Free Harry!

by Brian Patrick Bolger (June 2024)

The London School of Economics (LSE) is no more. Probably the most famous of the University of London colleges, that bastion of George Bernard Shaw, Fabian thought, social research, open minds and a diversity of thought, has closed its doors and wrapped itself in a wet blanket of feminist and off-the-shelf liberal positions. The LSE Review of Books section hosts some fascinating reviews: ‘ A History of Menstruation from the Global North and South,’ ‘Who’s afraid of Gender?’ ‘She Who Struggles: Revolutionary women who shaped the world,’ ‘Reimagining Liberation: How black women transformed citizenship in the French Empire.’ If you are still in denial you should attend the ‘Q and A with Caroline Derry on Agatha Christie, Lesbians and Criminal Courts.’ And on it goes. Not forgetting the current exhibition at the LSE Library— ‘Making Modern Women.’ It is as if men, especially white working class ones, have been air brushed from history. LSE has become the moniker of Stalin’s infamous remark to artists to become ‘The Engineer of Human Souls.’

Back in the riotous 80s, LSE was a real potpourri of left and right. All opinion was tolerated in the interests of free speech. We had the ‘far right’ National Front allowed to speak at the Student’s Union. There were on campus Albanian Communists, The Maoist Society, and Porn Nights hosted by the Rugby Club. Kenneth Minogue’s Political Philosophy course devoted 3 weeks to Nietschze and 1 hour to Marx. The ‘Cash Point’ was known as the ‘Hash Point.’ My roommate, a Marxist-Syndicalist, went down to Brixton to ‘Burn down the Ghetto,’ but suffered third degree burns trying to set fire to a car. On his way home, he was mugged in Camberwell by the black youth he was ‘liberating.’ White Northern males rubbed shoulders with the products of Britain’s Public Schools: Eton, Charterhouse and Rugby. Yes, there were a few bra-burning women going to Glastonbury and reading Maya Angelou, but they were interesting and could laugh at their own positions after a few bevvies. Going back to the LSE this year was a shock. It resembled a type of ethnic cleansing. It was as if all white working class males had been banned from the premises. The entire teaching staff is either female or drawn from BAME. The student body is the same and, despite the drop in foreign students post- Brexit, is unrepresentative of the British population. Working class students cannot now go to elite Universities for financial reasons, so you have Nietschze’s cycle of ‘eternal recurrence.’ Once liberalism gains a foothold, there is no respite. They employ each other, marry each other, and attend literary festivals at ‘Hay On Wye’ about boring authors with ethnic names. They attend the Edinburgh Festival of (Woke) Comedy which is about as much fun as a night at an ‘Antony Blinken’ concert.

This week it was revealed that British women are ‘unhappy.’ The ‘Hologic Global Women’s Health Index‘ interviewed 79000 women worldwide and the Brits are at the top of the miserableness league. This, of course, is nothing new. As an expat who travels back once per year, I have noticed the general ‘end of smiling’ which roughly originated with Tony Blair’s arrival with the Labour Party and the 20 new laws passed per day through parliament. Brits are scared to discuss most topics due to draconian Hate and Speech legislation. A humorous joke in the pub can see the Police arriving at your house with an arrest warrant. This is now extended to social media. An 18 year old student is spending 12 years in prison for possessing ‘right wing literature.’ If I was still in the UK, I would be looking at a life sentence of bird time. The former Labour Home Secretary, David Blunkett introduced IPPs in 2003. ‘Imprisonment for Public Protection’ means indefinite sentences are handed out for petty offences to people who are in suspect groups: Irish travellers, ‘right wing’ terrorists, etc. Tommy Nicol was incarcerated for stealing a car and, after years in prison , killed himself in 2015. Martin Myers stole a cigarette from a person outside a pub and is still in prison 18 years later. No wonder people are unhappy. It’s not just the women who are jumping off cliffs. Actually, jumping off cliffs is an ill-advised method of ending it all as British water authorities revealed this week that it is is ‘full of Diarrhoae.’

Women in Britain benefit from a politically correct recruitment practice institutionalised in every corporate, government, school and university. 97% of teachers in the UK are women. It is as if everything that the ‘Angry Young Men’ ( those white working class male writers of the 40s and 50s) achieved against institutionalised class prejudice has now been swept away to award all positions, grants and benefits to ethnic minorities, middle class women and the boat people from France. John Osborne’s play ‘Look Back In Anger’ typified the alienation of working class people and their exclusion from the professions. It represented the hideous nature of the British establishment— asking white working class people to sacrifice their lives in two world wars, and then being impoverished and ridiculed for wanting a political voice, especially if it upset ‘middle England.’ It is as if nothing has changed. In fact, it is worse. There is more poverty. They are demonised for wanting nation, family and church and told they are inherently ‘racist,’ ‘sexist,’ etc. However, this time, when the elites need them to mobilise against a Russian onslaught, they won’t be signing up—for there is no nation to fight for. Unlike, for example, the Beat Generation in the US (with experimental forays such as William Burroughs), the Angry Young Men were down to earth realists; the Woodie Guthries of literature, so to speak. The Labour Party and its Brahmin middle class leaders such as the arch phony Tony Blair, hated the febrile racism, chauvinism and power of the British worker. The left therefore jettisoned the working class and went all in on gender and race. The key being to ‘split’ the working class. The result is a catastrophic social anomie; parentless children, ethnic tensions, a toxic royal family, and cities which more resemble ‘The Black Hole of Calcutta’ than Thomas Hardy’s idyllic English Wessex. It is so bad, even Prince Harry has left the ‘Sceptered Isle.’

The role models for wimmin today are Taylor Swift and Meghan. No Ophelia having to listen to Hamlet’s soliloquies. No, modern wimmin must be of a certain bent. They must be ‘against nature.’ They must be CEOs. They hate children. They don’t want a family—or so the media and Cosmopolitan tells them. Taylor Swift is a product of years of compulsory Germaine Greer University courses on the ‘Vagina Monologues.’ Yet feminism, which started out as a legitimate attempt for fairness, has become an excuse for privilege. Feminism is now narcissism. Taylor Swift’s songs like ‘I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)’ and ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived’ are narcissistic and vulgar. Female celebrities are humourless. Like Madonna, style and class à la Marlene Dietrich are no more. Its as if many women have swaddled down into vulgar barbarism with an assortment of gangster rap half wits.

And let’s be clear about Meghan. Harry didn’t leave the ‘Spectered Isle’—he was kidnapped! Why else would anyone swan off to Africa on another Meghan woke caravan? What’s in it for Harry? Perhaps he’s ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,’ but come on. Free Harry! He does call his brother ‘Willy,’ however. It wouldn’t surprise me if, home in Montecito, California, he has a huge Aquarium and in it he swims around balancing rings on his nose as Meghan sunbathes on the tiles. Narcissism in the modern era began when Edgar Allan Poe, whilst at West Point, turned up to parade wearing only a pair of white gloves. Self obsession is all the rage. Or Truman Capote raging that he was ‘homosexual, an alcoholic and a genius.’ You can’t imagine William Burroughs doing charity or Sid Vicious helping an old woman across the road. Even the politicians are at it: there’s Blinken playing on stage in Kiev with a rendition of ‘Rockin in the Free World.’

Hasn’t the world always been narcissistic you say— à la Freud’s ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’? Yes it has, but the world is getting worse. In a brilliant new book by Baptiste Morizot, Ways of Being Alive, the Professor of Philosophy spends his spare time on all fours, in forests. This has nothing to do with Kamala Harris or Madonna. He explains that the crisis of human civilisation is not only inward, but outward. The nineteenth century biologist Jakub Von Uexkull’s conception of the ‘umwelt’ posits that each living creature occupies a particular perceptual ‘umwelt’; the umwelt of a rabbit differing from that of a cow, for example. Now the ‘umwelt’ of homo sapiens has changed exponentially, through technology, so much that the world exterior to man has been abandoned. We now live in cozy, dull virtual reality, encased in plastic, like Harry. Morizot sees that the non-human world doesn’t exist for homo sapiens. Ever since Christianity and since Kant removed the rights of animals, they have been seen as essentially a stock of resources to be plundered and abused. The words ‘wilderness’ and ‘civilisation’ are absurdities. I mean, would you rather spend time with Blinken or a pack of wolves in the wilderness? The finite wilderness and its exploitation is not just ecological, although that is at a cataclysmic stage. Man (woman) has neglected their ‘umwelt’; encased in plastic and health and safety. We have forgotten getting down with the wolves. We have to explore our ‘umwelt’ and respect fellow creatures. Therefore, Morizot works with the Wolves; following them with infra red sensors at night and also works with the farmers, whose livestock can be threatened by them. We have to share the ‘umwelt.’ Someone please tell that to Meghan.

Meanwhile, in Europe, a wolf killed Dolly, a pony belonging to Ursula Von Der Leyen, the Head of the EU Commission, in Lower Saxony, Germany. Her solution is to pass new legislation to remove the wolf population’s ‘strictly protected’ status. Ursula is not only vengeful but narcissistic. She is a consequence of the end of civilisation, the rational world of scientism and the entombing ourselves in a world of triviality, pop culture, and Brussel’s bureaucrats. Soon we will be all swimming in aquariums.

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Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in Universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany in magazines such as The American Spectator, Asian Affairs, Salisbury Review, Deliberatio, L’Indro Quotidiano Indipendente di Geopolitica, The National Interest, GeoPolitical Monitor, Merion West, Voegelin View, The Montreal Review, The European Conservative, Visegrad Insight, The Hungarian Review, The Village, New English Review, The Daily Globe,  American Thinker, The Internationalist, and Philosophy News. His latest book is Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century (Ethics International Press).

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