Category: Heroism

The Iron Lady

Heroism, History, Marxists, Politics

It’s been just over fifty years since Margaret Thatcher became BritPM, and ever since then the Left has been acting like rabid dogs towards her — once in power, doing what was necessary to reverse the tide of socialism that had essentially held Britain in its grasp since the post-WWII Attlee Labour Government and had led Britain right up to the edge of the abyss;  once out of power (stabbed in the back by the British Conservative Party’s equivalent of the RINO cabal in the U.S.), continuing to stab her over and over again;  and upon her death, vilifying her, spitting on her grave, rejoicing at her passing, and in general acting like the animals we all know they are and have always been.

So it’s been really good to see someone redressing the imbalance — in this case the brilliant publication TCW (The Conservative Woman) — in three fine articles, all written by Paul Horgan.  If you haven’t already seen them, go there now.

Fifty Years On:  Margaret Thatcher is still demonised by the left

If a lie is repeated long enough, it will become accepted by the less intellectually-endowed sections of the populace. We see this in the denial of the Holocaust. Some really awful people with a sick agenda know that their twisted beliefs are destroyed by accepting the truth of historic facts. So to further their immoral thinking, they will deny these events ever happened and were faked as part of some global conspiracy. The vindictively superstitious portions of our population will prefer the lie, especially after its repetition.
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Here in the UK we are experiencing a similar phenomenon over the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, which started 40 years ago last month. Rather than a conspiracy to lie over this, numerous people who are separately working towards the same goal realise that it is vital that they distort the Thatcher years. Those vulnerable to their propaganda are people too young to have lived through them, or to have lived through the years prior to Mrs Thatcher’s premiership when this country was known as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ whose government ran out of money and could not borrow any more from its usual creditors.

Fifty Years On:  The big lies about Mrs Thatcher

There are two main lies. The first is that Mrs Thatcher destroyed the ‘post-war consensus’. The second is that her policies devastated communities, particularly in the North of England. Both are false. Here I discuss the first lie.
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All Margaret Thatcher did was to take action based on the objective reality of the situation which was that a state-shackled economy needed liberation from the chaos that was causing the country to be ungovernable amidst accelerating economic collapse. All that is happening now is that the people who could not oppose her then are rewriting history now to brainwash anyone born after 1990.

Here I deal with the accusation that Thatcher’s policies devastated communities, when corporatist governance and incompetent planning were actually to blame.

The reform of the economy forms part of the second lie, accusing Thatcher of this devastation, particularly of those who depended on employment by state-run businesses. In fact, these communities were already devastated, and had been for years. The corporatist post-war consensus model was based on centralised economic planning, epitomised by the saying ‘the man from Whitehall knows best’. There had been calls for more central planning from the 1930s onwards by political and economic commentators and the planning started in earnest with the return of the Attlee government in 1945. It is therefore reasonable to believe that by the 1970s, whatever condition these state-dependent communities were in was as a direct consequence of state planning. However, it is clear that the planning did not include the contingency that these planned businesses on which the communities apparently utterly depended might not be able to sell to customers at a price the customers were willing to pay.

There was also the issue of the strikes, where customers, faced with unreliable supply, would take their business elsewhere. Working in an uneconomic coal-mine or loss-making steelworks was still hazardous and unpleasant, perhaps made more so by the lack of funds necessary to improve conditions, since all the money had to come from an increasingly-burdened taxpayer. The poor working men in these state businesses in this case were being subsidised to take part in a pointless, monotonous, and dangerous kind of work-based theme park, all according to a central plan made in Whitehall. It was a failure of state planning not to cater properly for change and innovation, but then all socialistic planning has that fault at its heart.

Fifty Years On:  Mrs Thatcher was polarising, not divisive

THE third big lie about Margaret Thatcher’s term in office is that she was a ‘divisive’ figure. This lie really started to be propagated in 2013 when it became the main narrative of the BBC and elsewhere after the Iron Lady died. What these media outlets probably meant was not ‘divisive’ but ‘polarising’. Margaret Thatcher presented a stark choice between consensus socialism and reformist capitalism. The voters chose the latter in decisive numbers in four General Elections. Despite unemployment, inflation and the miners’ strike, Britain still kept voting Conservative, keeping the party in power for a record-breaking 18 years.
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If Margaret Thatcher had been divisive, the response of her opponents would surely have been to form a ‘popular front’, where differences amongst themselves would be forgotten in an anti-Conservative electoral alliance. In fact the precise reverse happened.

The excerpts above do not really do the articles justice;  they are there merely to whet your appetite.

Why did I do this?  Why talk about some long-dead British politician?  Just to remind everyone that Shakespeare was right:  “the evil that men do lives after them;  the good is oft interred with their bones.”

In Margaret Thatcher’s case, the good — the truth of the matter — is that she almost single-handedly saved Britain from ruin.  The “evil” is in fact how the Left has demonized her, and that evil does indeed live after her.

Tommy’s Tale

Heroism

Anything produced by Jordan Peterson is worth watching.  His interview of Tommy Robinson, the bête noire  of British politics is very much more than that.

As Cathy Gyngell says of Robinson:

It also made me think of the many far more sullied characters on our political stage who have got away with it, and never been subjected to the across-the-board branding, silencing and curtailment of freedom he has been treated to. No epithet has stuck more effectively than those words thug, racist and far right have to him. You have to look quite far to find someone to whom you mention his name who doesn’t judge him so, who doesn’t assume he is the hooligan the press have told us he is, who doesn’t call him an idiot or simply display the distaste they feel for him on their faces. But ask those with these attitudes what they actually know about him and whether they have any idea of his story, and what his ‘beef’ is actually about they go quiet. They have no idea. Their judgement, as was mine in the past, is an unthinking one – based purely and simply on how the MSM cast him, and the fact he is actually working-class (unlike the elite politicians like Starmer so desperate to claim this background). This is a ‘tarring’ that is so universally accepted that anyone defending him in any way also risks being so tarred and outcast.

Of course no one ever sees him interviewed by the mainstream UK press or broadcasters: he is never allowed to defend himself, let alone be asked to tell his story. So there is nothing and no one to challenge the official Tommy characterisation as a law-breaker, inciter, thug or crook. Any out-of-context ‘angry monologue’ clips that people may have seen confirm their prejudice. It’s only when you hear his whole 20-year story that you start to understand it and empathise and are horrified by the cover-up. And understand his anger. There is such a thing as righteous indignation, and that without doubt is what Tommy feels.

The more the elite authorities want to suppress him, the more people like me want to know more about him.

And this was before the recent riots in the U.K.

This interview is quite possibly the most important insight into how the news is being shaped that I’ve ever seen.  Ignore that it’s primarily about a “racist” attack that took place in Britishland, because it concerns all of the news we’re being fed.

And by the way, if you start to feel the burn of anger when Robinson describes the fate of the hapless family, then you may begin to understand the background to the Stockport riots.

Out Of The Past

Heroism, Military

Longtime Readers will remember that many years ago, I attended Boomershoot with the Son&Heir, and took the 2-day training course delivered by Gene Econ and two kids from the unit he was training, Adam Plumendore and Walter Gaya.  As a result of that meeting, we (I plus my Readers) kind of “adopted” Adam and Walt, and when they told me they needed some gear (scopes and rangefinders) for their upcoming deployment, we raised the money and bought them the gear.  (As I recall, it took about three days to raise the $25,000-odd, because as I’ve said before, I have the best Readers on the Internet,)

Anyway, the kids went off to Iraq.  Two months later we heard that Adam had been killed by an IED, and Walt had been badly wounded in a different engagement.

I told you all that so I could tell you this.  Walt and Adam’s CO at the time was Col. Erik Kurilla, a man of incredible bravery and outstanding leadership.  He himself was wounded in Iraq (shot three times in the legs when ambushed by some assholes in, I think Mosul).

It will therefore come as no surprise to anyone when I tell you that Colonel Erik Kurilla is now General (4-star) Erik Kurilla.  You can learn all about him here.  It makes for some interesting reading.  Just the other units he’s since commanded makes me quite awestruck, but I bet he left them better than how he found them.  He’s that kind of man.

I had a chance to chat with him once, some time after Adam was killed, and when by way of introduction I told him how I’d met Adam and Walt, and about the gear we’d contributed, his immediate response was “Oh, I know all about you, Kim, and your group, and how you helped us.”

He was not then, and I doubt very much whether he would ever be one of those remote, office-bound types who doesn’t take care of his men.  With men like him in the Army, there may still be some hope for our future.

I feel extraordinarily privileged to have known him, even as slight as that acquaintance may have been.

Good Question

Heroism

Reader Preussenotto asks the important question:  “Has Nigel Farage displaced Jeremy Clarkson as the Greatest Living Englishman?”

Now that is a tough one to answer.  Both men love guns and love their pints.

Both men drive Range Rovers, so that’s a tie.  But Farage’s other car is a Volvo (ugh):

…whereas Clarkson has an Alfa Romeo GTV6:


…and that’s just on his farm.

Both shag sexy girlfriends — okay, Jezza’s chick is skinny and Irish, while Our Nige’s squeeze is French and not skinny;  but nobody’s perfect.


…and yes I know:  both men can be said to enjoy slipping into a Ferrari.

But Clarkson did not support Brexit at the time (most likely because his EU farm subsidy money would — and did — disappear), whereas Farage…

And both men have terrible teeth, but then they’re British.

Like I said, it’s a tough call.

Close, But No Cigar

Good Stuff, Heroism

Reader Mike L. asks me whether this incident is worthy of being classified as a Righteous Shooting.

It nearly is, Mike, except for this part:

The break-in attempt did not go as planned. The owner, Gordon Richard Sr., 75, used a muzzleloader rifle to shoot one of the three men, causing the other two to flee. He then secured himself inside the home and called the police.

State police say the man who was shot was 39-year-old Paul E. Brown of Milton and St. Albans, he was seriously injured.

When police arrived, the other two intruders had fled. The police report states, “Responding troopers located Brown in a neighbor’s yard. No other individuals were found at the scene. Brown was transported by ambulance to Northwestern Medical Center in St. Albans and later transferred to the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, where he was listed in critical condition Wednesday afternoon.”

You all know the rules:  no dead goblin, no Righteous Shooting.

But Our Hero deserves a huge “Attaboy” from all of us for using a muzzleloader to send the “Leave Me Alone” message to the would-be property redistrubutionist.

Oh, and Mike?  Let me know if the goblin snuffs it, so I can upgrade the award from Armed Good Guy to Righteous Shooter.

Inspiring

Good Stuff, Heroism, Resistance

I have often scoffed at people who build or live in houses located in a flood plain (or at least a place prone to occasional floods — not the same thing).  But here’s a story of a guy who did:

Nick Lupton, 60, and his wife Anne, 50, live in a converted 17th century house on the banks of the River Severn.  Since they moved into the four-bedroom detached property in Pixham, Worcestershire in 2016, the house and one-acre of land has been flooded 11 times.

But instead of weeping and wailing when his house was repeatedly underwater, he said, “Fuck this!”  and did something about it.

The couple became so fed up with the costly clear-ups, they decided to surround the entire property with a 7ft-high flood defence.  They spent four months constructing the brick barrier before finally finishing it last October – just weeks before Storm Henk swept Britain.

Here’s before:

And after:

The house itself?  Dry as a bone.  Read the whole story;  it’s excellent.  With more people like this, the Brits would still have an empire.

Of course, this being Britishland, when the flood waters go down the local council will doubtless tell him to tear the wall down because it ruins the character of the 17th-century house, or something.

But let me not be so cynical.