From Freedom to Slums to Mortgage Slavery

How We Built Britain was on BBC1 tonight.

Anyone who saw how circa 16,000 people lived in squalid conditions in dark, damp, smoky cellars in industrial Manchester [circa 1840] would understand completely how we can say that "Whites were slaves too."

Read (the great social historian) William Cobbett's History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland and you will begin to see the process that saw the healthy, propertied, free and well-fed peasant-farmer and his family of the 16th Century made into the property-less, slum-dwelling wage-slaves of the 19th Century.

I have an audio series on the history of London, and in that you hear of the squalid conditions, gin-soaked no-hopers, slum-dwelling Londoners too.

Given these conditions, it's no wonder that radical thought grew (as fast as alcoholism) in the 19th Century - it's just a shame that the call to collectivism (taking what little the workers actually had and given it to the State and party bosses) coupled with hatred of Christianity (born out of the Talmudism of so many of its leaders) went to the fore.

Of course, many point to the fact that certain Capitalists poured money into the coffers of certain Communists... and those conspiracies are well founded on facts.

It took a combination of nationalism, Christian social teaching and ex-Socialists who saw through collectivism (with some Fascists too) to bring about and join in the fight for Distributism.

People like the great author GK Chesterton and the ex-Fabian Arthur Penty fought for the rights of workers to be treated as God's creatures, with each to a right of a fair wage - and preferably his own business; certainly his own home!

Some might even say, in this age when everyone is mortgaged to the banks up to the eyeballs, that Distributism is still radical: certainly this call to common sense and decent values, which places the family at the centre of society, has never been implemented at any national or regional level in the modern age - whilst we've all had the wage-slavery and slums of Capitalism or the gulags and grey housing blocks of Socialism.

Yet when you read Chesterton or Penty today (amongst the other Distributists) their words still ring true and spring to life from the page. The intuitive nature of their social commentary, the scathing nature of their attacks on the obvious falsehoods and injustices of Capitalism. The names and situations have changed - but the overall picture remains the same.

In fact, in a few of the more recent books I've read, the warnings that the Distributists (of the 1920s and 30s) gave on international Big Business, the banks, Westminster politics etc. etc. were prophetic.

Nationalists and patriots would do well to read some of the books on economics (sounds like a "cold science" when these books often rip into our enemies and deal with so much more, from freedom to the family, from housing to hunger) available on the FC site.

Nationalist failure in this regard is what leads to errors like Bolshevism (on the one hand) and liberal Capitalism (on the other) appealing to some patriots - when any nationalist worth his salt should know that neither hold the answers to our problems.

Go to www.politicalsoldier.net and click on the books section of the shop. Under economics you'll find many of the books you'll need!

Links:
Distributism in Action
The Distributist Review
Distributism.Com