"There happened a great contretemps this afternoon. I was to be at home to receive visitors; so Lady Harriet and I sat in state, and nobody came! At five D. returned home, and I said to him,' Not a single soul has come to see us.' Tea came in, and he asked, 'Has nobody called?' 'Oh, yes,' said the servant…”
~ My Canadian Journal 1872-8, by the Marchioness of Dufferin & Ava, 1891
One evening at supper, mom and I had a nice chat about literature. She had written her Ph.D. thesis on Henry Green and had taught English literature for many years before retiring. We had previously discussed, I recall, the lack of Charles Dickens in the house. Dickens was not amongst my mom’s favourites. Many years later I found a single worn copy of The Old Curiosity Shop banished to the basement built-in bookcase with other rarely seen and less desired items.
Some of the authors we discussed included the Brontë sisters, whose books were also scarce in her home. Another name that came up was Jane Austen. Mom didn’t really like any of them. When I asked, her response was, “Tea came in. If the presence of a servant was mentioned, they were often not named. I find that kind of writing absurd. Someone brought in the tea, and had a life, and a story.” Mom was egalitarian in her outlook.
When I was a child in that same house, there was a middle-aged black lady who came over. I regret that I’m unable to fetch forth her name, but I do remember mom always referred to her as “our cleaning lady,” and as “Mrs. Varney,” though I am confident that wasn’t her last name. Similarly my mom and dad referred to the gentleman who came by twice a week to empty the outdoor garbage pails as “Mr. Simpson.” He and I met frequently because once I arrived at the age of six, my dad paid me a penny a week allowance and my chore was to go around the house with one of the bigger indoor garbage cans and collect the garbage into its plastic liner, then get that out to the outdoor pails. And secure the lid! So raccoons and possums didn’t get in.
Is that fancy, having a lady and a gentleman attending our household needs? Not especially. It was a dignity, to reflect that a woman is no less a lady because she works for a living. Nor did the humble origins of the garbage man prevent him from being a gentleman. Dignity and respect are worthwhile, and people are worthy of these things. Your life is improved by the respect you offer those around you, and you may be delighted by the extent to which goodness and conviviality are reciprocated.
There were a great many things wrong with Victorian society, and in the fullness of time a catalogue might be drawn up to list them out. One might provide cautionary tales about each one. Something happened in Europe in 1914 that was unlike things seen there since the 1648 peace of Westphalia. Order, good manners, decency, and honour were thrown away, by the British government. They were replaced with blood, mangled bodies, gas attacked survivors coughing blood, and decades of war. To a great extent the “first” world war was brought about deliberately and with malice by the British government and is still being fought, primarily by them through proxies.
Forever War
When the ugly and disgusting Boris Johnson was still prime minister in the fourth month of 2022, he visited Ukraine for the express purpose of preventing peace. He wanted more Ukrainians to die horribly on the battlefields of that war. He wanted to personally profit from his investments in war-related industries. He wanted to slather the blood of his victims on his chin.
There are people involved in the British government. I don’t believe they serve the peoples of England, Wales, Scotland, nor Northern Ireland, nor the dominion of Canada, nor any of the commonwealth countries. These evil men and women serve demons, the Venetian dark nobility, themselves, and cretins such as Upchuck the Third, usurper of the house of Hanover. Everyone at all levels of gooferment are masquerading as elected and appointed officials but are contemptuous of the people they have disarmed (not only of guns, but knives, garden shears, and cooking utensils). They don’t give a fig for the consent of the governed, all of whom are slaves or, at best, menial servants to be ordered about and beaten relentlessly.
Recently someone asked about the plans of the Irish government for the people of Ireland, in the context of an official Irish Labour party post to the effect that immigrants were to be provided free new built homes by the current government at taxpayer expense. I replied that Labour believes in a working Ireland, and had jobs for grave diggers, coffin makers, and tombstone monument chiselers (and those in government are all chiselers) to make resting places for the current inhabitants of the country. It is like that in England and the rest of Europe. The people who style themselves elite always put on airs and pretend they are better than anyone else, but they are the worst filth, the most disgusting scum, the kind of people who soil others merely by appearing at some remove. They are, to use an old word, “effete” meaning having exhausted their usefulness.
No one who aspires to government office is any good. The entire character of lying, thieving, conniving, cheating, corrupting, raping, torturing, abusing, and murdering which is the nature of those in power in government is essential to their success. There are a few people who are largely excluded from power but who attend to government as though it could be reformed or ameliorated, such as Ron Paul (for whom I voted in 1988 and for whom I worked in 2007-8 and 2011-12 as a volunteer), but these are exceptional individuals who know full well the nature of what they are around. (Ron had in his congressional office a sign “Don’t steal. The government hates competition.” He knows.)
To say that I blame the British government for world war “one” is in no way to exonerate or exculpate the Russian, German, Italian, Austro-Hungarian, Belgian, Dutch, and other governments of that era. I can point to atrocities by the British, including the instigation of “strategic” and deliberate bombardment of civilian populations by aircraft, and in no way indicate that the Germans get a free pass for their similar works. The British espionage agencies worked feverishly to instigate the “second” world war and many other conflicts.
Why all these wars? I’ve looked very closely at the matter. You might want to buy a copy of Michael Flynn’s book In the Country of the Blind or see if you can find his “Introduction to Cliology” essay included in the back of the paperback copy of that book that I still own in storage in Ohio. In it he points out that the pattern of wars on Earth over the last 500 years fits a Poisson distribution indicating a single cause. What is that cause? Flynn doesn’t choose to say, but it is profit. It is profit for the people who drink the blood of men, women, and children all over the world, who take tax money and use it to make murder weapons for the express purpose of ending the lives of other people for profit.
No doubt the chief executive, financial, information, political, technology, and marketing officers of major companies that build bombs and artillery shells are able to sleep at night, from time to time. But in order to do so, they are necessarily unwilling to see the people whose bodies are torn apart for the purpose of their profits as human. They are, to quote an acquaintance in the aerospace industry, persons destined to be servants. Jefferson wrote of the affectation that some are to be saddled and ridden by those fit for ruling others. I don’t believe any soul is created for either purpose, neither for the purpose of serving nor for the purpose of ruling.
There is a word in your lexicon that is widely abused, including in dictionaries. It is the word “anarchy” and it refers to self-rule, to the absence of imposed rulers, to the absence of “archon” or ruler. If you think you are going to vote your way to freedom, you’re a fool. None of the people who you vote for are interested in your success, and none of them are able to move the massive inertia of the existing system from its current course. If you think you are going to slaughter your way to freedom, you are also badly mistaken. The people who are most responsible for and who profit most disgustingly from the existing system are far beyond your reach. You should govern yourself and not delegate your power, nor should you seek to seize power.
What to do?
You might well ask, given all these considerations, what do I think people should do, now, in the face of the perfidy of the fbi, cia, dea, batfesfd, dhs, epa, osha, nasa, and other alphabetic conglomerations. I do say you should govern yourself. I’ve said it in a number of essays, in differing ways, and with the emphasis on various points. You should get together with people in your county. You should promulgate a search and rescue group, and actively search for human traffickers and their victims. You should do what you can to make your home and family safe, not only by preparing for eventualities, but by being familiar with the people who live around you, those who will help in a difficult situation, and those who won’t.
Have you considered issuing your own money? You would be unlikely to do a worse job than the governments around you. As long as you are willing to redeem “coupons” for the things and services you offer in exchange, you are not prevented by law from creating and distributing “gift cards” and other systems of monetary redemption. I wrote about it at considerable length.
Free market money
The truth is indeed that legal tender is simply a legal device to force people to accept in fulfilment of a contract something they never intended when they made the contract. It becomes thus, in certain circumstances, a factor that intensifies the uncertainty of dealings and consists, as Lord Farrer also remarked in the same context, 'in substituting f…
These are things you might think about, talk about, write about, and consider. See how it goes doing some of them.
Stay Alive
You want to be around next year. Things are going to be quite a bit different. Don’t get depressed, please. Pray for guidance from God. Remember that the people who gravitate toward power are doing you a favour by being in the state capital, the county seat, or the national capital. They are setting themselves apart, where you can avoid them. Don’t go to those places, even in the vanguard of a ten thousand man army. It won’t go the way you expect. And when the air clears you may find that the men who spurred you on sit in judgement of your wrongs, decide and let the shotgun sing the song.
There is time for a little while yet. Repent your sins. Read the Gospels. If you believe, be baptised. If you are baptised, baptise those who seek salvation, in water and in the Holy Spirit. God provides. Praise God. Amen.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.
"Jefferson wrote of the affectation that some are to be saddled and ridden by those fit for ruling others."
—I learned a couple of years back that Jefferson ripped that from Col. Richard Rumbold, who used the booted and spurred metaphor in something he wrote right before his execution. By the state. For opposing the state. Naturally.
"We can say that this divine principle of subsidiarity is the very spirit of gentlemanliness. A gentleman doesn’t take from the hands of his subordinates what they can do on their own. He trusts them to do what they can do—and refrains from doing it himself. A gentleman relies on his gentleman’s gentleman to look after his dinner jacket and give him a last brushstroke before he enters the dining room. (By the way, the very term for a valet, “gentleman’s gentleman,” is itself fraught with meaning and furnishes us with a precious hunch: The valet is a gentleman, too.) The contrary of this attitude of gentlemanly trust is well expressed by the German language: Besserwisserei, or “You won’t do that properly, I’ll do that for you.” As a doctrine of providence, this sort of compulsive interference is exactly wrong. God is not meddlesome."
From https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/02/god-as-a-gentleman