Widows Of The Living And The Dead

Some years ago my good lady, Revoltina, visited a friend in Andalusia. There was a distinct shortage of men in town.  There are many places in this world where the men folk have left to find work.
In this poem Rosalia de Castro describes a similar situation in nineteenth century Galicia. Like Galicia herself, the Peasant Woman is left without a man to work for her, without a man to serve her. 


Este vaise  y aquel vaise
E todos, todos se van,
Galicia, sin homes quedas
Que te poidan traballar.
Tés en cambio orfos e orfas
E campos de soledad.
E nais que non teñen fillos
E fillos que non tén pais
E tés corazóns que sufren
Longas ausencias mortás
Viudas de vivos e mortos
Que ninguén consolará.

This one goes and that one goes,
All of them, all of them go.
Galicia, you are left without men
Who can work you.
Instead you are left with
Orphans and lonely fields.
And mothers without sons,
And sons without fathers
And hearts that suffer 
The long dead absences,
Widows of the living and the dead
That no one can console.

The Conclusions Of The Lollards

John Ball writes: It is many years since the Lord took the blindness from my eyes and let me see His Truth. For that I was expelled, beaten, imprisoned. For years I existed, a wandering preacher, living off the charity of poor peasants, sympathetic merchants, and even the occasional godly knight. Women, in particular, were glad to hear my message, for they feel a particular revulsion for the violence of men, the endless war in France, the self serving priests, the taxes that steal the strength of their youth.
Several years after my death, some fellow Lollards presented the Twelve Conclusions to King Richard and Parliament.
Here are the first three Conclusions:

1. That when the Church of England began to go mad after temporalities, like its great step-mother the Roman Church, and churches were authorized by appropriation in divers places, faith, hope and charity began to flee from our Church, because pride, with its doleful progeny of mortal sins, claimed this under title of truth. This conclusion is general, and proved by experience, custom and manner or fashion, as you shall afterwards hear.

2.That our usual priesthood which began in Rome, pretended to be of power more lofty than the angels, is not that priesthood which Christ ordained for His apostles. This conclusion is proved because the Roman priesthood is bestowed with signs, rites, and pontifical blessings, of small virtue, nowhere exemplified in Holy Scripture, because the bishop's ordinal and the New Testament scarcely agree, and we cannot see that the Holy Spirit, by the reason of any such signs, confers the gift, for He and all His excellent gifts cannot consist in any one with mortal sin. A corollary of this is that it is a grievous play for wise men to see bishops trifle with the Holy Spirit in the bestowal of orders, because they give the tonsure in outward appearance in place of pure hearts: and this is the unrestrained introduction of antichrist into the Church to give colour to idleness.

3. That the law of celibacy enjoined to priests, which was first ordained to the prejudice of women, brings sodomy into all the Holy Church, but we excuse ourselves by the Bible because the decree says that we should not mention it, though suspected. Reason and experience prove this conclusion: reason, because the good living of ecclesiastics must have a natural outlet or worse; experience, because the secret proof of such men is that they find delight in women, and when thou hast proved such a man, mark him well, because he is one of them. A corollary to this is that private religions and the originators or beginning of this sin would be specially worthy of being checked, but God of His power with regard to secret sin sends open vengeance in His Church.

A Compact Mass

From the conclusion of Brooks Adams' book published in 1895 The Law of Civilization and Decay:

'As the pressure of economic competition intensifies with social consolidation, the family regularly disintegrates, the children rejecting the parental authority at a steadily decreasing age: until finally the population fuses into a compact mass, in which all individuals are equal before the law, and all are forced to compete with each other for the means of subsistence. When at length wealth has accumulated sufficiently to find vent through capitalistic methods of farming and manufacture, children lose all value, for then hiring labour is always cheaper than breeding. Thenceforward, among the more extravagant races, the family dwindles, as in ancient Rome or modern France, and marriage, having become a luxury, decreases. Moreover the economic instinct impels parents to reduce the possible number of inheritors of their property, that its bulk might not shrink.
Upon women the effect of these changes is prodigious. Their whole relation to society is altered. From a religious sacrament marriage is metamorphosed into a civil contract, by mutual consent; and, as the obligations of maternity diminish, the relation of husband and wife resolves itself into a sort of business partnership, tending always to become more ephemeral. Frequent as divorce now is, it was even more so under the Antonines.'

A False Equality

From her book The Denial Of Woman, Mary Malone writes;
'The religion of Equality, whose superstitions are the orthodoxy these days, seeks to reduce Woman to the level of Man.
To their credit, our ancestors knew that Woman was not like Man, and not simply because she has different genitalia. They were perfectly aware that gender is an integral part of a person's identity.
They knew that you are who you are, not who you want to be. They did not fantasize about what ought to be, and use their 'free will' to re-create themselves. They did not hate themselves as modern women do. They did not deny Woman.
When the Narrative tells us that all women should be Warriors and that all Men should be Carers, when the courage and resilience and the self denial of the male is denigrated, when the tenderness and love and practicality of the female is derided, when our children are taught that romance is gender neutral, that there is no difference between Woman and Man apart from our reproductive organs, we are staring into the abyss, we are on the edge of the destruction of Woman.
There is so much more to a man than his unseemly parts. He is strong, impulsive, energetic, loyal, irrational, childish, creative, everything a dog should be, and more.
Yet he lacks our adult purpose, our tenderness, our rationality. A man needs a woman for much more than her own unseemly parts. Without a woman a man is lost, as abandoned as a stray dog.
When a woman has a man and children she is complete. She has accomplished her will to power. She is the Mistress.
But a woman naked and alone, doing the work of men, has been stripped of her power.
For the Equal Woman, reduced to the level of the male, whose femininity has been ground down to the level of her sexual organs, there can be no romance, no love, no service, only mutual masturbation and genital imperialism.'

There Are A Lot Of Foreigners Abroad

My friend Dick has been nagging me again. He wants to have his say on the burning issues of the day. He says I think too much, lying on my back out in the forest, chewing hemp all day long. He says my readers need to know the opinion of the Man on the Clapham Omnibus, or in Dick's case, the piss artist down the pub.
Here is Dick's take on immigration.

'I was down in London the other day. Foreigners everywhere. I mean foreigners everywhere from everywhere.  It's supposed to be the capital of England, but where are the English? Southend, I suppose, if they're lucky - Scunthorpe if they're not.
I mean, I'm not being racist. I like West Indians. They play cricket, speak English, go to Protestant churches, and most of them have a drop or two of English blood in their veins.
And the Irish aren't too bad, either. They're from the British Isles like the English, though I'm not too keen on the Pope myself. I reckon he looks a bit shifty.
But who are these people from God forsaken places like Latvia and Zimbabwe and Kazakhstan?
Blimey, they'll be letting the French in next.
Me, I'm thinking of emigrating, there are so many foreigners here.
The only trouble is, when you go abroad, there are even more foreigners there than here.' 

What is Wrong With Life And Not Death?

Governments dress up their crimes with morality.
They dress up their crimes with the concept of the Just War and the Holy War.
They murder under the guise of Responsibility To Protect.
They are fighting a Holy War for human rights.
The Holy War is a central part of the idolatry of Humanism, the self righteousness of those who see their god in the mirror. It is called ‘human rights’, an ‘ethical foreign policy’, ‘the promotion of democracy’.
Holy War is murder dressed up with Morality.
There is no honesty in killers.
Those who hate themselves wish to punish.
For that is what Morality does. Morality condemns, Morality punishes. .
But there is no righteousness in Morality, only self, only punishment.
And, at the moment, the Hypocrites are punishing the people of Syria. Do not believe their weasel words! Inadequates, like post-Fascist Foreign Secretary William Hague, are warmongers. They are merchants of death.
Conservative M.P. Edward Leigh told Hague, a coward who wants to officially arm the terrorists, "What is wrong with basing our policy on life and not death?"
Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Libya, Mali, Syria. Where next?
NATO is in the process of conquering the Middle East to protect its supplies and to prevent its suppliers from trading with others.
Any prosperity, any independence, and development outside of their control must be destroyed.
Nowhere is safe.
Their nightmare will be coming to you sometime soon.

Syria -The Arab Nightmare

There are now estimated to be around a million refugees from the war in Syria. The country is being destroyed and with it the lives of millions of people.
Whatever the faults of the Ba'ath regime in Syria, ordinary Syrians do not deserve to be destroyed.
Members of NATO and their allies, the dictators of Arabia, have been arming terrorists for two years now. Right from the beginning ordinary Syrians knew that many of these ‘revolutionaries’ were foreigners, mercenaries and fanatics financed by the Gulf dictatorships.
There is a lot of guff talked by politicians about not arming the terrorists, but they are doing that right now. The latest weapons corridor appears to be from Croatia, via Jordan.
How do the ‘rebels’ pay for all these weapons?  
They must have some generous foreign backers.
It is hard to call these killers anything but terrorists because that is what they are.
The people using violence to overthrow the Syrian government kill people on account of their religion and ethnicity in order to encourage potential supporters of the government to leave their homes and go into exile.
Apart from Lebanon and Israel, Syria was the last remaining pluralist society between Europe and India. Now it is being annihilated.
The Syrian government is without doubt harsh and repressive. The secret police is universally feared.
However, it does not interfere in people’s religious beliefs, it does not drug up hundreds of thousands of working class schoolboys, it does not imprison its minority populations en masse, and it does not interfere in the minutiae of everyday life. It is an old fashioned modernizing dictatorship whose main aim was to feed, educate and provide medicine for its people, and in the process siphon off a few quid for its elite.
No doubt it has had its day, and it has failed to adapt to survive. The younger Assad was not feared as much as his father, yet did not move towards democracy.
It has proved to be a fatal combination.
Though some of the opposition are from Syria itself, from the beginning there have been many foreign fighters, Sunni Islamic Fascists and mercenaries paid  by the Gulf states, dictatorships themselves, nastier and more racist and more sexist than Syria.
Yet the corrupt West and the tyrannical oil states demonize the Syrian government and support these gangs who are unleashing the Arab Nightmare on the people of Syria.
They are unleashing a genocidal fury on Christians and Alawites, murdering any who oppose them.