Albion’s Alchemist

Hell & Damnation!

I honestly intended to write immediately after that last post, but, well as regular readers (which is to say anyone who reads at the irregular rate at which I post) will know, I’m unreliable.

Thank you to Mr. Free Market for that swift verbal kick – it seems to have done the job.

So… What shall we discuss?

Ah! I know just the thing. Any of you who have read or watched coverage of the latest atrocities committed in the name of animal rights will have been as appalled as the Alchemist, I’m sure. BUAV typically wash their hands of such violence, in public at least, but it still goes on, and one doubts that they are really that upset about it at Anthropomorphist HQ. The trouble of course is that there is no organized body to stand up for the rights of those Humans who don’t want to die from some ghastly, but potentially curable morbidity.

But wait! What’s that in Cyberspace? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a website!

Fear not citizens, for Pro-Test.org is here to stand up for your right to health. This is the project of one ‘Sqrrl101’ who prefers to remain anonymous (and the Alchemist understands why, long time Alchemy readers will recall that your author has himself been threatened for holding views out of harmony with those of another).

Last month our heroic Sqrrl101 and some colleagues, armed with almost £2 worth of protest gear, held a counter-demonstration during an animal-rights march in Oxon.

Doing so earned him a spot on the radio (credit where credit is due – I don’t like a lot of BEEB policies, but they gave him a voice) and an attack from SPEAK, who style themselves ‘the voice for animals’ – one wonders why they did not go the whole hog and call themselves SPEAK ‘the spray can and threatening letter for animals’. You can read the whole thing via the link from Pro-Test.org, I’m not linking to it because I don’t feel like giving them even one additional unique hit.

At the end of the day, the Alchemist likes animals a lot (I could eat a whole one), but he cannot bring himself to see them as people – this is because they are not. It is within Human power to save lives, but, as with any power, comes responsibility (oh dear, oh dear, oh dear). In this case our responsibility comes in the form of a choice – we can either save Human lives, or animal lives. It’s really that simple. One might argue that there is no shortage of Humans (I quite agree – and I am 100% in favour of birth control and abortion), however, by the same token, there are no shortage of rats, mice, fruit flies, dogs and cute little apes. So all we have to ask ourselves is, ‘which is more important?’ The answer, and it seems obvious enough to me, is ‘Humans’.

As an afterthought on my part, Pro-Test has a list of medical hoo-haa which has resulted from past vivisection (medicine is not the Alchemist’s strong suit, but he suspects the list is just a bare sampling of the whole) – and I defy any animal-rights activist to swear off the treatments on that list.

I almost take it as my due to get an email from some yahoo wanting to take me up on that – so let me make this clear, when I say I want you to swear off those treatments, I mean forever, you cannot change your mind when your diet of organic grasshopper’s ears gives you colon cancer.

Sois Musulman et tais tois! You cheese eating surrender Muslims…

Ooh, controversial!

In may of nineteen sixty eight the students of France, almost as one man, went on the warpath. No two people will ever agree on what exactly they were angry about, generally things like the Vietnam War and anti-fascist ideologies are cited and then the respectable historians move on to something more fun. So far as we are concerned the causes don’t really matter.

The recent riots in France are generally blamed on the poor conditions in which immigrant Muslims live. Commentators cite low income, unemployment and racism.
The Poosh makes a good point when he says that these privations are suffered by people who are neither immigrants, nor Muslims, yet they do not riot. In fact one imagines they are rioting, but they did not start the riot, and this is the good point.

France’s reaction to the riots has been execrable. In ’68 de Gaul reacted by laying down the law. He set up a military counter-riot office, and he authorised the police to use all necessary force. The riots nearly cost him his office (in fact they may have, but not immediately), but he crushed them swiftly enough. He prevented the sort of death and carnage which would have grown even greater had he pussy-footed around like the current administration.

Where are the water cannons? Where are the legions of armoured riot police? Where is the flash and staccato rhythm of sub-machineguns felling the unassimilated Mohammedan horde? I’ll tell you. Nowhere. Y’see Chirac has looked at the past, oh yes, and seen that de Gaul’s more, er, robust, response to the rioters made him unpopular with the left wing. Now the left wing are a powerful bunch in France today, and Chirac will not risk his les than sound position by doing his job.

In short, Chirac would rather people die than loose his job, and the left wing (not to mention the larger part of the global media) would rather see people die than see poor immigrant brown people made to abbey the law.

Actually, that’s not true, because of course the media, and the left wing, and most everyone else will not see anybody die. That don’t mean there will not be any death, just that the media will turn a blind eye, and no-one else will look.

This is the essence of the matter, regardless of the privations one might suffer, nothing grants the right to riot, to steal, to burn or to kill. If a man riots, then the Alchemist for one will look upon his plight with less, rather than more sympathy.

The IRA, and it’s various scions is one of the Alchemist’s least favourite religious terrorist organizations – you will appreciate that this is a hotly contested list.

I am of course rather too young to comment on their worst acts, these happening in the 70’s and early 80’s for the most part. Since then they have maintained a violent and murderous operation, but of steadily decreasing intensity.

In response to the group’s recent ‘promise’ to lay down their arms and pursue political means the British Army have begun to shut down certain installations in Armagh – this has been roundly criticised, and it is easy to see why. This is not the first time the IRA has promised to stop blowing people up, and it wont be the last time either – and with this borne in mind, weakening the Army in Northern Ireland does seem a trifle unwise. So why is it happening?

Simply put it is diplomacy. Diplomacy was once defined as the art of saying ‘nice doggy’ until such time as one can find a big enough stick. This is precisely what both sides are doing.

Both sides know that the cease-fire will not last, but both sides are willing to say ‘nice doggy’ to the other until a stick comes to hand. Unfortunately there is not a big enough stick to crush either the IRA or the British Army, so what will become of the cease-fire?

Well, it seems obvious that any reduction in overt Army presence will be countered by an increase in the covert – similarly we can expect to see more and more violent ‘IRA splinter groups’ which are in fact not splinter groups at all, but mainstream IRA doing business as usual under a new name.

Britain and Ireland will probably be forced to wheel out a couple more sacrificial lambs for the power sharing altar and Gerry Adams will continue to demand the moon on a stick because god knows there’s no reason for him to change, he’s an IRA meal ticket for life.

The big question is why does anyone bother? No one seriously believes this cease fire will last longer than the last one. Everyone knows that Sinn Féin is the IRA by another name and we are all aware that this whole situation is essentially and argument about who has the best way to worship the same deity.

There is, as we have discussed, no stick big enough, and the doggy is not nice, if we accepted those two facts then the situation would become rather simpler.

I don’t know how many of’ee remember an old Clash song called ‘Know Your Rights’, it began with the words ‘This is a public service announcement… with guitars!’ which is one of the better lyrics your author has come across. My point in remembering this song to you is in another lyric, to whit ‘Murder is a crime – unless it is done by a policeman’.

This is a fallacy. You might say that it is merely a song, and an old one at that and I ought not invest so much emotion in it, but it is merely a symptom of a wider feeling.

You will of course not have failed to hear of the regrettable death of Jean Charles de Menezes – shot by police recently.

There is a feeling amongst some that armed police are rather trigger happy, and that if they do shoot a man and later discover he was not so great a threat, that the officers in question have a finger waved at them, and are then let free. This is a fallacy.

Every time, every single time a police officer shoots a human in the course of his duty, the officer is tried for murder. Oh yes. During the trial it has to be conclusively proved that the defendant believed that his life or the life of another was in danger of being extinguished, and imminently so.

Not once has a police officer been convicted by a jury of his peers, every time, every officer has been vindicated. This is a phenomenal record if one stops to think about it. It s because of this practice of trials that our armed police show such restraint. Without wishing to cast aspersions on the officers or other lands we must acknowledge the remarkable number of armed police operations which end without a shot being fired. This is certainly a counterpoint to some forces who seem rather more willing to pull the trigger. I imagine you did not know, for instance, that no British police sniper has ever fired a shot in anger, not once.

I shall go on, I suppose you recall my post a while ago detailing the deplorable state of the firearms used by the Portuguese police. In Albion our armed police are issued with new and up-to-date weapons, but, they are actually modified to make them less effective, yes.

When you have seen armed police on the telly, or at airports you will have noticed their ‘machine guns’ (really sub-machine guns). These are H&K MP5 nine-mill submachine guns. When Heckler & Koch sell these weapons they are capable of automatic fire at 800 rounds/min, but the examples carried by our police have actually been modified to fire single shot only!

The point of this post is the somewhat elementary insight that although mistakes will happen, they are rare, they are dealt with most potently, and they are rather less severe than they might be, than they would be in other lands. It need hardly be pointed out that Albion is almost the only nation in the world whose police still, by and large, do not carry firearms.

If you have not done so before, then I think you ought pause a moment and give thanks that there are people willing to risk their lives for yours, and the next time you read about an innocent man being shot, I would like you to thank your deity, if you have one, that it was not you who had 1/8th of a second to decide whether to pull the trigger.

I still like The Clash by the way, but I am not going to base my politics on their lyrics.