THE TRIUMVIRATE OF DEFEAT: SCRUTON, HITCHENS, AND DANIELS

Paleocon line-up.

by Alter Orbis

Like most people, I never questioned the basis of the society that I lived in. Growing up in Leicester, it was assumed that multiculturalism was a fact of life. This has to be distinguished from seeing ethnic diversity as a positive thing, in and of itself. The fact that half of the city was non-white was just another quirk of geography, like living in a frost hollow or being more exposed to a sou’wester. A majority of people are political only in a provisional sense and those of us who spend our time browsing the wilder corners of the internet, never mind reading The Mail or The Sun, are in a minority. The average man has political opinions, often very deeply held, but they are not central to his life and nor are they consistent. I have seen people simultaneously support gay pride parades, castrating paedophiles, renationalising railways, wind-power, Gurkha immigration, repatriating blacks and reintroducing corporal punishment.

IMPORTING WAR AND MISERY

by David Hamilton

An eerie, frightening expectancy pervades the air as if something terrible is going to happen. Obtuse and naïve people think 'migration' is finite, but it's an ongoing process with our replacement as the aim. This will not be painless yet governments encourage us to think so. We have a frightening future. On 22 August 1998, the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat quoted Omar Bakri: "I work here in accordance with the covenant of peace which I made with the British government when I got [political] asylum." This covenant allowed Muslim extremists to plan attacks abroad and develop terror networks here. In 1999 it was reported that each year around 2,000 Muslims were trained in Holy War at camps in Britain run by Bakri's organisation al-Muhajiroun.

In Birmingham and London trainees were taught hand-to-hand combat and survival skills. For military training they went to Yemen and Afghanistan. After the London bombings, The Times reported that "a dozen members" of Al-Muhajiroun "have taken part in suicide bombings or have become close to Al-Qaeda and its support network". In January 2007 Bakri revealed that Islamist extremists were infiltrating the police and other public sector organisations. The Daily Mail exposed eight members of al-Qaeda in the Metropolitan Police. How do our elites miss this? Or is it actually something they want?

ROGER SCRUTON ON WAGNER'S PHILOSOPHY

Roger Scruton on "Philosophical Conversations" discusses Wagner's view of the erotic with the rather fetching Sarah-Jane Leslie. Unlike Plato and Kant, who saw the erotic as that which united us with the beasts, Wagner saw it as that which distinguishes us from them, a quintessential feeling that liberates us from power and offers us redemption and transcendence of the self.