Steve_Bamlett_blog

The Peterloo Massacre: flying the St George Cross has accompanied the success of Anarchy, Murder and Fraud in internal politics and always has. Below the equivalent, which Shelley might have described as the chanting of: ‘Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!’

As we peer through the dark of our current political woes, an inept government mouthing ‘patriotic’ platitudes and calling anti-genocide protest ‘un-British’, trying to provide a softened version of a platform that is as innately racist and oppressive as open fascism in its anarchic form, the method by which it rises, we need to think of why Elon Musk wants to tie his self-built image of himself as the icon of that success to both St. George for England and the Union Flag.

There is no doubt that Musk sees himself as self-made success, his most famous self-quotation (how throttled with ‘selves’ is anything you want to write about him) self-argues:

“I Think It Is Possible For Ordinary People To Choose To Be Extraordinary.”

Elon Musk

But recently he has taken on a role in what he thinks of as British politics, choosing as his lapdog not Nigel Farage, too closely associated with his rival, Donald Trump, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a fraud rejoicing in his working class alter-ego, Tommy Robinson.

We ought not to diminish the significance Musk and Yaxley-Lennon hear in Musk’s voice in his vague but dangerous platitudes. Here, he is quoted at the end of his streamed conversation with Yaxley-Lennon:

The reason that Musk believes the British are scared to exercise free speech is the rather tame ‘Online Safety Bill‘, which he believes threatens his freedoms to encourage populist ignorance and porn both of which increase his profits. But the rhetoric is that of rousing the masses against what he presents as violence aimed against them in order to justify ‘returned’ violence in the defence of populist ignorance but is actually the pure peoduct of slf-intetested imagination. It reeks of the strategies of the right in the 1930s in Germany and England under Mosley.

The violence is subliminal, although less so in Musk’s speeches, in huge posters promoting The Yaxley-Lennon faction. Below is one that appeared in Crook,  County Durham, softly encouraged by a Reform Council in the county. Urged to ‘stand up’, for a Union Flag, the implications still is ‘whether you choose violence or not, in the conviction that there is no choice of non-violence available to English men because ‘violence’ will be threatened against you anyway. To justify this, they use the supposed violence of Muslim immigrants, again imagined large from single cases.

Although it is not led yet by national politicians openly, the Musk credo of self-interest is entirely aimed at the production of Anarchy of a kind that hates the very masses of people it uses to meet its aims. Musk is perfectly described by  Shelley thus;

VIII

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

IX

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw –
‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’

X

With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude,

XI

And a mighty troop around,
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.

XII

And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.

XIII

O’er fields and towns, from sea to sea,
Passed the Pageant swift and free,
Tearing up, and trampling down;
Till they came to London town.

XIV

And each dweller, panic-stricken,
Felt his heart with terror sicken
Hearing the tempestuous cry
Of the triumph of Anarchy.

XV

For with pomp to meet him came,
Clothed in arms like blood and flame,
The hired murderers, who did sing
‘Thou art God, and Law, and King.

XVI

‘We have waited, weak and lone
For thy coming, Mighty One!
Our purses are empty, our swords are cold,
Give us glory, and blood, and gold.’

XVII

Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,
To the earth their pale brows bowed;
Like a bad prayer not over loud
Whispering – ‘Thou art Law and God.’ –

XVIII

Then all cried with one accord,
‘Thou art King, and God and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!’

XIX

And Anarchy, the Skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to every one,
As well as if his education
Had cost ten millions to the nation.

XX

For he knew the Palaces
Of our Kings were rightly his;
His the sceptre, crown and globe,
And the gold-inwoven robe.

XXI

So he sent his slaves before
To seize upon the Bank and Tower,
And was proceeding with intent
To meet his pensioned Parliament

That such Anarchy might win, as it did in Germany to establish a ‘Reich’ so darkly oppressive it  painted itself as the necessary perpetual principle of maintained order, has never been as near in Britain, I think, than it is now. Meanwhile, the current ruling Party barely seems to see that and plays electoral.games with its much deeper threat raising its ‘tempestuous cry’ around them against it’.

Musk himself, of course, would not survive that Reich either. His soul is too truly anarchic and childlike. Remember him bearing a chain-saw in public as head of DOGE in the USA:

After that, remember the equally petulant and increasingly bizarre rifts with Donald Trump, a much more consistent autocrat, if consistent in no other way than in following his self-interst. Even self-interests are masked by Anarchy in Musk, a man able to measure nothing except by virtue of his will. His very will is anarchic, not centred in any rationality, even that of accruing lasting personal power.

Yet again Shelley gets the autocrat right in his imagination of King Ozymandias, even in fragmented memory able to glory in the waste of lives, even his own, he creates around him. We can only hope he doesn’t so overstretch that our remains too are mixed in  tje ‘lone and level sands’ into which he grinds the principles of life down.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

That’s all for now,

With love

Steven xxxxxxx