at college studying Marx and Hegel, Bernie was still at high school. “Sometimes I would tell Bernard about something I’d heard about or read about so I think he did get — at a much younger age than most people — an idea of political thought. So I think I did help him get started,” he said. “He has given me credit — not all the credit.”

As a radical member of the Young Democrats in the 1950s, Larry was already attracting political attention within the student body. “I do recall a Republican club paper called me ‘an obese socialist’, ” he said, laughing. “And I wasn’t even very fat then!”

Last week, Larry was appointed health spokesman for the left-wing Green Party in England. He had been an active member of the Labour Party in the 1980s, but he grew disillusioned once Tony Blair had taken the party into the center ground.

He is far more impressed with Jeremy Corbyn — the hard left campaigner who won a shock election to become the new leader of the Labour Party last year. Many have pointed out the similarities between the two men [Bernie, that is, and Jeremy], even though British politics is centered considerably to the left of the American mainstream — and Corbyn is way out to the left of that.

Larry isn’t so sure that his brother is more moderate, however. “Bernard is a genuine socialist in his sense of class warfare — that he thinks there is not a national interest so much as there is an interest with sectors of the population,” he said. “In that sense, his passion and the sense of conflict between the major owners and the rest of the population is very socialist — as socialist as Corbyn.”

Some of the Corbynistas have been helping Larry and the “London for Bernie” organization to raise awareness about the global primary, which allows Americans abroad to send delegates — and even some super delegates — to the Democratic convention. Larry said Corbyn supporters within the Labour Party had helped to arrange for UNITE, Britain’s largest union, to allow Bernie’s supporters to hold events in their buildings for free. The union confirmed that the group used its rooms without charge. The move might be a violation of U.S. campaign finance law depending on who was involved, according to the former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission.

Bernie has always told his brother that the cause of socialism, or social democracy, is more important than his own career.

Who put in “or social democracy”? It is extremely unlikely that Bernie has “always” told his brother that his is “the cause of social democracy”. That’s his claimed cause as he fights in the Democratic Party for the presidential nomination. His long career shows his cause to have been a deeper shade of red.  

“What he said to me very clearly was: ‘I don’t mind running and making a fool of myself, I’ve been humiliated before — I’ll go back to doing the job I love[as Senator], no big sweat, but if I do badly then everyone will say: ‘See, I told you, nobody is interested in that crap.’ And for a generation those ideas and the millions of people he thinks need those ideas will be wiped out,” Larry said.

“He would not have run if he thought he would damage the cause — ‘I think I can make a respectable showing’ — that was his decision. I’m not sure that he thought he could win.”

Bernie Sanders has already surpassed the “respectable showing” stage, he has the Clinton camp on the hop, and the latest polling suggests that he has closed a 40-point deficit to come within the margin of error in Nevada.

Larry says he always had faith in his brother but he uses the word “astonishing” over and over again to describe the events of the last six months.

Bernie likes to praise the Scandinavian countries as “democratic socialist” models,

Here, in a 2013 video, Stefan Molyneaux talks about the Myth of Scandinavian Socialism.

We don’t agree with all his opinions, but find the facts he presents interesting: 

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.             – Ayn Rand

The political philosophy of the New Left is weak, shallow, and in its expression by some of its gurus, patently absurd. But it has won the West. It has won the academies of the pan-European word, and through them generations grow up steeped in the creed.

What is the creed, and why has it won?

It has won because it echoes a Christian teaching, to which some 8,000 generations (reckoning 4 generations per century) of Europeans have been subjected.

It is the notion that to be a good person you must pity other people and make sacrifices for them. Only if you do that, are you worthy and virtuous.

It has been drummed into every Christian from his earliest years, so even if he rebels against his religion, his class, his culture, his race, his nation, he clings to that idea as to the moral kingpin of his universe. Take it away, and the center will not hold.

The New Left was a rebellion by affluent, middle-class adolescents (some of them well advanced in middle age) against their class, culture, race, and nation, starting  about twenty years after the end of the Second World War (1939-1945).

The old Left, a secular version of Christianity, won the support of middle-class intellectuals by directing pity on to the working-class. The intellectuals would, at whatever cost to themselves, lead the oppressed and exploited workers in revolution. In Russia to start with, they did just that before the end of the First World War.

By the late 1960s, the old Left, in the person of dictators and their henchmen, was actively oppressing millions, including the populations of the Eastern European countries and a part of Germany.

So the old Left lost its appeal partly because the Leftist regimes could not easily be held up as models of paradise on earth. In addition, the working-class in the West had generally become prosperous enough to be content with its lot.

The New Left found new victims to feel sorry for. It found them first abroad, in the Third World, which was not prosperous. It declared the people of Third World countries to be exploited and oppressed by European colonialism and imperialism, even if their countries were no longer colonies or parts of empires. Its concern extended to Third World descendants who lived in the First World.

Then it declared that in the First World, women were victims of male-dominated societies. Many women volunteered for the role.

Next, homosexuals were declared, and many declared themselves, victims of heterosexual-dominated First World societies.

The main thing was, New Left intellectuals found new groups to pity, and so new sources for pride in a feeling of self-worth.

After 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War – of which the West was the immediate winner – the old Left was held by Western intellectuals (whom Thomas Sowell calls “the self-annointed”) to have been the wrong Left. The New Left, they maintain, is the politically correct Left.

The strange thing about the (new or old) Left’s remedy for human suffering is this: While only the individual can feel pain and suffer distress; while no masses, no group, no class, no race as such can suffer or feel anything at all; yet  the Plan of the Left to remedy suffering is always one that sacrifices individuals for the sake of the group. It is always a Plan that is implemented regardless of individual suffering. So important is the Plan itself, that any number of individuals may be persecuted, silenced, tortured, enslaved, killed for it. 

There is no collective remedy for human suffering. The only prescription that works is individual freedom; leaving people alone to serve their own purposes in the manner they choose for themselves. (Nothing need prevent an individual from aiding other individuals if that’s what he wants to do.)

*

John Schindler, who calls himself “a traditional leftist”, writes about why he believes the New Left has won in an article titled Who Really Won the Cold War?, in The Federalist. I quote it in full.

While he makes some points I do not agree with (chiefly the idea he takes for granted that Leftism ideally serves the cause of “human freedom”), he makes many more that bear out what I have said about the old Left and the New Left, and how and why the New Left has won the Cold War. I found this surprising. But it explains why an essay by a “traditional leftist” appears in The Federalist.

He starts with a figure from the old Left who has just recently risen to prominence:

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party has sent shockwaves far beyond Britain. There has been disbelief that the United Kingdom’s storied left-wing party opted to be led by a man so obviously contemptuous of his own society. In the wake of their recent electoral debacle under the uninspiring Ed Miliband, Labour has chosen as its leader an activist who resembles a walking leftist cliché. Corbyn’s radicalism is not in doubt. Aside from his embrace of socialist-throwback platitudes that linger on his party’s left flank on the full range of domestic issues, in adamant rejection of Blairism, Corbyn’s foreign-policy views merit attention. Openly hostile to NATO and Britain’s longstanding “special relationship” with the United States, Corbyn adds overt sympathy for numerous authoritarian regimes.

He blames the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not the Kremlin, for the Ukraine crisis and has endorsed Russia Today, Putin’s TV propaganda network. Corbyn opposes essentially all overseas military operations by Britain and wants to parley with Bashar al-Assad, four years into Syria’s fratricide, while viewing Tehran as a partner for Middle East peace.

That said, leftist infatuation with foreign dictators is hardly new. For decades a crush on “progressive” despots safely far away from their own free country has been a staple of the Western far-Left diet. Corbyn is simply a paid-up member of his ideological tribe.

Yet Corbyn surpasses his predecessors in his fervent embrace of the social-justice message at home as well as abroad. He exudes hostility towards the Britain that made the historic Labour Party. This, after all, is a man who celebrates Hamas, Hezbollah, and related Islamist extremists as freedom-fighters, while explaining the death of Osama bin Laden was “a tragedy”.

Unsurprisingly, Corbyn enthusiastically espouses multiculturalism and says Britain should “celebrate” record numbers of immigrants entering the country — a position not popular with many voters, who see the European Union being overwhelmed by waves of migrants from Asia and Africa. Between his crush on the West’s enemies and his desire to change his country’s population, Corbyn wants to abolish Britain, not reform it.

Yet we should not regard Corbyn as a particular outlier. In truth, his cocktail of trendy “progressive” opinions, which rejects virtually everything about their own society, is commonly found among postmodern Western leftists. The only difference is that Corbyn makes no effort to mask his views. Many of his fellow travelers obscure their take, which would be considered extreme by most voters, behind moderate-sounding language.

Unlike Barack Obama, who once assured us that he did not see a Red America or a Blue America, rather a United States of America — then proceeded to govern through two terms as a highly partisan liberal Democrat — Corbyn states openly that there is only one “real” Britain, and it is deep red (which in Britain, as most of Europe, means left-wing).

Corbynism is no sudden or shocking development, but the natural culmination of 50 years of left-wing views that have shifted from a desire to reform Western democracies to an unconcealed wish to kill them, or at least change them so fundamentally that they bear little resemblance to themselves.

The Old Left, for all its sometimes horrific flaws, sought socioeconomic change to benefit average citizens, not all-out social revolution. They, in their own way, were very much a product of Western culture. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which split the Left worldwide into communist and social democratic groupings, the latter worked within the socioeconomic system, embracing democracy while seeking minimal deep changes to society itself.

Even the communists were hardly social revolutionaries in practice. In the initial euphoria of the revolution there was experimentation. The Soviet Union became the first society ever to allow abortion and easy divorce. In Hungary, during the short-lived red revolution at the end of World War I, Bolsheviks embraced social radicalism and introduced sex education to undermine the traditional family.

However, once firmly in power, the Soviets dropped any pretense of social revolution to mirror the politico-economic one. While religion was persecuted and mild feminism got lip service, Stalin banned abortion and the party frowned upon sexual immorality. After all, the revolution needed soldiers and workers, and who but communist women could make those?

Although the abortion ban was dropped after Stalin, Soviet social practices remained highly “heteronormative,” with homosexuality being criminal while men and women were strongly encouraged to marry and be fruitful. In its most extreme form, Nicolae Ceaușescu nearly banned abortion and contraceptives altogether in his effort to build his highly fecund socialist Romania.

Many were the Western progressives who visited the East Bloc during the Cold War, having been fed propaganda about the wondrous “new society”, only to discover that communism was actually behind the West in matters of family, sex, and gender.

While the Soviets and their clients remained mired in traditional social models, the West moved on — or forward, depending on your viewpoint. The great social revolution of the 1960s, which passed the East Bloc by because communism had insulated the countries, brought forth a New Left in the West that was interested in matters of sex, gender, and race rather than who owns the means of production.

Their “long march through the institutions” after a half-century must be judged wholly successful. While the Right has won the battle for economics across the West — calls for public ownership now seem quaint rather than threatening to capitalists — the New Left has triumphed on the social front in every arena.

In the United States, which was more resistant to the New Left agenda than many Western countries, the Obama years have witnessed the victory of social justice on all major matters of race, gender, and sexuality. Thanks to activists, politicians, and courts, Americans today are living in a very different social and sexual world than their parents and grandparents.

More than a few communists saw all this coming. Beginning in the 1970s, East Bloc secret police began to notice the impact of the New Left on their Old Left countries. Cries for radical individualism from dissidents under Western influence troubled the communists, who didn’t know what to do about this trend, which they dismissed as a bourgeois affectation.

By the 1980s, the more perceptive East Bloc security services were denouncing this Western poison, which took the form of radical feminism, sexual freedom, environmental activism, and gay rights. To traditional communists, who barely understood this new ideology, it was a scary Western import, according to the secret police. Some in Eastern Europe termed this decadence “anarcho-liberalism”, and they considered it a disease of an affluent late capitalist society burdened with excessive consumerism and leisure time.

In the end, of course, the communists lost. Lots of average people in the East Bloc wanted the freedom to own cool shoes, while some pined for the social-sexual liberties that the West offered. In many ways, the revolutions of 1989 to 1991 that changed the map and politics of Europe and beyond can be viewed with a quarter-century of hindsight as the defeat of the Old Left in the East by the New Left in the West.

We are living still with the consequences of this seismic political shift. With the sudden disappearance of the communist threat, the Right lost interest in socioeconomic fairness, a Cold War necessity to keep reds at bay on the home-front, while oddly so did the Left.

The obsessive interest of the New Left in social justice has come at the expense of economic concerns, with the result that on a wide range of topics their positions, barring lip service, differ hardly at all from the Right. Few on the Left question our basic economic arrangements; tearing down our social foundations has been their core program.

Barack Obama is the most left-wing president ever on social justice, yet he is a darling of Wall Street. Hillary Clinton, despite her belated interest in social issues, is deeply enmeshed in high finance and will never challenge it. Thus Bernie Sanders, who is an amalgam of Old and New Left, is treated like an atavism by mainstream liberals when he opens the economics can of worms.

It’s all enough to make the few traditional leftists among us want to pull their hair out. The broad alliance of cultural Left and corporate Right, which questions none of our economics, has triumphed in our politics — or at least had until Donald Trump came along to question “settled” issues such as mass, often illegal, immigration. The cultural Left favors this because it gradually dissolves the traditional culture, which they despise, while the corporate Right favors it for the cheap labor. Postmodern capitalism is at least as revolutionary a force as anything cooked up by any Marxist, as well as something any Social Justice Warrior can live with.

For more than a generation we have sorely lacked mainstream contributions from social democrats who seek to make our society better, not destroy it. There ought to be no illusions about what the cultural Left seeks: a full revolution of our society and its history, which they see as benighted by irredeemable racism, sexism, and Old Think. Their opponents are objectively evil and on the“wrong side of history,” as Obama himself has assured us, and they must disappear. “Error has no rights,” the mid-nineteenth-century Vatican formulation, has oddly been adapted by our postmodern Left.

As communists once predicted the state itself would wither away, resulting in complete human freedom and progress, the New Left expects that all traditional societal arrangements will wither away, thereby allowing full human freedom and progress. One offered discipline and order and sometimes gulags; the other offers sexual liberty, anti-racism, and iPhones.

Both these beliefs are illusions, and dangerous ones, rooted in a Marxist sense of “knowing” where history is going. The working class was once revered by leftists as uniquely virtuous, while for the New Left that vanguard role is played by minorities sexual and racial, who are allegedly untainted by the dominant group. The essential willingness to ignore inconvenient truths remains the same.

Let us give the Old Left, particularly its social democratic guise, credit that they did not seek the extirpation of our whole society and culture, but instead its transformation. What the New Left today fights for is far more revolutionary and utopian. A Europe that seeks a future where actual Europeans are a dying remnant, replaced by more vigorous immigrants, is but one manifestation of this worldview.

Leftists once heartily sang the “Internationale,” which promised “This is the final struggle” (C’est la lutte finale). Communists were quite wrong about that. History has moved on and left them behind everywhere but Cuba, North Korea, and Western universities. Yet their social-justice descendants believe the same thing, with a different favored fantasy class.

They will be proved wrong, too. The Corbyn vision has no future to offer most Britons. It would be incomprehensible to generations of Labour patriots who fought for Britain, her values, and her allies. The only question is how much damage to what is left of the West will be inflicted before the New Left is vanquished, too.

I wish I could share his optimism that the New Left will be vanquished (in the foreseeable future).

And what I miss in the essay is any reference to the human misery that “traditional leftism” of the redder kind has caused wherever it has had power to cause it. Of course, his focus is on the British Left, which was never – until now? – as red as all that.

I dislike his implication that collectivism (aka Leftism) of his favored – or any –  kind is a valid recipe for improving what Leftists have called “the human condition”.

But I applaud his recognition that the New Left “seeks the extirpation of our whole society and culture”, and that he deplores that terrible aim.

If only he could also see that it is logically, even necessarily, derived from the old socialist collectivist thinking to which he remains faithful!

Jillian Becker   September 18, 2015

Watch out for the harm the well-meaning do!

Sam Westrop writes at Gatestone:

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has accepted an invitation to become chairman of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR). The ECTR boasts an advisory board comprising a dozen European presidents and prime ministers. It describes itself as a non-governmental body that “fosters understanding and tolerance among peoples of various ethnic origin; educates on techniques of reconciliation; facilitates post-conflict social apprehensions; monitors chauvinistic behaviours, proposes protolerance initiatives and legal solutions”.

Behind all this jargon, Blair and the ECTR claim to promote religious belief and dialogue as a means to challenge hate speech and extremism. Writing in The Times, Blair and ECTR President Moshe Kantor state:

It is our firm belief that it is not religion or faith per se that causes or foments conflict. It is the abuse of religion, which then becomes a mask behind which those bent on death and destruction all too often hide. … The ECTR brings together parties and political leaders who have been at the heart of some of the world’s most difficult conflicts to foster dialogue. Our projects also tackle conflicts from the ground up — focusing on the root causes of intolerance, which are usually ignorance of other faiths and cultures — and so the ECTR takes its message to schools and universities around Europe to encourage tolerance and reconciliation.

The ECTR’s mission is explained in a document entitled A European Framework: National Statue for the Promotion of Tolerance.  This “framework” is currently being brought before parliaments all across Europe. For Blair and the ECTR, however, “tolerance” seems not to be freedom of expression, but an Orwellian standard of behaviour to be rigidly enforced and regulated by government.

“Tolerance,” the ECTR claims, is “respect for and acceptance of the expression, preservation and development of the distinct identity of a [religious, racial or cultural] group”.

Proponents of individual liberty, however, argue that true tolerance means tolerating views that we dislike. In a free society, there is no requirement to show “respect” for such views, merely to accept the right of free people to express them.

“There is no need,” the ECTR explains, “to be tolerant to the intolerant.” It seems that European “tolerance” means only tolerating a European agenda.

The notion of “group rights” is deemed to trump individual liberties. The ECTR calls for European countries to introduce a number of “criminal offences punishable as aggravated crimes”,  as part of a Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance.  These crimes would include:

(iii) Group libel…
(iv) Overt approval of a totalitarian ideology, xenophobia or anti-Semitism.
(v) Public approval or denial of the Holocaust.
(vi) Public approval or denial of any other act of genocide the existence of which has been determined by an international criminal court or tribunal.

These measures are staggering assaults on free speech.

Particularly damaging is the proposed criminal offense of “group libel” – the notion that defamatory statements about a group of people are actionable by individual members of that group.

Group libel has no basis under British law. In 1993, a British court ruled in Derbyshire CC v Times newspapers that governmental entities could not sue for libel because it would lead precisely to undemocratic restrictions on free speech. Group libel laws, such as the ECTR is proposing, would allow extremist religious and political movements to censor reporting and criticisms of their beliefs.

In Britain, Public Order Acts already criminalize incitement to violence. If, for example, a neo-Nazi activist advocates that Jews should be murdered on the streets of London, he would likely be prosecuted.

The ECTR, however, wants to go much farther. As an “aggravated crime”,  group libel, the ECTR’s framework explains, also means “defamatory comments… with a view to… slandering the group, [or] holding it to ridicule”.

Blair is repeating his old mistakes. In 2006, his government was condemned for its attempts to criminalize anyone who “intends…to stir up religious hatred or was reckless as to whether religious hatred would be stirred up”.

After losing a vote in parliament and after politicians, comedians and journalists forcefully argued that such proscriptions would censor honest criticism of religious groups, Blair was forced to accept amendments to the legislation.

To criminalize ridicule would be disastrous. In a free society, no one has the right not to be offended. As Conservative MP Dominic Grieve said in 2006, the proposals were an attempt to “appease” some minority groups.

Along with criminalizing – in the name of tolerance – views that the ECTR deems intolerable, Blair’s group also proposes Orwellian means of regulation to further its “tolerance” ideology. “The Government shall ensure,” the ECTR advocates, “that public broadcasting (television and radio) stations will devote a prescribed percentage of their programmes to promoting a climate of tolerance.”

In addition, government funded bodies will impose and enforce such tolerance, with the ECTR framework calling on governments to “establish a National Tolerance Monitoring Commission as an independent body — composed of eminent persons from outside the civil service — vested with the authority to promote tolerance.” A separate governmental body will also be set up to “supervise the implementation” of the Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance.

The ECTR also lobbies for “entrenching state funding for religious institutions into law”.

Once again, Blair seems unable to learn from his own follies. Under the Blair government, the authorities poured millions of pounds of funding into the pockets of religious groups, which the government believed would challenge extremism and terrorism. Publicly-funded groups, however, included Islamist organizations connected with terrorist movements.

The current Prime Minister, David Cameron, has since noted:

As evidence emerges about the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were initially influenced by what some have called ‘non-violent extremists’, and they then took those radical beliefs to the next level by embracing violence. … Some organisations that seek to present themselves as a gateway to the Muslim community are showered with public money despite doing little to combat extremism. As others have observed, this is like turning to a right-wing fascist party to fight a violent white supremacist movement.

Europe needs to divorce the state from oppressive interest groups; it should not do the opposite and embrace them further.

The ECTR’s proposals only serve to reinforce the dangerous flaws of multiculturalism policy. Under this system, people are classified as members of religious and cultural groups, not as individual citizens with individual rights. By defining individuals by the groups to which they belong, you deny individuals their own voice and rights of citizenship.

In a recent case before London’s High Court, a British judge ruled that an illegal immigrant who beat his own son should be forgiven because of the “cultural context”.  In other words, the law should protect only white children; the ruling implicitly condones the beating of minority children — all in the name of diversity and tolerance. Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equality Commission, described the decision as “the effective abandonment of the migrant family’s child on the altar of multiculturalism”. 

As an extension of multiculturalism policy, the ECTR’s proposed measures seek to protect the various groups by which European states classify their citizens. Such laws and regulation would further divide Europe into tribal groupings, composed of various religious, ethnic, cultural and political movements – all in competition with each other for government patronage and support.

By criminalizing our freedom to criticize religious movements, or even to express intolerant thoughts, and by offering legal protection to religious groups from ridicule or insult, Blair and the ECTR would destroy the most important tenet of individual liberty: freedom of expression.

A free society cannot proscribe toleration of the intolerant. Actual tolerance requires free citizens to tolerate views they dislike.

We should certainly not, as the ECTR advocates, be forced to “respect” views that the government declares suitable.

In a democracy, the law is designed to protect individuals against the agenda of oppressive interest groups. But Blair and the ECTR are proposing the very opposite. Under government-enforced “tolerance”, extremists would flourish, honest critics would be silenced, freedom of expression would be criminalized, and, in deference to religious and cultural “groups”, the individual would lose his right to be an individual. 

Remember Tony Blair? He was Prime Minister of Great Britain in President G.W. Bush’s era.

Well, he’s found out that Islam is a threat.

Muslim immigrants poured into Britain under his watch. But suddenly he’s discovered that it was a bad idea.

The Clarion Project reports:

Tony Blair, the Former British Prime Minister, delivered a keynote speech at Bloomberg HQ in London entitled Why the Middle East Still Matters. In it he described radical Islam as the greatest threat facing the world today.

He specifies “radical Islam”, and speaks of “Islamism”, so evading the stark fact that there is only one Islam, and that it is Islam per se that is the greatest threat facing the world today. Its armies are actively waging the jihad by terrorist tactics.

Islam is not a race or a nation. It is an ideology. But like a nation, when it goes to war, its armed forces do the fighting, not everyone born into it or adopting it.

Blair is not a clear – let alone a deep – thinker. But he has at last come to an understanding that the non-Islamic world is under attack by Islam:

Wherever you look – from Iraq to Libya to Egypt to Yemen to Lebanon to Syria and then further afield to Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan – this is the essential battle.

Addressing those who regard these conflicts as distinct he said:

There is something frankly odd about the reluctance to accept what is so utterly plain: that they have in common a struggle around the issue of the rightful place of religion, and in particular Islam, in politics.

Not a good way of putting it. No Reagan-like plain speaking, let alone any felicitous Churchillian phrasing.

Yes, in all those countries Muslims fighting the Islamic jihad are engaged in the same “struggle”. But it would be hard to find a jihadi who would say that his “strugge” is “around the issue of the rightful place of religion, in particular Islam, in politics”.

Blair means that they are fighting a religious war, and he doesn’t think that religion should be a political issue. Religion has a “rightful place”, and it is not on a battlefield. He seems to have the thought swimming round in the shallows of his mind that religious wars are not the thing nowadays; that wars are fought in modern times over up-to-date political differences. (And that implies that he doesn’t see Nazism and Communism as the religions they most certainly are.)

He does see that the war is global.

He argued that this struggle does not end at the borders of the region. Rather, “The reason this matters so much is that this ideology is exported around the world.”

He asked listeners to “Take a step back and analyze the world today: with the possible exception of Latin America (leaving aside Hezbollah in the tri-border area in South America), there is not a region of the world not adversely affected by Islamism and the ideology is growing.”

Bravo, Blair! You have seen that the battle is also being fought by immigration, propaganda, and intense proselytizing:

He notes that:

The Muslim population in Europe is now over 40million and growing. The Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations are increasingly active and they operate without much investigation or constraint. Recent controversy over schools in Birmingham (and similar allegations in France) show heightened levels of concern about Islamist penetration of our own societies.

He gets better still:

The main thrust of the speech focused on “two fascinating things.”

The first is the absolutely rooted desire on the part of Western commentators to analyze these issues as disparate rather than united by common elements. They go to extraordinary lengths to say why, in every individual case, there are multiple reasons for understanding that this is not really about Islam, it is not really about religion; there are local or historic reasons which explain what is happening. There is a wish to eliminate the obvious common factor in a way that is almost wilful. …

The second thing is that there is a deep desire to separate the political ideology represented by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood from the actions of extremists including acts of terrorism.

He acknowledged the motivation behind these fears, saying “We feel almost that if we identify it in these terms, we’re being anti-Muslim, a sentiment on which the Islamists cleverly play.”

And then he gets almost very good:

Blair swept these distinctions aside, acknowledging the laudable motives behind such interpretations, but ultimately pinpointing the profound danger posed by the Islamist ideology, and that it is fundamentally incompatible with the modern world.

He urged the West and indeed the entire world, to unite against the ideology Islamic extremism.

It’s a speech that may help to wake up European leaders. Though it has its weakness, and the columnist Douglas Murray, clear-sighted as always, put his finger on it:  

Douglas Murray argued in the Spectator that Blair went too far in his efforts to brand Islamism as disconnected from Islam and called on moderate Muslims to help combat radicalism by driving extremists from their communities.

Blair came on to suggesting what might be done about the profound danger he’d identified:

Blair outlined potential foreign policy options for the West vis-a-vis various Middle Eastern countries in order to combat Islamists and to support religiously open and tolerant elements.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any – there cannot be any – “open and tolerant elements” among Muslims. Unless they are Muslims-in-name-only. (MINOs?)

In particular he focused on Egypt saying:

On the fate of Egypt hangs the future of the region. Here we have to understand plainly what happened. The Muslim Brotherhood government was not simply a bad government. It was systematically taking over the traditions and institutions of the country. The revolt of 30 June 2013 was not an ordinary protest. It was the absolutely necessary rescue of a nation.

All of these different policies are facets of the same policy:

Across the region we should be standing steadfast by our friends and allies as they try to change their own countries in the direction of reform. Whether in Jordan or the Gulf where they’re promoting the values of religious tolerance and open, rule based economies, or taking on the forces of reaction in the shape of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, we should be supporting and assisting them.

Hmm. Right about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt having to be overthrown. Wrong about the West having friends and allies among Arab and other Muslim countries. None want reform of a kind that would turn them into reliable friends and allies.

Perhaps this statement by Blair sums up the message of his keynote speech best: “When we consider the defining challenges of our time, surely this one should be up there along with the challenge of the environment or economic instability.”

It’s his saying “up there with the challenge of the environment” that shows how his mind is still murky with leftist pollution. But for a leftist to put Islam “up there” with climate change is an admirable advance. He deserves loud and quite long applause. Even more so if his speech encourages other European politicians to start facing the truth: that war is being waged on their countries by the barbarous hordes of Islam.

The Clarion Project does not report the last paragraph of the speech. Blair ended with this:

Consider for a moment since 9/11 how our world has changed, how in a myriad of different ways from the security measures we now take for granted to the arenas of conflict that have now continued over a span of years, there is a price being paid in money, life and opportunity for millions. This is not a conventional war. It isn’t a struggle between super powers or over territory. But it is real. It is fearsome in its impact. It is growing in its reach. It is a battle about belief and about modernity. It is important because the world through technology and globalisation is pushing us together across boundaries of faith and culture. Unaddressed, the likelihood of conflict increases.

Applause, applause. But then:

Engagement does not always mean military involvement. Commitment does not mean going it alone. But it does mean stirring ourselves. It does mean seeing the struggle for what it is. It does mean taking a side and sticking with it.

While it is true that military engagement alone won’t stop Islam’s subjugation of the West, and that the West needs to stir itself, and that every European country should side against Islam, if there is going to be reluctance to use military force at all, the war will be much harder to win. Perhaps he knows this, but feels it necessary to acknowledge – as he does – that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken away the West’s appetite for war.

The full text of the speech can be found here. Those who read it will find that Blair erroneously believes – or at least says – that Islam has a “true message” which “Islamists” distort. And that he praises Secretary of State John Kerry for his (absurd) attempt at yet another Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” and thinks his “commitment has not been in vain”. (It has been, and could not have been anything else.)

So – two cheers for Mr Blair. And let’s hope his speech stirs up the dhimmis of Europe to start resisting the onslaught of Islam.

Paul Weston is the leader of the Liberty GB organization in Britain.

The mission statement of Liberty GB includes this:

There is no guarantee at such a late stage that Britain can be saved, but Liberty GB will endeavour to put a stop to our rapidly accelerating descent into economic, educational, moral, cultural and social ruin.

It’s about time Britons started speaking out as he does.

Here is part of an article from Liberty GB, by a black author, Godspower Oboido, endorsing Paul Weston’s declaration. (We promise to praise “Godspower” only when speaking of Mr. Oboido.)

In my first article for Liberty GB, I wrote that I was racist just like Paul Weston but that I am black. I hate describing people by colour but what choice have I? Society likes placing tags and stereotypes. Paul Weston made it convenient for us all to come out – as racists – if that will make the leftist government, media, public and Islamic community any happier.

I must be a hypocrite through and through if I really am a racist as a black man after all blacks have been through. What makes me a racist, and can a black person actually be racist?

I am racist simply because I am against the forced and violent spread of Islam, against the barbaric doctrines of the political ideology. If you are reading this article, chances are that you are racist too. According to the Left, supporters of Liberty GB are all racists.

Muslims gave us several open invitations to read their Quran and discover the truth for ourselves. That’s exactly what I did – I read the Quran. I did not want to condemn the enduring faith of over a billion people with the violent acts of a few misguided Muslims. I wanted to know what was so radical about Islam and I found the answers right there in the Quran. Phrases like ‘radical Islam’ or ‘Islamic extremists’ are politically correct terms (which Muslims say are offensive). There is no such thing as radical Islam, Islamic extremists, peace loving Muslims, etc. Islam is Islam – a violent, radical and barbaric political ideology. Speaking the truth makes us racist.

My question for people like David Cameron is that if people like Paul Weston and EDL leader Tommy Robinson are easily called racists and bigots, what will they call a person of colour like me? Black racist or just racist? I certainly don’t fit the perfect idea of a racist because I am black. This shows us the one-fixedness of society.

Tommy Robinson, while appearing on the BBC Free Speech programme, was talking about the death threats he had been receiving when Saira Khan screamed the words: “Then stop being a racist and a bigot!”. Dear Heavens, I was furious, more so when neither Saira Khan nor any member of the audience in that venue could answer Tommy when he repeatedly asked, “What race is Islam?”

Just what race is islam? What races are we against that make us racist? Am I saying that Britain has no race problem at all? Certainly not! Britain does have a huge race problem that is getting out of hand while all David Cameron does is name-calling.

Here is Britain where Lee Rigby, a British serviceman, was murdered by two blacks of Nigerian descent who quoted from the Quran, it doesn’t come across as a racially motivated attack and David Cameron tells us it had nothing to do with Islam. We saw videos of how English teenage girls were attacked by Pakistani-born teenagers in Manchester and the police said it wasn’t a racially motivated attack. A racially motivated attack is when a white person attacks anyone that isn’t white, this is the picture the government and the media is giving us. Calling someone ‘Paki’ is racist but calling a native Briton ‘white trash’ or ‘ginger head’ isn’t racist. …

When a person of colour was shot dead by the police, thugs took to the streets, hell-bent on burning London down. A white British serviceman is slaughtered in broad daylight by black Britons of Nigerian descent and white peaceful protesters are arrested. These are the real race problems in Britain today. The sooner something is done about it, the better.

If Paul Weston, Tommy Robinson, Geert Wilders, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and all of us who speak the truth about Islam are racists, then Winston Churchill would have been a greater racist (he who wrote that “Islam is as dangerous in a man as rabies in a dog”), … [and] Richard Dawkins and all atheists are racists who think that all religions are ultimately evil.

What good would it do to David Cameron if after many years he comes to admit that “there is a problem within Islam” like Tony Blair? The time to act is now.

The best spokespersons for Islam these days have been political leaders like David Cameron and Barack Obama. After the Boston bombing by the two Chechnyan Islamic terrorists, Barack Obama went on air to ask the American public not to make quick judgments on Islam. Both David Cameron and Boris Johnson assured the world that the Woolwich attack had nothing to do with either Islam … In other words the murderers were two misguided killers who just, you know, happened to be Muslims. Islam is a religion of peace, it’s all about respect and care for the elderly and has given so much to Britain.

Muslims admit that there are bad Muslims who are giving their religion a bad image but that an Islamic act of terror does not mean the religion is bad. It’s about certain individuals, not the religion itself we’ve been constantly told. There are some bad Christians, they argue, but that doesn’t make Christianity bad. Well true, after all Tommy Robinson also defends the English Defence League, that while there may be some followers of the EDL who are racist, it doesn’t mean the EDL is a racist movement. He argues that there are supporters of the EDL who are golfers, but that does not make the EDL a golfers group. So then, can’t we say in like manner that there are a small minority of Muslims who are terrorists but that doesn’t make Islam a violent religion?

No! It isn’t the people who define a group, movement, political party or religion but rather it is what the group, movement, political party or religion stands for that defines it – its creed, purpose and doctrines.

There will be members who adhere more strongly to creeds, purpose and doctrines than others. What makes Islam bad isn’t the terrorists who rape, bomb and kill infidels, it is the religion itself and what it stands for.

Read the rest of the article here, and find out more about Liberty GB here.

*

More on the issue of Islam in Britain and the crimes Muslims commit in its name, comes from the Examiner:

Twitter is abuzz today over an offensive Facebook page titled, “Lee Rigby deserved it”. Lee Rigby, who had served in the British Army for seven years, was brutally killed on May 22 in south-east London by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, who ran the soldier down on the street and butchered him with a meat cleaver, attempted to decapitate him, while screaming “Allahu Akbar”. …

Rigby left behind a wife and young son. Many on the extreme left, such as the group Unite Against Fascism (UAF), have sickeningly justified the attack, or at least diminished it. Last month, UAF members threw away flowers which had been placed at a memorial for the slain soldier.

The Facebook page certainly falls into this category. The author declares,

He [Rigby] killed many people as a soldier directly or indirectly by supporting the Royal British Army, he deserved it. Great Britain is racist.

In a post today, the author of the page says in part,

Go away with your backward ideology, the troops of Great Britain are nothing but scum, they are the TOOL of your racist fascist government …

It needs to be noted that the Conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Cameron, head (under the Queen) of that “racist fascist government”, was a founding signatory to the creation of the UAF.  

Could there be something happening in the world today that is even more threatening to life and liberty than Islam and its jihad?

There could be, there is, and its name is Agenda 21.

It emanates from that powerhouse of evil, the United Nations. It was initiated and is driven by votaries of a dark mysticism.  They call themselves shamans. They freely confess – no, they boast – that they are working to establish totalitarian world government; that they aim to reduce the population of the world to half a billion and keep it at that number; that those suffered to live must return to a primitive existence deriving bare sustenance from such resources as their local habitat provides, own nothing, and worship the earth goddess Gaia with prescribed ritual.

That is their vision of a new world order, the ultimate objective. It is to be attained step by step, starting with the enforcing of environmental regulations (among them the phasing out of the motor vehicle); emptying the suburbs and bringing people into the cities to be closely and austerely housed; returning the countryside to wilderness, which involves the destruction of roads …

Is this just absurd alarmism? Surely no plotters, even in the UN, could really bring this off, could they? They haven’t really started doing these things have they? Who are these shadowy figures who can exert irresistible influence on the political powers of this world?

We quote from The Green Agenda, a (Christian) site established to expose the movement for world government and explain how it is being put into effect, chiefly through the implementation of Agenda 21. It has links to the documents themselves.  

Agenda 21 spreads it tentacles from Governments, to federal and local authorities, and right down to community groups. Chapter 28 of Agenda 21 specifically calls for each community to formulate its own Local Agenda 21: “Each local authority should enter into a dialogue with its citizens, local organizations, and private enterprises to formulate ‘a Local Agenda 21.’ Through consultation and consensus-building, local authorities would learn from citizens and from local, civic, community, business and industrial organizations and acquire the information needed for formulating the best strategies.” – Agenda 21, Chapter 28, sec 1.3

Interestingly, in April 1991, fourteen months before Earth Summit, Prince Charles held a private two day international conference aboard the royal yacht Britannia, moored off the coast of Brazil. His goal was to bring together key international figures in an attempt to achieve a degree of harmony between the various countries that would gather at the Summit. Al Gore was present, along with senior officials from the United Nations and the World Bank.

At the summit 179 nations officially signed Agenda 21 and many more have followed since. Nearly 12,000 local and federal authorities have legally committed themselves to the Agenda. In practice this means that all their plans and policies must begin with an assessment of how the plan or policy meets the requirements of Agenda 21, and no plans or policies are allowed to contradict any part of the Agenda. Local authorities are audited by UN inspectors and the results of the audits are placed on the UN website. You can see how many local authorities in your country were bound by Agenda 21 in 2001 here. The number has increased significantly since then.

The official opening ceremony was conducted by the Dalai Lama and centered around a Viking long-ship that was constructed to celebrate the summit and sailed to Rio from Norway. The ship was appropriately named Gaia. A huge mural of a beauiful woman holding the earth within her hands adorned the entrance to the summit. Al Gore led the US delegation where he was joined by 110 Heads of State, and representatives of more than 800 NGO’s.

Maurice Strong, Club of Rome member, devout Bahai, founder and first Secretary General of UNEP [UN Environment Program], has been the driving force behind the birth and imposition of Agenda 21.

He chaired the Earth Summit, and outside, while he did,  –

His wife Hanne and 300 followers called the Wisdom-Keepers, continuously beat drums, chanted prayers to Gaia, and tended sacred flames in order to “establish and hold the energy field” for the duration of the summit. …

In the course of his opening speech Maurice Strong made these remarks:

“The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states … The global community must be assured of environmental security.”

“We must transform our attitudes, and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature.”

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations.”

“Global management” is required in order to keep the earth clean and pure. Or it is necessary to keep the earth clean and pure in order to impose “global management”. Take your pick, because it is never made clear which is the means and which the end. In any case, they’re after “global management” (which we believe is the end). They will manage your life because they know best. You will do as they say. For “sustainability“. And to serve the Higher Good. Which is the nursing of the planet. The serving of the planet. The worshiping of the planet.

And the preservation of everything that lives on it. Even human beings within strict limits. This is called “biodiversity“.

The Global Biodiversity Assessment of the State of the Earth, prepared by the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) –

armed UN leaders with the “ecological basis, and moral authority” they needed to validate their global management system. The GBA concludes … that “the root causes of the loss of biodiversity are embedded in the way societies use resources. This world view is characteristic of large scale societies, heavily dependent on resources brought from considerable distances. It is a world view that is characterized by the denial of sacred attributes in nature.”

For this the inscribers of this idiotic document blame Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – of which we are not defenders; but it’s not as if they themselves are against religious superstition – far from it:

“Eastern cultures with religious traditions such as Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism did not depart as drastically from the perspective of humans as members of a community of beings including other living and non-living elements.”

The UN was delighted with this tosh. Maurice Strong was honored and rewarded:

Following the Earth Summit Maurice Strong was named Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, and was appointed to the position of Chief Policy Advisor by Kofi Annan. He was also a member of the UN’s Commission on Global Governance, and the key architect of the Kyoto Protocol.

Did you know that the UN has a Commission on Global Governance? Do Western governments know it? If so, why is the UN allowed to continue in existence?

Just as the dirty mystic Rasputin was able to influence the rulers of Russia, so Maurice Strong is able to influence the would-be rulers of the world in the UN. A parliament of fools if ever there was one.

Strong and his wife have also established the Manitou Foundation, providing land in Colorado to an eclectic mix of religious groups, including the Crestone Mountain Zen Center, the Spiritual Life Institute (a Catholic Carmelite monastery), the Haidakhandi Universal Ashram, the Sri Aurobindo Learning Center, Mangala Shri Bhuti (Tibetan Buddhists), and Karma Thegsum Tashi Gomang (Indian mystics). The Strongs have located their spiritual centre in the Colorado mountains because:”The Strongs learned that since antiquity indigenous peoples had revered this pristine wilderness as a place for conducting their vision quests and receiving shamanic trainings. It is prophesied that the world’s religious traditions would gather here and help move the world toward globally conscious co-existence and co-creation.”

But while these multifarious dupes and charlatans wait for their “vision quests” and “shamanic trainings”, their drumming, their sacred flames, and their invocations to return the human race to primitive savagery, the collective political steps to the same end are being taken conscientiously by national and local government in accordance with Agenda 21.

So what exactly does Agenda 21 contain? It consists of 115 different and very specific programs designed to facilitate, or to force, the transition to Sustainable Development. The objective, clearly enunciated by the leaders of the Earth Summit, is to bring about a change in the present system of independent nations. The agenda is broken up into 8 “programme areas for action”:  Agriculture,  Biodiversity and Ecosystem Management, Education, Energy and Housing, Population, Public Health, Resources and recycling, Transportation, Sustainable Economic Development.

A link to the entire document is provided, but as the author says, it would take a few days to read all of this “blueprint for the 21st century”. The first six paragraphs are quoted for those with less time at their disposal. There the assertion is made that it “reflects a global consensus and political commitment at the highest level on development and environment cooperation”.

This is nonsense of course. There is no global consensus. As for a political commitment “at the highest level”, if this means that the likes of Prince Charles, Prince Philip, Angela Merkel, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, have swallowed the ballyhoo without even chewing it, then yes.

It also asserts that “the developmental and environmental objectives of Agenda 21 will require a substantial flow of new and additional financial resources to developing countries, in order to cover the incremental costs for the actions they have to undertake to deal with global environmental problems and to accelerate sustainable development. Financial resources are also required for strengthening the capacity of international institutions for the implementation of Agenda 21.” That means taxing us, and global redistribution of our money.

The author (whose name we have not discovered) stresses that “Agenda 21 is … an attempt to impose a global centrally planned quasi-government administered by the United Nations. Under Agenda 21 all central government and local authority signatories are required to conform strictly to a common prescribed standard and hence this is just communism resurrected in a new guise.”

She also says that “Agenda 21 has [already] gained a stranglehold on global regulatory and planning processes”.

We think this is true, at least to some significant extent.

In our town the City Council is certainly putting Agenda 21 into effect. Small-unit housing is being built near railway stations. It is not family accomodation, but most suitable for single occupants. (Families are to be discouraged from living together. The family as such is bad for the environment and for collective organization.) There will be places to park bicycles but not cars. Private transport is being discouraged. “Smart meters” will inform the Authorities how warm or how cool the occupant keeps his/her austere little space. How much heat, light and water you use will not only be monitored, but controlled.

Hundreds of cities in many if not all the states have embarked, or plan to embark, on the same sort of program. (Unless they’re going bankrupt. It may be that economic crisis, bad as it is, could save us from something worse.)

President Obama is against the existence of the suburbs, where individual families live in privately-owned houses. He wants to concentrate population in the cities. (Some have written about this –   eg. see here – but have not put it into its proper context, which is the implementation of Agenda 21.) The government can, has, and will use the eminent domain clause of the fifth amendment to expropriate private property.

It is more than likely happening in your town. Your property is under threat. Your way of life is being decided for you.

Not only do we have Christians, we even have some Democrats on our side in confronting this horrifying movement. 

Watch this video made by Democrats Against UN Agenda 21. It is long but informative. The worst news about what state and local government are doing to us comes after the 50 minute mark, but don’t skip too much before that. The shocking information needs the explanation and context.

The UN must be destroyed.

Christopher Hitchens, atheist, and Tony Blair, convert to Catholicism, debated religion in Toronto on November 27, 2010.

The motion was: “Religion is a force for good in the world”.

The good news is that Hitchens, opposing, won the debate. The audience voted two-to-one in his favor.

From the report in the Telegraph (where there is also a video clip):

Mr Blair … said: “It is undoubtedly true that people commit horrific acts of evil in the name of religion.

“It is also undoubtedly true that people do acts of extraordinary common good inspired by religion.”

He pointed to the good done by faith based organisations, including the millions of lives saved in Africa and care for the mentally ill, disabled and destitute.

He added: “The proposition that religion is unadulterated poison is unsustainable.

“It can be destructive, it can also create a deep well of compassion, and frequently does.”

We would contend that good people will do good things and bad people bad things whether or not they have religious belief.

Mr Blair said the common thread running through all faiths was to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” .

Most religions have it, but not all. Islam does not have it. The understanding that you will probably be treated by others in much the same way you treat them is also common sense. Which Islam manifestly lacks.

Mr Hitchens … said: “Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well.

“And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.”

Even Tony Blair had to smile at that.

It looks very much as if the Conservative Party (the Tories) will be returned to power in this year’s general election under the leadership of David Cameron.

It will not be a big change. Such differences as there are between Cameron’s Conservatives and Brown’s (or Blair’s) New Labour socialists are small and few. The Conservative Party of today bears little resemblance to that of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

Our British editor, Sam Westrop, has posted two articles in which he expresses his disappointment with the character and behavior of several people who may well be future leaders of the Conservative Party, not this year but in a few years from now.

While this is chiefly of interest to our British readers, it does give Americans a glimpse into what is happening in the political arena over there.

The only Party which could make a difference if it came to power is the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which wants above all to detach Britain from the undemocratic, politically-correct, incorrigibly collectivist European Union (EU), governed by ukase from Brussels. But although UKIP might win some seats in Parliament, it cannot hope to become  a governing majority.

The greatest threat to the nation is Islamization, but no political party is willing to tackle it, or even talk about it above a low murmur, except the British National Party (BNP), which is neo-Nazi (and not so very neo). The refusal of both the major parties, the Conservatives and New Labour, to formulate policies that might deal effectively with it, is driving many voters into the arms of the BNP.

The result is highly likely to be civil strife, violent and bloody.