Keir Starmer's Britain is the one in which we woke up this morning to discover that an historic landmark had been destroyed by a fire in a vape shop while we were trying to come to terms with the news that Sister Monica Joan was dead. Meanwhile, Reform UK may be Noah's Ark, but it is no Ark of the Covenant, still less is it any Nonnatus House. Even Boris Johnson had to sack Robert Jenrick as Housing Secretary for his favours to Richard Desmond, so Jenrick is at home in the party of Bonnie Blue. But he spent yesterday morning saying something almost sensible about Iran, leading to feverish backpedalling by Richard Tice of Dubai and by the Christian Zionist Danny Kruger.
The idea that the modern State of Israel would be and now is a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy is a purely nineteenth-century heresy, even if its runaway popularity and consequent political influence from 1917 onwards has made it the real Oxford Movement, since we Dunelmensians must never miss an opportunity to point out that Oxford published the Scofield Reference Bible. That must be by far the most lucrative publication of Oxford University Press.
No Christian should wish for the restoration of animal sacrifice, and Jesus Himself foretold the destruction of the Temple. In 363, Julian the Apostate tried to rebuild it, but it kept blowing up and catching fire, soon after which he died. He was succeeded by Jovian, who restored the Christian Empire, but there has been a continuous, if usually almost invisible, refusal of the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire, by those who cleaved instead to the previously normative practices that have most lately been detailed in the Epstein Files.
Those Files name centrists, right-wing populists, right-wing elitists, and an anarcho-syndicalist libertarian socialist. At least unless Noam Chomsky would not vote either for the Green Party or for the Zarah Sultana wing of Your Party, then their proximity to his views and indeed to him should identify them as Epstein Class parties, and thus no more deserving of our votes than any of the others was.
It is a Class. In October 2016, Princess Beatrice went on a nine-day "charity trip" to Nepal with David Taylor of the alleged Chinese spy ring. With Taylor comes Joani Reid, and with Reid comes the Labour Together of Josh Simons, on whose slate internal Labour Party elections used to be contested by Councillor Mason Humberstone of Stevenage until last year, when he defected to Reform in a parliamentary seat that Reform expected to win. Also of that ring, Matthew Aplin was in Reform more recently than he was in the Labour Party, having passed between them without let or hindrance.
A mark of Epstein Class loyalty is the pretence that Britain was not in the Iran War, or at any rate somehow not quite. In fact, Britain is so much a part of it that, albeit doing no damage and done through a proxy, Iran has already retaliated. Yet one part of the London branch of the Epstein Class lauds Starmer for having "stayed out of it" by going in "only" as hard as he had, while the other berates him for having not gone in hard enough. To the Epstein Class media, that is balance.
Donald Trump now says that Iran's borders might be redrawn, so as much as anything else he is really not returning any calls from Reza Pahlavi. To Paula Smith's golden calf, Trump has sacrificed both the mighty petrodollar and Starmer's beloved BlackRock. Even Switzerland has taken a stand against this war, so Colonel Jacques Baud may yet have his day. Pahlavists in Britain insolently demand that we abrogate our freedom to protest, around the world they make it clear that they would not be returning to an Iran that many of them had never seen except for a few months of the year to holiday palaces, and in London they are going round demanding that restaurants take down Kurdish and Afghan flags to be replaced with their own.
Yet the present effect of this war is that another pro-Western monarchy stands on the cusp of being overthrown in favour of a second Shia Islamic Republic, this time of Bahrain, while Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are all simultaneously reconsidering their entire economic arrangements with the United States. The new Supreme Leader is the even more hardline son of the old one. The popular uprising has entirely failed to materialise.
And Westminster Quaker Meeting House has been raided for the second time. That the Quakers are "the sect that really rules the world" is the thesis of the latest book by Edward Dutton, whom I knew at university, where he once tried to seduce me after Mass, so that I know his little secret. In 2018, Evolutionary Psychological Science published this masterpiece by Dutton, who is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda.
On the Editorial Board of Evolutionary Psychological Science is the archetypal Epstein Class academic, Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, although one does have to wonder for how much longer. In 2021, Pinker wrote that, "Oliver Kamm's urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression." Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil. Truly, the Epstein Class.
No comments:
Post a Comment