‘White Flight’ Increasing, Race Chief Says
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| Report from Britain (Sep. 2001) |
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| No Representation (May 2001) |
| The Racial Transformation of Britain (Aug. 2000) |
| Black Crime in Britain (Apr. 1996) |
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The flight of the white middle classes from the inner cities is accelerating, the Government’s race relations chief has said.
Trevor Phillips said so-called “white flight”—an American phenomenon now increasingly seen here—was deepening racial segregation.
Mr Phillips has warned in the past of the growing polarisation of the country along ethnic lines.
But his use of the emotive term “white flight” will fuel the controversy triggered by the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester.
He said last week some Muslim enclaves were “no-go areas” for Christians and there was a need for greater integration.
Mr Phillips, who chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said the Bishop was right to raise the issue because white families were moving out of areas with high ethnic minority populations.
Interviewed on Radio Four’s Today programme, he said: “There are areas in which there is no contact or very little contact between different ethnic and cultural groups.
“Nobody is putting up walls and gates but we all know that in virtually every big city there are places where different kinds of people feel uncomfortable, whether that is Asians in so-called white areas or white people in so-called black areas.”
He added: “We know that white flight is accelerating. That schools—we know this from studies done by Bristol University—are becoming more segregated than the areas they sit in. So there is a phenomenon we have to deal with and I think that the Bishop of Rochester was right to raise this.”
The term “white flight” was coined in 1960s America to describe the emergence of inner city ghettos.
However, Government ministers have preferred to refer to it as “churn” and to attribute the movement of people to house price fluctuations.
A survey conducted by the old Commission for Racial Equality in 2006 found that a quarter of Britons wanted to live in an all-white area.
The movement has been especially notable in London, which has always seen a big turnover of population, and is now witnessing unprecedented movement.
Last year, nearly 245,000 people left inner boroughs for the suburbs, rural areas, or new lives abroad.
The movement has a bigger impact in northern cities where communities already live “parallel lives”.
As a consequence they become “shut off” and vulnerable to political and religious extremism.
Research by Migrationwatch suggests movement within Britain is mainly from areas of high ethnic minority population to those with predominantly white populations.
Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of Migrationwatch, praised Mr Phillips for confronting the evidence of “white flight”.
“This is another courageous contribution from Trevor Phillips, who is clearly prepared to face the facts about the current strains in our society,” he said.
“We would add—although he does not—that massive levels of immigration are a significant factor in this.”
(Posted on January 15, 2008)
Comments
What is Trevor Phillips to do? Either he does nothing, or he stops “White Flight,”…..when you force White people to live around racial minorities, they tend to get rather infuriated (Patterson’s First Axiom), and do something drastic, like vote BNP.
Posted by St. Louis CofCC Blogmeister at 6:14 PM on January 15
See - there are lots of White Nationalists “out there”. I doubt this would have happened if this treasonous government would ENFORCE criminal law against minorities when they commit crimes, and allow British Nationals the right to bear arms; however, the Crown would not like that.
“White flight” is a SYMPTOM of an underlying SOCIAL PROBLEM, and it has nothing to do with the NATIVE SONS, you liberal so and so’s…
Now the government will have to come up with a ‘solution’, that is, a ‘final solution’.
Posted by at 6:28 PM on January 15
“This is another courageous contribution from Trevor Phillips, who is clearly prepared to face the facts about the current strains in our society,” he said.”
If the British politicos are “prepared to face the facts” about current race strains in their society, it is likely they only do so for the purpose of making them worse, the same as do our own political-legal class of ruling tyrants.
Ronald
Posted by Ronald at 6:37 PM on January 15
There is no such thing as white flight. We move because we don’t like what’s happening in a certain place. Many reasons motivated the European move religion, poverty, unacceptable government, debtors prisons, ghettos, etc. They only made it “white” when it had to do with crime.
Posted by at 6:47 PM on January 15
Trevor Phillips said so-called “white flight”—an American phenomenon now increasingly seen here—was deepening racial segregation.
Uh oh, Britains…Watch out. Trevor Phillips, who is black, has taken notice and served notice: A correction is in order by the totalitarian social engineers to destroy your lily-white neighborhoods and your equity.
We have the misfortune here in America of knowing it all too well; the juggernaut known as Section 8 housing.
Posted by Voir Dire at 7:02 PM on January 15
“However, Government ministers have preferred to refer to it as “churn” and to attribute the movement of people to house price fluctuations”
Nice play on words but a rose by any other name is still a rose. “White flight” is emerging in Britain for the same reasons as in America. When a neighborhood becomes black etc., crime and other problems start to increase and whites don’t want to live around it, plain and simple.
Posted by at 8:31 PM on January 15
Is it “black flight” when blacks leave their homeland to go where living conditions are better?
Posted by at 8:58 PM on January 15
I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again because it’s worth repeating.
The Family, the most basic Bio-social unit since the Paleolithic and certainly the Neolithic Age, is falling apart,
and we’re talking about RACE RELATIONS?!?!?!
As if being a failure in the one is going to make us a success in the other?!?!?!?!
A better example to illustrate the fact that the
PC-Multi·Culti-Police State is Insane would be impossible to imagine.
Posted by Dedalus at 10:25 PM on January 15
“The flight of the white middle classes from the inner cities is accelerating, the Government’s race relations chief has said. Trevor Phillips said so-called white flight”—an American phenomenon now increasingly seen here— “
. ——————————-
Any surprise? The “white middle classes” don’t dare speak out. All they can do is vote with their feet.
Same as America!
With the spread of American-style racial problems, it’s not an “American phenomenon” any more. We could have told Europeans this 30 or 40 years ago. But no, they were so convinced that they knew better! They were wiser. Their socialist busybodies in government were going to show us the right way that it should be done.
Well, their ruling upper classes don’t have to worry about any of these problems; and at least the middle classes can (still) afford to flee somewhere. I feel sorry for the elderly and poor who are stuck right where they are and have to try to live with the situation as best they can.
And as for those fleeing middle classes: I would ask them, “who have you been voting for all these years?” You made your own bed, so now lie in it!
Posted by at 10:36 PM on January 15
Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of Migrationwatch, praised Mr Phillips for confronting the evidence of “white flight”. “This is another courageous contribution from Trevor Phillips, who is clearly prepared to face the facts about the current strains in our society,” he said.
Mr. Phillips, a non-British outsider, is in no position to pontificate to Britons about “OUR society”.
Having a foreign black man placed in the position of minister of race relations is clearly a case of a fox being put in charge of the chicken coop All the chickens can do is flee. And now, even that is perceived as evidence of their “anti-fox” racism.
Posted by at 10:45 PM on January 15
White British, you haven’t seen nothing yet. It is a shame you don’t have a Second Amendment.
Posted by LOGIC at 11:04 PM on January 15
Either segregate or mulattogate. Maintain your diversity or lose it. Seperate or mongrelize.
Posted by Obvious at 11:08 PM on January 15
Who gives a flying you-know-what what a black person thinks about Britian? Whites are what make Britian what it is. Why do whites care what blacks think about how we should run our countries and neighborhoods and organizations, etc?
Posted by at 11:12 PM on January 15
… in virtually every big city there are places where different kinds of people feel uncomfortable…
Contrary to the lie we have had shoved down our throats for generations, it’s not ignorance that breeds ‘racism’, it’s experience. Being around blacks will raise anyone’s racial awareness.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 11:19 PM on January 15
Same pattern in the UK as in America. Same forces are at work race-mixing another formerly white Christian nation. This is ethnic cleansing. Who is behind this?
Posted by Tim at 11:40 PM on January 15
1 Does this not support the recent findings by the researcher Putnam?
2 Watch for Big Brother to propose an internal passport requirement, in the coming years, to deal with this “problem”. Can’t let these people have the ability to choose where they want to live.
When that happens - Chairman Mao will be smiling somewhere. “The Revolution never ends”
Posted by at 12:08 AM on January 16
Watch for Big Brother to propose an internal passport requirement, in the coming years, to deal with this “problem”.
………………………………………
Internal passports. Residential permits It won’t be anything new either. The Soviet Union had them. I expect the next 50 years will see many inventive strategies such as this, all contrived to smother any lingering white resistance to racial extinction. I won’t even dare to speculate about the next hundred. If you could go back in time and tell British people a hundred years ago about what the situation is today, they would insist you’ve got to be crazy. You would be considered a loon.
Posted by ghw at 1:18 AM on January 16
Phillips is already proposing “bussing” to force children to mix with unwanted immigrants. He has recently also said that “something must be done” to stop people living seperately. Perhaps quotas for housing to enforce mixed neighbourhoods.
Who am I? I am a Briton who has moved to France to escape this nonsense. Only last week I called a government department to be asked if my mother was White British. I said she was English. I was then asked if she had white skin. What kind of English people dont? They are even giving away our racial identity now!
White flight isn’t just about people moving out of cities. We are experiencing the largest emigration levels ever known from the UK. Before people went abroad to build new lives and make their fortune. Now, for the first time ever, the emigrants are wealthy, middle class and educated. Bright enough to see the writing on the wall.
Even so, I financially support the BNP and still retain a vote in UK elections.
Posted by Geoff Miller at 5:00 AM on January 16
St. Louis CofCC wrote:
“they tend to get rather infuriated (Patterson’s First Axiom), and do something drastic, like vote BNP.”
I used to think the BNP were an extremist party becuase that’s what the press and other parties constantly refer to them as.
Then I went to their website, read their policies and joined them. It’s not that they’re extreme just that all the other parties have slowly drifted off to the left, including the Conservatives.
Posted by compo at 5:07 AM on January 16
I encourage all Brits to call me an inbred, bigoted, backward, racist redneck now. You won’t have that luxury much longer.
Posted by Robert Binion at 5:31 AM on January 16
“If you could go back in time and tell British people a hundred years ago about what the situation is today, they would insist you’ve got to be crazy. You would be considered a loon.”
I’m sure if you had told them, 50 years ago, that they would one day have a black man as chairman of an “equality and race relations commisision”, monitoring the speech and behavior of whites, they would have laughed at you as delusional. That was the stuff of fiction — Orwell, Huxley, and all that.
Posted by at 5:40 AM on January 16
I wonder why Britain decided to destroy itself after WW2. I wish I knew what madness of self-hatred possesses the British elites. There is some deep, deep pathology in the British especially English character that is the cause of this. Look at the cold war. Look at how many wealthy, well-educated Britons betrayed their country for the USSR. Look at Philby and all those traitors from Cambridge. They were not motivated by money. There is a good book waiting to be written to explain why the British/English elites so hate themselves their country and society. I really wish I knew.
Posted by at 7:26 AM on January 16
“Trevor Phillips (who is black) said so-called ‘white flight’ - an American phenomenon…”
What an ASININE statement. White flight is not an American phenomenon!!! It happens in ALL white nations with large black populations.
Are we trying to run the ugly (racist) American stereotype to advance a social engineering agenda Mr. Phillips?!?!
Posted by erinzdad at 8:06 AM on January 16
“And as for those fleeing middle classes: I would ask them, “who have you been voting for all these years?” You made your own bed, so now lie in it!
Posted by at 10:36 PM on January 15 “
So true, whoever you are. A majority of voters asked for the current social conditions and their preferred politicians complied. “Voters get the government they ask for, good and hard”, to quote the late “Sage of Baltimore” and political pundit, H.L.Mencken.
A future surprise is in store for the fleeing masses. The blacks and muslims will soon follow. The predator and parasite classes need victims. Their lives depend on them.
Posted by Proactive at 10:38 AM on January 16
Didn’t Huxley write Brave New World Order? Didn’t Orwell go to his grave as a socialist?
Posted by spy v. spy at 12:10 PM on January 16
You people need to understand, the Brits are ‘flying’ from other whites (slavs) in addition to muslims and south east asians, there are, relatively speaking, very few blacks in England.
Posted by at 2:33 PM on January 16
If any Briton wants to throw a bar thru the spokes of liberalism here is your chance. Ask the comrade Phillips what he is going to do about “white flight.” Here in America they no longer even have the guts to talk about racial intergration because when they do they notice a stampede out of what they propose to intergrate. We get the happy talk of “diversity” but that is little but code for liberals to know what to avoid.
Posted by Simmons at 2:54 PM on January 16
The amazing thing is, if all this immigration is causing such sever social consequences, such as Britains actually FLEEING their own country, soaring crime, etc, WHY ARE “THEY” SUBJECTING THEIR COUNTRY TO THIS??? WHY, are they destroying their own country???
Posted by Tom Stanton at 4:26 PM on January 16
To paraphrase (and parody) the commie rock band The Clash’s pan-racial anthem “White Riot”…
“White flight, I want a flight!
White flight, a flight of my own!”
Posted by Right-Wing Rocker at 5:09 PM on January 16
I find much of London a frightening and depressing place what with the police billboards at murder scenes appealing for witnesses, districts filled with immigrants where rubbish is strewn in the streets, old sofas and fridges abandoned on the pavement etc. The remaining white areas often seem to be populated by people so cosmopolitan, trendy and wealthy that they are either insulated against the decay or celebrate it as “vibrancy”. You can really see them finding it exciting that they can go to restaurants serving food from a dozen Third World countries near their home or browsing the offerings of Africans at a local market and thinking it wonderful. I think wealth earned without much effort, such as from stocks or housing speculation, the media etc combined with boredom can do terrible things to ones judgement, leading these jaded people to seek more and more bizarre and foreign experiences (It is people like this that dominate the BBC and other media giving them the opportunity to spread their views which are alien to most British people as orthodoxy). London really isn’t an English city any more, it is like a foreign country.
Still, there are still many white working class areas, usually further out from the centre where the change hasn’t been so welcome and BNP councillors have been elected.
See this article from BNP members in London called “The cesspit called London” after a teenage girl was kidnapped, gang raped and had acid poured over her recently. No prizes for guessing the race of the rapists!
http://www.bnp.org.uk/2008/01/16/the-cesspit-called-london/
Posted by Ed at 5:30 PM on January 16
Compo wrote:
Then I went to their website, read their policies and joined them. It’s not that they’re extreme just that all the other parties have slowly drifted off to the left, including the Conservatives.
And the BNP website is the UK’s #1 political website in terms of traffic.
Posted by St. Louis CofCC Blogmeister at 6:09 PM on January 16
Somebody’s been voting for the labour party since 1948. It is no secret their plans to transform Britain. The BNP is there as an alternative. If people make bad voting choices they will suffer the consequences.
Posted by at 7:40 PM on January 16
“With the spread of American-style racial problems, it’s not an “American phenomenon” any more. We could have told Europeans this 30 or 40 years ago. But no, they were so convinced that they knew better! They were wiser”
Forty years ago, Europe was virtuall all-white. As such, unlike many Americans, they had no experience with blacks and others, and smugly pointed their fingers at so-called American “racism”. It’s always the people who do NOT have the problem that think they know everything. My father was in Scandianavia in the 60’s and remembers being lectured by some Dutch and Danes about American “racism.” I wonder how the ones who lectured him now, being much older and having all the problems they have today with the Muslims feel? I’ll bet they’re not so naive anymore. Europe could have listened to America but they thought they knew it all, now they’re learing the hard way.
Posted by at 8:42 PM on January 16
8:42 PM poster: You can add Canada to that list too.
Posted by at 10:11 PM on January 16
5:40 AM POSTER:
Powell told them FORTY YEARS AGO.
Posted by at 7:35 AM on January 17
>>>Trevor Phillips said so-called “white flight”—an American phenomenon now increasingly seen here—was deepening racial segregation.
Notice how Phillips continues to lay blame for what he considers a societal ill (i.e. segregation,although we here might think otherwise)upon White society.
>>>As a consequence (of white flight) they become “shut off” and vulnerable to political and religious extremism.
More backtracking over failed policies, Mr Trevor Phillips and his CRE cronies were the very people who proposed “Multiculturalism” because Assimilation and Integration had failed. They believed in and encouraged separate cultural communities so that we could all be living in la la land alongside each other.
They have destroyed my country and I hold him and his cronies and enablers responsible. They are not going to walk away from this one.
Vote BNP.
Arc
Posted by Arcadian at 9:23 AM on January 17
>>>I wonder why Britain decided to destroy itself after WW2. I wish I knew what madness of self-hatred possesses the British elites. There is some deep, deep pathology in the British especially English character that is the cause of this. Look at the cold war. Look at how many wealthy, well-educated Britons betrayed their country for the USSR. Look at Philby and all those traitors from Cambridge. They were not motivated by money. There is a good book waiting to be written to explain why the British/English elites so hate themselves their country and society. I really wish I knew.
Posted by at 7:26 AM on January 16
I used to wonder about this too because I felt this awful guilt at being Conservative. I thought long and hard and found myself back at 1945 when we ‘won’ the war with the assistance of the Communist USSR; the Far Left. The Rightwing Conservatives were immediately tarred with guilt by association with the losing Nazis - the Far Right, whilst Labour Leftists were happy to be associated with the Communists for whom they openly expressed admiration. All those Cambridge spies who sold secrets to the Communists truly believed that they were acting morally.
We on the Right have been feeling the weight of the Left’s applied guilt ever since the end of the war, especially as the Left, being the victors were able to dictate the moral high ground. This included racial politics most especially as the Nazis ideology was in part based on race and nationalism. Since 1945 any form of Nationalism has become a form of Racism, any White nation that seeks to keep its identity is Racist.
Check back through the mists of time and there is Joseph Stalin admonishing any Socialist group that did not adhere to HIS form of International Socialism, It was he who labelled the Nationalists of Germany as Rightwingers in order to draw clear water between his form of Socialism and theirs. And so began the long association of Nazis with Conservatism, the true Right wing party.
Anyone in Britain who espoused a view that was contrary to the race politics of the Left was labelled a Fasist, Nazi and so forth, and not just in the UK, look at how the Far Left use ‘Nazi’ against George Bush or anyone in his outfit they hate. I’m no admirer of Geo. Bush but he’s not a Nazi. This intimidation is why no-one dare speak up in Britain,no-one wants to be associated with Hitler, it’s truly Orwellian.
I have an ongoing correspondence with a Marxist in Britain and the namecalling never, ever stops. No cogent argument is ever attempted, just unrelenting attempts to silence me by insult and intimidation. It’s a microcosm of what’s happened to Britain.
Luckily more and more articles are appearing in the press in Britain that are voicing the fears of the indigenous population.
BTW a book just out by Jonah Goldberg called ‘Liberal Fascism’ explains this half century of polical fraud and smear tactics from the Left. Buy it and get angry at what has been done by these vile nation wreckers.
Arc
Posted by Arcadian at 3:32 PM on January 17
7:26 AM-There’s a book about Homosexuals in the Church cal-
led the “Rite of Sodomy” that branches out into the role Gays
have played in Society at large. Utterly alienated and therefore
lusting for revenge, gays have often been traitors. And for what
ever reason, the upper classes in Britain seemed to have more
than their share. Both Oxford and Bloomsbury were full of influ-
ential homosexual traitors. One well known examply is John May-
mannard Keynes. In his younger days he wrote a solid book about
monetary policy. But later he was corrupted and wrote nonsense
about deficit spending knowing that it would fail and thus lead
to socialism. Ah, Socialism-where people of all races, genders,
and persuasion will live in bliss. Sometimes, then more than now,
blackmail played a part. But the norm was I already said, alien-
ation leading to a desire for revenge. And for the more thought-
ful, the idea that indulging this would help bring on Utopia.
Posted by Freyr at 6:23 PM on January 17
The story reminds me of those fine liberal progressive folks, who never tire of lecturing all of the unenlightened dolts of the world that , if they would just move into ghetto areas and get to meet the people and have tea, hand out blankets to the homeless in places like Compton, or South Central L.A., The Bronx, certain areas in Detroit, etc.ETC, (just think of an area you know you’d risk being murdered in)—then you’d become a better human being, etc. etc. Funny thing though, I’ve never seen Hollywood liberals in these places doing this, or liberal politicians, university professors,or hard core East Coast liberals. Instead they all seem to either live in gated communities, or mansions with huge fences. We all know the type. Pure hypocrites.
Posted by Bobby at 11:47 PM on January 17
“I wonder why Britain decided to destroy itself after WW2. I wish I knew what madness of self-hatred possesses the British elites. There is some deep, deep pathology in the British especially English character that is the cause of this. “
That “pathology” is deeply rooted, not starting merely with WW2. It goes all the way back to Cromwell. It crept into England at that time and has grown gradually stronger and more malevolent ever since.
Look at Philby and all those traitors from Cambridge. They were not motivated by money. There is a good book waiting to be written to explain why the British/English elites so hate themselves, their country, and society. I really wish I knew.
Posted by at 7:26
Regarding Philby, there was a TV documentary that I saw - many years ago - pointing out that he, like almost all of his “comrades”, had a deep sense of alienation [each one for his own reason] from British society. He was the child of an immigrant — Danish — and no matter how prosperous and successful be became, and no matter how generously Britain had treated him, he retained the sense of “outsider-hood” or “otherness” and the concomitant resentment that is often the case with people who have assimilated superficially but never fully adjusted internally. True, he was “not motivated by money”. He had other reasons though. Perceiving himself as an outsider in Britain, he was motivated by a deep sense of alienation and resentment to the host society.
That frank assessment probably could not be made in today’s PC world, as that was easily 35 years ago (probably about 1970). But just think of this: that if Philby, being of Danish origin (which is practically the closest thing to being English), felt himself alienated from British society … then consider the vastly different racial groups that are being imported into Britain today, people who are wholly unrelated in any way to the native British population by language, blood, religion, culture, or history. How many centuries hence will their descendents still retain a lingering bitterness and hostility to their hosts for every perceived or imaginary slight? The ever-festering resentment of the outsider against the insider!
I can only say that proud Britannia has no idea the mountain of future problems that she is building for herself. Philby’s alienation was nothing compared to what’s coming.
Posted by browser at 7:08 AM on January 18
Following up on my previous post on Kim Philby, I have done some further checking. I find that his father was St. John Philby, a famous orientalist who was a classmate and friend of Nehru, as well as a close personal friend (and advisor) of King Ibn-Saud of Arabia. According to Wikipedia, he “was one of the lesser known but most influential persons in the modern history of the Middle East.”
Born in Ceylon, he was an Arabist, diplomat, writer, and also intelligence operative. Knowing all the important people of his day in that part of the world, he was a strong influence in furthering his son’s [Kim’s] career. He was long rumored to be a communist. He became a convert to Islam, and took as a second wife an Arabian woman. He lived the rest of his life in Riyadh and Beirut. [“At the end of the war [1945] he returned to Arabia, and at the age of sixty he purchased his second wife, a 16-year-old girl, from the slave market at Taif, about forty miles south of Mecca. He is buried in the Muslim cemetery in Beirut.”]
So then, although Kim’s father was not from Denmark, as I thought I remembered hearing, he was very strongly opposed to the establishment in Britain (for which activities he had even been arrested and imprisoned). He was born and raised and spent almost all of his life abroad. I suppose it could be said that he was opposed to Europe itself and to Christianity. But it must have been the grandfather, then, who came from Denmark. I definitely remember hearing the Danish origins brought out in the documentary, which was not too long after Kim had been outed (1963). It is definitely a Danish name.
Kim played an amazing double role, secretly working for the communists while posturing in Britain as a representative of the extreme right. (Nothing terribly unusual, though.) “In 1933, Kim Philby went to Vienna to aid refugees who were fleeing Nazi Germany. There he met Litzi Friedman, a Jewish Communist whom he married and brought to Britain to save her life. In 1936, as ordered by Moscow, Philby began cultivating a pro-fascist persona, appearing at Anglo-German meetings and editing a pro-Hitler magazine.”
Both his (Kim’s) life story and his father’s reek of disaffection, deceit, duplicity, and alienation. Everything but loyalty! Perhaps that will give some insight to the poster who said, “I really wish I knew.”
Posted by browser at 8:38 AM on January 18
Native Britain didn’t decide to destroy herself. A small clique of her treacherous white renegade sons did that on her.
Yet another riveting insight into the mind of the Traitor.
Quote:
Last week, an 84-year-old grandfather living on his pension in quiet retirement was awarded damages of nearly £5,000 for the distress and frustration caused by nine years’ delay in the hearing of his court case. Negligent lawyers! Triumph of the little man! Justice deferred but finally done!
Two aspects made this story different. First, the judgment was given by the European Court of Human Rights, which is a constant object of scorn to many on the right. Second, the octogenarian was George Blake, one of the most notorious British double-agents uncovered during the Cold War - a conflict in which our opponent undoubtedly did have nuclear WMD and the means to deliver them.
Since his dramatic escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966, he has lived in Moscow. He’s a colonel in the KGB, with the Order of Lenin and a government pension, living in a spacious, rent-free apartment. In 1991 his autobiography, No Other Choice, was published in Britain by Jonathan Cape. He received £60,000 for it, but a further £90,000 was frozen after the Attorney-General claimed that the book drew on knowledge gained while he was a member of MI6 and that Blake had violated a duty of trust to his employers and a lifelong duty of confidentiality. In 2000 the House of Lords finally upheld this claim and the money was donated to a children’s charity. It is for this nine-year delay in the hearing that the court in Strasbourg awarded the damages -the ruling on the £90,000 is unaffected.
The money will probably make little difference to Blake as it was announced last week by his Russian publisher that he is seriously ill. He is the last living example of that group of ideologically motivated British spies such as Blunt, Philby, Burgess and Maclean among them, drawn by idealism to work for the Soviet Union, and one of the few to live long enough to see the expiration of their hopes for a communist world.
Blunt’s upbringing was cosmopolitan. His father, a Spanish Jew resident in Egypt, fought for the British and was decorated in the First World War. After the war he settled in the Netherlands where he met Blake’s mother. Blake, born in 1922, grew up in his mother’s Calvinist tradition middle-class background.
His father’s death left the family in financial straits, so the 13-year-old boy was sent to live with his paternal aunt in Cairo. His cousins, both boys a decade older, were Blake’s first introduction to left-wing ideas. The younger, Henri Curiel, was already a Communist. “His views had a great influence on me,” Blake said in 1991, “but I resisted them because I was a very religious boy. It was my intention to become a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church but later on in life things changed. Many of his views acted as a time bomb.” (Curiel later became an leading anti-colonial activist, and was assassinated in Paris in 1978.)
Blake was visiting his family in the Hague when the outbreak of the Second World War stranded him. The following year he was with his grandmother in Rotterdam when the Germans invaded. Returning to the Hague, he discovered his mother and two sisters had been evacuated to England. A half-Jewish British subject, he acquired false papers and went underground. He was a member of the Resistance for two years until he escaped to England.
On arrival, he joined the Royal Navy, and was soon seconded to intelligence on account of his fluency in Dutch. After the war he was placed on the famous Russian course at Cambridge, which inspired in him a love of the country and the culture, and sent to Berlin to spy on East Germany.
In 1948 he was chosen to go to Korea to establish a network of agents. While he was there, as vice-consul in Seoul, the Korean war broke out and the capital was overrun by the Communist North Korean army. In the company of other diplomats and missionaries, Blake was evacuated north and interned and witnessed what he claimed convinced him that he should work for the other side: “It was the relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous American flying fortresses. Women and children and old people, because the young men were away in the army. We might have been victims ourselves. It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technically superior countries fighting against what seemed to me defenceless people. I felt I was on the wrong side … that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war.”
He contacted the KGB and offered his services and for the next nine years, wherever he was posted for MI6 - Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Beirut - he met his KGB case officer every three weeks to pass over information.
In 1960, a senior Polish intelligence officer defected to the West and uncovered many major spies in the United Kingdom, including Gordon Lonsdale and Peter and Helen Kroger. In April 1961, Blake was recalled to London from Beirut where he was learning Arabic and accused of working for the Soviets.
Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government was highly embarrassed by this new failure of British intelligence. The prime minister suggested to Dick White, MI6’s head, that Blake’s treachery should be kept quiet and he be offered immunity from prosecution in return for a full confession. “The government could fall on this,” he told White. White refused to cooperate; he later said Blake had done more damage than Philby, the most notorious traitor of the period.
Blake’s trial was held in camera, and he was found guilty. The maximum sentence for passing official secrets in peace time was fourteen years. However, the judge divided his spying into separate episodes in three countries and sentenced him to three periods of fourteen years, to run consecutively. At the time, forty-two years was the longest sentence ever passed in a British court. The actual damage he did is still classified.
The severity of this sentence was one reason that Blake found prisoners to assist him in making his 1966 escape by way of a rope thrown from outside. He later expressed regret for those agents he betrayed, and also personal regrets for the pain he caused his unwitting first wife and family. (He remarried in 1969.)
However, he has no regrets for his support of Communism and states:
“The Communist ideal is too high to achieve … and there can only be nominal adherents to it in the end. But I am optimistic, that in time, and it may take thousands of years, that humanity will come to the viewpoint that it would be better to live in a Communist society where people were really equal.”
Posted by A Swain at 11:25 PM on January 18
Thank you A. Swain. That was a fascinating piece about “George Blake”. [I wonder what his real name was.]
Alienation seems to be the common thread in these cases. As you said, the British weren’t really betrayed by their own, not generally, and as Freyr said, “The norm was alienation, leading to a desire for revenge.”
Posted by ghw at 1:33 PM on January 19
A SWAIN;
Thank you for that. The root problem with socialists and their fellow-travellers is that they just cannot understand that EQUAL OPPORTUNITY will not result in EQUAL OUTCOME. They see any such situations as conspiratorial, or proof of ‘racism’ instead of the natural playing out of events among people. Not everyone can finish first in a marathon even though everyone may start out at the same spot.
Posted by at 2:52 PM on January 19
“Alienation seems to be the common thread in these cases.”
Alienation is an inevitable problem in any multi-cultural society.
Posted by at 3:13 AM on January 20
“The root problem with socialists and their fellow-travellers is that they just cannot understand that EQUAL OPPORTUNITY will not result in EQUAL OUTCOME.”
————-
But given the central dogma of their marxist “religion” — that everyone is equal — the outcome therefore HAS TO come out equal!!!
When it doesn’t, that mysterious fluke can only be explained by such a thing as “white racism” which must be interferring with the natural process. Therefore, there must be an intensified campaign to uproot racism, white privilege, etc., in order to MAKE everyone come out equal.
Posted by at 3:22 AM on January 20
“Alienation seems to be the common thread in these cases.”
Alienation is an inevitable problem in any multi-cultural society.
Posted by at 3:13 AM on January 20
Alienation is a problem, period.
It is the very condition of the Modern Age.
As the Old Order crumbles all around, with nothing but pale copies offered as substitutes (and so anti-historical are most people that they actually think these copies are originals) the condition of ANY sensitive, intelligent being is alienation.
This is what Existentialism was about. It wasn’t about a bunch of French guys in berets hanging out somewhere smoking lots of cigarettes and trying to act cool and sound smart.
It’s a very real problem and the only people living in Modern Society who aren’t effected are people who are so mindlessly sunk in the present moment that they can’t see any difference between the beliefs of their culture and the REALITY they live in on a daily basis.
Multiculturalism is merely salt on an old wound that has not healed because the tide of the Mass Man, who is fundamentally anti-historical and anti-intellectual, has risen too high.
It must never be forgotten that the appearance on the world stage of the Mass Man horrified the Directive classes at the time the same way Illegal Immigrants horrify us.
But most people don’t even know what the term “Mass Man” means. THAT’S our problem, of which Multi-culturalism is but a symptom.
Posted by Dedalus at 11:43 AM on January 20
Dedalus:
You might want to read the writings of Major-General J.F.C. Fuller. He explains how the rise of Lenin, Hitler and others was largely possible because of the vaccuum of beliefs in European society following the collapse of strong Christian beliefs.
Posted by at 12:51 PM on January 20
“Alienation is a problem, period. It is the very condition of the Modern Age.This is what Existentialism was about.”
Yes, but I think what they’re discussing here is ethnic/racial alienation. You’re completely missing that point.
Posted by at 4:04 PM on January 20
This is what Existentialism was about.”
Daedalus
Yes, but I think what they’re discussing here is ethnic/racial alienation. You’re completely missing that point.
——————————————————————-
Exactly! Forget about extentialism. This is a racial site, not philosophical. And the “alienation” discussed here is racial.
Posted by voter at 8:07 PM on January 22
This is what Existentialism was about.”
Daedalus
Yes, but I think what they’re discussing here is ethnic/racial alienation. You’re completely missing that point.
——————————————————————-
Exactly! Forget about extentialism. This is a racial site, not philosophical. And the “alienation” discussed here is racial.
Posted by voter at 8:07 PM on January 22
Actually your both missing the point.
It might not seem so at first, but the FACT of the matter is there is not a single Philosophical issue that does not sooner or later get around to effecting EVERYONE and EVERYTHING.
My point was that the much older view of Alienation, which has been around for a long time now, SUBSUMES the alienation brought up in these posts about Race. As it clearly does.
Also, the two posts quoted above seemed a little too emotional, which suggests you took the rest of my post personally. But instead of addressing it you took one line out of the entire post and isolated it as if that’s all I said; well, to any interested I refer you to the rest of my post.
And what an idiotic statement that this is a Racial site and not a Philosophical one. As if all of our arguments flow like a fountain simply from our Race and not our intellects. In fact, if you knew anything about Philosophy you would know that YOU were engaged in it. Since Philosophy is, and always has been, devoted to one and only one question: “What are we talking about, if, indeed, we are talking about anything?” ie; What aspect of human experience does a particular word locate and inform us about?
Also; I find hit and run posts to be ignoble and cowardly.
I post my email address so anyone interested can take up an issue in more detail. But people who leave posts like the two above are not interested in doing such a thing for a simple reason. They can’t. So they post quick hit and run message (apparently under the assumption I need their approval) that does nothing to add to the discussion, because they haven’t anything to say.
And finally;
Whether you guys approve of my post or not obviously someone at this site thought it was worth putting up on the board. That’s good enough for me.
Posted by Dedalus at 12:24 AM on January 23
“Is it “black flight” when blacks leave their homeland to go where living conditions are better?”
By definition, yes…except for one major difference -
When a black person leaves his or her homeland, where do they go (or try to go to) 90% of the time?
To a WHITE country. NEVER another black country.
But this doesn’t happen for whites - a white person leaving their neighborhood often goes to another white neighborhood!
Why the difference, do you think?
Posted by Dark-Star at 12:19 PM on January 26