Nine Letter Words

Nine Letter Words

Democracy and Despotism are nine letter words. Because they have four letters in common some politicians think they are synonymous. Politicians like SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon. Politicians like failed MP and Lib-Dem ‘leader’ Jo Swinson. And, of course, our old friend and Failure-in-Chief, Jeremy Corbyn and his consiglieri John McDonnell.

They are aided and abetted by hundreds of thousands of people across the land, most often found in Parliament or the Media or the Courts or the Universities. The bien pensant, virtue-signalling chatterati who wear their hearts on their sleeves and their wallets in their off-shore tax haven vaults and who are the army who always march in step with the fascists, with those whose contempt for the common people is matched only by their oleaginous, sanctimonious humbug in protesting their allegiance to the ‘People’. Sanctimony. Simony. What’s in a word?

There are, of course, no ‘People’. There are only citizens who vote. Alas, the citizenry are invariably found wanting so the more deserving ‘People’ must be the beneficiaries of the Guardians of Virtue. As Bertholdt Brecht noted in his poem ‘The Solution’,

Wouldn’t it be simpler in that case if the government dissolved the people and elected another?

An elegant and possibly final solution.

There is another nine letter word that applies here: Dictators .

The L Word

The L Word

Liberalism is a sickness, a cancer which, once it takes root in the body politic metastasizes with frightening rapidity to infect every organ. While the body slumbers in innocence and blissful ignorance, the armies of dissolution are clashing by night in every nook, cranny and channel of its life blood. A necrosis spreads from limb to limb, relentless in its blind, unthinking will to sacrifice every mechanism of self-preservation , every anti-body and corpuscle in order to honour, celebrate and welcome the barbarians at the gate, the savage horde at war with every healthy, robust, independent organism.

Their avowed aim: to dissolve our very self, to strip away the barriers that stave off all that seeks to invade the imperium of self. The Liberal agenda is to appropriate and consume our rude vitality and vigour in the brutal self-aggrandisement of the deformed and deforming, insatiable carcinoma that is the beating heart of the liberal mind (although the term flatters the insane and self-destructive narcissism that lies behind the mask of virtue, or virtue signalling to be absolutely clear).

Jack Merrit is a case in point. His violent death (along with Saskia Jones) at the blood-stained hands of a proven jihadist at a public event to celebrate the ‘healing powers’ of mercy, forgiveness and rehabilitation is just the point of entry to this modern pathology. The public letter his family wrote to the Guardian (mouth-piece of choice by the liberal cognoscenti, the epitome of smug arrogance and condescension) is the real casus belli.

Far from holding the murderous and dissembling jihadist to account, the letter chose to use the crudest kind of emotional blackmail, the most nauseating display of disingenuous sentimentality to criticise those of us who thought it right to question a criminal justice system so gullible and lax that the most hardened and fanatical enemies of our state merit the milk of human kindness, an unending benign and bottomless tolerance of their avowed and criminal intent to blow us and our enlightened institutions to dust and then to stab and slash every infidel standing to death, man, woman or child, every one.

We must hug these ‘holy assassins’ to our bosom and help them steer their knives towards our heart’s blood. For the sake of the Family of Man (not forgetting Woman – it is the Guardian after all.) If the 20^th century had taught us one thing, one would have thought, it was to beware of those ready to sacrifice innocent flesh and blood for the sake of an ‘idea’.

The rest of us look on in horror to see Christian teaching so traduced, to see sacred teachings used to dress up the utter abdication of principle, judgement and responsibility. And we are appalled. And typically, the necrosis is so advanced in our body politic that our natural instincts to preserve ourselves and castigate our enemies is seen as shameful and repellent. When a father proclaims the virtues of his son’s barbaric killer, we have reached the end of Western civilisation, Christendom and the Enlightenment. As the poet Cavafy put it, we are waiting for the barbarians.

Waiting for the Barbarians   

 

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

 The barbarians are due here today.

 

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

 

      Because the barbarians are coming today.

      What’s the point of senators making laws now?

      Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

 

Why did our emperor get up so early,

and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,

in state, wearing the crown?

 

      Because the barbarians are coming today

      and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.

      He’s even got a scroll to give him,

      loaded with titles, with imposing names.

 

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today

wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?

Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,

rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes

beautifully worked in silver and gold?

 

      Because the barbarians are coming today

      and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

 

Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual

to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

 

      Because the barbarians are coming today

      and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

 

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people’s faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

 

      Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.

      And some of our men just in from the border say

      there are no barbarians any longer.

 

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.                                                                                 (1904)

 

Footnote

As a regular church-goer for over twenty years (Methodist) and life-long observer of the political, social and cultural scene, I have drawn one clear conclusion as a practising Christian. The teachings of Christ apply solely to the realm of individual action, to the moral principles, actions and conscience guiding one human being engaging with another in the sight of the Lord. As soon as the state or politicians seek to appropriate Christian values for their own ends casuistry, corruption, chaos and catastrophe will ensue. Tony Blair is a perfect example. If you seek his monument, look around you.

David Kelly                                                 5 December, 2019