Walking Through History...

This morning, it being what the weathermen call "squally," we decided to for a walk in a forest - where we'd be sheltered from the worst of the elements, but still get some fresh air.

Sometimes Saturdays are just too commercialised... and whilst I do enjoy popping around the shops, grabbing a coffee, browsing the bargain bookshops etc. I've been getting more and more "bored" of town centres as the years go by.

So it was we all decided this morning to get out and enjoy a walk free of the provocative sights and sounds you get, even in the more acceptable market towns (asylum seekers with their top of the range mobiles and brand new tracksuits).

The last time we went for a walk through a forest was quite some months ago, I don't know why we'd left it so long - I suppose work, family events, sports etc. just encroach on weekends more and more. Anyway, we all really enjoyed it.

The sprogs ran off into the undergrowth playing at Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean or whatever the latest snarling, swash-buckling, heroic, arrow-flying, sword-shaking game is.

It left your author (his swash long ago buckled) to ramble on through the little pathways, the Mrs. close by, talking over the latest events of the world, local news and family bits n bobs.

Being close to nature has always appealed to nationalists, and the more I read about our own history, and our own ideological forebears, the more my eyes are opened.

I think being a Distributist (well, at least I like to think I'm one, even though sometimes falling far short of it) helps, the idea that this land belongs to all of us, that we have an inalienable right to own a small part of it, but also that its vast tracts should be open to responsible and careful usage.

Just today tramping through the trees, finding hidden clearings, discovering ancient, moss and ivy-covered gnarled trees - it was like taking a step back in time.

Ah... you say, but you're just indulging in a bit of romanticism.

Well dear reader, perhaps I am, but do you know what: I don't care. Maybe if more of us did that from time to time, this might be a better world. Perhaps being close to the creation of the creator might make us take a little more care of our birthright. Perhaps treading the same paths that our forefathers trod, we might realise that their blood still courses through our veins, and that we have the duty to bring up our children to fully realise their history, their duty.

Two recent books I read have made me realise what we have lost in recent decades and centuries as our land has been grabbed and enclosed, as our people have been forced into factories and down mines, as our religion has been bastardised into a touchy-feely quagmire and our national leaders care more for the rights of money-grubbing international financiers, free-services quaffing immigrants and 'asylum-seekers' and degenerate amoral gyrating homosexuals.

The Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland by William Cobbett (hereafter PREI), and The Guild State by G. R. S. Taylor (hereafter TGS) have made me re-assess the history of our land and of how a once free and fair country has been ensnared and enchained by a small bunch of thieves and political opportunists.

Of course other books have been important too. One thinks here of books like the Neo-Conned volumes which totally exposed the Neo Con nonsense behind the Iraq war, or of The Party System by Hilaire Belloc which brings into sharp focus how Westminster is the problem and not the cure. Another personal favourite of mine is The Flying Inn by G.K. Chesterton which rips to shreads political correctness (decades before anyone had heard of it) in defence of ancient English freedoms.

But to get an overview of history and especially the social history of the land you'd be hard-pressed not to find two better books than Taylor's TGS or Cobbett's PREI (though I have yet to read Cobbett's Rural Rides - another, like PREI before it, which I've scandalously left to gather dust on my shelf whilst other "more important" books took precedent).

But to return to the books, they complement each other because Cobbett (a Protestant remember) paints a clear and vivid picture of pre-Reformation England - and he uses evidence of the time, and of his own time (early 19th Century) to show that England 'back then' was a well-fed land, with widely owned property, with widely held freedoms and with very little crime.

Whilst the roots of Capitalism are to be found before the Reformation (as the Italian Prof. Amintore Fanfani explains in his easily read, but equally studious, Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism, originally published in 1934) there is little doubt - especially in Cobbett's mind in regard to England, that the Reformation started the land-grab, the smash and grab (dare I say a touch of 'shocking and awful' plunder to make Donny Rumsfeld blush) of important cultural, architectural and communal structures that would begin the process which ended in the enclosing of the land, the treating our own people not as God's creatures, but as cogs in a machine to be worked (close) to death.

I think what G.R.S. Taylor's (as I understand it, an Anglican) TGS adds to the debate about our social history is that the country enjoyed far more freedom - personal, community, work, national - when the Guilds guaranteed working standards, wages, quality, local "democracy" and so on.

The Common Good (again, the idea that your neighbour was made in the image of God and wasn't just a wallet on legs to be ripped off or used till he collapsed) used to matter as both Taylor and Cobbett attest, and this meant that the people who wanted to rip people off wouldn't get away with it, and that crime was not acceptable and of a much lower level.

There's also the anomaly that we've never had so many taxes, so many layers of "democracy," so many professional politicians or bureaucrats and yet we have never had less of a say in what happens in our local communities!

I suppose this is mirrored in the way that we've never had so much "choice" in regards to the media and news - from 24 Hour TV news channels from a host of companies and countries, to a
wide range of newspapers and magazines - and yet we have never had such an attention-deficit population, such a nation of know-nothings, such an ignorant generation of children (thanks in part to the "gift" of mass coloured immigration) who have no idea who Hitler and Churchill were -- so what hope have we that any of these rootless, Playstation addicts will know anything of the world which Cobbett and Taylor tell us was so cultured, free and secure?

Or I might say that we have never had so many law-enforcement officers as today, with gun-totting policemen driving around our cities, with people living with bars on their windows and chains on their doors for fear of the criminals. Our jails are overflowing, our streets are CCTV'd hither and thither, new laws are passed month on month, year on year... yet we've never been in so much danger of being attacked, being robbed, of having our homes and chattels broken into, ransacked, etc.

We have more taxes, more news-reporting, more policemen than EVER before, yet we have fewer freedoms, more ignorance and more crime than our forefathers. Makes you think doesn't it?

And so it was that your author walked through the forest, imagining days when travelers through that very same spot enjoyed more basic freedoms, lived amongst their own people, told tales of their own forefathers' heroism on cold Winter evenings...

Of course finding a quiet spot, seeing a rabbit dart into some ferns or seeing a split tree isn't something most of us do as we zoom about in our cars day in day out (or, more realistically sit in traffic jams wondering why everything crawls to a stop when there's no stoppage ahead on the road!), as we run to catch a train, or rush to finish some job before a deadline.

But if you take the time, even if your schedule doesn't allow it - do take that walk in the forest.

For one, if you have children they'll enjoy it ten times more than being sat at a red plastic table cramming in McJunk and downing tooth-rotting additive-ridden crap that our forefathers would have more readily used to clean out the gutters...

You'll also find yourself giving time over to think about things, important and unimportant. You might even - if you take the time to read Cobbett and Taylor - find yourself back in time wondering what freedoms our people had before the enclosures, before the advent of Westminster, before Wall Street, before Capitalism, Communism and Zionism...

The same wind blows through the same trees. The same rain falls on the same soil.

Might we one day enjoy the same freedoms and the same values as our forefathers enjoyed?

Perhaps as the backlash grows against Globalism, against McGarbage, against chemical farming, against anti-family legislation, against the stalemate, betrayal or empty promises of party politics, against the thievery and immorality of government, big business etc., against the EU and its reams and reams of rules and regulations... we might indeed, one day enjoy the same freedoms and the same values as our forefathers enjoyed?

We can live in hope...