Here are Brian Micklethwait and Antoine Clarke talking all about my new book:
http://brianmicklethwait.signal100.com/podcast/2007-10-06-brian-and-antoine-22.mp3
Here is the book:
“Culture revolution; Culture War. How the conservatives lost England, and how to get it back.”
And here is a comment on the podcast from David Robert Gibson:
“Well said. I have downloaded the mp3 then listened to it twice. Initially, I thought how civilised it was, and I liked their approval of Sean’s individualistic approach to libertarianism, and of his recent writing about Epicurus – a worthy subject and one of the greatest philosophers. However, I became a tad *alarmed* – Brian and Antoine gave me the impression of belonging to the cigar and brandy chattering class school of politics. They disagreed with Sean’s notion of the ruling class, what I call The Regime, looking upon our rulers as mere unco-ordinated incompetents floundering around for a way to compensate for the failure of the Communist economic ideals of their youth, to replace them with the social equivalent. They are probably in part correct, but this world is not a university debating society – out in the real world people get hurt, and even those who don’t directly are, I think like me, developing a growing sense of anomie. Our culture is no longer our own, but rather a plaything for the increasingly interventionist Regime to inflict whatever fashionable Leftist, and lucrative, scheme they choose, and the imported multi-culturalism, which Brian and Antoine appear to welcome, is a *central* part of that deconstruction. The Enemy Class, as Sean rightly calls them, are not a bunch of Hippies, they have vast power and wealth – our power and wealth – and they are *co-ordinated* in their plan to re-engineer this country. They steal from us to fund it, and they will imprison and kill us if we resist. We should not regard them complacently!
“My hatred of modernist culture is not mere idealism but, rather, visceral, and I would love to see a return of much, not all, of traditional English life. That is why I find Sean’s conservative libertarianism both refreshing and comforting. He and I may not agree on everything, but we are not mesmerised by the fashionable notion that if something is new or foreign it must be better. No! – the way culture is, it is almost certainly worse. Freedom, especially responsible freedom, isn’t something invented in the 1960’s in the LSE, the Sorbonne or a Hippy commune. It existed in the minds of Indian and Chinese mystics and in those of Greek philosophers thousands of years ago. It grew in England during the Protestant Reformation and with the ideas of the Renaissance, given the opportunity to grow during the relatively enlightened reign of Elizabeth I. Its foundations were cemented by the integrity of Pym, Hampden and Cromwell and the victory of Parliament in the English Civil War. Newton, Locke, Hume and Smith (to be fair, these two were Scots, but admirers of English culture), the Mills, Wilberforce and their like helped to develop it, together with the peaceful relinquishing of some power by the aristocracy to the people. All these are English and British achievements. They all began to be undermined by government intervention during The Great War and World War II, which was continued after 1945, particularly by Socialist governments, little restrained by the Tories, and accelerated by the current one from 1997 – our actions and even our utterances are legally constrained as never before. Consequently, I think a ‘return to the past’ would be a good thing, and I too am nostalgic for it. It would be a vastly sounder foundation for developing liberty rather than the current creeping totalitarianism. Libertarianism focuses upon people, rather than countries, but it is more possible in some countries, and cultures, than others. I am very pleased that your media contacts despise ‘The Enemy Class’. I have long argued that beating about the bush when criticising, and when possible actively undermining, The Regime only allows them to claim their fraudulent ‘high moral ground’. The Tories have for example, with few notable exceptions, been compromising for decades, to such agree that they are now almost indistinguishable from the Socialists; effectively they are their allies.”
David Robert Gibson
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