Theodore Dalrymple is the nom de plume of an English forensic psychiatrist. Way back in 2005, in an interview, he spoke about the end-stage of propaganda in a totalitarian state – the stage when it no longer matters that you know what you’re being told is the opposite of the truth:
Only last year (and I’ve no doubt it’s still the case throughout the media) the Independent dismissed the concept of Cultural Marxism’s “long march through the institutions” as a far-right conspiracy theory. This may be the case, but if so we are seeing this month exactly the same phenomenon made starkly manifest under whatever name you choose to give it.
I heard an interesting quotation from Pastor Mike Bickle, to the effect that over forty years of charismatic ministry he considered that 80% of the prophecies and miracles he’d witnessed were false, but that 20% were genuinely from the Lord. Let’s look at that idea, which roughly matches my own, more limited, experience… or to be brutally honest, is a lot more optimistic than my experience.
Post-millennialism is the interpretation of the Book of Revelation that holds that the Church, empowered by Christ, will bring about God’s Kingdom on Earth, after which Christ will return to a world already fitted for his reign. The main alternative views are pre-millennialism, in which Christ returns climactically to a world in chaos and establishes an earthly kingdom for a thousand years before the new creation; and a-millennialism, which interprets the “thousand years” as the “already but not yet” rule of Christ in the Church Age, prior to the Great Rebellion and his triumphant return to transform the cosmos.
I just like the word, actually, but over the years the local caterpillars have given me several opportunities to take pretty pictures and think about their presumably defensive, or maybe just creative, colouration.
Just a couple of days after the police let rioters destroy a statue of the 17th century philanthropist and slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, I saw on the BBC website that the Canal and River Trust, apparently under instruction from the Museum of London Docklands, removed a statue of Robert Milligan that it owns in London, outside the museum.
Here’s another lockdown video for you , once more from a remix of an old recording of one of my songs. The views of The Vegetable Man have been encouraging, so the effort seems worthwhile.
This one’s in darker vein than the last, and would probably be more effective when countries produce their first emergency budgets after lockdown and, in the UK particularly, reveal just how big a knife we’ve stuck in the economy. The Nobel Prizewinner Michael Levitt estimates that, whereas the usual averaged cost of a death (using “quality added life years,” or “QUALYs”), and therefore the “economic” health cost of saving it medically, is £40,000, the cost of each and every COVID death, because of lockdown, probably runs into millions. Bearing in mind that the a majority of those dying would have perished from other causes within the year, statistically, that is a high cost indeed.
Anyway, back to the song. Because it is basically the apocalyptic imagery of the Revelation of John set to music, it was culturally relevant even when I wrote it many years ago, but the video tries to map the images rather literally to the current state of the world.
The almost subliminal images are deliberate – the Book of Revelation is awash with significant details that are lost on the reader until further reflection. It seems likely the book was written to be read out loud to the churches, and then taken and studied against the Scriptures by their prophets and teachers to understand more fully. So for any of you willing to embrace my pretensions, a second viewing with finger hovering over the “pause” button is required!
There is hope in the darkness, but not from the strategies of activists, politicians or scientists.
The leader of the UK opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, was quoted on the BBC news today as saying that if there is any increase in the Coronavirus “R-number” it will be the direct fault of the government. And therein lies much of the cause of the current fear pandemic across the world.
YouTube algorithms gave me a “blast from the past” last week, in the form of videos by Dr Vernon Coleman. Vernon was writing for the same medical periodicals as I was back in the early eighties, though he started five years before me, and because he gave up clinical practice, was also writing for the major newspapers and producing books long after I eased off on that aspect of my career.
