Steve Sailer: iSteve: Tony Benn, RIP

March 24, 2014

Tony Benn, RIP

The lion of the left of the British Labour party, Tony Benn (a.k.a., Anthony Wedgewood-Benn, a.k.a., Viscount Stansgate) recently died. In this video, he tries to answer the question: "Does the welfare not just encourage young girls to go out and get jiggy with Mr Biggy?"

74 comments:

Anonymous said...: He was against the EU and against free trade. His allegiances were with the workers of his own country. He was your kind of guy. Take the PC out of the left and you'd have more in common with the left than the right.; 3/24/14, 8:14 PM
Anonymous said...: I guess he was in on the joke. Damn, the British laugh tracks are worse than American laugh tracks. Anyway, welfare obviously encourages the jigglies to sleep with the bigglies or whatever--that's probably the whole point. That's probably why Mr. Benn was having a nice time.; 3/24/14, 8:50 PM
Anonymous said...: "Take the PC out of the left and you'd have more in common with the left than the right."

Good luck with that. PC, open borders one-worldism, and a fundamental dislike for traditional Western culture and its people are more important to the Left than anything else, including the interests of the middle class.; 3/24/14, 9:40 PM
Anonymous said...: The Labour party did more damage and harm to England then the Kaiser and Hitler combined.; 3/24/14, 9:44 PM
Anonymous said...: Benn was also opposed to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. His heart was generally in the right place, although he was always an accident-prone politician.

Semi-off-topic, Andy Rooney destroyed Ali G, which is probably why his "interview" has rarely/never been repeated on television, but it is on Youtube.; 3/24/14, 10:16 PM
Anonymous said...: Somewhere, somehow, the Left in the West got taken over by hard core apparatchiks who have nothing but contempt for the white working class they claim to represent. The same is true, albeit in a slightly different way, regarding the centrist European parties like the Tories,who,while protecting the wealthy, are equally contemptuous of their own working class and who seek to break them, and displace them with South Asians and Africans as fast as they possibly can.

Educated, smart and articulate people like Benn have a lot to answer for; they saw what was happening and did nothing to stop it. I think they just mouthed platitudes for the last 40 years while being deeply complicit in the treason.

Unfortunately the British electorate did not have the brains, and/or was caught up in its own class divisions, to realize the magnitude of the unfolding horror. Now of course they are being told it's "too late" to reverse course. Amazingly, for the most part they just seem to accept the destruction of their own culture and values.

At some point there will be an expression of mass revulsion; the rising support for UKIP is an early premonition of this, although UKIP might not be enough of an answer.

Anon.; 3/24/14, 10:20 PM
paleo left said...: Yeah, if you think maybe young women get knocked up with government assistance in mind you're "living in a funny world"--what a clear-eyed/honest HBD'er this late viscount was.; 3/24/14, 11:06 PM
Anonymous said...: Ali G is hilarious.; 3/24/14, 11:08 PM
Ross said...: He renounced his title because he didn't believe in hereditary privilege.

His son, former cabinet minister Hilary Benn, and granddaughter Emily Benn, who was selected as a parliamentary candidate in 2010 at the age of seventeen, no doubt agree whole heartedly.; 3/24/14, 11:14 PM
Bert said...: It really is bizarre and sickening how incestuous the Labour Party is.; 3/25/14, 12:57 AM
Anonymous said...: Whatever you might tink of him, Tony Benn was the real deal - a real English socialist in the mould of the Bloomsbury set, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, James Keir Hardie etc and all the other pioneers who founded the Labour Party way back in the 1890s-1900s as a counter attack against the horrible class/income inequalities that existed back then, (think of Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs).
In retrospect, that movement largely failed. In terms of inequality, the UK is back to the 1890s, the unions have no real power anymore - the biggest decline in incomes ever recorded never provoked a wave of backlash strikes, workers are simply too cowed to strike anymore, and the UK welfare state is being rapidly rolled-back - we'll soon be back to the Workhouse and the Poor Law if things continue this way.
In fact a great deal of the dog-eat-do, beggar thy neighbor econmics that has so demoralised the UK working class was brought in by that disgusing abomination 'New Labour' - that abortion has no connection whatsoever with Benn's real Labour brand. In fact it's just a shitty US DEmocrat Party wannabe full of 'equalities' piss and wind.

The high-point of Labourism in the UK was the mid '70s during the Wilson/Callaghan adminstrations. Although Benn hated them for being too soft, the UK was on its way to becoming a Labour Party 'workerist' state, but the stupid bastards of the Trade Union movement got too greedy and overplayed their hand. And then Thatcher.
The rest, as they say is history.

As a side-note, it's likely that the schismatic SDP was responsible for Thatcher's victory in 1983, which consolidated the Thatcher revolution in the 80s/90s. The reason why the SDP split off was at bottom due to Benn and mostly because Benn insisted that Labour made the UK withdraw from the EU. To the right-wingers of the SDP this was totally unacceptable. In those days the Tories were strongly pro-EU.
The amount of damage the EU has caused to domestic UK politics is enormous.; 3/25/14, 1:43 AM
Anonymous said...: This is hilarious. The only person living in a funny world was Benn. The safety net was always going to become a safety hammock.; 3/25/14, 2:03 AM
Anonymous said...: One of the more interesting aspects about Tony Benn was that he was an obsessive compulsive diarist and archivisr. In fact he taped every interview he ever made and collected every paper pertinent to his political career to create a vast cross indexed Benn archive. The Benn diaries the published account of his day to day political life which cover a period of decades are an excellent resource for any student of British pollitics as well as being immensely readable and enjoyable.
Benn was also a lifelong teetotaller and self described tea addict. He could get through 20 or so cups a day.; 3/25/14, 3:01 AM
Anonymous said...: I've always wondered whether the BBCs excellent early 70s TV kids cartoon 'Mr Benn' was somehow named in tribute after Tony Benn.; 3/25/14, 3:03 AM
Steve Sailer said...: Kind of like Samuel Pepys, who kept an immense diary that's our best single resource into late 17th Century London life, all the while being the chief architect of the institutions of the Royal Navy that would rule the world for a couple of centuries.

Some people just have a lot more energy than me.; 3/25/14, 3:23 AM
Peter the Shark said...: Benn comes off as an anachronistic idealist who has no idea what the modern underclass is like. He was still stuck in a romantic world of fighting English miners, a class based world where intelligent conscientious people could still be found in the working class because the social barriers to advancement were very high. Benn never understood that the advance of the meritocracy has drained a lot of talent from the working class, combine that with mass immigration of people with a very different work ethic and you end up with the current British disaster. Another aspect of modern life that has made socialism unworkable is paradoxically the fact that we live in world of surplus where basic food, alcohol and entertainment are very, very cheap. That has probably done a lot more to destroy the work ethic than many old guard socialists like Benn realize.; 3/25/14, 3:24 AM
Peter the Shark said...: It really is bizarre and sickening how incestuous the Labour Party is.

It's not any more incestuous than any other British institution. Great Britain is a small, incestuous place.; 3/25/14, 3:26 AM
Hunsdon said...: Anonydroid at 9:44 PM said: The Labour party did more damage and harm to England then the Kaiser and Hitler combined.

Hunsdon said: New Labour? Yes. Just plain old Labour? Dunno about that one. (I can be convinced.); 3/25/14, 3:54 AM
a martian said...: "He was against the EU and against free trade. His allegiances were with the workers of his own country."

He may have been anti-EU but he was totally and vocally pro-replacement of 'the workers of his own country' by immigrants.

The intellectual heritage that gave him outlook is the important thing - common to the so called 'left' - which sets people like Benn apart from people on the so called 'right' who've ended up with much common ground from a different starting point. I don't really think it's useful to put any value into the terms 'right' and 'left', then - except for when insulting people/shit stirring

-----

"The Labour party did more damage and harm to England then the Kaiser and Hitler combined."

Neither of them were ever a threat to the English people really (indeed Hitler was quite the fan...). Nor Napoleon, nor anyone else, ever, would have been even if they had 'won'. Threat to the political establishment, maybe. The Normans (who did win) had the biggest impact and caused a lot of change though it was kinda just the beginning of the story. But the Labour party *really did* do more *damage and harm* then all of them combined, 1000+ years of 'enemies', real or supposed, in just a few decades.; 3/25/14, 4:05 AM
Anonymous said...: A few more points about Benn and 'bennery'.

The heavily Benn-influenced 1983 Labour Party manifesto has long gone in folklore, if not history as 'the longest suicide note in history', (Gerald Kauffman's elegant phrase).

Well, what did that manifesto contain? - it transpires that one of the key recommendations, one that really raised Tory and right-wing press ire to fever point was a committment to 'nationalize Britain's banks'.
Alas, Michaell Foot's Labour Party wa well and truly rejected by the British electorate at the polls, ushering a a nervous breakdown in Labour and its ultimate birth child - that deformed abomination known as 'New Labour' Ans so the fre-wheeling, free-dealing, Friedmanite Thatcher consensus reigned supreme, its most enthusiastic backers being New Labour itself. Out went any attempt to manage the economy and in came globalisation, the destruction of UK industry, massive imports and massive trade deficits - and the flip Friedmanite side, massive immigration.
The Friedmanites who ran and still run britain thought in their own perverse little way that Britain's 'comparative advantage' in the world was the City of London, and that aliving could be made by basically hosting a financial mega-casino - not mention the proliferation of betting shops, FOBTs and online gambling. The Result?

The massive crash of 2007, of which the UK still hasn't crawled out of, which destroyed living-standards far, far worse than any wet-dream the Daily Mail ever had about 'nuggets of Bennery'.
- And the ultimate irony was that the taxpayer *was* forced to nationalize the UK banks, in order to save thme from their own capitalism!; 3/25/14, 4:45 AM
dearieme said...: "He renounced his title because he didn't believe in hereditary privilege." If only. He renounced it because if he hadn't he couldn't sit in the House of Commons and therefore couldn't become Prime Minister. Simple ambition, not principle.

P.S. Now the old boy is dead his eldest son has accepted the title.; 3/25/14, 5:17 AM
Anonymous said...: RE: Keeping diaries,

Probably the average person's surest route to immortality. Chronicle your daily doings for decades (what you eat, what you watch on tv, what you read, how you react to events, etc), and you can be damn sure that future historians will treasure your very existence.; 3/25/14, 5:37 AM
RAZ said...: “Semi-off-topic, Andy Rooney destroyed Ali G, which is probably why his "interview" has rarely/never been repeated on television, but it is on Youtube.”

Disagree. Think the people who handled their Ali G interviews the best were not those who lost it like Rooney, but those who realized there was something up but kept their composure and went along with it like Pat Buchanan and former Olympic swimmer John Nabor.

On a related note I had read that the Ali G camera crews were drilled that when the interviewees would look at them with their "what the hell is it with this guy" look that the crews were to remain totally emotionless and not let on that the interview was supposed to be anything other then on the up and up.; 3/25/14, 5:50 AM
Anonymous said...: Steve, you seem to be fascinated with lords, knights, viscounts, counts, barons, etc... You might be interested, then, in the reintroduction of the titles Knight and Dame into Australia.
http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/australian-knights-and-the-republic

I think that heroic and transcendent titles like Knight and Baron provide a non-material path to status, which is good because material-status produces the exorbitant income inequality we see today.; 3/25/14, 5:50 AM
Steve Sailer said...: Trump outsmarted Ali G.; 3/25/14, 5:54 AM
Jerry said...: "Unfortunately the British electorate did not have the brains, and/or was caught up in its own class divisions, to realize the magnitude of the unfolding horror. Now of course they are being told it's "too late" to reverse course. Amazingly, for the most part they just seem to accept the destruction of their own culture and values."

--So now it turns out that the Brits were no better than, say, the Hungarians, only they got to have an island. The island life is over for them (as for other islands such as France, Spain, Italy), and I cannot help being happy about that. They gave the world enough--common law, the English language--and now it will be someone else's turn. "Move along now," as they'd say. They never really cared for anyone but themselves, this is appropriate or not, but they themselves would find it strange that anyone but themselves mourns their decline. I do not mourn it. Let them suffer and learn, or suffer and be corrupted, as mostly happens, as mostly has happened to the world's nations. Not invaded in a thousand years! Until the Pakis came. "Finally!", one feels like exclaiming.; 3/25/14, 5:55 AM
Anonymous said...: RE: Keeping diaries,

They can be divided into two groups:

1. Those who are famous because they kept a diary: Pepys, Evelyn, William Byrd II, Samuel Sewall, Chips Channon, etc.

2. Famous people who kept diaries: John Quincy Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joseph Goebbels, etc.; 3/25/14, 5:58 AM
Anonymous said...: Trump outsmarted Ali G just by seeing through his BS in about 5 seconds. He walked out on him.; 3/25/14, 6:04 AM
Anonymous said...: "He renounced his title because he didn't believe in hereditary privilege."

"His son, former cabinet minister Hilary Benn, and granddaughter Emily Benn, who was selected as a parliamentary candidate in 2010 at the age of seventeen, no doubt agree whole heartedly."

1. She was 17 when she was selected as the candidate in 2007. She was 20 when elections were ultimately held, in 2010.

2. The constant networking (and massive inherited wealth) of the modern "meritocratic" aristocracy means that you don't need a formal hereditary class to pass power from one generation to the next. The wealth especially makes a difference. Remember that the old aristocracy didn't necessarily inherit lots of money (Downton Abbey, etc.). Many were practically broke. The children of Clinton, Gore, Bush, and Obama will inherit far more money than most British nobility.

3. According to her Wikipedia bio, she is one-fourth Indian. In fact, her Wikipedia photo is of her dressed in a sari while visiting Bombay. I guess she's being groomed as the UK version of George P. Bush. She'll next be running for a safe Labour seat in a local council election later this year - kinda like George P. Bush.; 3/25/14, 6:21 AM
anony-mouse said...: Yes.; 3/25/14, 6:22 AM
anony-mouse said...: (That was an answer to the original question BTW which no one here has answered.); 3/25/14, 6:24 AM
Anonymous said...: I'm surprised by the number of sympathetic posters here for Benn, who is in reality, the face of pure evil.; 3/25/14, 6:42 AM
Bert said...: "I'm surprised by the number of sympathetic posters here for Benn, who is in reality, the face of pure evil."

As crappy as Benn was, he really was small change compared to the New Labourites.; 3/25/14, 7:55 AM
Syme said...: Jerry - don't dance on our graves just yet my friend. We have endured worse crises than this before and prevailed.

What nation do you belong to, by the way, and in what state of health do you assess it currently to be?; 3/25/14, 8:03 AM
Anonymous said...: OT: the Ukrainian government started cracking down on Right Sector. They killed one prominent Sectorite and arrested several others. The minister of Internal Affairs of the Ukraine said that he wants to arrest all Right Sector activists with illegal weapons. That means all of them, period. They're going to fight back. This could be the start of a long-term IRA-like insurgency in the Ukraine.; 3/25/14, 8:16 AM
Dan said...: If I were Putin right now, I'd funnel cash to both teams.

Result: he can ride in with his conditions after the dust settles.; 3/25/14, 8:37 AM
Anonymous said...: OT - Bush's use of housing boom strategy before the housing boom.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/paint-it-black; 3/25/14, 9:43 AM
HA said...: ”Jerry - don't dance on our graves just yet my friend...What nation do you belong to, by the way, and in what state of health do you assess it currently to be?

I don't know where's Jerry's from, but given his clear-eyed take on Russia and Putin, I would guess central European roots. Speaking for myself, I would never rejoice at England’s woes, or count them out, but I do see his point. Given the centuries which England (and other parts of North/West Europe) whiled away letting the nations they delight in looking down on dirty themselves with the bloody business of keeping the Turks out (not to mention all the times that England and France and Sweden actively collaborated with the Ottomans against those "buffer states"), there is some unavoidable Schaudenfreude in England finally realizing that it is not just the Poles, Austrians, Spaniards and Russians who have to fight to keep what is theirs, lest some ReligionOfPeace-nik comes and claims it for himself. If that clash of civilizations is ever going to something worth calling a victory, there is going to need to be a wider realization in Europe that they are all in it together, and must act accordingly.; 3/25/14, 10:21 AM
HA said...: the Ukrainian government started cracking down on Right Sector.

Given the fact that Right Sector are just Putin’s agents provocateur, some kind of crackdown by the Ukrainians was inevitable.; 3/25/14, 10:23 AM
Truth said...: Can we now call him a Has-Been?; 3/25/14, 10:44 AM
Bert said...: "This could be the start of a long-term IRA-like insurgency in the Ukraine."

No. If there is any kind of low-level civil war it will only make Russia that much more tempted to just take the entire country.; 3/25/14, 10:49 AM
Rob said...: I find it funny the way Ali G got away with his ridiculing of black rapper types by claiming he was really ridiculing whites who imitated them.; 3/25/14, 11:54 AM
Anonymous said...: "And the ultimate irony was that the taxpayer *was* forced to nationalize the UK banks, in order to save them from their own capitalism!"

That's called socialising the losses. Bonuses are back at pre-crash levels. And directors of FT100 companies are paid four times more than they were in 1999, despite their share prices actually being lower.

"but they themselves would find it strange that anyone but themselves mourns their decline. I do not mourn it. Let them suffer and learn..."

Don't know where you live, but this Brit is sure there'll be suffering and learning enough and to spare - not only in Britain.; 3/25/14, 12:39 PM
Anonymous said...: In fact, the massive uncontrolled immigration foisted upon Britain by that disgusting new labour regime was actually more of a right wing Friedmanite position than anything that the meat and potatoes cloth capped old school real labour would ever espouse. That party only gave a damn about organised labor and nothing else.
It was during the high noon of Blairite bullshit that the unrestricted immigration together with other shite such as super casinos really took off. Add to that Blair acting like Bush's bitch over Afghanistan and sacrificing British blood and treasure for no advantage to Britain.
All tha above gobshite Blair postions were recommended and endorsed by The Economist magazine. Commenters above have waxed lyrical about how the labour party destroyed Britain, but it is my contention that the damage wrought by The Economist magazine is infinitely massively worse. As I've bored readers here incessantly for years, the real tragedy of modern life is how one execrable worthless witless garbage publication fascinates the second rate minds of politicians in the way a cobra fascinates a rat.; 3/25/14, 1:26 PM
Anonymous said...: "As crappy as Benn was, he really was small change compared to the New Labourites." - And yet, that small change was how it all started.; 3/25/14, 1:36 PM
Anonymous said...: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117086/inside-east-wing-who-shrank-michelle-obama; 3/25/14, 2:06 PM
Anonymous said...: Off-topic, but of interest:

"On Sunday, the Obama administration finally followed the lead of European countries and NGOs by cutting aid to Uganda. In addition to withholding funds from Uganda’s Inter-Religious Council, which helps combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the US will suspend programs that might endanger gays and lesbians:

[B]ecause the law makes “promoting homosexuality” illegal, a U.S. funded study to help identify populations at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS has been suspended. The study, which was going to be conducted by a Ugandan university and the Center for Disease Control, has been suspended out of fear that both staff and survey respondents could be put in danger. [And] because any LGBT person or LGBT ally who now enters Uganda is at risk, money intended for tourism programs will be redirected. And finally, the Department of Defense had several events scheduled in the country later this spring and those will be moved to other locations."

(ANDREW SULLIVAN); 3/25/14, 2:19 PM
Anonymous said...: I see the Right Sector in Ukraine, having supplied cannon fodder/martyrs and been the answer to a Maidan's prayer, have outlived their usefulness to EUSA.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26729273

"Earlier, a Ukrainian MP, Oles Doniy, gave a different version of events. He said two cars had forced Muzychko's car to stop, and he had then been dragged into one of the other cars. Later his body was found dumped, his hands tied behind his back and two bullet wounds in his heart"; 3/25/14, 2:36 PM
roger in florida said...: Syme;
Jerry is almost certainly catholic Irish.
Benn was a child of privilege and worked off his guilt for that advantage by adopting socialism and a mystic view of the high minded qualities of the British working class. As a member of that class myself I can attest to the dysfunction, shiftlessness, dishonesty and general decadence that pervades a substantial number of them. Benn's admiration for them can be compared to the Victorian explorer's admiration for the "noble savage". Benn, like many of his contemporaries, had this vision of phalanxes of patriotic workers, shovels over shoulder, marching in lockstep to the mine, dam, highway, etc. singing the "Iternationale". As far as his individual achievements go; he almost single-handedly destroyed the British aircraft industry and he named his son Hilary. That just sums him up really.; 3/25/14, 2:36 PM
Anonymous said...: "Given the fact that Right Sector are just Putin’s agents provocateur, some kind of crackdown by the Ukrainians was inevitable."

That's not just a lie (the Banderites are Nuland's pets, not Putin's), it's also an illiteracy. If agents are plural, so should be provocateurs. If you don't know any French, don't quote it.

The Right Sector's West Ukrainian nationalism is real. Their sudden prominence, which will decline from now on, was due to them being temporarily useful to Soros and the neocons as tools.; 3/25/14, 2:51 PM
Anonymous said...: Yanukovich could claim to represent southeastern Ukraine. He represented it very imperfectly, but at least he wasn't fighting an actual war against it. The current neocon-installed Ukrainian government is hostile to both southeastern and northwestern Ukrainians, i.e. to all the Ukrainians that exist. It could end up fighting two insurgencies at once. While going bankrupt. It's married to the oligarchs who will only continue to loot.; 3/25/14, 3:08 PM
Anonymous said...: If that clash of civilizations is ever going to something worth calling a victory, there is going to need to be a wider realization in Europe that they are all in it together, and must act accordingly.

Fuckin A!; 3/25/14, 3:25 PM
Hunsdon said...: HA said: Given the fact that Right Sector are just Putin’s agents provocateur, some kind of crackdown by the Ukrainians was inevitable.

Hunsdon said: Do you have any support for this, or just intuition?; 3/25/14, 3:48 PM
Anon87 said...: OT: New program turns DNA into 3-D mugshot

It reminded me of an old article, The Inconvenient Science of Racial DNA Profiling

"If I could push a button and make this technology disappear, I would."; 3/25/14, 3:49 PM
Anonymous said...: ""In fact, the massive uncontrolled immigration foisted upon Britain by that disgusting new labour regime was actually more of a right wing Friedmanite position than anything that the meat and potatoes cloth capped old school real labour would ever espouse""

look, I've no doubt 'New' Labour is/was the worst in every way, but you guys (actually it seems to be just one guy judging by the topics) can't let 'old' labour off the hook with some silly romantic view of them as 'fighting for the working man'. New Labour was just following in old Labour tracks on topics like immigration, multicultualism, etc. Why did their infamous memo say they wanted to 'rub the right's face in diversity' for instance ? it wasn't for 'Friedmanite' reasons, that's for sure. It's a view of social justice that was always a part of Labour. Guys like Roy Jenkins in particular, and yes, Tony Benn too, were the people pushing - and effecting - *all* the kinds of social changes this blog queries. The only difference 'New' Labour made was it cranked them up to 11, and merged it to the economic Thatcherism you're decrying (not that it stopped them laying waste to the country's finances - again!).; 3/25/14, 4:03 PM
reiner Tor said...: I find it funny the way Ali G got away with his ridiculing of black rapper types by claiming he was really ridiculing whites who imitated them.

Just as he got away with his ridiculing a third world country based on total falsehoods. He didn't ridicule Kazakhs by caricaturing Kazakh behavior. He made up fictional Kazakhs. I'm not sure if anybody else doing that to any other third world country could have survived even five minutes amidst the scandal of racism.

But this Borat/Ali G guy just survived somehow. I don't really understand how. I almost entertain the absurd notion that he got a pass because of his ethnicity or something.; 3/25/14, 5:25 PM
reiner Tor said...: Take the PC out of the left and you'd have more in common with the left than the right

I agree, but taking the PC out of the left at present looks like taking the alcohol out of the vodka, and then taking out the water as well.; 3/25/14, 5:26 PM
Jerry said...: ”Jerry - don't dance on our graves just yet my friend...What nation do you belong to, by the way, and in what state of health do you assess it currently to be?

I don't know where's Jerry's from, but given his clear-eyed take on Russia and Putin, I would guess central European roots. Speaking for myself, I would never rejoice at England’s woes, or count them out, but I do see his point. Given the centuries which England (and other parts of North/West Europe) whiled away letting the nations they delight in looking down on dirty themselves with the bloody business of keeping the Turks out (not to mention all the times that England and France and Sweden actively collaborated with the Ottomans against those "buffer states"), there is some unavoidable Schaudenfreude in England finally realizing that it is not just the Poles, Austrians, Spaniards and Russians who have to fight to keep what is theirs, lest some ReligionOfPeace-nik comes and claims it for himself. If that clash of civilizations is ever going to something worth calling a victory, there is going to need to be a wider realization in Europe that they are all in it together, and must act accordingly.

--I'm from Poland... I am certainly not rejoicing nor dancing on anyone's grave nor, I hope, experiencing Schadenfreude; I am proposing a more philosophical way of looking at Britain's decline. I have a doctorate from a good American university in Victorian literature, and certain aspects of British culture (or what it used to be) are intimately close to me. Better to read the good old books than to mourn and suffer at present decline.

Consider this thought experiment: go back 500 years, and put the Poles on the island, and the Brits in Poland. Neither would have been what it is now, to put it mildly.

Poland is not in a state of good health. Not least because of very harmful naivete about the West in the early 1990's, when the foundations of the current system were being laid down. But it is now, at least, Poland, and not something less. If minorities begin consistently returning left-wing governments in Britain and France (and Hollande was elected on the strength of the Muslim vote), then these countries will become more clearly something less than themselves.; 3/25/14, 7:18 PM
HA said...: should be provocateurs…

Oh, please. On the rare occasions that I manage to keep the typos and grammatical errors to less than two per paragraph, I know that it’s my beer glass that needs refreshing more so than my French, mon frère. Mary!

Hundsen has a far less picayune point to make, and suffice it to say that when Victoria Nuland is passing out pastries to protesters in Maidan Square, I recognize that as the work of the clowns from Washington. But when apartments start blowing up, and journalists start disappearing or succumbing to strange poisons, or armories get raided, I ask who benefits and come up with someone else.
And to answer another point, claiming that Putin is infiltrating the Right Sector is not the same as denying that they have also taken assistance from elsewhere, or that they are not for the most part sincere about their extremism.; 3/25/14, 7:33 PM
Anonymous said...: "but you guys (actually it seems to be just one guy judging by the topics) can't let 'old' labour off the hook with some silly romantic view of them as 'fighting for the working man'. New Labour was just following in old Labour tracks on topics like immigration, multicultualism, etc."

Old Labour (and old Democrats) never seemed to complain about the PC takeover of their parties. Arguably, they enabled that takeover. It was old school Leftist judges who created school busing, allowed affirmative action , and gutted immigration enforcement. Pyles v. Doe, the Supreme Court ruling which requires states to educate the children of illegal immigrants, was handed down in 1982. These were pre-baby boom guys. I have zero doubt that Benn's son and granddaughter embrace the multicult (just look at that Wikipedia photo) and that he had little if any objection to it.

"Caring for the working man" was a means to an end, not the end itself.; 3/25/14, 7:52 PM
Anonymous said...: "As crappy as Benn was, he really was small change compared to the New Labourites."

Is New Labour more radical, or just more brazen about their agenda?; 3/25/14, 7:55 PM
Anonymous said...: Note how he says at 2:50 about how the miners wanted to work and the government was "stopping" them. As if Thatcher just decided to close down the state owned coal mines because she was just having a bad hair day.

Of course what he doesn't say is that all the coal mines in question were losing money. A lot of money. And the miners were offered generous severance packages. What is the logic in keeping open a mine that loses money? Would Coca-Cola spend 1.2 billion dollars a year on a bottling plant that only made 900 million dollars? How long would shareholders tolerate a plant losing 300 million dollars annually?

Note too how he says the miners wanted jobs for themselves and for their sons. In America a coal miner in West Virginia would want his son to go to college and become an engineer or something. In Britain, a class society with little social mobility, its a different story.

I bet he has never walked around a council estate to see what the underclass he claims to know so much about are really like.; 3/25/14, 9:35 PM
Anonymous said...: "Is New Labour more radical, or just more brazen about their agenda?"

Old Labour was dominated by the unions which meant it was dominated by economic leftism and openly so. Cultural leftism existed within it but partially suppressed.

For example when the party went for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s the party split as a lot of the union types wouldn't support it and so they had to give up the idea.

When Thatcher destroyed the unions she unwittingly allowed the cultural left to take over and create New Labour which is much more like the Democrats.

The difference is they are both more radical and less brazen i.e. they were prepared to drop a lot of the economic leftism / protectionism in exchange for more immigration as they know - like the Democrats - if they can import enough new poor people they will eventually get socialism later.

.

"Unfortunately the British electorate did not have the brains, and/or was caught up in its own class divisions, to realize the magnitude of the unfolding horror."

The media - especially the BBC - blatantly lied about what was happening so only the people in the inner cities knew about it until it was too late.; 3/25/14, 10:19 PM
Anonymous said...: "As if Thatcher just decided to close down the state owned coal mines because she was just having a bad hair day."

TPTB wanted to destroy the unions and the miners were the strongest union so they were targeted.

You could make a valid case that at the time the unions were wrecking the country economically but once the unions were gone that allowed the banking mafia to take over completely and destroy the country on a much more fundamental level.

"I bet he has never walked around a council estate to see what the underclass he claims to know so much about are really like."

The underclass came into being after the mines closed as the old industrial working class communities had a lot of resistance to cultural Marxist poison which disappeared with the industry.; 3/25/14, 10:31 PM
Anonymous said...: As I noted before, Benn pretended to support the white working class as a mask while all the while he did nothing to stop, and plenty to promote, the destruction of white Britain.

The anti-white hatred exhibited by Blair,Brown,Clegg and Cameron really is not a new phenomenon. It started with an knife-in-the-back attack by the British Left on their own people in the colonies, decades before, by people like Benn and his generation.

Benn was not a fool, but he was, in his plummy, sanctimonious way, an evil man.

Anon.; 3/25/14, 10:34 PM
Bert said...: "The anti-white hatred exhibited by Blair,Brown,Clegg and Cameron really is not a new phenomenon. It started with an knife-in-the-back attack by the British Left on their own people in the colonies, decades before, by people like Benn and his generation."

You're talking about Rhodesia, right? They ironic thing is that as late as the 1950s London was still trying to get their people to settle there. Then all of sudden there were "wind of change" thanks to the worthless and feckless Harold Macmillan.

Then there was the betrayal of the Anglo-Indians and the abandonment of the plan to settle them onto the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.; 3/25/14, 11:50 PM
reiner Tor said...: What is the logic in keeping open a mine that loses money?

I don't know much about British coal mines, but Hungarian coal mines were closed a decade later in the mid-1990s. By the mid-2000s they would have become economically viable again, but by then they were closed, with all the workers and engineers and expertise gone, and a lot of money would have been needed to reopen them. Now, two decades after the mines closure, they started to reopen them.

Yes, it would have cost a lot of money to keep them running 1995-2005, when they might have lost money (especially between 1995-2000), but that money was instead spent on closing the mines (it wasn't for free either), and then we didn't have the mines from 2005-2014 when they would have made money, and we now have to spend a lot of money on reopening them, and probably it will be a slow and protracted process.

So a case could be made that we would have been better off if we had kept them running even as they kept losing money.

Same thing with German steel industry. In around 2005 or 2006 I read a story of a complete ThyssenKrupp steel works being sold as crap to China. It was closed in the early 2000s, but by the time it started working in China, steel prices recovered and it became profitable again.

So I think a case could be made that even that aspect of Thatcherism (closing all unprofitable enterprises) was a big minus for Western Civilization.; 3/26/14, 1:55 AM
Anonymous said...: "Then all of sudden there were "wind of change" thanks to the worthless and feckless Harold Macmillan."

Probably blackmail.; 3/26/14, 2:58 AM
Hunsdon said...: HA said: Oh, please. On the rare occasions that I manage to keep the typos and grammatical errors to less than two per paragraph, I know that it’s my beer glass that needs refreshing more so than my French, mon frère. Mary!

Hunsdon said: Grammatical errors in a second (or third) language are, in my view, entirely excusable.

HA said: But when apartments start blowing up, and journalists start disappearing or succumbing to strange poisons, or armories get raided, I ask who benefits and come up with someone else.

Hunsdon said: Hmm, Moscow '99, Politskaya (among others), Yuschenko. All point at the arch fiend, Putin! But if Berezovsky wasn't dead, I'd look to his fingerprints on the pay stubs to Sashko Bilyy more than Putin, given that Berezovsky had funded the Chechen side, and Sashko was famous for killing serving Russians in Chechnya. (I could be wrong.); 3/26/14, 5:01 AM
Hunsdon said...: reiner Tor said: But this Borat/Ali G guy just survived somehow. I don't really understand how. I almost entertain the absurd notion that he got a pass because of his ethnicity or something.

Hunsdon said: Crazy talk!; 3/26/14, 5:09 AM
Anonymous said...: I love coming to American blogs and reading how bad the Brits are. Oh, it's hilarious!

A country that starts wars but never wins them, a country whose record of using others for their own narrow gains -- often without a clue who lives in those places -- and a country that glorifies itself with a succession of lies about history thanks to cocaine-sniffing Hollywood, a country that routinely votes in the power-hungry and selfish to office (and then mutters incessantly about revolution... would this be like the supposed revolution against Britain that was in fact a civil war? But then, it was nation that fought against a section of itself seceding and called it a 'civil war!' Laughable)

Yes, please keep telling us how bad Britain is. We love it! (Yes, I know, let's get to bad teeth prattle you Yanks keep coming up with. Okay, as your celebrity-obsessed society spends more on teeth whitening and dental cosmetics than most third world countries spend on staying alive, that's good... Oh, and I'be been to America and seen the bad teeth you have. Scary!)

Sure Benn was a fool, sure he believed as a lot of the elite do that the workers are heroes -- without ever going to see them in their native habitat -- and probably he set the standard for all the future 'we care about people but don't want to be near them' attitudes we see today. But, he stuck to what he believed in, outdated though it was.

A bit like your Obama chap, I suppose. But you love him!

Benn also saw the EU for what it was, though whether he ever saw Communism for what it was is a moot point. But I bet he saw the two-faced (sorry, three-faced) Americans for what they were.

Discuss, if you can. Americans are renowned for being ignorant, so carry on. Try hard.; 3/27/14, 1:19 AM
Anonymous said...: dunno what the above guy is talking about. The only brit-bashing I've seen on this post is from someone who is apparently a continental european. I've bashed Benn a couple of times in this discussion, but I'm a 'Brit', and I suspect most of the others who've done so are, too. I'd like to dismiss the above as a troll, but, unfortunately, this kind of 'look-at-us we're great because we used to rule you savage americans a long time ago before we were irrelevant, rah!' provincial jingoism is embarrassingly common & usually done in much more earnest then american jokes about our teeth. sigh.; 3/27/14, 2:47 AM
iSteve London correspondent said...: The "Brit-bashing" (really English-bashing) that I've seen on iSteve - and there has been some - has come from the occasional Irish poster, one Indian poster (Dr Von Nostrand) and one or two Americans. But it doesn't really add up to much. We're not THAT thin-skinned are we?

I always feel the urge when criticism are made of the British Empire, English society and all the rest to explain how much of what is presented to the world as English or British (and the conflation of the two annoys this Englishman very much, but that's a story for another day) is in fact something else.

The Normans never left, never went away, never relinquished their vice-like grip on our country. Now we simply know them as "the upper classes". Why do they have such a distinctive accent, that sounds nothing like the speech of ordinary English people? Where did that come from? And boy do they not like their English untertanen one bit (although some do idolise them, in an insincere way - see the video above). Hostile elite? We've had one for a millennium!; 3/27/14, 7:39 PM
Anonymous said...: "I love coming to American blogs and reading how bad the Brits are. Oh, it's hilarious!"

Don't be a prick. Just because a blog is American doesn't mean the commentators are and just because a commentator says they are something doesn't mean they are.: "Let's you and him fight."; 3/28/14, 1:54 PM

Steve Sailer: iSteve

March 24, 2014

Tony Benn, RIP

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Steve Sailer: iSteve

March 24, 2014

Tony Benn, RIP

74 comments:

Panhandling

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Classic Steve Sailer articles

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