“More than a quarter of EU citizens are having their applications for permanent residency in the UK rejected since the UK voted to leave the EU, according to new analysis of the government’s migration data.” – Guardian Today, 28 Feb. (Meanwhile the number of EU citizen doctors planning to quit the NHS, of which they comprise 40%, is now 60%)
In order to apply for residency, EU citizens domiciled in Britain are forced to complete an 85-page form, complete with supporting evidence. Any error in the data results in an automatic letter requiring the citizen to return to their country of origin, despite the fact that EU citizens have the right to reside and work in any EU country. Many are in essential work.
One woman interviewed, a French citizen, had submitted her physical passport in evidence, only to have her application form rejected on another technicality. Her passport was returned as an officially certified copy had been taken. When she re-applied using the certified copy of her passport, she received a deportation notice as she had failed to submit her physical passport a second time. She has lived here for 20 years and has a British husband and British-born children. She speaks fluent English.
Twenty-eight per cent of forms are automatically rejected. I repeat, Britain has not yet left the EU. We are still subject to EU conditions. Free movement of people is one of the fundamental principles of EU membership.
Extreme euro-fascists are untroubled, even in denial. It’s not true people are being told to leave; are being targeted, victimised by Immigration officials. Of course EU citizens are free to remain. For now. Confronted with the thought that European countries might retaliate against Britain’s two million expatriates, most of them pensioners, the Tory euro-fascist baboons reply: no they won’t, as soon as they see we’re deporting their nationals the European surrender-monkeys will back off. We’re great, we’re Britain.
These people are efectively being held hostage by the unelected Prime Minister, who is directing the movements of her appointed triumvirate of castrated Brexit-donkeys, Wilson, Kepple and Doris. Happily, the House of Lords has demanded an amendment to the Article 50 bill guaranteeing the security of EU nationals. But it’s expected that the robotic Mrs May will try to get it overturned. She needs those hostages.
The problem with being a liberal snowflake is simply that we are basically cowards. If we had any guts we would arm ourselves and declare war on the fascists and destroy them like ants before it’s too late. But that goes against our principles. We believe in civil society; agreeable accommodations; amity between peoples.
It doesn’t go against theirs. Because they don’t have principles; only brutish instincts.
Which obliges us once again to wait until dehumanised minorities are clawing at the walls of gas chambers and tanks are rolling across the Centre Court at Wimbledon before we can feel free to fight back.
I can’t find an emoji for resigned despair.
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“Should he return, I fully expect Sir Mo will be placed in detention and then posted back to wherever the thuggish goons of Theresa’s immigration service decide he would be best left to rot.” – Ed.
It has to stop now
Many Posts ago I wrote a piece called Stirring the Jam Back Out of the Pudding.
It was in fact a review of a play, Arcadia, by Sir Tom Stoppard, a Czech refugee immigrant, in which I had taken a modest role. The plot, such as it is (it’s quite intellectual), linked the neoclassical revivalist world of aristocratic C19th Britain with the shallow fopperies of modern academia.
My thought was that once the currents of history had become intertwined, there was no way back. You could not, literally, stir the jam out of a semolina pudding once you had mixed it all in – although I recall Stephen Fry or someone doing something amazing with physics on TV, doing exactly that with water and some chemical dye he separated out, I forget how.
Allow me to explain what it is now, that has to stop.
Here’s a brief history of the world:
For millennia, humans have been migrating around the globe. Eleven – perhaps it was 16 – thousand years ago, Siberian tribespeople crossed the Bering Straight along the Aleutian islands from northeast Asia into what is now Alaska and spread southwards over the American plains into Mexico and across the Isthmus of Panama into South America. Many stopped on the way and founded pre-Columbian civilizations.
Humans had emerged, more than once, from the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia and driven by climate change spread northwards and eastwards to follow the hunting. Some were driven back by the advancing Arctic ice sheet, but thousands of years later returned to the northern lands as the ice retreated.
Those who moved eastwards into Anatolia and Sumeria began the seven thousand years of transhumance, of settled agriculture and technological development that have brought us to the modern era and the verge of extinction. Others founded the classical Mediterranean cultures.
Possibly in a separate evolution, a third eruption, forty thousand years ago humans left southeastern China and moved into Micronesia and on to Australia, where they were marginalised thousands of years later by brutal and arrogant white European settlers. Something similar happened in the Americas. Millions perished; cultures came close to vanishing.
Around the world the seas rose and fell, exposing and then isolating the land; the sun baked people brown, red, black; freezing winters turned people white.
But the intermingling continued at the margins.
Settled communities growing grain that could be stored for the winter had time on their hands; they began making stuff – pots, weapons, tools, jewellery, clothing, icons. At Dolní Věstonice in old Czechoslovakia are the early remains of a factory churning out ceramic ‘Venus’ figurines, as we call them: fetish objects, currency, souvenirs – we have no idea – thirty thousand years BCE.
The makers and their middlemen began trading in the surpluses. Trade depended on the endlesss, restless movement of peoples and goods across continents. Running for thousands of miles through mountains, across plains and along great rivers, trade routes opened up vast areas of the globe, chaining cities and their markets together.
Ports sprang up, customs flourished. Merchants settled and sold goods in one another’s capitals; sailors criss-crossed the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Baltic. Phoenicians from Carthage – black men – traded with tin miners in Cornwall; London traded furs for African diamonds with Volgograd. Empires arose, and as they expanded, kept stirring the human pudding.
Craftsmen were imported from everywhere to construct and decorate the grandiose buildings of military and religi0us empires for the glory of the rulers. Warfare and rapine spread genetic variation; conquered lands settled, moved and removed and scrambled-up entire populations.
And people intermarried.
After the first great era of modern mercantilism got under way, resource wars broke out – tentatively in the 9th and 10th centuries AD and into the early Medieval, then more fully in the C17th as people rushed hither and yon, desperately trying to grab a slice of the profit for themselves.
Millions of Europeans – some greedy, most just hungry – took ship for the New Worlds, seeking a better life for themselves, usually at the expense of the settled peoples who simply disappear from view, murdered, marginalised and miscegenated.
The transatlantic trade in slaves grew – the human power-plant of the early industrial and agrarian revolutions, inconsiderable by-products of commodity brokers – mixing Africans with Berbers with Europeans with native Caribs and Indians and Portuguese traders and London haut-bourgeoisie and Virginia plantation bosses – God-knows who, you can’t stop people from having sex.
While ethnic ‘purity’ persisted in pockets, indeed to this day the Welsh of mountainous North Wales are reported to be 85 per cent ethnically ‘pure’ Brythonic survivors of the Romans and the Normans and the detested English. Otherwise, miscegenation was the general rule over the entire world.
But some crazed ruler, some self-important baboon along the way had invented the idea of the ‘nation state’.
And thus it was on 25th February, 2017, that a grandmother, Irene Clennel, married to a British man and domiciled in Scotland for 27 years, a woman with a British native husband, two British children and a British grandchild, having been abducted on her return to the country by the State and held in a detention centre, was forcibly put on a plane to Singapore – her country of origin – because in the flint-cold eyes of some brain-dead bureaucratic cypher, an unperson I would be happy to pull a lever and watch twitching, a dope on a rope, the few years she had spent caring for her dying father in Singapore along the way disqualified her from having any right of residence in the UK; and her sick husband does not nowadays earn enough money to qualify to be allowed to keep her without imaginary State support.
(The Trades Union Congress has calculated that real wages in Britain have fallen by one per cent since the well-padded bankers got away almost literally with murder in 2008.)
The injustice and hypocrisy, the sheer malignant brutality of this indefensible, unChristian action in targeting this innocent woman for deportation and the heedless damage to her family it has caused defies belief. It is beyond words. It sears the soul.
It is, if such a thing can be isolated and focussed on the fate of one individual, a crime against humanity.
Last year we celebrated the life and mourned the passing of one David Jones, also known as Bowie. London-born, this globally famous ‘British’ rock star had lived for much of his life in Berlin and New York. Nobody kidnapped and imprisoned and deported Bowie or his family for the crime of living in the wrong country.
Wealthy Russians – Lebedev, the self-promoting millionaire owner of the London Evening Standard; Goncharenko, billionaire owner of £multi-million Mayfair properties left empty; Fridman, the ‘second richest man in Russia’, owner of £130 million Athlone House; Usmanov, who reportedly paid $77 million for Beechwood House in Highgate, north London and is busily building a Roman emperor-style pool complex underneath the tasteless Victorian excrescence; such men, their trophy wives, their well-armed goon squads and gardeners have no problem with their British residency status.
Up in Oregon, in a gated compound, lives with his British wife and children ‘Sir’ Mohammed Farah, world-famous distance runner, winner of many races, holder of many records and titles. This extraordinary athlete lives in America But he comes from war-ravaged Somalia. A black African Muslim, he celebrates his successes in the colours of Great Britain, he is honoured as a knight of the Queen’s realm. But he doesn’t live here in Britain.
Should he return, I fully expect that Sir Mo will be placed in detention and then posted back to wherever the thuggish goons of the British immigration service decide he would be best left to rot.
Anywhere but here.
And as the Trump deportations grind into gear, the ethnic cleansing of swathes of America, the hollowing-out of its labour force, the ‘military operation’, the ruthless removals by the gum-chewing moronic Border Force thugs to God knows where of eleven million people to make America ‘great again’, cowering behind its protective wall, white again (how long has it been white, Trump, you disgusting and pretentious old orange slug?), English-speaking, we hear of more and more of these cases of lunatic official intransigence at our supposedly civilized gateways.
We hear of academics on their way to conferences with no intention of remaining, and writers and much-needed technology industry workers turned back, their Green cards useless; even the former Prime Minister of Sweden, for having an Iranian stamp in his well-travelled passport; detained at the airport, grilled for two hours.
We hear of US citizens with darker complexions detained and questioned for hours for reasons of blind and untutored prejudice on the part of dumbfuck airport jobsworths; even small children, regarded as ‘terrorists’; of racial and cultural hate crimes increasingly perpetrated under licence from cynical and expedient ‘populist’ politicians, proxies and bum-boys for diseased billionaires hastening to suck-out the remaining wealth of the world in the last days of humanity, before the game ends.
While here in tolerant, liberal Britain, home of Democracy, Empire, Commonwealth and manifest hypocrisy, we learn today that within a month, workers from Europe, 26 miles across the English Channel, will no longer be allowed automatically to settle and work; although employers are already complaining of labour shortages and major infrastructure projects are in abeyance. While those already living here with jobs and families are offered no security as Mrs May instructs her three wise monkeys to use them as a negotiating tool against the 27.
A strange shift in human evolutionary history seems to have begun.
Try as one might, it is hard to imagine: but the great vomiting disease of nationalism is separating everyone back into their original forms, forcing us to return to our points and conditions of origin, to fester behind miles of razor-wire.
We hear the newly empowered nobodies saying: well, according to our identification chart you’re this colour, you have these genes, you have this accent, these clothes, these visa stamps in your passport; you prefer these foods, you follow this unacceptable minor variation in our perceptions of the imaginary Creator; you have these genetic predispositions to particular diseases and disorders, your hair and eyes are this colour, your nose we measure such a length, your penis has this bit on the end or not, we determine that your ancestors came from such-and-such a place, you’ve stolen my job, so back you go.
A vast and, frankly, futile quest to ‘stir the jam back out of the pudding’ is underway which, if taken to its logical but frankly risible conclusion, would see a complete reset of a hundred thousand years of human migration and miscegenation when, in truth, our origins are so obscure, complex and convoluted as to defy racial and topographical analysis.
It’s bonkers – but on an individual level, heartlessly destructive: pointless, economically self-defeating, mad and cruel.
It has to stop now.
Dogwhistle politics
From: Political editor Laura Facebook ©2017, @Laurasweeplace
Remember the name Roderick Chunn, of The Elliott School, Putney (a wealthy borough in SW London).
(Although you might care to note that it has not been The Elliott School – founded 1904 – since 2012, when it became known as The Ark Academy, under a Government scheme to rob public education of finance to pay US multinational corporations to run failing schools in the UK.)
For, there’s a petition trending on Change.org, that is approaching a quarter of a million signatures.
Clearly, a very serious issue of public concern. About education funding, possibly?
Actually, it’s about a pensioner, 87-year-old ‘Bob’, who rents a room in a care home in Carlisle, Cumbria, 316 miles from London, run by an outfit called Mead Medical.
Bob has a dog, a Schnauzer called, perhaps not politically correctly, Darkie, who has been his companion since his wife died from cancer two years ago. Bob has been in the home, Burnfoot Hall, for four years. The original lease from the local council gave him permission to have the dog, which is apparently well behaved and popular with the other residents, but the council has since privatised the operation, as I understand it, and the new landlords have given Bob an ultimatum: either the mutt goes, or you do.
Contrary to all other opinion I have seen on the petition, Mead Medical (‘Person-centred care’) have argued that Darkie is ‘a nuisance’. Now, I have a dog, Hunzi, and I could lay my hands on at least thirty witnesses before lunch who would tell you straight, Hunzi is no nuisance. In fact, their observation would be that he is astonishingly well behaved; quiet, patient and gentle. And here he is, snoozing at my feet.
But I live in constant fear of someone maliciously pointing a finger, or reporting him for some imaginary crime, in a situation where their own uncontrolled dog has committed, and not for the first time, some unexpected savagery for which Hunzi will be blamed.
It has almost happened once, when an elderly party I recognise from casual encounters on walks was bitten by another dog, whose owner subsequently lied to the police that he did not own a dog, so it must have been my dog, ‘ the man over the road’, Hunzi being of a similar appearance and breed. Only the victim had already told the police that he knew my dog and it was not him, and the police let the matter drop. At least, I was never interviewed.
And poor Hunzi, so innocent and guileless is he that he is constantly being snarled at or actually attacked on our walks by the kind of vicious dogs the cretins off the council estate like to parade in public to show how tiny their genitals must be. (Or nice, retired middle-class folk with demented spaniels…)
So I understand the power of an accusation: many people – especially our wonderful police – being all too ready at the drop of a hat to jump to conclusions and point the finger of blame wildly in all the wrong directions; there being never any ‘smoke without fire’ in a mainly working-class community where incomers are regarded with suspicion.
On 1st February ‘Bob’ received a formal notice to quit, for failing to comply with the new regulation. He is to be evicted in April. So far, Mead Medical has refused to show the slightest concern that a baying mob of two hundred and forty-four thousand petitioners would cheerfully march on Carlisle, burn down their offices and string up their company officers on piano wire from lampposts in the street.
Like Donald Trump, Katie Hopkins or Nigel Farage, the company’s directors appear to be impervious to, even to thrive on, popular hatred.
Below the details of the petition is a Comment thread. It starts out, as you would expect, with half a dozen messages of support and sympathy for ‘Bob’. Most people in Britain, I suspect, other than out-and-out Nazi scumbag trolls hoping to foment bloodshed, chaos and oppression are righteously angered by such displays of high-handed officialdom and random instances of injustice.
Not so, young Master Chunn.
The snotnosed cretin pretending to come from a no-longer extant school in a really posh riverside suburb of wealthy London town, Chunn has contributed a brief message consisting of just seven terrible words:
“They wouldn’t do it to an immigrant.”
And from that point on, virtually the entire Comment thread erupts into a furious tirade from ghastly old hags and trolls, obese football hooligans bound to their piss-stained, bargain-basement sofas, poisonous amoebas who can barely spell their own names, howling down anyone reasonably disposed to pointing out that the matter has nothing whatever to do with immigrants.
Master Chunn’s message has received as of the last time of looking, 112 Likes.
Where has this visceral, kneejerk hatred of ‘foreigners’ grown from? What is going on, when so many people are happy to wallow in the abusive meme that ‘foreigners’ somehow get a better deal in life than they do; and why should that be a cause of such loathing?
It’s being promoted, exploited and revelled in by politicians who see votes in it; and their shadowy corporate backers.
The loutish British are notorious for their admiration of ignorance and prejudice, disparaging but secretly envying anyone marginally worse off – or marginally better off than – or in any respect different from themselves. Everything that goes wrong in their petty lives has got to be someone else’s fault, everyone else is somehow getting a better deal, more favourable treatment – is ‘on the take’ or ‘only out for themselves’ – as if wallowing in one’s own ignorance and prejudice is not itself evidence of the selfish behaviour of the human piggery.
It is so easy to push their buttons.
I wish it were only the insular British underclass, with their eternal inferiority complex and pathetic clinging to myths of cultural superiority, victory and Empire. But just over the water, in Holland, where the ‘genetically pure’ British mostly originated, we have the vainglorious, bouffant-haired pretty-boy, Wilders, poised to achieve victory come election-time on a platform of exploiting the fear, prejudice and bile against darker-skinned Others of the deeply devout and conservative, red-faced Boers.
Fortunately, his neighbouring presidential candidate, Mme le Pen, who seems to share many of his super-nationalist views, or is at least equally willing to exploit the dark undercurrents of chauvinism and prejudice in the bourgeois French soul – the French, whose ancestors originated in both northern Europe, Roman Italy and moorish Spain – has just become embroiled in an expenses scandal that threatens to setback her own campaign for a racially and culturally ‘pure’ France, free from both the evils of Greater Europe and the Muslim plague.
If genuinely a pupil, which must be in doubt, young Master Chunn needs to be brought to the attention of his school, who should call in the Prevent programme de-radicalisation specialists before his stupid and childish racialism, his dimly educated irresponsibility becomes a habit of mind.
But that isn’t going to happen. Because only-ever Muslims are radicalised in the security obsessed, authoritarian hellhole of State surveillance and the interception of Orwellian thought-crimes this country has become.
Anyone else – it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where in the world the name Chunn has come from – is apparently now on the side of the angels.
Snow-white Christian angels, that is.
x
Dead letter days
Because she was born in Scotland in 1924 on an RAF base my mother, although half-Greek and half-English and living in London, always had a fantasy of being Scots and in the early 1960s opened an account with the Royal Bank of Scotland, to whose brand she remained loyal all her life.
When she died in December last year I rang the Bereavement office at the bank to ask them to close her account, only to be told they could find no record of her; although I had her most recent statement in my hand, showing an unaccustomed surplus of £474.66.
Reasoning nothing would happen over Christmas and New Year, I sent a death certificate to her branch on the 6th of January, asking them to make sure the account was closed. The certificate was returned to me a few days later with a letter from the Bereavement office saying someone would be in touch with me shortly.
When nothing arrived, I followed it up on the 21st of January with another letter to the branch, begging for confirmation that no more money was going out of the account. Nothing.
On the 24th of February a photocopy of the certificate arrived in the post, again from the Bereavement office, with a letter saying they had received it and someone would be in touch with me shortly. Three weeks later I had a closing statement: there was £90 in the account.
I’m not surprised these incompetent 73 per cent taxpayer-owned bailed-out wankers, once the biggest bank in the world, have lost a total of £58 BILLION since the crash of 2008, £7 billion of it last year alone.
The CEO should be arrested.
Instead of which, Mr Ross McEwan, an Australian – sorry, New Zealand – immigrant, is being paid an annual salary of £3.8 million.
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A Message from The Editor:
Hi. Bogl here. So great!
With only four days to go until the fifth anniversary of the first-ever edition of this, muh li’l bogl, for the first time I awoke this morning, a) feeling as if I had been transformed into a giant insect, and b) wondering whether Monday oughtn’t to be the day I finally stop doing this, since I still use grammar like: oughtn’t to, which modern linguists find not only quaint, but repulsive.
588 Posts ought to be enough for anyone; I’m not going to make it to the magic 600 before Monday, thus for the first time my numericism is in doubt; and when you consider that in recent months and years I have taken to producing multi-Posts, rambling omnibus editions of spleniferous political commentary running sometimes to five and six-thousand well-aimed words, my global word count is definitely well into the low tens of millions. So many words, so little effect, it’s unbelievable.
I have begun therefore to realise why it is that my Likers, Spammers, Followers, and Those No Longer Reading My Bogl invariably go on and on switching into just an annoyingly small handful of Posts I Posted more than four years ago; and are ignoring any more contemporaneous comment they might find instructive.
It is because they have realised how long it will otherwise take them to get to the end.
There are some Posts they lap up avidly: for instance, those about the ill-fated ‘Comex Two’ Commonwealth Youth Expedition to India, in 1967, on which I rashly ventured beyond my comfort zone into what sadly turned out to be the real world, articles mainly concerning the frisky relationship between Time and Memory; there is one about my seven years a slave, employed for £1.60 an hour as the Old Caretaker of a freezing ‘stately home’ in a windy Welsh valley, that seems inexplicably attractive to wishful-thinkers; there is the inconsiderable trifle masquerading as an encomium to apple crumble, and other pensées that are grateful to receive some scant attention.
That sort of thing goes on attracting viewers by the bucketload, averaging at least three a week. But anything mentioning my twin-track obsession with Brexit and Trump… Well, you are getting your fake news elsewhere and it seems hardly worth my while fulminating over the results of my adventures into the farther reaches of the US alt-left media or conning the wit and wisdom of Boris Fucking Johnson and Iain Cunting Smith, if you are just going to wallow in nostalgia for those early days before the End Times arrived.
Yesterday, for instance, as I toiled over The Pumpkin – Issue 7, all day my viewing figures hovered around the average: zero. By bedtime one reader had crept in late, unobserved. But this morning, unaccountably, the figure in the handy WordPress bar-chart had jumped up to 19, marking a record since records began the previous week; when on the Wednesday we achieved 25. (The all-time record is a Guinness-unattributable 47, set some time last October. That was when it occurred to me that GCHQ might be listening in.)
It is of course possible that these extra readers are illegal immigrants, whose viewings should not count.
Bringing up the rear, one person yesterday had actually viewed a Post I posted only a week ago, The Pumpkin – Issue 5, making it almost a contemporary piece. I was so overjoyed, to be honest, I went back and re-edited it, in case anyone else drops by. And in fact, it garnered a ‘most viewed the previous day’ award from WordPress, for which I made a silent speech thanking my old headmaster for putting me off the idea that I might ever enjoy a rewarding career.
But I am assured by one technically minded reader, muh gudfriend Professor Sir Roger d’ Boyle, that there may be more eyes on the internal workings of my journalistic brain than I might appreciate, via the DSS; viewers who by some means would not appear in the figures. I shall leave it to him yet again to explain how.
There is one other reason I am imagining abandoning my quest.
This, muh li’l laptop thing. It’s disintegrating, literally. One of the hinges holding the lid on has fallen to pieces, and there seems to be some connective mechanism inside the hinge that has become wildly displaced. This connects to the screen, which is floating free as the lid comes in two parts, at least it does now. And I dare not turn it off, ever, as when I have done recently it won’t wake up again, and I have to resort to various mystical passes and incantations, and it takes about 20 minutes to get to where I want to go; which is of course here.
Then indeed there is the problem of the vanishing lettering on the keys, that those of you who do try to keep up may have read about before. Despite more than thirty years in the field of high-pressure literary endeavours of all kinds, I have yet to learn to touch-type and can thus hardly sneer at Mr Trump for never having learned to read, or speak. Or, as you have just added, think. In this way my miskeying count continues to rise, doubling the editing time it takes to present a respectable text to the world.
Yesterday I ventured into the local branch of Curry’s where, after twenty minutes of bulling the shit with a bored salesboy, I heaved a sigh and made a choice from a range of about twenty-five identically boring machines. As we went through the rigmarole of purchasing the thing, however, when it became clear that a computer advertised at £629.99 would cost more like £999.99 once I had paid for all the extras to be able to actually use it, I was, I now realise, being saved by my Committee of Discarnate Entities from a rash fiscal error when the shop’s intranet ground to a halt and we were unable to complete the transaction that evening.
I have not been back, as promised.
I can’t face it, to be honest. All those passwords.
Leaving this and other compulsive internet-based practices behind me, becoming mindful, living toadly in the Now!, I reason, I could embark on a more fulfilling life, maximising the time available for struggling to piss, walking li’l Hunzi, selling my guitars and crawling into bed alone in the dark, which has become one of my favourite activities; as with sweaters, thick socks and a woolly hat on, a padded underblanket and two thick fleecy blankets atop the duvet, a couple of large nightcaps burning their way through my hiatus hernia, even in an unheated house in winter it’s so… I don’t know, cosy.
Anyway, I will bethink me, and let you know in due course.
In the meantime, I have to take a nap, sorry.
Bloody cats.
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But I can’t, can I?
Oh God, what is going on?
I’ve blogged already as have many others about the weird statements Trump made last weekend concerning Sweden, migrants and the non-events of the previous night, that did not in fact happen until two nights later.
His curious error made news all over the free world as the Swedish government puzzled over what exactly he was on about. His camp proposed that he had in fact been discussing the ‘crime rate’ in Sweden, a) an unlikely proposition, given that he has no interest in Sweden and did not use the words ‘crime rate’, and b) again alt-factual, as the crime rate has actually been going down since so many migrants arrived.
The mystery is now compounded by further weirdness upon weirdness, as revealed in – again – a Guardian report. (The Guardian was one of the news organisations denied a seat at the Spicer ‘gaggle’ briefing on Thursday.)
One of the very few journalists on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channels to dare to criticise the Orange President, Bill O’Reilly invited on his show to discuss the Swedish matter, two guests.
One was a Swedish news reporter, the other a man called Nils Bildt, billed as a ‘national security advisor’. But after the show, the Swedish defense ministry denied having any knowledge of or connection with Bildt, whose position in debate was virulently anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and who confirmed Trump’s inaccurate belief that migrant crime in Sweden is a national problem.
Surprise, surprise when AP trotted out the following info:
“Bildt is a founding member of a corporate geopolitical strategy and security consulting business with offices in Washington, Brussels and Tokyo, according to its website….
“Security experts in Sweden said he was not a familiar figure in their ranks in that country.
“He is in not in any way a known quantity in Sweden and has never been part of the Swedish debate,” Swedish Defence University leadership professor Robert Egnell said by email to The Associated Press on Saturday.”
Someone was being set up?
O’Reilly’s producers claim Bildt was foisted on them in the usual way, through their research team and its contacts. But it seems a stretch to imagine someone outside didn’t wangle him a seat in the studio. Whether to discredit O’Reilly, to massage the President (whose ego did seem somewhat bruised when his nonsense was pointed out), and to make him happy (he mostly watches Fox News and gets most of his policy announcements from them) or to simply further the alt-right cause among the Dumbfucks by putting in a ringer, we may never know.
But to this paranoid conspiracy theorist, there are numerous threads – fingers in the pie – running through this evolving tale of a globalised corporate coup in motion against liberal democracy (they are not by and large corporates whose brand-names anyone would recognise, by the way), where names crop up again and again in the context of semi-official skulduggery, that include one labelled Murdoch; owner of Fox.
And it would not be entirely bonkers, would it, to wonder about that mini-riot in Stockholm, and how conveniently it provided the fuel for rightwing commentators to justify Trump’s ‘post hoc, propter hoc’ assertion that migrants cause crime; justifying his policies of voter disenfranchisement and ethnic cleansing – with possibly worse to come – in the US.
The Boglington Post (Incorporating The Pumpkin) 