Michael Blackburn: ‘It’s probably worth remembering that the Bros are partly responsible for Mubarak coming to power in the first place. He replaced Sadat, who was assassinated in 1979 – by members of an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. And what was Sadat’s great sin? That’s another element the media have been happy not to talk about very much: Israel. Sadat made a peace treaty with Israel, and thus, placed him in the antechamber of perdition.’
Michel Blackburn: ‘Politicians and educators have been at pains (not without reason) to acquaint us with the horror of war through poets such as Sassoon and Owen, but they have tended to leave out other equally important elements. Most soldiers, for example, despite the unspeakable misery of the war, believed they were fighting for a worthwhile cause. The closeness between officers and men began to break down the class divisions of British society. The sons of the ruling classes, when the call came, took their their place on the fire-step, and with pistol in hand, went over the top ahead of their men.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘I don’t count myself among the Philistines and have no desire to see art schools closed, but if this is the best that they can do to justify their existence to the outside world then they’re doomed. Most parents would not be happy if they knew their children were going off to college just to get a three-year course in Marxist indoctrination.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘How on earth do you measure something such as equality or “wellbeing” or happiness? Does it really make a difference if some actions are right-brain or left-brain or is the whole concept bunkum? Neuroscience is the new phrenology. All our social and political problems will be solved by the right application of its discoveries if you believe these shysters.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘The media have been keen to talk up fear of a backlash against Muslims and Islamic groups have enjoyed playing the Islamophobia card, despite the fact that real revenge attacks, sparse as they have been, have actually dropped since the Woolwich murder. Unfortunately, the British people, it seems, just haven’t been able to rouse themselves into sufficient vengefulness to do anything. How disappointing for the media.’
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Michael Blackburn: ‘On the way I was going to take half a dozen bags of garden waste to the town dump. Apart from the fact that some of the black bin bags holding the waste were so thin they tore as soon as I picked them up, some of the cuttings were so old they‘d started to liquefy. In other words they were turning into a type of silage, and silage, in case you didn’t know, stinks most rankly.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘I have to admit that when I began Ms Bennett’s (55) piece I was confused. I truly thought it was a spoof. Can anyone really be this offensive about old people? Especially those who’d grown up during and after the war against fascism; the people who built the Welfare State? Those white-haired dears dying of hypothermia every winter or starving to death in NHS beds?
Apparently yes. Ms Bennett (55) may as well have said not only do they hate blacks, gays and women but they also stink of cigarettes and piss.’
Michael Blackburn: Like a Muslim permitted by taqiyya to lie about his true beliefs and intentions, so you are permitted to prevaricate about the purpose of the project. That’s another reason we have grown to hate the EU in Britain: we know we were lied to when we joined. It’s not a fantasy, it’s a fact that can be clearly demonstrated from the official documents. We were told we were joining an economic free trade community, not being suckered into eventual unification into a single state.
Michael Blackburn: ‘It just happens that many of the books proposed are not just grown-up but “old” and “old” is always categorised as bad by certain people, even some who want youngsters to develop the reading habit. ‘
Michael Blackburn: ‘This Snooper’s Charter, which received no attention whatsoever in the UK media, was “transposed”, i.e. incorporated into English law in 2009. Thus we are already being snooped on. Both the Labour government’s planned database and the Coalition’s are merely expensive add-ons to what already exists.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘This is where Thatcher and her colleagues failed: totally, dismally, catastrophically. They allowed Political Correctness and its corruption of the language to enter the culture, mainly at local level, and it has proliferated ever since. The leftist ideologues and educationists poisoned the country from inside and the EU poisoned it from outside. Now we are all made to suffer from the hysterical hypersensitivity it creates and the institutional bullying employed to enforce it.’
Michael Blackburn: The same words and phrases kept rising up and floating away like untethered balloons: young people and police “relating”, finding “views” and “needs”, “communicating”, “interacting” and making “connections”. This is no more than the slop of cod psychology dished up as serious social policy.
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Michael Blackburn: ‘Community’ is a toxic solvent that destroys both society and the individual. It’s the atomisation of a nation. It’s a means of destroying the concept of society while pretending to care about it. It’s the operation of a very old, well-tried political tactic: divide and rule. Dissolve society and you have nothing left but the state.’
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Michael Blackburn: ‘You would normally assume that failing to learn any facts is the same as being ignorant, and the purpose of education is to eradicate ignorance. But there’s the core of modern progressive education for you: ignorance is knowledge. And quite how you can interpret anything from evidence when evidence is fact-free I don’t know. Perhaps that’s a skill teachers learn at training college.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘ the phrase “aspiration nation” makes me think of a body in terminal decline, enduring painful interventions for only short-term relief. There’s no need to labour the metaphor. As far as the country’s concerned all we know is that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. We just don’t know how much worse.’
