Saturday 12 April 2014

Lynette Burrows talk to the 'Inn Catholics' - 2nd April 2014...



Mr Chairman, Sir, Ladies and Gentlemen,


I usually begin my talks by telling an amusing anecdote because it gives people the feeling that they are going to enjoy my talk – even if they are not. On this occasion, however, I cannot think of one that would bring even a faint smile to my normally granite features; let alone yours, so I won’t try.

However, not having a roguish joke to hand does not equate with being depressed - I am very far from depressed about the parlous state that we are in as a country. We are truly degenerate at present but, if one has to make a descent down a rather dirty pipe, I guess it is better to arrive at somewhere near the bottom than to have to face many more years sliding down it. The past twenty years and have been so infuriating and frustrating, when the mammoth edifice of a degenerate society was being painstakingly constructed, largely from left/liberal academic opinion, and pious cant. The predictably crippled hens are now coming in to roost; although what is wrong with them is heavily ‘spun’ as a reason to recruit yet more ideologically blinkered bureaucrats to sort out the problems they have themselves caused.

I make no apology for making reference several times to what GK Chesterton said about it nearly a hundred years ago because he was in at the start of this particular rot and its development has been continuous, and predicted by him, from then. In 1921 he wrote a piece about the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, which had given rise ten years earlier to the Mental Incapacity Act which the govt had passed in 1914 under which ‘panels of experts’ would decide which citizens should be allowed to have children; in his words “to incarcerate as madmen those whom no doctor would consent to call mad. It is enough if some doctor or other may happen to call them weak-minded”. It actually became law in some of the States of America, where people had to present themselves before a panel for permission to marry and, if they were found wanting – not mad, you understand, just ‘wanting’, they could be refused that permission and, unless they consented to be sterilised, they were imprisoned.

Chesterton wrote, “I seek to describe a quite extraordinary atmosphere in which such things have become possible. I call that atmosphere anarchy and insist that it is anarchy at the centre where there should be authority. Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless that it cannot see where law should leave off. The chief feature of the time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of government’.

Now that is an amazingly accurate description of government in our time. Things’ have become possible’ that no-one predicted and no-one asked for. How many things we can think of that come into this category of the madness of government. There is scarcely any wild and immoral legislation that has been passed in the last thirty years that came in response to public demand. Nobody asked for divorce to be made easier; nor for no-fault divorce; nobody wanted children subjected to dirty talk in the classroom; there were no calls for abortion and contraception to be given to under-age girls without their parents’ knowledge and consent. They did not demand that co-habitation should be subsidized by welfare. Nor that respectable parents should not allowed to bring up their children as they see fit – and yet still be used as a jury to pass judgement on the subtleties of guilt or innocence in a court of law.

How did it come about that those who work are obliged to finance those who choose not to work. And the latest, the so-called ‘same-sex marriages’ for those who cannot fulfil the most basic requirements of ‘equality’ in the normal sense of a marriage.

It is no more the business of govt to re-write what marriage is than it is their business to change the Ten Commandments in order to bring them in line with the modern thinking of a handful top people. Again, as before the first WW, when the ruling class gave only perfunctory consideration of who would enforce the law on mental incapacity and on what principle, they just assumed the passivity and acquiescence of the people – as if they had somehow fallen into the habit of thinking of themselves as despots and the people as slaves. In the event, of course, the Great War intervened only months after the Mental Incapacity Act was passed and, when it was over, the Act was gone – never to be referred to again. Britain found itself at war with the home of Superman and nine-tenths of the professors and philosophers who had done so much to advance the ideas of the racially superior. Overnight, even the name of a German became anathema to the general public as they realised where this ‘scientific approach to life’ had led the Prussians.

But after the war against the very people whose ideas they had craved and then rejected, the old preoccupation with the ‘wrong’ people having children returned – but in another form. This time, it was birth controllers who had in their sights, again, the families of the poor. Chesterton confessed himself to be astounded that the intellectual elite was prepared so quickly to return to a scientific approach to life, in view of where it had lead in the previous decade but he nonetheless took out his old notes and articles and entered the fray again. This time the birth controllers were equally mad as the largely male eugenicists had been; but much more unpleasant, and almost all female. They didn’t like families at all – and didn’t want anyone, not even the clever, having children or making families. It is quite clear from their writings that, unlike the eugenicists, they didn’t want the intelligent like themselves to have large families; their main preoccupation was that they did not want to be out-bred by inferior people.

They are with us today and it’s worth noting that there are, in addition, three huge delusions espoused and promoted by what one might call ‘the governing class’, and none of them has any democratic legitimacy and none reflect the beliefs of ordinary people. The first is multi-culturalism and the belief that you can more in millions of strangers to a culture and they will assimilate and be accepted. The second is a belief that we will be better governed, and happier if we are not governed by our own people, but by the EU. The third is ‘global warming’, which is, as far as I can see, only believed by people who look and dress like lefties!

All these policies have been ‘top down’, as they say – which is why they are never changed when they plainly don’t work but, on the contrary, produce insuperable problems with which we all have to live. . They must be intended by those – somewhere – who govern us and they are not telling us why; even though they must be put in place and then defended, by the well meaning minions whom GK referred to as ‘gigantic dupes’.

There is an added dimension to this destruction of the social and moral fabric of England by the governing class that I find extremely fascinating. It must have been germinating in Chesterton’s day because he wrote a book in 1908 called ‘The Flying Inn’ which is, remarkably, about the Islamification of Britain by the governing class. After being out of print for many years, it has now been re-published here and in America and can be obtained from Amazon. I’ll return to it in a minute.

Chesterton, of course, had far more faith in the common sense of ordinary people than he did in the sanity of intellectuals – particularly scientists. However, in ‘The Flying Inn’, an important and prophetic book, he makes the point several times that the breaking of a specifically Christian morality would inevitably make tyranny possible. Once the link with Christian dogma is severed, then all our traditional liberties are in danger since there is no concrete basis for them. This is why governments tend to favour agnosticism, or even better scepticism, in its populace. A sceptic cannot be tolerant because only a person with a fixed moral standpoint can exercise tolerance. The word itself implies that there is something to be tolerated but not accepted. Without a fixed morality, with nothing either right or wrong, one cannot be tolerant, but only permissive. Governments much prefer this because it is easier to manipulate a populace into accepting what they want if morality does not come into it.

The concrete liberties of Western man, Chesterton said, grew out of the Christian dogma that every man's soul was his own and that, consequently, the individual personality has a sanctity, dignity and responsibility beyond anything that politics or economics can demand. Once that link with Christian dogma is severed, then all our traditional liberties are in danger since there is no other basis for them. Once morality becomes simply what the top people of any period want - then our traditional freedoms can no longer be considered safe.

And indeed, it seems to me that this insight of Chesterton's that without a specifically Christian dogma to deploy, people are easily confused and silenced was amply demonstrated in a debate I attended in the Cambridge Union Society a few years ago. The motion concerned whether or not the events of the 20century disproved the existence of a loving and personal God. ‘This House rejects the idea of a personal God’. The ignorance of the undergraduates was quite stunning with one of the first speakers talking about a 'personal god' exactly if he was referring to a personal computer. 'How can we all have a different, personal god, he raved, 'if we all had a god of our own, they'd all be working at different speeds and with different software and no-one would know which one you were talking about!' Unfortunately, his contribution was not a joke; or even ironic.

Then several impressive clerics argued in scholarly terms with the students - but they did not seem to realize that these young people did not have an idea what they were talking about. It was like talking higher maths to people who hadn't been taught to count! They simply didn't know the terms of reference.

Then a rabbi came rushing on as the last speaker against the motion. He was Smuly Boteach, an American and famous for his eloquence. Since several speakers had mentioned Hitler as the chief reason why God could not possibly exist, this Jew demanded of them why they called Hitler immoral. 'Was it just because he lost the war?' he said. No, of course not, came the indignant reply; it was because he killed people.

He killed his enemies, like every country does, the rabbi said; like you do, he just had a different idea about who deserved to die. He then read out two statements about racial inferiority and the importance, in the modern age, of weeding out inferior people and races, for the common good. Who wrote that? He bellowed, and the students dutifully identified Hitler. 'Wrong', said Boteach, the first was your own dear Darwin and the second, milder one, was Hitler. 'You don't like it. Eh? but it was rational and many people believed that people who were born handicapped or became handicapped through accident or illness should be quietly 'put down'.

The President of the National Secular society rose to her feet like a corpse hearing the last trump. 'Quite right, she shrilled. They are a burden to themselves'. The rabbi was pleased. 'You see, he said, it is rational to remove problems.'

Then he told the by now severely bewildered students a little story. They hear a great man is coming to their area to tell them how best to live, so they come in droves to hear him with rapt attention. He tells them. Don't murder; don't steal; don't take other men's wives or tell lies about them. That's all. And they look at each other; ‘We came here to listen to this? We know this already. What's new?’

'You are those morons', Boteach told the students, because you think your opinions are natural and safe and that you'll never be tempted to change them to something you now think is repugnant. Then he quoted a magisterial piece by Francis Crick, Nobel prize-winning, joint- discoverer of DNA who said that we now have to re-define the words 'birth' and 'death' to mean something more rational than hitherto. Birth should begin at an agreed time after parturition and only after society had decided it wanted the child; death too should take place at an age decreed by the economic needs of society.

What did they think about that? Boteach bellowed at his aghast audience. What would they do if Crick's opinions ever suited the government? What if many governments agreed to support the idea, in the interests, of course, of mankind. What arguments, apart from those they had already dismissed as irrational religion, would they be able to advance against them? There were none, he told them and there were no grounds for condemning Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot. Their morality was just different; more rational and less emotional than theirs. More scientific in fact.

The students were lost and you could almost feel them willing him to take this argument to a conclusion they could understand. The rabbi raised his arms in a dramatic gesture. 'The man who came with the morals written on stone, came from God' he said. It is that and that alone, which makes them unchangeable.' And the students believed him. When the vote was taken, only 34 out of several hundred disbelieved him.

As Chesterton said so many times and in so many different ways. The truth is not given to man by reason alone; it has to be taught as it has been revealed by God. It was a beautiful example to me, both clear and alarming, of how disarmed even the best educated young people are by their ignorance of their religion and the effect it has had on their beliefs and their liberties.

Now to look at 'The Flying Inn' ; a fascinating book which has been rather neglected by critics for a number of reasons but particularly because the phenomenon he describes in it, of Islam rising in this country, seemed like a fantasy when it was written in 1908. Until quite recently, few would have seen the means by which it could possibly come about. That is how far Chesterton’s prophetic imagination stretched.

At first sight, it appears to be simply an exploration of what could happen once the Imperial powers were told to pack-up and go home by the colonies they ruled. As an opponent of imperialism, and a believer in the strong impulse of people to live according to their own culture, Chesterton saw this as inevitable. He also knew that the largely commercial interests which were the driving force of imperialism would not abandon the effort to harness cheap labour in the interest of trade simply because they had been thrown out of the colonies. They would take steps to attract those whom it could no longer rule in their own country to come and settle where they might be similarly employed to maintain profit-margins on the world market.

The main protagonist in the Flying Inn, Dalroy, says ‘The destiny of Empire in the eyes of the governing class, is in four acts. Victory over barbarians. Employment of barbarians. Alliance with barbarians. Conquest by barbarians.

The story of the Flying Inn takes place at the point at which the fourth Act is about to be undertaken. The alien force that stands for the barbarian is the Turks, and the religion under whose philosophy conquest is to be achieved, is Islam.

The eponymous Flying Inn of the title is the last pub in England, since alcohol has been outlawed in the interests of the 'higher philosophy' of Islam, disguised as a health measure - much as banning smoking in pubs has caused thousands to close, so accommodating the objections to alcohol of Islam.

The hero is obliged to move about the country, rather like Alfred when the Danes came, rallying people to his pub sign and reminding them of what had been taken away from them without their leave, or any shred of democratic consultation.

Incidentally, the fact that Chesterton was at pains to show how laws were changed at the behest of powerful people, without the slightest consideration of what the mass of people wanted – is as pertinent today as it was in 1913. Ken Livingstone wrote a book in 1987 called ‘If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It’. It was because they knew it gave people no power that they gave them a vote. Thus they lowered the age at which you could vote even as they were laying furtive plans to absorb us into a federal Europe. As Charles Moore quoted in the Telegraph, the EU’s founding father, Jean Monnet said “Europe’s nations should be guided towards a super state without their people understanding what is happening.”

As a character in the Flying Inn says, ‘and for whom would you cast your vote if you were against the changing of Britain into something entirely different?' It seemed a wild question then; it doesn’t now.

Returning to the main action, of the Flying Inn, as the people begin to stir themselves towards revolt, the hero notes how extremely biddable the British are until a certain point is reached. ‘Politics has never got the people what they want,’ Dalroy muses; it is regarded as an activity for the rich, literally and figuratively. But because it has been done slowly, they have almost not noticed how their traditions have been undermined. They have bishops who don't believe in God and clerics who are rabidly anti-scripture. Laws are enormously increased even as much crime is ignored - and the police wear fezzes to demonstrate admiration for all things foreign.

There is a hint of nameless horrors being planned on the domestic front, of polygamy, selective breeding and secret courts. The workers in model villages – now called housing estates - are treated literally like half-wits and urged to take exercise, and drink milk.

And yet the people involved in all this are still recognizably English. They grumble and complain but are still trying to be fair to the people manipulating and driving them. They apologise for wanting a bit more freedom - or for yearning for the past - but they are a long-suffering people.

The curious thing is how much they resemble the people who have to suffer race and gender indoctrination in order to get or keep a job today. The mixture of resignation and complaint is a familiar one to us.

The inexplicable hatred of the ruling class for all things English is exemplified by Dalroy's enemy, Lord Ivywood. He is an interesting character because he embodies an attitude commented on by George Orwell when he said that the higher you rise is the intellectual scale, the more likely you are to hate your own country. Indeed, David Pryce Jones has written a book on this very subject, ‘Treason of the Heart,’ in which he traces this contempt for English things back many generations. He thinks that it came about because, in espousing foreign, rather than native, allegiance, it conferred a new identity that seemed virtuous and idealistic. So Ivywood was not an original, or even unusual character; he was simply the fruition of many of the attitudes GK encountered in the pre-war debates on how to get rid of, or at least control, the English poor and their habits.

Ivywood espouses the cause of Islam, not through any belief in, or feeling for, the new religion but because he believes it will give him power. If he can destroy every living tradition of Britain, he can replace it with something that he has fashioned, some new movement that he has made. One can see the embodiment of this when Michael Heseltine, in an interview on the European Union in the Spectator in the late nineties, says that one day the names of the nations comprising the United Kingdom will be as lost and forgotten as the names of the 12 ancient kingdoms of Britain. When he adds, approvingly, that this is inevitable, we are aware of someone who does not love his country, at least as it exists. The strange thing is that he said that Great Britain would simply fade away, like the 12 kingdoms, and he seems to have edited out of his consciousness that they did not simply fade away. They were fought over, step by step and town by town until they were conquered or obliterated. Ivywood, at least, knew how to do it.

In the Flying Inn, the outcome is strictly logical. Since people have lost the knowledge or ability to argue for what they want, they revolt and simply fall on their oppressors. If no one can any longer argue the case for liberty, or right and wrong, then they can only fight about it.

The 'pro-choice’ philosophy so beloved of liberals and feminists everywhere, is simply translated to another field and people declare their 'right to choose', to destroy those whom they cannot fight by other means.

I feel sure that is what Mother Theresa meant, when she said that abortion was the greatest threat to world peace. We may feel free now to dispose of our own unborn children at the rate of 500 a day today, but, by accepting this cruel and unnatural solution to a problem, we are culturally grooming an indifference to evil which, tomorrow, when the mood has changed, could be used against a dozen more likely targets of our anger and discontent.

One of the most sober things Chesterton said came late on in his book ‘Eugenics and Other Evils’ and it is only saved from an untypical pessimism by the use of the word ‘If’. “ If the unique spirit of the English be indeed departed, it matters little that it has been driven out by perversions it had itself permitted, by monsters it had idly let loose. Industrialism and capitalism and the rage for physical science were English experiments in the sense that the English lent themselves to their encouragement; .. . . It may be that this delicate and tenacious spirit has at last evaporated. If so it matters little what becomes of the external experiments of our nation in later times. That at which we look will be a dead thing, alive with its own parasites. The English will have destroyed England.”

That he felt it necessary to express this gloomy view shows how much he had come to realize that the triumph of the birth-controllers, whom he detested almost more than any others, was justified; it had, at last, found a way – through sexual liberty - to curb the poor and ignorant with their full acquiescence.

He was realistic about what had been done to the working classes in his own day; how the poverty and uncertainty of their lives had rendered them passive and biddable; apt subjects of the servile state, that he and Belloc warned against. So he was acutely aware of the damage that can be done to a people by bad ideas. But sexual liberation was a bad idea made irresistible by remorseless propaganda. However, it could not be said that he didn’t foresee the next ‘divine boomerang ‘, as he called it. – because he did, and described it in the Flying Inn. The liberals’ confidence in the irresistible attractiveness of their decadent power is well-founded to the extent that many people today cannot see any way to arrest it. It would take something that is the theme of the Flying Inn to dislodge. A thing both natural, and, for that reason, much practiced – that thing is conflict.

The ruling elite made a fatal mistake that, probably alone, will lead to the collapse of all their confident hopes for the future they have planned. They deliberately engineered, as we now know since John Neather revealed it in 2010, that the Labour Govt, deliberately allowed immigration to escalate to unmanageable proportions in order to secure their vote and, in his words, to ‘stuff traditional English culture’. Setting aside the breathtaking cynicism not to say traitorousness of such a plan, it was also fatal to liberal hopes.

They decided to replace the English lost to abortion and contraception, with people from outside our culture or religion, most of whom had no love of what liberals love and a significant proportion of whom had no intention of living under it. They have another version, as in a distorted mirror, of our own ‘culture of death’ and their growing presence destroys any hope of settled communities in a foreseeable future. Though the characters in this scenario are different from anything we see today, the atmosphere in The Flying Inn reflects our own day with eerie accuracy. How well he knew the enemy. It is a story about our own times with only the details left for us to fill in.

Politics never got the people what they wanted, said Dalroy, and he knew whereof he spoke. Our ruling class knows very well how to make any new political Party unelectable by one means or another, however much the majority might wish t o see the things imposed on them turned back. The people know it too which is why they don’t vote for the fringe Parties who do believe what they believe. They know such Parties are doomed.

They therefore become a many-headed movement rather than a political party; which is actually more dangerous because it is under the radar of the ruling class and they can neither see nor gauge its strength; just sense uneasily, its ominous proliferation. In the Flying Inn we don’t hear about what is happening on the popular level, but there is certainly no political Party on the scene to represent them.

We hear only the thoughts of the main protagonists on the subject and we witness the explosion when the people rise up.

Chesterton mourned the horrors of the Great War but he also knew we went to war with something horrible that we ourselves had nurtured the fantasy of the superman. The Mental Incapacity Act was actually passed into law in April 1914, just months before the Great War began and when the war finished, it was gone. At this time, Chesterton wrote: “A new mood came upon the whole people; Men began to talk strangely of old and common things, of the counties of England, of its quiet landscapes, of motherhood and the half-buried religion of the race. Death shone on the land like a new daylight, making all things vivid and visibly clear.” It was not just because we won the war, that we were saved, but that many evil ideas died in it too.

This mood didn’t last, of course; that is in the nature of moods – as Chesterton observed. He did not live to see how the people of England, battered by one war, rallied to another in 1939; but he certainly foresaw it - and he foresaw the battle after that too.

Chesterton would have known that every wicked enterprise, particularly on a national scale, has in it the seeds of its own demise; didn’t Aristotle say so; but, in the battle for sanity, which is to say civilization, everybody suffers. The common man was always his chief love and concern. Consequently all his efforts and energies were bent towards persuading them to see through the empty, Godless liberalism which would inevitably lead to conflict and suffering - and undoubtedly many did see it too - but they had no political voice; not in his day and not in our own.

It is not difficult to see now how only the extremity of having to fight for our lives can break the iron hold of a decadent liberalism that has overwhelmed us all. In the Flying Inn it was the only way to recover sanity and Chesterton specifically says that, in the conflict, good men on both sides, died. But in conflict, many eternal truths are re-discovered; the fragility of human existence, the sacredness and privilege of life, the importance to us of our Christian religion, the necessity of men defending and women nurturing the family, the value of selfless courage, of brotherhood and truth.

By a strange paradox, inherent in human nature, we often learn what we need to know from suffering as we did from the Great War. Chesterton obviously foresaw the trouble that our neglect of these things would lead us to - and he offered a prophetic vision of the way evil can be overcome and a progressive nightmare, going ever downwards, would end with conflict between opposing sides, each with their own culture of death. And how it can, and would be defeated.

Paradoxically, I believe Chesterton would regard it as hopeful – which is why The Flying Inn very often makes you laugh out loud.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen - thank you. 

The Inn Catholics’ 2.4.14.