I.

But yesterday, your noble fathers bled
Upon the fields of France, where countless dead
Had found among the vines their final rest,
To gild with fame a venerated crest
Whose princely brandishing from age to age
Outlasted armies and the tyrant’s rage.
But yesterday, you bravely fought and won
A war against the socialistic Hun
Who sought to clap you in the helot’s chains
And seize the free world’s economic reins.
Again, but yesterday, the darkest hour
Of all the world you lifted by your power,
When many owed so much to you, so few,
Across all continents and oceans blue;
No sacrifice too great, no effort spared,
You rallied to the battle and declared,
In England’s name, the inauspicious fight
Against the German Marxist and his spite.
When fire from your once-peaceful skies rained down
On London’s ancient temples of renown,
Your valour triumphed over every fear
Whose darkness could not mute your English cheer.
You fought, yet weeping for your sons that died,
And rose to glory on your fathers’ pride!

 

II.

Would you, brave sons of Britain’s best
Now crawl in servitude at the behest
Of Prussia’s despot and her Eastbourne stooge,
And let your nation fall to subterfuge?
Would you embrace their Novus Ordo plot
To make you into something you are not,
Abandoning your martyrs’ ancient faith
In globalist apostasy to bathe,
Or sanctify Mohammed’s violent hordes
Who now seize power from your local lords?
Your government, a servile rubber-stamp,
Transforms your world into a migrant camp.
Already London teems with Saracens,
But will not welcome us Americans!

Full many are the masks that Satan wears:
Take Corbyn and his self-anointing airs,
Nicola Sturgeon and Theresa May,
Who nourish Brussels while your towns decay.
These bear no love for you and never will,
But count as meaningless the nation’s will.
For Britain’s debt you have these frauds to thank:
What is their “Europe” but a German bank?
Whose fattened bureaucrats, a pampered club,
Appropriate your wealth, your selves to snub!
Corrupt, they steal and loot without surcease:
What Hitler lost through war they grab through peace!

Would you allow their constant plundering
To go unspoken with their blundering?
Surrender speech to their repressive state
To share with the Chinese a eunuch’s fate?
Would you let England topple on the brink,
Whilst petty deskmen dictate what you think?
Or let robotic censors gag your cries,
Whilst leftists freely spew their shop-worn lies?

For, liberty is but an empty creed,
Until the day Tom Robinson is freed!

 

III.

Fair England, land of hills and columbine,
Most gracious isle of rills and eglantine,
Return to thy devout, ancestral ways,
The regal virtues of thy former days!
Come forth in all thy splendor, pow’r, and might,
Proclaim thy fealty to truth and right!
Arise, O England, take thy rightful place,
Let not the heathen thy good self debase!
The sun is rising on thy fields of green,
And glory waits for thee in stars unseen.
The sword of Arthur has ennobled thee:
Thou wast not made for chains and slavery.
The clang of battle on the winds of time
And shouts of knights that echo in my rhyme,
Resound this day in every village square
And rise to heaven like an antique prayer,
That there will always and forever be
An England where the mind and heart are free
To celebrate her once and future King
Whom prophets prophesied and poets sing,
That Mary’s Dowry not be spent in vain
But magnify the Holy Virgin’s reign,
When Christ shall every bond of hate unbind
And England hold a torch for all mankind.

 

Joseph Charles MacKenzie is a traditional lyric poet, the only American to have won Scottish International Poetry Competition. His poetry has appeared in The New York Times, The Scotsman (Edinburgh), The Independent (London), US News and World Report, Google News, and many other outlets. He writes primarily for the Society of Classical Poets (New York) and Trinacria (New York). MacKenzie has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.


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The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


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182 Responses

  1. Joseph S. Salemi

    Bravo, Joseph MacKenzie!

    Tommy Robinson is one of the few persons in England left with the backbone and guts to fight against the degradation of his people. God bless him and strengthen those like him.

    Reply
      • Nicole Davidoff

        Joseph, thank you so much for such a wonderful, wonderful poem, I shared it with my friends and we all are now your big fans! It is just what we need dark times when the treacherous government seeks to destroy our country and us as a nation.

        .You are blessed with exceptional talent, only a true talent can create such a powerful message to which people would respond. Yes, Britain should rise!

        Thank you for dedicating it to our Tommy. He is a true hero, genuine, caring, clever and incredibly brave. There are, of course, decent politicians who act in the best interests of their countries and protect their people – you have Trump! But Tomy is not a politician, he is a patriot who is constantly risking his life by helping those whom the traitors in government deny justice, who are being raped and killed by moslem gangs cover up the rapists and murderers to appease Moslems – what they are doing with Europe looks like ethnic cleansing for their vile agenda. They bread brainwashed zombies at schools and unis who think what they are programmed to think and to hate “Fascists” and “racists”, Such zombies lack any knowledge of basic history – otherwise, they would have known that National=socialist party was left-wing and that islam is not a race. Out of a whole lot of those spitting blood screaming that islam is a “religion of peace” never even opened the quran yet they argue with Tommy who has profound knowledge on that. I’ve noticed one of those left his marks on this page but you and other people handled him well. That is they never win an argument with Tonny and look like idiots they are.

        And again, a big thank you for the poem, it is a masterpiece

      • Hugh Maclean

        Populist nonsense inhabits this increasingly hateful discourse that hides the unsavoury truth of the emotionally driven patriotism and loyalty to ones country. This seemingly harmless pursuit always turns extremely nasty when there is alleged transgression by the ‘other’. Hitler concocted abuses of ethnic Germans as reason to invade Poland and Czechoslovakia. Trump foments racial hostility describing refugees as criminals and drug gangs. Crude propaganda to unleash racial hatred on minorities under the ‘America First’ patriotic call. Nationalism is never a benign love of country it is more often it’s vicious flipside, easily provoked, and prepared to mete out terrible injustices on the ‘other’.
        This ‘sleeping’ nasty nationalism is roused by economic misfortune when lives become insecure and people grasp at wild promises of ‘greatness’ again. It is built on nostalgia for a past ‘golden age’ of empire. In such hollow promises the struggling masses long for a saviour with the flag riding a white horse. Yes Trump. I know you have to laugh but don’t; it’s too dangerous a time for comedy.
        Robinson getting hero worship for provoking Muslim intolerance seems wrong but in times of economic turmoil it finds a ready and needy audience in areas where immigration causes tensions. Tommy forgets Britain ransacked the countries and people’s of its empire to enrich a few merchants. Now when we need immigrants to work in areas like our health service, agriculture, and generally in jobs Brits. won’t do Robinson selects Pakistan crime gangs(all were imprisoned) to foment nationalist outrage. Such selective stoking of emotional patriotism quickly reveals the vicious face of ‘Britain First’ with widespread attacks on Muslims the vast majority who live in peaceful coexistence with white Britons. Robinson wants to provoke this reaction carrying the WASP flag. Pathetic, insular, small mindedness help up as loyalty to the flag.

    • Hugh Maclean

      Tommy Robinson is a far right bigot and is a member of the English Defence League who spread hate for immigrants and in their nationalism represent a threat to peace.
      I find the veneration for him in this thread an outrageous breech of time served liberal attitudes and representative of Trump intolerance. Shame on all of you.

      Reply
      • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

        Tommy Robinson is a respected member of the United Kingdom Independence Party and may very well be on his way to serving as MP one day. In fact, he was attacked by British Nazis during his EDL days after he burned a Nazi flag, an even that was covered by the BBC itself.

        Tommy Robinson has also worked with immigrants and even Muslim immigrants in the UK who stand with him in addressing the problem of Islamic rape gangs and other crimes committed by so-called “refugees.”

      • Hermina (Mia) Van Der Stam

        Hugh Maclean- Shame on you- if you have a good future , it will be because of people like Tommy Robinson and Trump.

      • E. V. Wyler

        Regarding your 02/03/19 post above: Mr. Maclean, I hope you didn’t have breakfast this morning. Food is bad! Bad! Bad! Food can (sometimes) prompt people to overeat, which causes obesity, which causes a wide swath of illnesses leading to death. Therefore, empty your refrigerator, clear you pantry and rid all supermarkets of food products. Now! Food is evil. Evil, I say!

        Are you capable of understanding that the “right” (i.e. healthy) foods eaten in appropriate proportions is not only benign, but also vital to one’s sustenance?

        Now substitute “food” with “patriotism”. The quality and quantity of the “food” (“patriotism”) determines the outcome.

        Being fed a “diet” of “junk food” nationalism (i.e. racial supremacy, military aggression against a HARMLESS “other”, etc.) leads to a “health” crisis. However, the other extreme, where citizens are “starved” of their national sustenance (patriotism) leads to a malnourished sovereign soul, lacking in unity and devotion.

        Countries whose citizenry are too (self) righteous to be patriotic will learn a hard lesson; specifically, that not all of the “others” were truly harmless. At some point in time, probably sooner rather than later, there will be an “other” with no qualms about using its own “nationalism” to conquer those people too (self) righteous to have their own national identity.

        No, we are not “citizens of the world”. That’s bullshit! We are citizens of the country in which we were born or nationalized. I am a native-born citizen of the United States of America. I unapologetically love my country. The men and women who shed their blood and give their lives to keep me, my family, and fellow countrymen safe and free get my respect … and loyalty!

        A nation deprived of its patriotic soul, a unifying love of country, will soon cease to exist! May libtards never inflict that destiny upon us!

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Here’s Hugh Maclean, back from a Left-Labourite Jeremy Corbyn rally, where his hero spouts raw anti-Semitism. And little Hughie presumes to lecture the rest of us on racial hatred and prejudice.

        You really are a stupid pillock, Hugh.

      • Hugh maclean

        Calm down children. All Jeremy did was offer support to the Palestinians a people who had their country stolen. This reasonable position is interpreted as anti-semitism which it is not. It is objectionable that Britain through the Balfour Declaration effectively made the Palestinians homeless en masse. You dipsticks need to calm down.

      • The Society

        Dear Mr. Maclean,

        Similar benign sounding (but actually malign) comments about the illegitimacy of the nation of Israel may be removed in the future and those who make them may be banned from this forum. At a time when there are nations who are threatening to wipe Israel off the map, and could very well succeed if they banded together all of the anti-Israel sentiment in the Middle East, such comments are unacceptable. Palestine was won fairly from the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the movement of Jews after World War II was done under the authority of the United States (and for what it’s worth the United Nations).

        -Evan Mantyk, the SCP Editor

      • E. V.

        Thank you, Evan Mantyk, for your FACTUAL response to the above commenter. The Society of Classical Poets supports Freedom of Speech in that poets and readers across the political spectrum are welcome to submit work, have their poetry published, and make comments. However, “comments” posing as “facts” must be correct. Lies that liable any ethnic group should not be tolerated under the mantra of “Free Speech”.

    • Corallan

      Tommy Robinson is trying to get England back to a safe stable and unracial place to live. God bless this man of sense and honour.

      Reply
      • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

        Thank you for responding, Corallan. We must do everything we can to draw attention to Tommy Robinson, as many in the United States remain unaware of him and his importance to the cause of freedom not only in Britain but throughout the world.

        I hope you will please get others to comment on this thread.

  2. Jan Buchanan-Medina

    Splendid! My heart and prayers are with Mr Robinson. There is nothing more noble than Truth and its Defence. Your offering is exquisite in its expression of history and the many present pc attempts to trample the values of free speech. PC used to be the subject of dark humour, it’s now a threat to common sense. Time is ripe to wake the Lion from her sleep and once again raise the Standard high. Thank you Joseph Charles MacKenzie. I salute your elegant tribute.
    Jan Buchanan-Medina

    Reply
  3. Jo Patti

    Thank you for writing it. Important to put into poetry as well as prose this brave man’s sacrifice. I shall share it on social media and I hope you can as well.

    Reply
  4. Joseph Tessitore

    Bravo, Joseph Charles! An incredible poem, for England and for the United States as well!

    Reply
  5. James A. Tweedie

    Tommy Robinson’s efforts on behalf of his cause would be twice as effective if he could find a way to be half as articulate as Mr. MacKenzie.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Yes, this is perhaps where a poet can be useful, although, in some ironic way, it is precisely Mr. Robinson’s effectiveness, together with that of the English Defence League and many other organizations, which provided the groundwork and inspiration for the poem.

      In my native New Mexico, Mr. Robinson would be honored with a corrido, a kind of folk ballad composed by a singer-songwriter called a corridista.

      Reply
  6. Satyananda Sarangi

    Hello Sir!

    A truthful poem for the sake of truth. In ancient Hindu culture, we have a saying : “Satyameva Jayate” – it means ” Truth always triumphs”.
    However, this incident makes me wonder about the scarcity of good that remains in this world.
    I would like to share a few lines on this degradation of humanity if I’m permitted by you.

    Kind regards

    Reply
  7. David Paul Behrens

    Although I have limited knowledge about politics in England, I tend to agree with some of the sentiments in this poem. However, in terms of the line which says: “But will not welcome us Americans!”, I must point out, it depends on which Americans. Yesterday my granddaughter performed at St. Mathew’s Church in London as a member of the Southern California Ambassadors of Music Choir and Orchestra. Today she flies to Paris as the next stop on a tour of Europe, after which it is on to Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Germany. I had to mention this as a personal point of pride.

    Reply
  8. C.B. Anderson

    Yes, Joseph, some of my specific ancestors came from England, but that is not the only reason I rally to the cause of preservation of that grand state. There are many others, both here and abroad, who uphold a similar sentiment. For us, by God, it might be as simple a thing as the fact that most of us here have a commitment to preserve and extend the tradition of English literature. Here’s what some others have had to say:

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Thank you, C. B. Anderson. It does seem from your link that we can still count on Englishmen to express themselves in very often the most original if not perfectly engaging ways!

      Your great love of England is evidently visceral and no doubt rests upon your broad historical knowledge, let alone your own Englishness. I can imagine that one of your many reasons for wishing to preserve the British state has something to do not only with the grand institutions she herself has preserved and developed and refined, but also that unique way in which she animates them, as if the British character were the first and foremost of all of them, the single most important institution upon which all the others depend—if you will please forgive me coming off as rather abstract.

      I have had the great privilege of knowing many Englishmen of every conceivable class throughout my life. One cannot fail to notice within individuals that there is something in the national character which endears England to everyone, everywhere.

      As a poet, this one fact presents quite a number of challenges, however. One must finally give up on trying to define that character, forget about discoursing on its notorious charms, and rather hope that its effects in one’s own mental construction of it might shine through in ones verses, if I may wield a wee criticism against myself.

      I hope I have not altogether disappointed.

      Reply
  9. David Watt

    Your elegant command of the English language evident in this poem serves to reinforce the very expressiveness we stand to lose through degradation of tradition and culture.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Dear Mr. Watt,

      I am greatly relieved to discern your sense of tradition and culture as, even among those who call themselves “classical” poets, I am every now and then criticized precisely for my recourse to tradition.

      Pope was perhaps, as many today still insist, including myself, the best English poet of the 18th century, and even if his remarkable development of the heroic couplet never reached the perfections of his French counterparts (think —one can see even in the Epistle on Man a certain number of baroque syntactical twistings that our modern ears would find awkward indeed), there was never any reason for discarding the discipline behind them.

      I don’t believe any poet did more for the English rhymed couplet that Pope. If I must set aside Homer’s Greek for any reason—and it is more and more out of simple fatigue these days—I will turn to no other English translation that Pope’s. Given that his version is in rhymed verse in a rhyme-poor language, it is absolutely remarkable that it happens to be also far more faithful to Homer’s Greek than, say, Fitzgerald’s more contemporary translation in what amounts to prose.

      And so, one realizes that Pope’s development of the heroic couplet was really a great gift to the world, in the sense of being one of the finest developments in the history of modern English literature. But the Romantics, through a kind of doctrine of indiscipline—fine as many of their works may be—were unable to bear the rigors of such an arduous discipline, and so one might say that they missed a great opportunity.

      Even if we are unable to emulate the individual poets of tradition, it has always seemed to me that we would do always and everywhere well to at very least acquire some part of their method in view of pleasing our modern tastes.

      I have a counterpart in the world of music, by the way. The English sacred polyphonist Nicholas Wilton of London. This greatest of English contemporary composers freely takes from every shelf of England’s musical pantry, as it were, with surprisingly effective results of rarest beauty and elegance. Just when one thinks that he is reproducing William Byrd, one very quickly catches oneself in discerning Wilton’s originality which is informed as much by Mozart as by Palestrina and, even more important, by his own personal sense of the sacred in music.

      To address your extremely important statement about the relationship of expression to culture and tradition, I feel that culture and tradition are degraded primarily by lack of use.

      Thank you for your always insightful remarks.

      Reply
  10. ...

    Congratulations, you wrote a poem bemoaning society’s “decay” (read: the declining supremacy of white people) and the imprisonment of a white supremacist. Robinson lead the BNP for a period; a party that denies the holocaust. Oh, how brave of you to defend him!

    I am forced to ask… how the hell did this get published?

    Mr. Mantyk, with all due respect, come on. You can do better than putting stuff out there like this. People will associate your website with politics (and the far-right) rather than with poetry. And that would be a shame.

    This poem itself is nice, don’t get me wrong. Bravo to Mackenzie for his command of the English language. But again I wonder: what the hell? The stark contrast between the beauty of your verse and the grotequeness of your ideology… I can’t be the only person repulsed by this poem’s message, yes? Because nobody has issued anything but praise in the comments here.

    All in all, this website would be better off if it avoided straying into the political.

    Reply
    • ...

      Ouch, just reread that. Let me try again.

      I say this in a civil manner: I would like for this website to try and avoid the political sphere, because it tends to distract from the verse itself in a negative way. Especially if it those political beliefs approach the fringe. Or at least change the thumbnail for these posts. The juxtaposition of modern photos on poems like this vs pretty paintings everywhere else is odd, I think. I suppose I direct those comments to Mr. Mantyk. I otherwise enjoy this website very much, and think it’s moving in a good direction, even if I disagree with (some of) the political poems.

      Mr. Mackenzie: I am fond of your poetic mission as defined by your website, I simply strongly disagree with your political ideology as expressed here. But what am I going to do arguing with a stranger online? I apologize for responding in a heated manner.

      Reply
      • Damian Robin

        Thanks, Mr McK, for this link. I had seen bits of Mr Robinson’s Oxford Union visit, mainly the Q and A. This gives the deeper backstory to his stance.

    • E. V.

      Anonymous, this is probably the main reason why SCP’s publishes more right-wing poetry: Many people who prefer “classical” to “contemporary” also appreciate tradition from many perspectives, ranging from politics to culture. For example, I prefer historic homes over modern ones, and write poetry from a roll top desk. Writers espousing liberal politics prefer the opposite; “contemporary” over “classical” and write modern “poetry”, a style usually inconsistent with “formal verse” criteria. However (unlike Antifa) neither SCP nor Evan believe in censorship. Therefore, if you’d like to submit “left-wing” poetry IN FORMAL VERSE, go for it.

      Reply
      • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

        There is also a fascinating subtext to your astute observation, E. V., in that form is very much related to beauty which, as a transcendental property of being, is in turn interchangeable with truth.

  11. Leo Yankevich

    It’s five in the morning in Poland. I have dear friends who support Tommy Robinson, and some who think him a fraud with no sense of British Law, as his filming in front of court was illegal.

    I find your poem well-made. I’d like more of the same kind, poems with gonads.

    Reply
  12. Leo Yankevich

    What a fagtard you are! Who cares what you think? You are a cowardly nameless clown. Liberals are not even human beings. We have special FEMA camps prepared especially for you in Northern Alaska where you’ll be turned out nightly by Black Lives Matter Prisons guards. Think about it, libtard!

    Reply
  13. Evan Mantyk

    Dear Mr. MacKenzie,

    Thank you for your rousing and timely poem!

    Dear . . .,

    Thank you for your civil response and thank you for reading. I am certainly open to running a better image if there is one available.
    It seems to me that Mr. Robinson is brave. He and other UK residents are being denied a basic right. Socialism, the first phase of communism, has robbed people of their common sense in the West and there should be international outcry (https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-specter-of-communism-is-ruling-our-world). The Society has a duty to give classical style poets a forum to speak out on significant topics of our day and age, which of course include politics and of course include journalists being jailed for refusing to bow to strongarm socialist policies.

    Reply
    • ...

      Mr. Mantyk: thank you for your civility as well. I understand your rationale for publishing this poem now. As for the image, I have no concrete suggestions. Perhaps a painting connected thematically? Of someone being jailed? It’s not truly an issue, I’d just like to see it keep to the classical aesthetic. Keep up the good work!

      Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Dear Mr. Mantyk,

      I applaud your keeping the unfortunate comment of the nameless attacker (supra).

      It reads like the last breath of a beast that died on the night of November 4, 2016. Even better, it bears all the marks of the hooded, masked, and faceless liberal.

      As for my ideology, its most perfect expression will not be found in any of my poems.

      For, my ideology is the crucifix.

      Neither left nor right, but up.

      Reply
  14. Taylor Thomas

    Magnificent! I have been following Tommy Robinson’s exploits for several years now due to his association with Info Wars and Alex Jones. It appears that England has become so corrupt with the pedophile royal class that the people who shine a light on the abuse of children are doomed to spend more time in jail than the very ones who they unmasked. I am glad that you are aware of the situation and have such an excellent insight into the larger cogs at work that contribute to such a dramatic miscarriage of justice. Another excellent work.

    Reply
  15. Joseph S. Salemi

    To …

    Like Antifa terrorists, you prefer to keep your identity masked. How courageous.

    You want a website to “avoid the political sphere.” And yet it’s a sure bet that if a pro-feminist or anti-Trump or pro-immigrant poem were published here, you wouldn’t have made a peep. Why not be totally honest and admit that when you say “political sphere” you mean anything that expresses a viewpoint contrary to the pabulum of left-liberal orthodoxy?

    When you ask “How the hell did this get published?” you are essentially asking why censorship wasn’t imposed on a viewpoint that you have decided is “fringe.” Is that the kind of liberalism and tolerance and diversity that you are pushing? It sure doesn’t sound like what Voltaire or Jefferson would have argued.

    I’m trying to be civil too. But it is precisely this sort of blinkered, reflexively left-liberal, censorious, anti-rightist ideology that is enraging thousands of Americans and Europeans, and that is making Tommy Robinson into a martyr.

    We aren’t “the fringe” anymore. Deal with it.

    Reply
  16. James A. Tweedie

    Several thoughts somewhat behind the curve:
    1. I support Mr. Mantyk for his decision (and reasons given) to publish Mr. MacKenzie’s poem.
    2. I am disappointed that some who choose to express disagreement to some of the strong (conservative) political positions expressed in poems and comments feel the need to post their comments under pseudonyms, or “Anonymous,” or “Mr. . . .” My disappointment is both with those who seek to hide behind such anonymity but also with the site itself, where such dissenting opinions and their authors (whether expressed in comments or in poetry) have been repeatedly subjected to a level of mean-spirited abuse seemingly calculated to cause all but the the most stubborn or sadistic to walk away from the SCP site in disgust, kicking the dust from their sandals as they make their exit. Having experienced it myself, I can affirm that personal attacks and uncivil intimidation are an existential reality in this otherwise collegial community.
    3. Having made an earlier comment in this thread I do not want “Mr. . . . ” to think that I was in any way expressing “praise” for the content of Mr. MacKenzie’s poem or the person to whom it was addressed. I only complimented the poet on his ability to articulate Mr. Robinson’s cause far better than Mr. Robinson has been able to do.
    4. While I concede that I am concerned about some of the same things that concern Mr. Robinson I do not personally find him to be particularly worthy of Mr. MacKenzie’s poem. Out of respect for the site I will keep my reasons for this to myself.
    5. I will, however, say that I find Mr. MacKenzie’s support of both Robinson and the EDL somewhat curious insofar as over five years ago Robinson told the BBC that he was dismayed to discover that the EDL’s ranks had been swollen with racist and neo-Nazi supporters. Several months later he distanced himself from the EDL altogether because of his concerns over the “dangers of far-right extremism.”
    6. I only add that I wholeheartedly affirm Mr. MacKenzie’s closing words and gladly claim them as my own:

    “As for my ideology, its most perfect expression will not be found in any of my poems.

    For, my ideology is the crucifix.

    Neither left nor right, but up.”

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      The reality is that anyone group who opposes the Islamo-globalist establishment is either infiltrated directly by George Soros’s poseurs and provocateurs (one of international communism’s oldest tactics) or subject to propaganda usually taking the form of “their ranks are swollen by Nazis,” something which was said of none other than the Republican party in the United States.

      That Mr. Robinson may have witnessed such an infiltration in various groups in no way diminishes either his work or that of the EDL or any other of the many movements now arising to meet this urgency. The EDL’s mission could not be more clearly stated on the home page of their website and has absolutely not the least thing to do with Nazism of any kind.

      Indeed, the contrary is true: Every ideological doctrine promoted by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party since 1922 has become the European Union’s official policy down to taking the side of Barack Obama for what amounts to the elimination of Israel, Hitler’s dream of an inter-European financial system designed exclusively for Germany’s benefit, and the depraving of society through the normalization of sexual perversion.

      One of the great successes of EU and American leftist propaganda is precisely the raising of voices against popular national movements for the least “taint” in their numbers.

      And yet, there is not a single group or subgroup within these popular national movements that have committed anything remotely as grave or as numerous as the myriad unspeakable crimes committed by pseudo-refugees flooding into Europe, to include actual beheadings in the public square, endless knife attacks in London, terror attacks in the ancient capitols of Europe, genital mutilation, human trafficking, and institutional child sexual exploitation…

      …crimes which the EU and the American left have tacitly but overtly condoned by their official protection of the perpetrators as a privileged class of untouchables—in view of an orchestrated, deliberate, and coordinated attempt to eliminate Christianity from the face of the earth.

      And THAT is why Tommy Robinson is important.

      Reply
      • Charles Southerland

        Not only that, Mr. MacKenzie–

        I don’t have to be civil to demon-possessed leftists. I’d rather scrape their putrefying remains off the the streets and bury them as close to Hell as I can dig.

        …, Sue me for being uncivil.

  17. James A. Tweedie

    Sheesh. I did not express any personal opinion on the matter but only referenced Tommy Robinson’s own comments. If you don’t agree with what he said I respectfully suggest that you direct your comments in his direction.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Oh, no disrespect intended, Mr. Tweedie. The point was simply that what was said is unrelated to what Tommy Robinson has come to symbolize for the vast majority of his fellow Englishmen. In other words, as a poet, I am concerned with symbols infinitely more than particulars of the men who embody them. I naively assumed that my poem would be read in this way.

      If anything, I thank you for the occasion to answer an objection.

      Reply
      • James A. Tweedie

        I have no problem with “Tommy Robinson” being a symbol for something larger than himself. The process by which an individual becomes a larger-than-life symbol is quite fascinating. Think of Guy Fawkes, or Ned Kelly, or Carrie Nation, for example. None of these rose to any great position of power or influence but, through their very notoriety, became cultural icons, representing movements and historical events larger and more complex than their own lives actually embraced. I accept the distinction you have made between Tommy Robinson, the person, and Tommy Robinson. the now-iconic symbol.

  18. C.B. Anderson

    To all,

    Why would anyone ever want to eliminate political discussion from the comment section of this website. This was the most spirited intellectual exchange here ever! And thank you, Joseph S., for nailing that sniper to his own coffin. And Evan, let not your heart be troubled. There are a lot of good and intelligent people here who appreciate an open (if unpopular) forum. I’d tell Mr. X to go to hell, but he’s already there.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Really, we should all be grateful to you, C. B. Anderson, for reminding us of the pleasure of lively discourse, an art which is all too often forgotten.

      And yes, for razor sharp sword-work, it never gets any better than Joseph Salemi, to be sure!

      All the best to you!

      Reply
  19. Dave Whippman

    Mr X’s earlier comment typifies a problem: that anyone who opposes – in any shape or form – the idea of mass immigration and what it brings is dubbed racist, pro-Nazi, etc. Tommy Robinson has his critics, but at least he never abused vulnerable girls as the grooming gangs he exposed did. The fact is that those gangs flourished for years because the authorities were afraid that if they cracked down on them, they would get a similar response to the one that Mr X gave to this poem. Also: when did politics not belong in poetry? Read W H Auden, W B Yeats and a lot of others.
    For me, this was a well-written poem. I don’t agree 100% with all of it, but it highlighted the real problem, of a clash of cultures, that is only getting worse in much of the western world.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      I appreciate, Mr. Whippman, your ability to put matters into perspective.

      And there is also the theological perspective. God summons all kinds of men for all kinds of reasons to all kinds of tasks.

      The man of whom we speak sits in prison in fear of his very life. This is a man with children and a family, a man who grew up in Muslim-occupied Luton, harassed every day, beaten, spit upon, threatened with violence and death.

      Perhaps it is time to think about the virtues of such a man and ask that question which is most conducive to one’s humility: Have I been gifted by my Creator with the same virtues—or are mine by far the lesser?

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        This corrupt and venal British government wants Tommy Robinson to be killed in prison by Muslims. That is their intention. All we can do now is pray for the poor man, and remember him as a hero of the resistance.

        And this is what we call a “Tory” government! God help the English people.

      • Dave Whippman

        Points taken sir. This was an interesting poem to read, and it sparked off an interesting debate.

  20. E. V.

    Once again, Joseph, you have written a masterpiece. If some on the political left are in a twist, perhaps it’s because they feel threatened by a talented, right-wing poet. If you don’t mind my asking, I’m curious: How long did it take to write this tribute to Tommy Robinson?

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Well, there is a question as to whether I possess any talent at all because I always beg God for my words and feel everything I possess I have received. I began all my works in prayer with the acknowledgment that I possess nothing and am nothing.

      I doubt that I can answer your question to your satisfaction, E. V. as I have never thought to time myself. If it should be of interest to you, I can say that I wrote the “Letter to England” in one sitting in the course of my morning coffee, after my spiritual duties.

      Reply
      • E. V.

        Oh my! Joseph Charles MacKenzie, I am beyond impressed! (When I asked you how long it took to compose “Letter to England: For Tommy Robinson”, I didn’t mean in minutes/hours. I meant in weeks/months.) The fact that you did this in one sitting is beyond remarkable! Yes! You definitely do have talent, but it is also very modest of you to acknowledge that all blessings, including talent, come from God. Thank you for sharing your gift.

  21. B. S. Eliud Acrewe

    Mr. Mackenzie’s “Letter to England” is a spirited commentary on his vision of England. Structurally it divides into three sections of 12, 18, and 12, iambic pentametre couplets. The poem opens with a nice rhetorical flourish, “but yesterday”, repeated thrice, and proceeds with striking gusto. Throughout, the poem is remarkable for its admixture of contemporary and ancient diction. Though Mr. MacKenzie mentions Pope in his comments, his heroic couplets are, though not totally unlike Pope’s (and Dryden’s) couplets, particularly in the realm of “public poetry”, rather more like Shakespeare’s lines in his historical plays (especially at the opening). Though I would not call it a masterpiece for Mr. MacKenzie’s historical flaws and the occasional metrical shortening, as in “Come forth in splendor, pow’r, and might”, the overall effect of the poem is invigourating. The poem is really not about Tommy Robinson, as was my smaller, more focused, less rousing, dodeca “The Imprisonment of Tommy Robinson”, and his dedication and mention at the end of section II are rather anticlimactic, when one considers Mr. Mackenzie’s larger, overarching vision. There are many excellent lines in the poem, from echoes of Churchill and Brooke to incisive couplets like the following: “Would you let England topple on the brink/ Whilst petty deskmen dictate what you think?” In short, I concur wholeheartedly with Mr. Watt, Mr. Mackenzie demonstrates here in his “Letter to England” an “elegant command of…English”.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      I would like everyone to know that I write for the toughest, most difficult audience in Christendom: the readers and poets of the SCP!

      It is important that Mr. Acrewe correctly read my title, as others had mistaken the poem as a piece about Tommy Robinson when it was in fact for him. The poem is rather about the English people and their century-long struggle against German socialism which continues even today.

      Angela Merkle is Hitler without the mustache. The EU is the Fourth Reich.

      As for the shortening of words like “power,” I do wish that, when I was auditioning actors for the recording of the Sonnets for Christ the King, that I had not come across so many who voiced the “w,” giving the word two syllables, which in classic recitation (think Gielgud’s recording of Shakespeare’s sonnets) never happens.

      This poem was meant to be recited, so my shortening of that word is the stage instruction of disgruntled poet.

      Mr. Acrewe may also be right in identifying the style of the couplets as rather more in Shakespeare’s realm than Pope’s, causing me to go back this morning to the Agincourt speech in Henry V, although I confess that I did my best to emulate neither Pope nor Shakespeare (one does not have to in borrowing their techniques). Still, I find myself unable to disagree with Mr. Acrewe on this point, as the third part of the poem certainly has recourse to Elizabethan diction, precisely in honor of England’s golden age.

      Reply
  22. EDLmedia

    What a wonderful poem!
    You have captured so well – albeit from half a hemisphere distant – the way millions of English men and women think and feel. Many of these are reluctant to voice their feelings, but this does not mean those feelings don’t exist.
    We will not venture further into criticism, but we can add that in matters of fact and implication, your work stands in no need of qualification or correction.
    Thank you for your contribution. We have been pleased to commend it to our members.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      On behalf of all our readers and poets, I thank you for this kind intervention on the part of the English Defence League’s media department, including the confirmation that I am not in need of qualification or correction in matters of fact or implication.

      The ever shifting relations among the British movement’s historical players—ephemeral minutiae compared the glorious successes the movement has achieved as a whole—are stale news indeed. The growing campaign initiated by the EDL many years ago is internationalizing at a rapid pace.

      Anglophone poets throughout the world have a natural obligation to support the English Defence League in union with its many allies and associates who at the present moment are ever growing in numbers. For, as seen in the many intelligent criticisms posted in this thread, the debt we Americans owe to the literary history and traditions of the British peoples can never be fully estimated or repaid.

      In our commitment to the continuation of those traditions, let our literary defence of Britain—whose freedom is the surest guarantee of our own—be always vibrant, meaningful, and true.

      Reply
  23. Uwe Carl Diebes

    Though Mr. MacKenzie thought Mr. Acrewe was noting the shortening of the word “pow’r”, I don’t believe he was; after all, elision and contraction are not only entirely acceptable; but there is a natural tendency to condense the Englinguage in all kinds of ways. No, rather he was pointing out the line was one foot shorter than all the rest, making it, though forceful, an iambic tetrametre.

    But as for the antagonism to Deutschland (Germany), that is a bridge too far for those who are fascinated by German culture in many ways. Remember, in the same way that Angela Merkel may be lacking in moral insight, so too, Mr. MacKenzie mentions May, Sturgeon and Corbyn. A nation is not merely its leaders at any one point in time.

    Observe some of the figures in the last few hundred years in German music, for example. Though Händel came to England, he was part of the German linguistic culture, as were Bach, Glück, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelsohn, Schumann, Wagner, the Strausses, German-born Offenbach, Brahms, Mahler, etc. It is only a provincial insularity that could not see the greatness in the great body of work that came from such individuals.

    The same holds true in other fields, as, for example, mathematics: Leibniz, the Swiss Bernoullis and Euler, Gauss, Jacobi, Dirichlet, Riemann, Weierstrass, Cantor, Kronecker, Kummer, Frobenius, Steiner, Möbius, Plücker, Grassmann, Klein, Cantor, Hilbert, etc. There is a richness in German culture that, if one writes it off, one loses a great deal indeed. In the great body of Indo-European languages, English is, after all, a Germanic language.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      No one is attacking German Kultur, neither MacKenzie nor anyone else. Where do you get that crazy idea?

      We are simply saying that the E.U., dominated by a smug left-liberal ideologue like Merkel, is nothing but the Third Reich with a Smiley-face button. And Merkel, like almost all continental Europeans, is by nature an arrogant statist. Unfortunately there are too many degenerate Britons who now have the same attitude.

      Talking about Bach and Beethoven is absurd in this argument.

      Reply
  24. Uwe Carl Diebes

    Where did you get that crazy idea?

    1.
    “But yesterday, you bravely fought and won
    A war against the socialistic Hun…”

    Are Germans Huns? Were all Germans of WW1 socialistic?

    2.
    “In England’s name, the inauspicious fight
    Against the German Marxist and his spite…”

    Which German Marxist(s)?

    3.
    “Of Prussia’s despot and her Eastbourne stooge
    And let your nation fall to subterfuge?”

    Is Angela Merkel a despot, or a duly elected Chancellor?
    Is Germany really only Prussia?

    4.
    “For Britain’s debt you have these frauds to thank:
    What is their “Europe” but a German bank?”

    Are May’s, Sturgeon’s, and Corbyn’s visions of Europe really only a German bank, or do they actually see more than that?

    5.
    “Corrupt, they steal and loot without surcease:
    What Hitler lost through war they grab through peace!”

    Which Germans are stealing and looting, or are some Germans just making excellent products?

    “Der Irrtum ist viel leichter zu erkennen, als die Wahrheit zu finden…”
    —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      This list proves Mr. Salemi’s point to perfection! Not a single attack on German music or mathematics.

      As for provincial insularity, it is now completely evident that Mr. Diebes has not the faintest idea of what is going on in Europe.

      For him, there is no hope.

      Still, it is a testament to the power of the “Letter to England” that his life revolves it.

      Reply
  25. Uwe Carl Diebes

    1. The questions remain unanswered, but I don’t expect any answers. “Not everyone is able to read or interpret poetry.”

    2. The critical literary observation remains unnoted, but I don’t expect it to be, and “jealousy is blinding”!

    3. It seems “there is no hope for” me. But I shall soldier on.

    4. The “absurdity” of my comments comes from my “desperate far-left attempt to vindicate Merkel and the EU”. Hmm.

    5. “Angela Merkel is Hitler without the mustache. The EU is the Fourth Reich.” Obviously Mr. Diebes is “nonsensical and factually incorrect”.

    6. I haven’t the “faintest idea of what is going on in Europe”. I grant it is difficult. Think of what is going on in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia…

    7. Croatia took second @ the World Cup. Yeehaw! Here is Croatian poet Ivan Gundulič (1589-1638), from his pastoral “Dubravka” on the priceless value of God-given, fair, sweet, beloved liberty.

    “O liepa, o draga, o slatka slobodo,
    dar u kom sva blaga višnji nam Bog je do,
    uzroče istini od naše sve slave,
    uresu jedini od ove Dubrave,
    sva srebra, sva zlata, svi ljudcki životi
    ne mogu bit plata tvoj čistoj lipot.”

    8. Apparently my “life revolves it”—the “Letter to England”. Huh?

    9. I find I agree with Mr. Acrewe’s assessment, though he seems to be offering the “stage instruction of a disgruntled poet.

    10. Here is a memorable previous quote of Mr. MacKenzie from July of 2017: “Mr. Wise, you made only one mistake in your” comments. “You failed to adore”.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      None other than the EDL’s media team has stated, in this very thread, that my Letter to England “captured so well – albeit from half a hemisphere distant – the way millions of English men and women think and feel. ”

      You’re always welcome to keep embarrassing yourself in front of the SCP’s British readers.

      Don’t know what to tell ya…

      Reply
  26. Joseph S. Salemi

    I wonder if this tiresome gentleman could possibly desist from using these silly anagrammatic pseudonyms. Is there anything wrong with the name Bruce Dale Wise? Why this adolescent posturing?

    His original “questions” were answered fully. The value of German Kultur in music, mathematics, or any other field has nothing whatsoever to do with the political question being discussed. But Mr. Wise seems to think that if you appreciate German Kultur, you must necessarily favor everything that the current German Republic favors. I guess that means if you appreciate the beauty of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture, you also favor daily human sacrifice.

    But since Wise is so keen on having answers to his five original questions, let his chew on these:

    1) No, the Germans are not ethnically Huns. But that was the derogatory nickname given to them in World War I, and there is no reason not to use it again. In point of fact they certainly did live up to a Hunnish reputation at the pointless destruction of the Louvain, and the introduction of poison gas to warfare. And no, they were not all socialistic — but imperial Germany was the most statist and bureaucratic and socialistically-influenced government in the Europe of 1914.

    2. Which German Marxists were the English fighting? Well, how about Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, just to name the most prominent? Prior to the Russian revolution, Germany was the most communistically inclined nation in Europe. Its bureaucracy was world-famous for its mindless rigidity and regulatory nit-picking.

    3. No, Germany is not all Prussia. But the savage authoritarianism of Prussia has left its mark on all of Germany, right up to today. And yes, Merkel is a would-be despot, which is why she is hanging on desperately to power with her fingernails, even though her own cabinet is screaming at her stupidity and leftist ideology. And it is well to remember that Angela Merkel was raised in East Germany, and served as an official propagandist for Marxism. This bitch was “duly elected”? Big deal. So was Adolf Hitler.

    4. May, Sturgeon, and Corbyn are just stupid left-liberals, so why is their opinion important? The plain fact is that German arrogance and financial power are attempting to dictate to the rest of Europe how to live and what to think. Merkel has done everything to force Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other smaller states to kowtow to E.U. orders. MacKenzie was perfectly correct to speak of Europe under the E.U. as a German bank.

    5. Germany may make good products — so what? No one denies Germans the right to sell them and make a profit. The real issue is the financial stranglehold of multinational banks (many headquartered in Germany) that are hell-bent on reducing all of Europe and beyond to a kind of chattel slavery to their world-encircling network. Why do you think the Deep State in America and Europe is so fanatically Russophobic? The Russians have declined, quite correctly, to be a part of this kleptocracy.

    Mr. Wise really doesn’t seem to know much about the European situation at all. I happen to have relatives in Germany and Italy, and believe me — people in Europe are well aware of the power-grab that Merkel and ideologues of her ilk are attempting. Perhaps Wise is unaware that there have been mass rapes of German women by Muslim immigrant scum, but the German Polizei (at Merkel’s order) have been forbidden to interfere, and any German male who attempts to prevent such rapes is himself arrested for disturbing the peace. Is that the Germany that you admire, Mr. Wise?

    And Mr. Wise — please don’t answer under some asinine pseudonym. It just isn’t becoming. We all think that Bruce Dale Wise is a very nice name.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Bruce Dale Wise is now missing in action, because, of course, he has no answer.

      And one suspects that his ignorance of history—to include those massive political movements which are the very hallmark of the present age—is ultimately coupled with a foundational lack of literary training and knowledge.

      Reply
  27. Uwe Carl Diebes

    My, my, my—we are a bit of a Germa(no!)phobe. Nevertheless, I thank Mr. Salemi for Mr. Salemi’s answers.

    As relating to the five questions, cf. above.

    1. No. No. That is correct,

    2. Is Mr. MacKenzie really referring to Karl Marx? Hmm. Was it not the English who gave Marx sanctuary?

    3. No. That is correct. But, though Merkel is not perfect (nor Salemi, MacKenzie, Diebes, etc.), “would-be despot” and “bitch”—really? Yes, “duly elected” candidates do matter to England and to Germany—and to the United States of America too. And no, Hitler was not “duly elected”, as FDR was during that same time period, nor as Merkel has been in the New Millennium.

    4. It was Mr. MacKenzie’s poem that brought up the opinions of May, Sturgeon and Corbyn. My question relates to his interpretation of their visions of Europe—a German bank? If I am not mistaken, wasn’t London a greater financial hub than any German city before Brexit? And now?

    5. Multinationals doesn’t sound so much like specific Germans stealing and looting—certainly not Mr. Salemi’s relatives in Germany, nor my own. I do grant that international banking is corrupt in Europe, but also in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, though of course, at differening levels nationally. Ironically, these days it is the Russian economy that is most frequently discussed as a “kleptocracy” in economics.

    Finally, thanks to Mr. Salemi’s cogent arguments, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital importance of being Uwe Carl Diebes.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      In fact, anyone who reads “Letter to England” immediately discerns that the first part is referring to a Germany that had fallen into barbarism in the First World War and a Germany that had fallen into Marxism in the Second—and that my use of qualifiers such as “socialistic” perfectly prevent the poem from being anti-German with the completely obvious subtext that the German people themselves have always been the first victims of false government as they are today….

      …anyone, that is, who possesses enough historical and cultural literacy to read the poem correctly, which, so far, has been everyone but you, Mr. Wise.

      Dr. Salemi has not only elucidated with perfect clarity my meaning, but he has exposed your motives for rejecting my meaning.

      It is moreover ironic that as the founder of the St. John’s College String Quartet, I played a German violin and performed a number of German composers which your thin little copied-and-pasted list does not even include. Ironic, again, that my baptismal priest, the subject of Stanley Kubrick’s first film, “The Flying Padre,” was a German immigrant, and that my current bishop is also a German immigrant.

      Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven belong to my Catholic heritage.

      Again, you are free to continue embarrassing yourself, under whatever name you please.

      But if I may suggest a more fitting pseudonym, one which more accurately conforms to the content of your writing, may I please suggest:

      Ignoramus.

      Reply
  28. Joseph S. Salemi

    Push a man hard enough, and his true ideological loyalties emerge. Such seems to be the case with my treatment of Bruce Dale Wise.

    His “answer” to point 3 makes it clear that Mr. Wise is still smarting over the 2016 election result in the United States. Perhaps — like so many left-liberals with Trump Derangement Syndrome — he thinks that Trump was not “duly elected.” Has he been seduced by the chimerical idea of Russian interference in that election, which allegedly prevented another bitch (the odious Hillary Clinton) from ascending to the presidency?

    As for Hitler’s accession to power, it came about in perfect accord with the Weimar Republic’s laws. Hitler was legally appointed to the German Chancellorship on January 30, 1933, just as several other persons (e.g. Bruning and von Papen) had been appointed to the Chancellorship in prior years. Don’t blame me if the electoral rules of the democratic Weimar Republic weren’t the same as those of democracies today.

    Karl Marx resided in England? Oh wow. I guess that makes England responsible for Marxism. Are you serious, Bruce?

    I notice you haven’t answered my question about the legally protected rapes of German women by Muslim immigrant scum (the same issue, by the way, that brought Tommy Robinson to public notice in Britain, where the identical thing was happening to girls in the north of England). If you can come up with plenty of pseudonyms, surely can you come up with a defense of this atrocity.

    By the way, “Hmm…” is not a logical argument. I can’t find a source for it in Aristotle.

    Reply
  29. Damian Robin

    For background on the present establishment in England and the UK, see the link below.

    For specifics about the May 25th arrest of Tommy Robinson, also see the link below (starting from 22 mins).

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Thank you, Mr. Robin for this invaluable information.

      The video linked is completely horrific. It is as if England has already fallen. To think that the official press in Britain actually relies on the reprisal lists of hard-left communist organizations to target entities for suppression and press black-outs!

      On the simple level of the violation of international norms of human rights, this is unacceptable.

      Reply
  30. Uwe Carl Diebes

    1. I do think Mr. MacKenzie’s “Letter to England” is one of the better poems I have seen in the New Millennium. It is exciting, and it is polemical. I’m just merely pointing out historical errors in its iambic pentametres and some of its skewed positions that I frankly would do to any poem from Homer on.

    One of my questions had to do with the following couplets. Note the excellent diction and ideas succinctly and artistically placed.

    “In England’s name the inauspicious fight
    against the German Marxist and his spite.
    When fire from your once peaceful skies rained down
    On London’s ancient temples of renown,
    Your valour triumphed over every fear
    Whose darkness could not mute your English cheer.”

    Mr. MacKenzie tells us that “Germany…had fallen into Marxism in the Second” World War. My suggestion would be to replace Marxist with Nazi. Does the great statesman and historian Winston Churchill ever speak against “the German Marxist” in his renowned speeches of WW2?

    2. From Realist Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary”: “Ignoramus, n. A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.”

    3. “It is clear that Mr. Wise is still smarting over the 2016 election in the United States.”

    It actually looks pretty rosy over here.

    4. “He thinks Trump was not ‘duly elected’. Hmm.

    I think the final tally electoral college result is fairly clear: Trump/Pence 304 and Clinton/Kaine 227.

    5. “Has he been seduced by the chimerical idea of Russian interference in that election…?”

    Nope.

    6. Yes, Hitler was legally appointed to the German Chancellorship in 1933. My reference was to all of the elections afterwards up to 1945, up through WW2 and the Holocaust.

    7. I did not suggest England was responsible for Marxism, only that tolerant, Merrie Olde England gave a safe space to the German philosopher whom the German leaders had rejected.

    8. I didn’t answer Mr. Salemi’s question, because I preferred to focus on Mr. MacKenzie’s poem. “If you can come up with plenty of pseudonyms, surely you can come up with a defense of this [kind of] atrocity.”

    Okay. Here is just one, an unpublished tennos from 2016. If for no other reason, I do think it is incumbent upon poets to record the historical truths of our time, as Damian Robin has recently done in “Organ Harves͡t”.

    For the Memory of Maria Ladenburger (1996-2016)
    by Bleda Ur Ecweis
    “In the beginning there was the Word and not the talk…”
    —Gottfried Benn

    She was last seen when she was cycling home from party fun;
    her body was discovered in the Dreisum in the sun,
    Maria L., in Freiburg, 19, a med-student, who
    had volunteered as helper at a migrant refuge too.
    Her father, an EU official, drowned in misery;
    police identified the suspect on CCTV.
    He was an Afghan Muslim migrant, who perhaps had raped
    and killed one Carolin as well, aged 18. And there draped,
    a black scarf, round that murderer, the night Maria died.
    This hellish murk ‘ll finish off the innocent, one cried.

    I suspect Mr. Salemi might appreciate the pun in line 10, though it is certainly not my overall assessment of the Chancellor.

    9. The word “hmm” here suggests reflection on erroneous assumptions, united with an unwillingness of the speaker to expound. As to “hmm” not being in the work of Aristotle, the greatest logician of all time, I would respond first with “There are more things in heaven and Earth…than are dreamt of in his philosophy…” and secondly, though our native tongues are different, I am fairly sure my vocabulary is larger than Aristotle’s, and I suppose, Mr. Salemi’s is too. That is but one of the exciting things about writing in English.

    10. Finally, lest I seem too brusque in my assessment of Aristotle’s vocabulary. Here is a poem on his legacy, an unpublished dodeca of 2016.

    The Tomb of the Philosopher
    by Erisbawdle Cue

    An archaeologist says he’s found Aristotle’s tomb
    in ancient Stagira, where Aristotle left the womb.
    Konstantinos Sismanidis says there’s no evidence,
    but indications reaching certitude and confidence.

    It’s a reminder of the famed philosopher of old,
    whose logic and whose syllogisms cross this spinning globe,
    who took all knowledge as his college in reality,
    and spawned a vision of the cosmic span’s totality.

    He gazed on topics, from the sciences to social arts,
    his golden meanings shining greater than his many parts.
    Itinerant, meandering, he walked about the World,
    with balance in his virtues, beauty in his truths unfurled.

    Reply
  31. Joseph Charles MacKenzie

    I quote from an article by Mr. Watson in alt-left tabloid, The Independent, entitled “Hitler and Socialist Dream” and dated november 22, 1998:

    “Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism” he once remarked, “as I do not hesitate to admit”. He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch. The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that “they had never even read Marx”, implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been “a private Russian affair”, whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history! His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun”, adding revealingly that “the whole of National Socialism” was based on Marx.”

    And this is only the tip of the scholarly iceberg on tHitler’s Marxism, as whole dissertations have appeared on the topic.

    May I please suggest, Mr. Wise, that you consider learning to research the facts before before parading your ignorance before the general public…

    Reply
  32. Joseph S. Salemi

    Paul Weston’s commentary is utterly devastating.

    The left-liberal scum who now control Britain (both Tory and Labourite) are truly “the traitor class.”

    As we say in the States, this guy Weston has a set of brass balls. What courage!

    Watch how the multiculturalist scum in Britain now work to destroy the man. Like Tommy Robinson, Weston will be subjected to vicious attacks orchestrated by the government of another sick left-liberal bitch, Theresa May.

    And once again, let me say it — Bruce Dale Wise won’t comment on the thirty-year ongoing rape of white working-class girls in England by Muslim immigrant scum. I guess he’s still trying to figure out what to say.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Oh, he knows precisely what to say: anything that will distract from the question, be it the creation of a major scandal over one word of my poem, or an elaborate change of subject. The predictability of the left is absolute.

      Reply
  33. Clide Abersuwe

    I think I shall parade my ignorance before the general public, but not comment on the on-going rape of girls in England, leaving only a poem published here @ SCP on June 19, 2018.

    The Imprisonment of Tommy Robinson

    The sea is rough tonight. The tide is full, the moon in doubt.
    The European lights of liberty are going out.
    I’m hearing some reports that Tommy Robinson is jailed,
    for streaming news on Muslim sex slaves, jailed with no bail.

    In just one day he was locked up, and secretly was tried;
    he has been tossed into the slammer, thirteen months confined.
    And no one in the British press could say a thing at all;
    but everywhere the truth broke out, an info waterfall.

    Why was he tried and jailed for reporting on the rapes?
    Has Tommy Robinson been bitten by judicial hate?
    Has England’s legal system, once the envy of the World,
    declined so far its citizens are fodder for misrule?

    http://classicalpoets.org/confucius-institutes-and-other-poetry-by-bruce-dale-wise/

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      I wanted to offer you, Mr. Wise, a conciliatory note in saying that the only real shame is in failing to remedy one’s ignorance once it has been exposed. No sooner, however, did I conceive this thought, than you have demonstrated by this latest post a second form of shame: presenting one’s self as a poet without actually being one.

      Reply
  34. C.B. Anderson

    That’s a wrap, folks. Once someone tries to convince me that “rapes” rhymes with “hate,” or “tried” with “confined,” the game is over. Half-rhymes are simply not enough to overcome the insufficiency of half-truths.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      “Half-truths are not concealed by half-rhymes” should be rendered into an immortal Latin proverb. It strikes at the very heart of the whole modernist movement.

      Even worse, it seems we now have in Mr. Wise a self-made critic who was never a poet.

      Yes, Mr. Anderson:

      “That’s a wrap, folks!”

      Reply
  35. Clide Abersuwe

    First off, I grant Mr. Anderson that the poem is not that good. I like what it attempts, the opening Arnoldian couplet, the placement of “Tommy Robinson” in the poem, and the concluding couplet with the rhyme “World/misrule”; but other than that the dodeca is marred by hasty balland [sic] writing. Though others may certainly see it differently, for me, one of the least flaws is the rhyme of “judicial hate” to “rapes”.

    I only offered one recent poem because Mr. Salemi stated that I “won’t comment on the thirty-year ongoing rape of white working-class girls in England by Muslim immigrant scum. I guess he’s still trying to figure out what to say.” That is also the only reason I offered the poem on the murder of Maria Ladenburger.

    However, as to Mr. Anderson’s “wrap”, I can repeat myself for those who have not read the Tim Myers’ strand. I like rhyme. Yet the obsession with rhyme in poetry is definitely not Classical. Rhymes (that is, all the different kinds of rhymes) are traditional in English verse, in balladry and song, since the time of great writers, like Geoffrey Chaucer; but poets certainly are not limited to exact rhyme.

    Much of the greatest poetry in English does not rhyme, “Beowulf”, wide swaths of Shakespearean drama, Miltonic epic, Wordworthian musings, etc. One thing I was thinking about today, Shakespeare reaches his greatest poetry outside of rhyme. Since Mr. MacKenzie mentions “Henry V”. Here are four lines, not my favourite at all, but which I would argue, are poetry, though they do not rhyme (nor try to).

    “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
    Or close the wall up with our English dead.
    In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
    As modest stillness and humility…”

    And an example of imperfect rhyme from Dickinson. Here are four lines which I would also call poetry.

    “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—
    That perches in the soul—
    And sings the tune without the words—
    And never stops—at all—”

    Reply
    • James Eliot

      Mr. Abersuwe: To English ears, your poem sounds American whilst MacKenzie’s poem sounds English. I am not one to discuss the merits of American poetry, but can you see how MacKenzie’s Letter to England is more forceful in asserting truth which I believe is what Mr. Anderson is trying to get at? The Letter is getting round on social media where we’ve been seeing it.

      Reply
      • Charles Southerland

        News flash: Mckenzie has conversation with MacKenzie, I mean, Eliot. Gets Mr. Wise in on it too. Where is Mr. Sale when he’s needed?

  36. Clide Abersuwe

    I agree with Mr. Eliot: “To English ears, your poem sounds American, whilst MacKenzie’s poem sounds English”. And, I would add, that is intentional on both our parts. Mr. MacKenzie utilizes the English tradition in his excellent, iambic pentametre couplets, reminiscent of Shakespeare and Pope, whereas, I am drawing on the British tradition of the ballad form, using Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) and breaking with absolute rhyme. Mr. MacKenzie utilizes heroic echoes of English history, like Arthur, the once and future king, while I am focused on the present state of British law.

    However, I disagree with Mr. Eliot (and peripherally Mr. Anderson, et. al.) when he states that Mr. MacKenzie’s poem is “more forceful in asserting truth”. I do agree Mr. MacKenzie’s poem is more forceful, but not in asserting truth. I need not repeat all of the historical errors of Mr. MacKenzie’s poem, but certainly Mr. Eliot should remember from his history the Battle of Britain was not against the German Marxist, but rather the German Nazi. I am sure the speeches of the great historian and statesman Winston Churchill confirm that.

    Although I am first and foremost an American, I do believe that Winston Churchill, despite all of his flaws, was the greatest statesman of the 20th century. My father, who fought in the Pacific in World War II and in the Korean War, and was himself a deep reader in history, thought the two greatest figures of World War II were Eisenhower and Churchill. Nevertheless, it was English Socialism (Ingsoc), not German Marxists that replaced Churchill from 1945 to 1951.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Dear Mr. Wise,

      You speak of a truth that is a bit higher than mere politics, and that is your dear father surviving the Pacific campaign (which is unimaginable) and also Korea, hardly any more conceivable.

      That higher truth is the grace that leads men to sacrifice for others.

      You are the son of a great man, however ordinary or not so ordinary all great men are. I think my harshness in answering your objections is convicted by that higher virtue, your father’s virtue I apologize to you for that and am very sorry for it.

      In some way, what matters is that we Americans have played a role for so many others throughout the world. My poem should really strike the ears as American, because it, too, albeit in a lesser way to be sure, hopes to come to the aid of others whose condition is now dire.

      May God bless you and all those around you!

      Reply
  37. James Eliot

    To say, Mr. Abersuwe, that the Nazis were not Marxist, when the very founder of the German Nationalist Socialist German Worker’s Party on myriad occasions either wrote or spoke of his indebtedness to Marx is where I believe your argument collapses. The above quoted article from The Independent is fantastically revealing. Even that does not matter when you consider that every one of Nazism’s doctrines are Marxist. Simply substitute the word volk with proletariat.

    To me, your argument is like saying the Russian front was a battle against Stalinism, not Marxism. As for Churchill, we understand him as a complex figure who lacked in many instances the foresight of history.

    And this, I believe, why Mr. MacKenzie’s Letter to England speaks so profoundly to Britons at this moment.. No one will argue with you about his craftsmanship and I am not here to critique yours, but there is more to his poem than how it’s put together. The Letter to England shares our sense of history.

    Reply
  38. Clide Abersuwe

    It is absolutely true that I do differentiate between Marxists and nazis, as well as other groups, like communists, socialists, Maoists, and fascists, though I agree with Mr. Eliot that they all show similar statist beliefs.

    In reference to the English-speaking peoples, as relates to Churchill, even when I disagree with him, I feel he had more foresight, in an historical sense, than any figure in the 20th century; for, though he is not my favourite English-speaking historian of the 20th century, he possessed foresight in the approaching cataclysms of the mid-to-later 20th century back in the 1920s.

    Reply
  39. Mark wall

    Tommy is a truth seaker, admired by many in this country because of his honesty. One who people can have belief in. Please watch his speech at the oxford union for an understanding of where he comes from and why he is who he is.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      The Oxford Union speech Mr. Wall is referring to was delivered November 27 2014 and is one of the great, dramatic moments in the history of freedom.

      Protesters from the Socialist Workers Party, Unite, Unison, and UAF gathered outside the window in front of which Tommy Robinson was speaking inside and their menacing chants can be heard during the first several minutes of the event.

      Everyone should see the Oxford Union’s official recording of Tommy Robinson’s presentation which is available here:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YQ94jFg_4A

      Thank you, Mr. Wall, for bringing this to everyone’s attention.

      Reply
      • Hugh maclean

        ‘History of freedom’ this is slack use of language that infects out national discourse. Whose freedom; if some are free others are enslaved; free to do what- bomb mosques.

  40. Neil Rhind

    I have never read such a well-framed tribute to a blundering racist thug.

    Reply
    • Damian Robin

      Thanks Neil, I see the truth in what you say.
      Truth can be beautiful as well as well or poorly said by all of us, including Mr Robinson whose physical expressions have often clumsily overstepped legal grammar’s requirements.

      Of Tommy Robinson

      With his body’s strengths
      and gush of youth
      He’s leaped the social fence
      to flag the truth.
      With sinews from his heart
      he lifts his home;
      With lines of common art
      he rides a comb
      Through piling, haystack tinder
      of the state
      Whose flint would wiff good folk
      from fair debate.

      Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Sorry, Mr. Rhind, the world since November 2016 has officially declared that it no longer buys into the leftist-fascist mantra that anyone who dares oppose Islamo-globalism is a racist thug.

      You are, how shall I say it politely, passé, rather like bell-bottoms, headbands, and flower power.

      Please go back to your mum’s basement, where you live, and light more candles in front of your “Oprah and Chelsea in 2020” poster. Perhaps it will give you comfort.

      Reply
      • Neil Rhind

        Thank goodness you don’t stoop to irrelevant personal attacks. And that’s “Dr” Rhind, BTW.

  41. Neil Rhind

    Yes, your’s is a better formed piece of verse. Strangely, though, mine is more true. Keats would be perplexed.

    In Praise of Tommy

    To protect his green and pleasant sward
    He will not bow to Libtard Lords
    Who bind free speech with weasel words.
    (We shan’t mention the mortgage fraud).

    If the MSM keep finding faults
    In the Truth and Free Speech he exalts
    We’ll take them with a pinch salt.
    (Nor his conviction for assault).

    For he found his sacred calling
    Standing up in hope of stalling
    The plight of Merrie England, falling.
    (Nor two arrests for public brawling)

    The good fight’s one that must be fought.
    Muslamic Rayguns must be caught
    And brought to trial in public court.
    (Nor yet his counterfeit passport)

    And if the media mock and titter
    He’s neither coward nor a quitter
    But soldiers on, blithely unbittered.
    (Nor coming onto kids on twitter).

    Caught by the Court’s peado-Cabal
    For his investigative journo-trawl
    To bring crime rings to their downfall.
    (Nor that he’s caught just sweet f— all)

    That’s why the Courts came to revile
    The live reports that he compiled
    On rings of Asian peadophiles
    (Or just because they risked mistrials

    Through taping while the court’s in session
    Which could call convictions into question.
    That, not Free Speech’s suppression
    Was why they banged up Yaxley-Lennon).

    Reply
      • Neil Rhind

        “The World” has indeed spoken, as you say, with the resounding 158 votes this muppet received the last time he stood in a General Election. Clearly, his platform that the UK is ailing from White Genocide has been fully endorsed there. Voice of the people, innit.

  42. Charles Southerland

    To whom it may concern:

    Most, if not all of these names listed here on this thread are fabrications of McSkirt’s fertile imagination. (I’ll get by with a little help from my friends.) (John Lennon)

    Mike Marsh
    Corallan
    Jan Buchanan-Medina
    Jo Patti
    Taylor Thomas
    David Whippman
    EDL media
    Mark wall

    Reply
    • The Society

      Dear Charles, off the top of my head, I can confirm with a high degree of certainty that Jan Buchanan-Medina (also known as Jan Darling) and David Whippman are genuinely who they say they are.

      Reply
      • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

        And obviously, dear Mr. Mantyk, these are all real people commenting under whatever name they please, as they are free to do in this particular venue.

        Quite simply, Mr. Southerland is going to have to come to grips with the fact that the “Letter to England” has touched a chord with people in the UK where the poem is being read and shared within many echelons of British society, to include, as I have learned only yesterday, the political class.

        I have many friends in Britain who have been instrumental in disseminating the poem while drawing attention to the Society of Classical Poets at the same time.

        In thinking back on my Inaugural Poem for Donald J. Trump, I can recall how my detractors were just as useful as my admirers in catapulting the “Pibroch of the Domhnall” to international fame, and how their final act of desperation consisted of false narratives of “hidden identities”—one detractor writing that I was a failed Madison Avenue marketing executive while another proudly announced that I did not exist at all but was the “creation” of a group of conspirators.

        Alas, I and others throughout the world who admire Tommy Robinson, who understand the communist underpinnings of the failing Remainer movement in Westminster, and who stand for British sovereignty, we are all real people—like it or not.

        If anything, Mr. Southerland should be even more afraid of the many thousands of Brexit supporters who, for one reason or another, do not happen to leave comments in this venue, but who are nevertheless enjoying, sharing, and taking interest in the “Letter to England: For Tommy Robinson.”

      • E. V.

        @ Charles Southerland: Regarding your 2/1/19 comment, did I misunderstand you? Do you want ALL traces of your presence on SCP scrubbed from this website? Is so, do you (perhaps) wish to reconsider? I’ve enjoyed reading your poetry and will be sad to see you go.

      • Charles Southerland

        Dear Evan; How about James Eliot, who has conversations with Mr. Mck and Mr. Wise? James Sale Knows the truth. Don’t you?

    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Dear Joseph —

      I shouldn’t have to remind you that name-calling of this sort is really uncalled for. Whatever dispute you have with Charles Southerland should not drive you into uncharitable and un-Christian language.

      I think it’s time for all of us to ask ourselves if we really want to turn this website into another horrid “Social Media” nightmare. Let’s just stop with the nasty sobriquets, OK?

      I don’t want to hear any arguments or justifications or disputes over this matter. So please — no replies to this post of mine, from anyone.

      Reply
  43. E. V.

    @ JCM: I admire your poetic skill. Your rhyme and meter are perfect. Your message is never cryptic, but always clear. The Society of Classical Poets is one of the few remaining literary venues that still support the all-American right to Freedom of Speech!

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Dear E. V.,

      I thank you for your kind observation as to the clarity of my verses, and also for your support of the Society of Classical Poets (SCP). I have made every effort to bring the SCP to the attention readers outside of the United States. From the great interest shown the “Letter to England: For Tommy Robinson” among our colleagues in the United Kingdom and Europe, the Society is certainly gaining ground.

      Above all, as the world focuses on the plight of the United Kingdom and the progress of Britain’s most courageous voice—that of Tommy Robinson—the SCP should be proud of its roll in making traditional poetry relevant to the aspirations of freedom in our time.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Dear Joseph —

        I’ve only just looked again at this old thread, after learning that it had been revitalized recently as a result of your poem’s growing popularity in Britain and elsewhere. Congratulations — the heroism of Tommy Robinson is being recognized, and your tribute to that heroism is helping to bring about that result.

        Things are slowly changing in Britain. The stinging parliamentary rebuke to that dumb left-liberal bitch May is a portent. She tried desperately to sabotage Brexit, and her own party kicked her in the teeth.

        There are still leftist scum like “Dr. Rhind” infesting Britain, but they no longer have the floor all to themselves. In Brazil, Italy, Hungary, and plenty of other places, things are moving rightwards. As the counter-cultural jackasses from the 1960s sang, the times they are a-changin’.

      • Hugh.maclean

        The shift to the right in politics in a number of countries is anti democratic and leading to the 1930s madness that led to world war. Nationalism is the road to war and it is rooted in intolerance for others. The emotions it unleashes are irrational and appeals to the less intelligent who are enamoured by flag waving idiots like Farage. Genocide is often the result of arrogant nationalism. It thrives on hate for the ‘other’. Robinson is the epitome of this pathetic stereotype.

      • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

        Dear Dr. Salemi,

        And it is significant, indeed, that one of the illustrious supporters of this poem, whose comment can still be enjoyed in this thread (supra), was none other than Leo Yankevich, another great voice of freedom, who expresses that I produce more poetry along these lines—even as he attacks a liberal commentator in his signature manner!

        To quote: “I find your poem well-made. I’d like more of the same kind, poems with gonads.”

      • Hugh Maclean

        ‘Freedom’a term that is abused more than any other. Freedom for who? White nationalists? Invariably yes. Largely low intelligence and led by a scumbag fascist.

  44. Joseph S. Salemi

    Maclean — has anyone ever told you that you are a walking cliche? You sound like a tape recording of a Corbyn rally.

    Reply
    • Hugh maclean

      No comment on what I said. Typical avoidance tactic moving in cliche circles. Nationalism leads to wars this is a fact. Blood and soil patriots are emotionally driven idiots clueless about the benefits of cooperation nationally and internationally. We have had peace in Europe for 70 years through E.U cooperation.

      Reply
      • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

        “Peace is not only the avoidance of war, but the enjoyment of order.” —St. Augustine

        Was it not for the chaos created by the EU, there would be no nationalist movements.

      • Hugh maclean

        The EU had nothing to do with the nationalism of Milosovic in the genocide of Yugoslavia. Tribal behaviour scars our social landscape. The EDF in England are the British manifestation of this rabid hate filled behaviour. They are happy to sow the seeds of disorder attacking minorities churches and individuals. You and Robinson are feeding this dysfunction.

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        The E.U. was founded by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Its purely economic predecessor, the European Economic Community (the Common Market), only came into being around 1958. There was no E.U. seventy years ago. Get educated, Hughie.

  45. E. V.

    This is a really dumb debate! Many inherently good/benign things, if taken to an extreme, can turn toxic. Possessing a patriotic love and loyalty to one’s county is good … Creating a delusion of racial/ethnic superiority to justify sadism and/or aggression towards “the foreigner” is bad. The desire to preserve your country’s history, culture, and social norms belong to the former, not the latter. See, it’s not complicated. Grow up!

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Yes. E.V., you are absolutely right in the abstract. But warfare (whether physical or intellectual) is never totally abstract. It’s complicated by the sheer hormonal malice of one’s enemies. A left-wing ideologue like Hugh Maclean, who just parrots mainstream-media muck, can’t be “debated” in any rational sense. (He’s so historically uninformed that he thinks the E.U. has been around for 70 years!) All you can do with an ignoramus like that is fling ridicule at him. It’s not pretty, but it’s the only way to fight. Leo Yankevich understood this sort of thing very well.

      Reply
      • Hugh Maclean

        The first pan European agreement on Steel and Coal industries was agreed in 1946. Both industries that fed war machines. Churchill talked of the ‘United States of Europe’ in the same year. Further integration followed so it has been roughly 70 years of cooperation that has helped to maintain peace in Europe. Your ignorance takes the breath away.

    • Hugh maclean

      No ‘benign’ patriotism is the dog that turns when slighted and the emotions it feeds are violent and irrational. Given the conditions of an economic slump nationalists look to authoritarianism of the right for solutions. Populists like Trump don’t like democracy and his blue collar base want him to break with the constitution.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        You really are clueless about American law and government, aren’t you, Hugh? Why embarrass yourself in public by talking about matters of which you know nothing?

        Trump’s base (and it includes a helluva lot more people than just “blue-collar” workers) wants him to preserve our constitution — more specifically, the First Amendment that protects our right to unfettered free speech, and the Second Amendment that protects our right to bear arms. The American Left is desperate to destroy both of those constitutional rights.

        You Brits don’t have either of those precious rights in the politically correct bureaucracy of permanent Leftist-Liberal-Labourite agencies that dictate how you can live. You can’t speak freely, and you can’t even own a shotgun without registering it.

        And yes, your hero Corbyn (along with most Labourite activists) is an anti-Semite. That’s why British Jews are leaving your party in droves.

      • Hugh maclean

        The second amendment is the right to kill people if you are having a bad day. Nothing can change the unhinged US obsession with guns where the murder rate is shocking by international comparisons. Trump supports this and the NRA reward him substantially for this support. Most of your two Houses are also in the pay of this supporter of domestic terror. The American left are concerned about free speech when Trump has a propaganda Channel,Fox, that is as effective as North Korea’s propaganda channel in brainwashing the public. Trump had the Russians help in winning the election -they discredited Clinton and used illegal information gathering on the electorate they wanted to target. Corruption is everywhere in the land of the free.
        You are clearly clueless on the British unwritten constitution where free speech is practiced widely except where Rupert Murdoch imposes his bigoted views to uphold the Conservatives grip on power. Also the extreme right has been in control in Britain for the last decade so kindly leave alone things you are ill equipped to understand. Under this Right wing neoliberal agenda our country has been destroyed with inequality at record levels, our public services starved of funds and the poor stigmatised and left with little money to survive. As I call it we have been ‘Americanised’ where compassion for others is gone, individualism is rampant, and workers rights have been eviscerated.
        Corbyn is not an anti-Semite he has a record of compassion for the plight of the Palestinians. He does not question the right of the Jewish State to exist and has said this on numerous occasions. You really show both your ignorance on such matters and your prejudices. You need to find some humility because your arrogance is overbearing.

      • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

        It appears that Mr. MacLean is a conservative writing in the guise of a liberal, given that his posts are caricatural and ludicrous, emphasizing the intellectual narcolepsy of the left.

        To say, for example, that the 2nd Amendment is the right to kill someone if you are having a bad day, is to confuse the fundamental right of self-defense with “free choice” which has led to over 61 million infanticides since Roe versus Wade in 1973.

        Here’s a little history, Mr. MacLean, of what has happened after governments disarmed their citizens:

        1911 – Turkey disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1915 – 1917 they murdered 1.5 million Armenians.

        1929 – Russia disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1929 – 1953 they murdered 20 million Russians.

        1935 – China disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1948 – 1952 they murdered 20 million Chinese.

        1938 – Germany disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1939 – 1945 they murdered 6 million Jews.

        1956 – Cambodia disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1975 – 1977 they murdered 1 million educated people.

        1964 – Guatamala disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1964 – 1981 they murdered 100,000 Mayan Indians.

        1970 – Uganda disarmed it’s citizens, and between 1971 – 1979 they murdered 300,000 Christians.

        Given, Mr. MacLean, that the neuro-virus of liberalism prevents the brain from acknowledging facts and that history is liberalism’s enemy number one, your adroit, satirical caricature of the typical alt-left neo-fascist is spot on.

      • Hugh maclean

        Strange answer to say the least. You give the impression with your odd take on deaths in countries under extreme regimes that a fully armed population were suddenly disarmed and governments proceeded to massacre their populations. Very odd take on these atrocities carried out by authoritarian regimes.
        Of course the converse of this is a fully armed American population stopping Federal government slaughtering them. Mr Mackenzie you appear to be supporting this rather extreme view of a population fearing for its collective life. Surely checks and balances does not include an armed standoff of Americans and their government. I thought you had put the Wild West behind you in a bloody civil war.

      • Neil Rhind

        Tell me, Shug, are you as keen to play chess with pigeons, or does your masochism only go so far.

        I fear you’re wasting your time, but it’s nice to see someone trying even in this obscure outpost of the internet.

      • E. V.

        How creative! The original quote (by an anonymous author) reads: “Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are, the bird is going to shit on the board and strut around like it won anyway.” Unfortunately, Joseph Charles MacKenzie, the “pigeons” attempting to soil your board, and view themselves as moral and intellectual superiors, can’t even compose their own, original quote.

      • E. V.

        … because you’re (obviously) too refined for name calling.

      • Hugh Maclean

        I would never on principle bad mouth other decent people.

      • E. V.

        So … 1). YOU get to determine who’s “decent” and 2). Those people YOU deem indecent are not worthy of civility.

        YOU are committing the exact demonization of the “other” behavior that you’ve accused Trump supporters of exhibiting.

      • Hugh Maclean

        Yes it’s reasonable to know and like people with similar values. I have been on the receiving end of abuse on this thread and cannot always turn the other cheek. It’s true I cannot fathom why people support Trump and do not think their judgement either sound or rational. I assumed it was the left behinds in the rust belt who voted for him but some other ‘classicis’ thinks the well heeled older folk backed him. My views are only my views and no one is claiming they are infallible. I do like a debate though even if it gets a bit heated. No shortage of angry Trumpeteers on here.
        One other point while I have been threatened with exclusion by the moderator others have been very scathing in their attitude to ‘Muslim scum’ and ‘bitches’ both terms I find offensive. The ‘establishment’ people can say what they want apparently.

      • E. V.

        No. Mr. Maclean, you are NOT the victim here. The editor rebuked you for making factually incorrect statements. To paraphrase the famous quote, “One is entitled to one’s own opinions, but not one’s own facts.” Furthermore, anti-Jewish (and, by extension, anti-Israel) untruths escalate into existential threats against an ethnic group that has historically suffered so so much because of discrimination … and the libels that fuel those fires!

      • Hugh Maclean

        I disagree with your politically correct stance because it is trying to close down all discussion about the problems facing the Palestinians. You can be concerned about Palestinians and still support the existence of a Jewish state. This type of censorship is manipulative and designed to stop debate ensuring the Jewish lobby is the only one heard.

      • E V.

        Didn’t you properly read the memo? Jews (and Israel) are the only ethnic minority group not protected by the left’s PC doctrine.

        Furthermore, if you truly cared about the suffering of everyday Palistineans, how about addressing their refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist, a pre-requisite for a 2-state solution? How about condemning those terrorist acts which force Israel to protect its citizens? How about showing concern for Israeli victims of terror?

  46. Joseph S. Salemi

    It’s hard to know how to deal with an idiot like Maclean (he can’t even remember to capitalize his last name), when all he does is spout the same old Mainstream-Media drivel put out by the BBC. Let’s puncture a few of his overinflated dirigibles, just to let our British readers know that we aren’t enslaved to left-liberal propaganda here across the pond.

    1) He calls the NRA a “supporter of domestic terror,” when in fact it is one of the oldest and most patriotic civic organizations in the United States, and is financially supported solely by the membership fees and voluntary donations of millions of individual American citizens. It receives no money from anyone else, or from any governmental source. The NRA has power because the American people want it to have power.

    2) He claims that FOX News channel is “brainwashing the American public,” when in fact it is the only conservative and rightist network in operation. The entire remainder of the media in the United States (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, BBC, and all the other networks and news outlets) are completely in the hands of the Left. Maclean apparently thinks that censoring FOX News (and censoring Rupert Murdoch in Britain) is perfectly OK. Like all left-liberals, Hugh believes that censorship of anyone on the right is acceptable and proper, while censoring anyone on the left is unthinkable. What a hypocritical jackass he is!

    3) Maclean is still pushing the imbecilic fantasy that Trump had “Russian help in winning the election.” He must be living in a cocoon — not even the American left is pushing that canard anymore. It is a complete and total lie, without a shred of evidence to back it up. I guess it takes time for news to get across the Atlantic to the Labourite dimwits in Corbyn’s parade, most of whom seem to prefer to live in their own dreamworld of propaganda.

    4) Yes, Jeremy Corbyn is trying very hard to cover his arse concerning the long trail of evidence that he has left over the years concerning his hatred of Israel, his support of Palestinian terrorism, and his visceral dislike of Jews. But he’s having little luck — the rank and file of his party are still insulting and berating Jews in Britain who dare to raise their voices in support of a Jewish state. Labour’s anti-Semitism is now so ingrained that it hard to hide.

    4) If Maclean thinks the Britain of that insufferable wet, Theresa May, is under the control of “the extreme right,” he must be delusional. He thinks that stupid left-liberal bitch, who can’t even handle Brexit properly and who has tried surreptitiously to foil it, is on “the extreme right”? I don’t know what kind of heavy-duty weed Hugh Maclean is smoking, but it must be pretty powerful stuff.

    If you think my “arrogance is overbearing,” Hughie, well then, too bad. Just bugger off, as you Brits say. I intend to continue flaming your arse here if you post more idiocies, just to let the good people in Britain know that we don’t have to tolerate left-liberal crap in the U.S.A.

    And God bless Tommy Robinson, and his supporters. We’re with you!

    Reply
  47. Charles Southerland

    My God, Joe!

    Don’t you get it yet? You are most gullible. There is no persona,Brit,: Hugh Mclean. There is nothing in his speech pattern that identifies him as a Brit. He’s American. But not just that, here’s a whole bunch more: Nicole Davidoff, Mike Marsh, Hermina (Mia) Van Der Stam, Corallen, Jo Patti, Taylor Thomas, Mark Wall, and the now infamous: James Eliot.

    There is no doubt that all of these “folks” are at best, two different people. I bet I know who Hugh Mclean is, and I’m confident who the others are. That alos includes Sally Lacey on the winner’s thread.

    Joe, I don’t normally have revelations. However, a simple study on Wikipedia, (in depth) of Tommy Robinson, (not his real given name), surprise, revealed multiple identities of Mr. Robinson, and his and other’s proclivities to use pseudonyms whenever it was necessary and convenient to do so. They hide behind real masks, brawl and lie, intimidate, coerce and cajole whomsoever they can. “Tommy Robinson” is a convicted felon: for stealing a pretty substantial sum of money. He is a convicted felon for other crimes that are adjudged by any reasonable measure, fair and undeniable. How is he a hero? He is a criminal. He served time, real time.

    You are being led down a dishonest path.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Oh for Pete’s sake, Charlie — how long are you going to go on about this theory of false names? What is this conspiratorial thing you have about some manipulative plot? Do you honestly think that everybody here at the SCP is writing under an assumed name?

      I know very well that “Tommy Robinson” is not the man’s real name, but he does exist, he has been an activist in the North of Britain, and he was arrested by the British police. Do you think all the media in both Britain and the U.S. are lying when they report on him and his activities?

      The Wikipedia article on Robinson was penned (and embellished and added to) by a huge group of anti-Tommy-Robinson leftist scum. They have dug up every true thing (or lie) that they can find to discredit him. And you fell for it.

      I don’t give a damn about Tommy Robinson’s past, real or imagined. He is a real warrior for the English people.

      And Charlie — when you come here with this silly distraction about false names and conspiracies, you only play into the hands of our leftist enemies.

      Reply
  48. Andrew Gardner

    What an excellent piece of prose, illustrating the juncture we, and all free peoples, are now at. The grip of totalitarianism never went away, it just morphed into a different guise.
    To quote Ronald Reagan; Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.
    Challenging times indeed.

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      I thank you, Mr. Gardner, for your refreshing response which serves to redirect us to what Tommy Robinson and the Brexit movement are all about. I think the “Letter to England” resonates precisely because of readers’ visceral understanding of freedom’s fragility and direct experience with the morphing of their once useful political institutions into mere tools of international communism.

      Reply
      • Hugh Maclean

        That should read ‘tools of international capitalism’ surely. Most Senators, Congressmen and MP’s in Britain are in the pay of some corporate interest, lobby group, and dutifully pursue the aims of said corporate paymaster. Corruption is everywhere in the land of the free since Reagan and Thatcher decided to deregulate everything to allow their rich buddies to amass fortunes. Trumps tax cuts for the richest put millions in his own bank account how’s that for one of the most corrupt acts in history.

      • Hugh Maclean

        The only E.U. grants are for a BBC international charity and independent drama production companies also can apply for funding assistance particularly in poorer regions. The news and world Service are funded from the license fee paid by households.

  49. Joseph S. Salemi

    Notice Maclean’s rhetoric: “tools of international capitalism” and “corporate paymaster.” That’s as pure an example of communist verbiage as you’ll get this side of Venezuela. It’s a good bet that Maclean wears a hammer-and-sickle in his lapel, or maybe under his kilt. He probably stuff envelopes for Corbyn and the Labourite party.

    MacKenzie’s point is well taken — the E.U uses its vast resources of wealth to subsidize a range of activities that it thinks will lengthen its propaganda reach. The tinpot tyrants in Brussels are, by inclination and education, coercive statists. If they can’t give direct orders, they’ll use their purse strings to force change. They’ll support the lying scum in mainstream media (especially the BBC) any way they can. Payment for “a BBC international charity” and “independent drama production companies” only frees up cash for other BBC projects. I guess Maclean has never balanced a budget.

    As for Trump’s economic policies, they have given us the longest stockmarket boom in U.S. history, and our unemployment rate has plummeted. The American left, of course, is in frenzied despair over this.

    This Maclean character is like Cool Hand Luke — you punch him senseless, and he still keeps getting up to be knocked down again. Keep at it, Hughie! It’s good exercise for us here.

    Reply
    • Hugh Maclean

      Salemi salami wtf. You really are clueless on the E.U. as it is a neoliberal organisation ensuring rigid financial controls and austerity after the crash when some member states economies went under-Greece for example. It imposed rigid fiscal constraints in return for a bail out loan that impoverished the country, shut down its public services and left the population going hungry. So yes they used their purse string to force the harshest terms possible and privatised all utilities and local government services. So yes the parasite shareholders moved in and bled the country dry.
      The BBC is 97% funded by the license fee paid by households. The Tory scum threatened this with privatisation and have forced strict controls on the amount households pay. This is the root of the financial difficulties the BBC faces with Murdoch like a vulture waiting for pickings off the carcass. Salemi clueless again sitting in his ivory tower, accepting Trumps buck and staying a loyal ass kisser. I take it your freeloader shares are doing ok.
      America, like Britain, has a government bumming about low unemployment but this is an illusion hiding the realty of pay stagnation for 10 years, temporary contracts in the gig economy, zero hour contracts, and employers working staff to exhaustion. Amazon is the most brutal and of course a US export paying no tax to host nations. The Tories have removed Union powers to facilitate this exploitation. Workers (makers) have lost 26% of the national income in the last eight years with elites(takers) being handed this freebie. How rich do you want to be for gods sake.
      Salemi still thinks it’s the McCarthy era with a red under every bed. Clueless.

      Reply
      • Hugh Maclean

        Dictatorship of the right or left are indistinguishable. Orwell was the first to write about this. Your type of leader Mr Mackenzie ,Hitler, Franco, I think we’re involved in some unhealthy pursuits that led to one or two disappearing. And let’s not forget the darling of Thatcher version of authoritarian rule, yes you’ve guessed it Pinochet. How many vanished under that iron heel.
        Me I like democracy at the least you can get rid of Thatcher or Trump after a few years of hell. Your post was a juvenile, crude attempt at discrediting me -you’ll be joining Salami in the gutter shortly.

      • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

        It looks like Hug MacLean, whose identifying data is now known to the editorship of this venue, is a little embarrassed by the Hitlerian foundations of Merkle’s German socialism which he defends against Brexit and the British freedom movement.

        Unfortunate, isn’t it, Mr. MacLean, that your lost world was so handily flushed down the toilet of history on the night of November 7, 2016?

        As a consolation, you can go back to your mother’s basement, where you live, and light candles in front of your Ocasio-Cortez poster as you sing the Internationale.

  50. Joseph S. Salemi

    It looks like Hughie is getting desperate. I haven’t had someone make fun of my surname since kindergarten days. It brings back childhood memories.

    Feeling the polemical heat, Maclean? Perhaps you’d better ask Dr. Rhind for help, especially with proper English grammar and punctuation. You could use some work.

    Yes, we still have communists in the United States. They now call themselves “leftists,” “socialists,” or “progressives,” and they tend to be undercover Gramscians rather than raging Bolsheviks. Like your favorite anti-Semite, Jeremy Corbyn, they try to keep their real opinions hidden from public view.

    I’m very glad you realize that the E.U. is a malign organization. It’s run by the Germans, and is nothing more than the Third Reich with a Smiley-Face button. I assume therefore that you voted for Brexit, for which I congratulate you. There’s hope for you yet, Hughie! I guess all your previous praise for the E.U. was just window-dressing.

    By the way, our troops heading towards the border are being sent to protect our national sovereignty. Those invading scum aren’t “refugees” — they are agitators put together by leftist NGOs and leftist governments like Venezuela as a way to cause trouble. I tell you what, Maclean — how about if we redirect all of those so-called “refugees” to the Kentish coast, or Brighton, or the Thames estuary? Let them take over your damned country, OK? Then you can have the disease and crime that they bring. Since you despise your own identity, that will probably make you happy.

    Reply
  51. Clide Abersuwe

    Although B. S. Eliud Acrewe’s critique of the “Letter to England” went largely undiscussed on this thread, I still insist that it is the poetry that matters, and should be the main focus @ SCP. This thread has gone far from the poem itself.

    Still, one can be thankful for Mr. Salemi in correcting Mr. Maclean’s many historical distortions and mistakes, as, e.g., regarding the EU; something Uwe Carl Diebes did earlier on this thread in relation to Mr. MacKenzie’s historical distortions in his “Letter to England”.

    One might be less satisfied with Mr. MacKenzie’s prose, though still appreciate his list regarding the viciousness of dictators of the 20th century, and his mention of ongoing infanticide.

    I personally agree with Mr. Salemi that Tommy Robinson is “a real warrior for the English people”.

    As to Mr. Maclean’s comment on George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) on dictatotships, we learned this week that Jeff Bezos (Jeffrey Preston Jorgenson) @ Amazon.com will no longer sell Tommy Robinson’s book “Mohammad’s Koran”. One could truly argue that the banning of person’s speech has a chilling effect on that person’s society. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others is one of the central tenets of socialist identity politics.

    Despite Mr. Maclean’s newspeak (which is really Modernist/ Postmodernist oldspeak), any shift to the right and the good is not antidemocratic, and freedom does matter (though perhaps more to the Romantics than to us New Millennials), certainly than to Mr, Maclean.

    As to Mr. Southerland’s contention that Mr. Maclean is not a Brit; he still seems to argue from a British (perhaps more Scots than Welsh or English) point of view; and James Eliot does not strike me as not British either. One could be wrong, but certainly one needs more proof.

    Although I disagree with him on so many things (especially poetically), I can think of no greater polemicist in New Millennial America than Mr. Salemi. Does anyone out there have any other American contenders? Who would be at the top of British polemical prose now? or English polemical prose around the globe?

    Reply
    • Joseph Charles MacKenzie

      Your comment lacks cohesion, structure, sound reasoning, historical veracity, and truth. Please learn how to write or consider not commenting on this thread at all. Thank you.

      Reply
  52. Clide Abersuwe

    Instead of wanting to silence a poet and literary critic, it would be better to focus on the British attempting to silence Tommy Robinson AGAIN.

    Reply
  53. Clide Abersuwe

    I thank you for your words. B. S. and Uwe do so too.
    Allow us to be generous and say the same to you.

    Reply

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