JOHN STEPPLING—The ruling class and its stenographers, the ownership class and its affluent flatterers, have colonized the western imagination. And it is leading to this sense of pervasive unreality.
BRITISH DEVIOUSNESS
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A Margaret Thatcher Statue in Parliament Square?
22 minutes readKENNETH SURIN—The roster of British prime ministers shows the overwhelming majority to be undistinguished, a great many to be inept (some beyond belief), and even when deemed to be “distinguished”, to have so many failings that few merit having their statue in front of parliament. Perhaps not even the vaunted Churchill, who was an unmitigated scoundrel in many ways not connected with the war that gave him his reputation.
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Netflix: The Crown Season Two—Apologetics for the monarchy as sun sets on British Empire
22 minutes readPAUL MITCHELL—Living in this shut-up world of endless privilege, based on the accident of birth, placed at the summit of the political system and its state power, they are not only victims but also perpetrators. Their personalities acquire characteristics that, to a significant extent, epitomise the indifference to human suffering and even cruelty that characterise the ruling class.
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JEFF BROWN—One article blared the headline, “China’s “Social Credit System” Will Rate How Valuable You Are as a Human, which is total bollocks. The SCS’s purpose is to determine for anyone who lives in China or any company doing business, their reputation for good citizenship, not their intrinsic or spiritual value.
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JOHN WIGHT—Britain’s dirty war in Ireland, waged throughout the course of the Troubles, marked an especial low point in the country’s sordid colonial history. It is a history that has come back into focus with the explosive revelations contained in declassified state documents from the 1980s, made public by the Government of the Irish Republic in Dublin under the country’s thirty-year rule governing the release of state documents.