With the consciousness that they are being hunted by women who would take sexual delight in dismembering them…

To clarify the dilemma women have about sexual enthusiasm for men, it is helpful to contrast it with men’s situation. It is unlikely in the extreme that men will have experienced actual sexual violence from women or its threat. Men do not live in cultures where the degradation and brutalisation of men at the hands of women is the stuff of pornography, entertainment and advertising. Men do not live with the consciousness that they are being hunted by women who would take sexual delight in dismembering them simply on account of their gender. They do not live in a society in which their degradation through sex is the dominant theme of the culture. They do not have to approach women sexually in fear or with distressing images or associations with their own oppression. The images they are likely to carry with them are those of women degraded and brutalised by men. In fact they are likely to have practised sexual arousal with such images, extensively, through pornography and fantasy. It is not surprising, then, that sexologists have identified women’s ‘inhibition’ as the main sexual problem of this century. They have identified as healthy sexual feelings those which the male ruling class experiences and have chosen to avoid recognising the political reasons why women might feel differently.

Sheila Jeffreys – Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

their fate was commonly the same…

Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same. A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike lead to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.

Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

A pagan religious festival…

Many folklore customs have their roots planted firmly back in the Dark Ages, when the ancient Celts had divided their year by four major festivals. Beltane or ‘the fire of Bel’, had particular significance to the Celts as it represented the first day of summer and was celebrated with bonfires to welcome in the new season. Still celebrated today, we perhaps know Beltane better as May 1st, or May Day.

Down through the centuries May Day has been associated with fun, revelry and perhaps most important of all, fertility. The Day would be marked with village folk cavorting round the maypole, the selection of the May Queen and the dancing figure of the Jack-in-the-Green at the head of the procession. Jack is thought to be a relic from those enlightened days when our ancient ancestors worshipped trees.

These pagan roots did little to endear these May Day festivities with the either the established Church or State. In the sixteenth century riots followed when May Day celebrations were banned. Fourteen rioters were hanged, and Henry VIII is said to have pardoned a further 400 who had been sentenced to death.

The May Day festivities all but vanished following the English Civil War when Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans took control of the country in 1645. Describing maypole dancing as ‘a heathenish vanity generally abused to superstition and wickedness’, legislation was passed which saw the end of village maypoles throughout the country.

Dancing did not return to the village greens until the restoration of Charles II. ‘The Merry Monarch’ helped ensure the support of his subjects with the erection of a massive 40-metre-high maypole in London’s Strand. This pole signalled the return of the fun times, and remained standing for almost fifty years.

Maypoles can still be seen on the village greens at Welford-on-Avon and at Dunchurch, Warwickshire, both of which stand all year round. Barwick in Yorkshire, claims the largest maypole in England, standing some 86 feet in height.

May Day is still celebrated in many villages with the crowning of the May Queen. The gentlemen of the village may also been found celebrating with Jack-in-the-Green, otherwise found on the signs of pubs across the country called the Green Man.

Ben Johnson – May Day Celebrations

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Some people believe that the celebrations on May Day began with Beltane and the tree worship of the Druids. Others believe they go back to the spring festivals of ancient Egypt and India. However, May Day as it is celebrated today is more of a European import, believe it or not, from Italy. The people of ancient Rome honoured Flora, the goddess of flowers and springtime, with a festival called Florialia. The goddess was represented by a small statue wreathed in garlands. A procession of singers and dancers carried the statue past a sacred blossom-decked tree. Later, festivals of this kind spread to other lands conquered by the Romans, and of course this included Britain.

As Europe became Christianized, the pagan holidays lost their religious character and either morphed into popular secular celebrations, as with May Day, or were given new Christian interpretations while retaining many traditional pagan features, as with Christmas, Easter, and All Saint’s Day. Beginning in the 20th century, many neopagans began reconstructing the old traditions and celebrating May Day as a pagan religious festival once more….

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female desire mustn’t be seen…

The on-screen depiction of oral sex performed on women has consistently earned movies an NC-17 rating – Blue Valentine, Boys Don’t Cry, and Charlie Countryman are a few that come to mind. The same standard has certainly not been applied to on-screen blow jobs. I often think of 2013s Lovelace, a biopic about the star of the 1972 porn film Deep Throat. This was an entire movie dedicated to fellatio, and to extreme sexual violence, and even that was given a mild R. Sure, let the kids watch a porn star get repeatedly raped, but female desire? No, no, no.

Amanda Montell – Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

he ran naked…

Anointing himself [Alexander at Troy] with oil, he ran naked among his companions to the tombstone of Achilles and honoured it with a garland, while Hephaestion did likewise for the tomb of Patroclus. It was a remarkable tribute, uniquely paid, and it is also Hephaestion’s first mention in Alexander’s career. Already the two were intimate, Patroclus and Achilles even to those around them; the comparison would remain to the end of their days and is proof of their life as lovers, for by Alexander’s time, Achilles and Patroclus were agreed to have enjoyed the same relationship which Homer himself had never mentioned.

Robin Lane Fox – Alexander the Great

Horror…

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history…

Robert Anton Wilson – Cosmic Trigger II : Down to Earth

Freedom

Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so. …When you seek the taproot of reform movements, you find an urgency to eradicate these innate differences and to make all men equal; in practice, this means the levelling-off of the more capable to the mediocrity of the average. That is not Freedom    –    Frank Chodorov

only the tools of a hungry culture

Surely little remained of the Puritan legacy of prudish rectitude, he thought: surely this was now a country of excess, gluttony, lust, and sloth; surely this had grown into a land where obesity reigned and even the poor moved ponderously down the street on big thighs that rubbed fatly together. What had become of the pilgrims’ gaunt and stingy oversight? He knew in part it was the visionary genius of enterprising men, but such entrepreneurs were only the tools of a hungry culture. For the descendants of those gray, upright pioneers had cherished cravings for beef patties with ketchup, deep-fried chicken and vats of ice cream, chemically scented and dyed all the colours of the rainbow, and billions upon billions of gallons of soda. Their thirst had never been quite slaked and so they never finished drinking; and this was the market in all its streamlined functionality — which, precisely where the supply and the demand curves crossed, had swiftly produced a nation of paralyzed giants, fallen across their couches much as soldiers on the field of battle, their arteries hard, their softened hearts failing.

The market made a fool of you by giving you what you wanted. But this did not make him resent it; it merely earned his respect. From the day you were born you were called upon to discern what to choose.

Lydia Millet – How the Dead Dream

Visited by MI5 officers and questioned about rituals…

Some occultists themselves believed that the authorities were showing an interest in their activities. Ronald ‘Chalky’ White, a prominent follower of the early pioneer of Neopagan witchcraft Robert Cochrane, claimed he was once visited by MI5 officers in the 1970s and questioned about rituals in which he assumed the identity of Merlin as ‘kingmaker’. It is possible that White made up this story in order to inflate his own importance, and it seems somewhat unlikely that British intelligence took seriously magical ritual performances in which members of the coven took on roles such as King Arthur, Merlin, Queen Elizabeth and John Dee.

Francis Young – Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain

People who want to appear serious but are actually not thinking…

The first time I went to Jerusalem (crouched in the back of Margaret Thatcher’s obsolete VC10 jet) in 1986, it was an easy matter to drive down to Bethlehem for the evening, and drive back again in time for bed. I recall no checkpoints and no fences. Try that now, after nearly 40 years of incessant peacemaking, and see how you get on.

The contrast in other parts of the region between those bad old days and now is even more striking and almost cruel to remember. We have since then had an awful lot of diplomacy, but no true improvement. As an Arab Israeli colleague of mine once said as we navigated the complexities of the wriggling frontier between Israeli Jerusalem and Arab Ramallah, “Oh, for the good old days before we had peace!”

He had a point. Unbelievably, Israelis living near Gaza used to go there at weekends for the nightlife —pleasant beach-front bars and hardly a hijab in sight. Jerusalem itself was reasonably relaxed, even around the Temple Mount. It was an entirely different world. Many thousands of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza travelled daily into Israel to work, an arrangement which led to friendship, or at least mutual cooperation, between Jews and Arabs, and which enriched the Arab population.

In the same era, the Jewish state was still obviously descended from the original ramshackle arrangements of 1948, when much of the world’s Left had still supported the Zionist enterprise with money and Czech weapons. A fair number of kibbutzes, more or less communism in practice, still existed. The Foreign Ministry was still housed in temporary shacks, and offered visitors a type of coffee now almost extinct, the once-famous “Botz” (literally “mud”) made by pouring hot water into coffee grounds in a worn mug and not caring much what happened next. I only ever encountered this substance in Israel and in Soviet-occupied Prague, which may give a clue to its origins. No doubt these days there are plentiful cappuccinos in smooth modern offices. Israel, isolated as never before from its neighbourhood, transformed by immigration and glowing with economic success, is now a wholly different place, harder to love and yet still just as important to the world.

Mrs. Thatcher, when I followed her to the Holy Land that year, had gone to call on Yitzhak Shamir, the shrivelled old terrorist who had by then become Israel’s foreign minister. As she sat awkwardly with him, nobody knew that this relatively relaxed period was almost over. About 18 months later, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization launched its “First Intifada,” an allegedly spontaneous rising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This proved far more effective than the conventional wars against Israel waged in 1948, 1967, and 1973. Yasser Arafat’s uprising, slingshots against guns, children against soldiers, occupied against occupiers, was a form of political judo. It turned Israel’s strength against itself and destroyed its good image. It has been so ever since. Thanks to this inversion, Western statesmen have persisted ever since with failed and damaging efforts to make a new peace. 

In the age of TV (and even more in the age of the computer) no open society can cope for long with such tactics. It will either be too weak and lose authority, or it will be too tough, and the world will regard it as cruel and brutal. And so it happens. The Western world, especially the Left that had once admired the Jewish state, has turned against it, except (to begin with) in the United States. That is how we got to where we now are. The intifada’s leaders greatly worsened the living conditions of Arabs under Israeli occupation. They cut off the economic and social links between the two peoples. They made life into an increasing misery of suspicion, enforced searches and checkpoints. When riots were later supplemented by organized murder, this only grew worse, making the case for a physical barrier unanswerable.

How the USA, Israel’s ultimate protector and sponsor, would like to be rid of this problem. They sought and failed to do so at Madrid in 1991. They seized hungrily on the Oslo proposals, eventually dragging Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on to the White House lawn together in 1993 for what must have been the most insincere handshake in history. (I was there.) Even in that great liberal wet dream, the TV series The West Wing, President Bartlet attempts an obviously unworkable Arab–Israeli deal at Camp David.

But the awkward, unsayable fact is that a new peace cannot now be found. After the pogrom of October 7, 2023, it must surely be obvious to even the dimmest that the “two-state solution” is just an incantation uttered by people who want to appear serious but are actually not thinking. The idea of a sovereign Arab state right next to the heart of Israel, governed by Hamas or something like it, and separated from the Jewish state by no more than a fence and a raked strip, is so absurd that it is amazing anyone suggests it. But who do the advocates of this “solution” think will govern such a state?

The real Camp David deal, achieved in 1978–79 by President Jimmy Carter, cannot be repeated. Its arrangements, amusingly, are based on the crude sort of “land for peace” appeasement that everyone claims to be against in Ukraine. Israel gave up its 1967 Sinai conquests, which had for once in its existence provided that tiny country with what it most grievously lacked, defence in depth. Appeasement doth never prosper, for if it prosper, who dares call it appeasement? When this policy suits the mighty, it is hung with garlands and proclaimed to be “peace,” just as it was in 1938. 

Carter ended the repeated conventional wars between Israel and its neighbours by giant acts of cynicism. As well as the territorial appeasement, there was a huge monetary pay-off, linked to the freedom to buy advanced weapons. Ever since Camp David, the U.S. has paid giant sums to Cairo. The price of keeping Egypt sweet currently runs at about $1.3 billion a year. 

This insincere arrangement has always reminded me of a clever George Orwell sneer in The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell was mocking well-meaning attempts to mix young men from the hostile English classes in youth camps, but it applies just as well to Egyptians and Israelis. He said such artificial truces reminded him of “the animals in one of those ‘Happy Family’ cages where a dog, a cat, two ferrets, a rabbit and three canaries preserve an armed truce while the showman’s eye is on them.” We all know, of course, what will happen when the supervision breaks down.

Could it? The current peace has no warmth in it. Beguiled western media covering the 2011 “Arab Spring” in Tahrir Square largely failed to notice the Jew-hatred evident during the 2011 mob overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. His portrait everywhere in Cairo was daubed with Stars of David. During the months that followed, Israel’s embassy in Cairo came under severe mob attack, and its staff had to be rescued by Egyptian commandos. In more normal times, the so-called “Cold Peace” is obeyed by Egypt without any popular enthusiasm. For instance, during peaceful interludes, there are about 50 times as many Israeli tourists in Egypt each year as there are Egyptian tourists in Israel. 

But the Camp David Accords have so far lasted remarkably well, precisely because they are so cynical. Their greatest weakness is that they depend on economic and political stability in Egypt that cannot really be guaranteed. The world saw this when the 2011 Arab Spring, quite predictably, placed the Muslim Brotherhood in office. Here we saw once again how American foreign policy is increasingly in the hands of utopian world-reformers rather than hard-headed guardians of diplomatic wisdom. Western political leaders, who had at first gushed about this development, slowly grasped its implications. This was why they choked back their protests in August 2013 when hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters were shot down in the Cairo streets. The Brotherhood had mistakenly thought that winning an election would put their party in power, and that the democratic West would take their side against violent repression.

Had Syria’s tyrant, Bashar al Assad, conducted such a massacre, he would have been furiously denounced by the Western powers for “killing his own people” and perhaps bombed. But the man in charge of the Cairo killing, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, soon afterwards became his country’s president with the blessing of the State Department, the White House, and all the other moral arbiters of the Near East. Since then, Western nations have at least not been quite so enthusiastic about democracy in the Arab Muslim world. But they will not let go of the utopian fantasy that one more heave will create love and justice on the banks of the River Jordan…

Peter Hitchens – The U.S. Should Get Out of the Israel-Palestine Game