Hamburgers and coke, yes you already knew
But do you also know the cause of the general decay?
Short-sighted thinking, loud talking
Sticking to one-liners forever
Down with America! Down with the jerks from America
Down with America! [...]

Down with American colonialism
Down with that ugly, biting English
All the Anglo-Saxon pretence, arrogance
Yes, a hot pick up their ass
And that is that [...]

I am from the Belgian, the European panel
And I ask you: “Clear my channel! Clear my channel!”
Megalomaniac unicellular idiots
Kiss my ass, yes, kiss my balls

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The original director of The Wicker Man has called in his lawyers to have his name taken off promotional material for the $40m movie even before lead star Nicolas Cage has finished filming. [...]

In the original, Christopher Lee played Lord Summerisle, head of a pagan community on a remote Scottish island where locals resort to human sacrifice when the crops fail. [...]

The original Wicker Man was firmly rooted in Scotland. Hardy and Shaffer carried out extensive research on pagan rituals and were fascinated by references to a giant wicker man, in which Druids supposedly burned prisoners (though this may have been Roman propaganda).

They freely mixed folklore and music from different parts of Britain, but chose Scotland as the setting because of its history of fundamentalist religious sects and remote communities. The film combined locations all over Galloway with footage from Culzean Castle in Ayrshire and Plockton in Wester Ross, and aerial shots of Skye.

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John Skelton lived from the 1460s until 1529. He came after Geoffrey Chaucer and Sir Thomas Mallory. He preceded Spenser and Shakespeare. He was a young man when Mallory’s “Le Mort d’Arthur” was published, and he was old when Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia” came out.

Like most rap artists, John Skelton did not have a glamorous background. Nothing is known about him prior to when he began studying at Oxford University in the early 1480’s. There he was awarded the title “poet laureate”, which would be the equivalent of a modern day doctorate of poetry. He soon became famous for his rhetoric, his satiric flair and his translations. In 1488 he joined the court of Henry VII, and was the official royal poet for most of the next 40 years. [...]

Skelton had invented a new style of poetry. Typically they were rapid two or three-stressed lines with frequent alliteration and a single-rhyme pattern repeated for as long as the poet pleases. His style was later dubbed the Skeltonic meter.

As an example here’s the second stanza of The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng, about an ugly old hag who ran a brewery:

Her lothely lere

Is nothynge clere,

But ugly of chere,

Droupy and drowsy,

Scurvy and lowsy;

Her face all bowsy,

Comely crynkled,

Woundersly wrynkled,

Lyke a rost pygges eare,

Brystled wyth here.

Which is not unlike how modern rap artists describe their women…

Incidentally the first line of the poem is: Tell you I chill, a rapper declaration if I’ve ever heard one.

The common folk were often the theme of his poetry – he used more colloquial English and vulgar terms than Robert Burns.

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Far from being an ambitious entertainer who played down his Catholic roots under a repressive Elizabethan regime, Shakespeare took deliberate risks each time he took up his quill, according to Clare Asquith’s new book Shadowplay. She argues that the plays and poems are a network of crossword puzzle-like clues to his strong Catholic beliefs and his fears for England’s future. Aside from being the first to spot this daring Shakespearean code, Asquith also claims to be the first to have cracked it. [...]

As a result the Catholic resistance, which had been going for 70 years by the time Shakespeare was writing, had already developed its own secret code words; a subversive communication system which the playwright developed further in his work. ‘They inevitably had a hidden language, and Shakespeare used it rather like the composer Shostakovich used political codes in the 20th century,’ she said.

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Again and again the lyrics of Bushido and his gangsta rapper homies openly flirt with fascism. “Salutiert, steht stramm, Ich bin der Leader wie A,” (Salute, stand to attention, I am the leader like ‘A’), raps Bushido. The ‘A’, of course, stands for Adolf. A rap collective called Mor were heavily criticised for rapping lyrics where ” Wack MCs” were sent to the “gas showers” and “children to the concentration camps.”

Fler, 24, another Berlin bad boy went one further. His latest hit, ” Neue Deutsche Welle” (New German Wave) which went gold within two weeks of its release, features the ultra nationalistic lyrics: “That is black, red, gold, hard and proud, you might not see it in me, but believe me, my mom (sic) is German”. The CD was advertised with an adapted pre-Polish invasion Adolf Hitler quote: “From May 1st, we will shoot back”. His name on the CD cover was written in Third Reich style gothic print. The video to “Neue Deutsche Welle”, constantly played on Germany’s rolling music channels is set in a deprived high-rise East Berlin estate and features German flag waving, a complete taboo, as well as the ultimate Nazi symbol,an eagle, landing on the rapper’s shoulder. The video’s director said he would have liked to have lots of skinheads march through the estate with Fler, but worried, “that it might have pushed us into a bit of a corner.” But Fler wasn’t done with his neo-Nazi antics. Rumours flew recently that he had called his producer, DJ Ilan a ” money grabbing Jewish pig.” Germany’s newspapers were outraged, but Fler didn’t bother to deny it. Germany’s far-right party, The NPD has even recommended “Neue Deutsche Welle” to party members.

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The Winter of Constantinople

A nasty Politically Correct article accusing the great Gilbert of “unsavoury xenophobia”, among other things…

Far from being an outcrop of Tory thinking, Chesterton’s idea of England’s “secret people” originated as part of this dispute within Edwardian socialism and the radical Liberalism of that time. Chesterton and Belloc came to be known as “Distributists”, arguing, against both monopoly capitalism and state socialism, that property and ownership of the “means of production” should be as widely spread as possible. Their vision was variously shaped by Catholicism, anarchism, Chartism, and also the decentralising thought of guild socialism, a movement that followed William Morris and John Ruskin in finding inspiration in the craft guilds of the medieval age. Their beleaguered “England” was on the side of the people against industrialism, monopoly capitalism and the rules and bureaucrats of what Belloc called “the servile state”. Chesterton and Belloc would join the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in seeking to preserve traditional “thatched” roofs against the big businesses that could spend fortunes pushing synthetic alternatives. Yet if theirs was emphatically a “little England”, this was also because it entailed a strong rejection of British imperialism.

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‘Cool Croatia’
by Tomislav Sunic
PRICE: £5 / $7 (INCLUDING POSTAGE)
This book contains a collection of excellent articles taken from ‘Chronicles’ magazine, dealing with issues such as Maastricht and the EU, political correctness, Croatia, globalisation, communism, liberalism
and the Right. Highly recommended.

‘Titoism And Dissidence’
by Tomislav Sunic
PRICE: £7 / $10 (INCLUDING POSTAGE)
The author examines the myth of Yugoslavia and multicultural pathology, looking at the rise of Tito, the war, the communist persecution of the Church, Milovan Djilas, Croatian terrorism, the Albanian question and much much more.

‘Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right’
by Tomislav Sunic
PRICE: £17 / $20 (INCLUDING POSTAGE)
Coupled with the January 2005 launch of the New Right in the British Isles, the republication of Tomislav Sunic’s popular and erudite work is very timely indeed. The author has written a superb introduction to the counter-intellectual history of our Continent. By mapping out the main personalities and strategies that characterise not simply the revolutionary conservative strands that arose during the first part of the the twentieth century, but also the development of the New Right itself from the mid-1970s onwards, Sunic has provided us with a concise and easily-digestible handbook for the challenges that lie ahead of us in the present climate of global American hegemony. In short, this book represents a textual arsenal for
The coming battle of minds.

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The most distinctive and significant alliance between Marinetti and Nevinson was in the joint declaration of ‘A Futurist Manifesto: Vital English Art’, in early June 1914. The document began in typically polemic mode:

I am an Italian Futurist poet, and a passionate admirer of England. I wish however, to cure English Art of that most grave of all maladies – passe-ism. I have the right to speak plainly and without compromise, and together with my friend Nevinson, an English Futurist painter, to give the signal for battle.

It then went on to attack: worship of tradition, effeminacy, decorativeness, sentimentality, snobs, the New English Art Club, the King, sham revolutionaries, indifference, the ‘right of the ignorant to discuss…Art’, passeiest filth and the ‘mania for immortality’. Instead it demanded an ‘English Art which would be strong, virile and anti-sentimental’ and lobbied for the inclusion of optimism, heroism, creativity, excitement, genius, courage, and pioneering spirit, to save English art. It concluded: ‘So we call upon the English public to support, defend, and glorify the genius of the great Futurist painters or pioneers and advance forces of Vital English Art

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