Sadly, we inhabit a world where the version of life pumped out in the mainstream is institutionally prejudiced, chronically so. Racism, sexism, and the rest are rife. This can be amply demonstrated by the simple application of the call-and-response test:
'Proud to be black!' 'Right on, brother.'
'Proud to be woman!' 'All power to you, sister!'
'Proud to be gay!' 'So you should be. Go for it!'
'Proud to be white!' 'Racist! Supremacist! Nazi! And you're banned from Facebook from today.'
From the outset, we should note that all of this has little to do with the vast majority of people, be they black, white, purple, female, male, both, neither, or anything else. It is all to do with a certain ideological view of the world, pushed relentlessly like a drug by politicians and their partners-in-crime in the mainstream media. It is a bunch of bullshit, to quote Jim Morrison, but is aimed to befuddle and stupefy. It is a bad-smelling veil placed over the magical spontaneity of natural existence.
Two particularly curious facts stand out concerning this phenomenon. Firstly, although the hymn book states that it is all about promoting peace, harmony, equality everywhere, its effects are the opposite. It fuels resentments, stirs up strife, bad feeling, by constantly appealing to the baser sides of people's group identities, then pitting them against one another in the mould of victims and perpetrators. And secondly, this white-loathing doctrine is largely promoted by …. white people.
For myself, all this nonsense has had little effect personally; though it would be naïve to assume that will continue to be the case indefinitely. As a white English-born male who, for those keen on such labelling, comes with a middle-class background, I have my feet firmly planted at the bottom of the pile. Frankly, who cares? I get up in the morning, look at the sky and give thanks, before getting on with being who I am and doing what I do. On a social level, however, especially in the high-density urban environments which I have done my level-best to escape, it is toxic, creating social strife and doing great harm.
Having said that, there was one moment when the 'trashy white male' motif did get to me. It was back in the 1980s - the 'white European culture is bad' notion is not new - and ironically involves my time as a 'this is my passport to freedom' Buddhist. It was a meeting with a considerable number of fellow Buddhists, on a grim, grey January (?) Sunday. In Bethnal Green, East London. As well as our centres in Europe and other 'white culture' places, we had a growing number in India. Now, some of we British Buddhists didn't always come up to the mark. We - me included - tended to get despondent, ask lots of questions, have lots of doubts, take our highly complex personal psychology very seriously, and generally act miserably. We were a source of frustration for those few who really wanted to build a great Buddhist movement quickly and efficiently. A few of we western Buddhists would make the journey to India to help out. Those who went east would return with tales to tell.
So it was the thing at the time. At this particular meeting, one recent returner was regaling us all with details of his experiences. Of how, unlike we spoilt children of the western world, our Indian counterparts were always smiling, always friendly, always helpful, never getting tied up in their personal psychology. 'We' had everything while 'they' had nothing, but look at their positivity. What nobody mentioned (in fairness because they probably didn't know) was that, after a hard day's work smiling and being positive, half these Indians went home in the evening and beat up their wives.
Part Two
After you've had your centuries of exploiting us, it's our turn now. It's payback time, white boy. Such are the excuses sometimes put forward for putting the European white male at the bottom of the pile. I have heard these sentiments on many occasions. It's like a socially-fashioned karma (it's the universe that sees to karma, not humans, dummy. Whatever....). And it's not exactly white skin that's being got at - it's a particular culture, western culture, western civilisation. The root of all evil.
This is all mendacious nonsense from a number of angles. It's group identitarianism at its grossest. The idea of group karma is dodgy, reducing everybody to robotic units. I never exploited people in far-off countries, neither did my parents or anybody else on my family tree, from what I can tell.
In the USA reparation is the thing, I believe. Compensation to black people for the wrongs afforded by slavery (it might be rude to point this out, but slavery was abolished quite a long time ago). This continues to today, as a section of white American population's misplaced and irrational guilt complex seems to know no bounds. As a matter of fact, roughly 2% of white Americans of the time owned slaves. Which means a healthy 98% were stuck in the same boat as everyone else regardless of race, colour, favourite vegetable, or anything else.
Meanwhile, back here in Europe; in the UK; in Scotland. It's pretty much the same story.
Well south of where I live is found Glencoe, a great mountain cleft famed for things both light and dark. The glen eventually disgorges onto Rannoch Moor, a wide expanse of peat, bog, lochans which sparkle when the suns deigns to shine, and which ripple in the almost omnipresent wind. At the far side you encounter the enormous expanse of water that is Blackwater Reservoir. Like a long finger it extends eastwards, held in perilous check by the Blackwater dam.
The building of this astonishing piece dates to 1899 - 1900. Huge numbers of navvies were enlisted from all over, but Scotland and Ireland mainly, to carry out the work. Conditions were by all accounts appalling, with rude lodgings in the worst weather that Scotland could throw at you, and work undertaken for wages that amounted to next-to nothing. Such was the unremitting cruelty of life at the dam that a goodly number of workers perished under the conditions. There is even a graveyard to those who died, each individual marked with a rude headstone comprising a piece of local stone, which was opened up next to the reservoir to deal with the number of dead.
Follow the river flowing into the reservoir east for another short while and you arrive at the West Highland railway line. This was constructed a few years before the reservoir, in the early 1890s. It is a triumph of engineering, cutting its way through a variety of hostile environments as it snakes its way north then westwards. To cross Rannoch Moor, it is essentially floated. Like the dam, the railway was built under conditions which are, for me, unimaginable. Another hefty tally of deaths as a result of accident or mere extremeness of conditions. Further south, in Arrochar, is a graveyard to those 37 navvies who died during construction.
All of which I relate to make a simple point. All kinds of people have been treated badly - terribly - by other people at all times and all over the place. It is not a case of nasty white men having a go at nice black people, with some compensatory mechanism required. No. This is a political weapon, no more. If a generalisation is to be made, it concerns a minority of human beings behaving badly towards others in pursuit of their own ends. Whether those misused ones are black, white, or striped, is a matter of little concern.
In the dark corners of Highland history there is also the little matter of the Clearances with their forced emigration in the eighteenth century. Another example of white people behaving badly towards other white people.
Part Three
Well, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster over recent blog pieces, up hill and down dale. The pulse of energy which has connected these writings may be in the process of exhausting itself - or maybe not. Over recent times I have found myself increasingly guided by intuition. I have learnt to listen to this aspect of my being, and it invariably knows better than 'I' do what to do and what not to do. Or, more accurately, I have learnt to trust this faculty: it has always been at work, but I have been insufficiently aware of its presence, or viewed it with suspicion. It has been foremost in the writing of these bits and pieces. An inner voice has instructed me to dip into a certain pot, and here we are...
It all kicked off with freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom to say what you think and feel. How this is the social atmosphere most conducive to spiritual gnosis, to discovering ones own uniqueness and its own unique connection with 'the divine'. Not to mention the basis of a positive human society (don't ask me to define what I mean by that...). This in turn led to the topic of censoring and shutting people up on social media, a phenomenon that has been rampant and accelerating no end over recent times. I avoid Facebook, Twitter, and similar like the plague, but many people do not. It is clear that a certain type of person is being targeted for silencing, and that a certain type of person is most zealous in this ignoble activity. Who the good guys are and who the bad has required a certain personal revision.
One element in all this is my difficulty in absorbing that some people really are nasty, and they are not necessarily the people who are portrayed as such in mainstream. To try and silence another person because you disagree with them and you think they might steal some votes which you'd like to have in upcoming elections is simply in my book downright nasty. Not acceptable in a properly human world, and one which likes to throw around words like 'democracy' and 'freedom'.
Most people who I know are decent folk, who value honesty, have a certain respect for individual differences, and are in possession of a certain integrity. So it comes as a bit of a shock that there are others who are not like that at all. Top of the list come most mainstream media, some politicians of a 'socialist' bent (noticeable in the UK: certain Labour Party members are at the forefront of this selective silencing, and they aren't even in government! Heaven help us if they win an election), some people who attract the tag 'far left', and some who consider themselves as 'social justice warriors' (SJWs to those in the know).
Somewhere in among all this I began to look into the phenomenon of Tommy Robinson, as the most reviled Britain of all by mainstream media. He and Trump are the twin horns of the mainstream media. 'Far-right racist thug' is the typical label. Nasty guy, it seems. So I decided to check him out a bit. I watched his address to the Oxford Union. I checked out his news website. I read his autobiography, 'Enemy of the State' (well, most of it). And you know what? He's not like that at all. Not really.
'Racist?' Seeing as how loads of his friends seem to be black, and he has fans and followers across the globe, not exactly. Thug? Well, by his own admission, he was a bit of a football hooligan in his day, and remains a feisty and sometimes provocative character. Yet he generally appears to act with restraint in the face of provocation on a daily basis these days. He is currently running for MEP, and is the subject of continual unpleasant harassment and attack. His condition is made worse by the people who should be protecting him, the British forces of law and disorder, who often seem to encourage rather than deter attacks on him and his supporters.
And 'far right?' I'm not sure what it means. But he has always dismissed anybody with a racist agenda from anything he has been involved with, including self-professed neo-Nazis and BNP members, who get short shrift.
More than anything, Tommy appears to be a patriot in a way that is almost quaint and old-fashioned nowadays. He thinks St Georges Day should be a public holiday, and that traditional British values are worth standing up for. Like Trump, he is not a globalist, and is prepared to put his head above the parapet to protest against things, particularly things Islamic, which he feels threaten traditional British values. It is the anti-globalist stance, along with his persistence in asking uncomfortable questions, which makes him such a reviled figure by the Establishment.
My own take on Tommy Robinson is irrelevant here. The important point is how he is portrayed and how he is 'dealt with' by a certain influential element within the edifice of power. For years, and ad nauseam, I have harped on about the mainstream media. But maybe a little aspect of me has continued to resist the inevitable: the complete and absolute discrediting of our time-honoured channels of communication. Maybe it's been too much to believe.
All this has, I suspect and hope, finally been changed. The last nail driven into the coffin of 'mainstream credibility'.
How much I may agree or disagree with what Tommy Robinson says and does is not the topic of discussion here. What is relevant is the extent to which I have seen Tommy Robinson misrepresented (a polite word for 'lied about') in the mainstream media - not just partly or a little bit, but pretty much relentlessly and absolutely in creating an image, a severely distorted image, of the guy. The lesson may have finally got through the defences of my own thick skull. It is the lesson that I have resisted learning, resisted absorbing into the core of my being: how nasty people can be, how dismissive of truth in the pursuit of their own (normally ideological) ends. And this, not in Stalin's Russia of the 1940s, but in Britain in 2019.
No more prior credibility for anything issuing from mainstream sources. Not a jot (apart from sports scores, which they probably won't get wrong). I should stop using this expression 'mainstream media' anyhow. They are on their way out, so I am told. 'Legacy media' is the more appropriate term. Or, as Styx has referred to them, 'lamestream media'. I like that.
Images: Top: A book you may or may not decide to read.
Centre: Blackwater Dam
Below: Train crosses Rannoch Moor
