James Delingpole
Politics • Culture • Writing
How to Murder 100 Million People and Come out Smelling of Roses
September 05, 2025
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Some people call the Covid scam the greatest crime in history. But I beg to differ. I think the two events that steal the crown are the First and Second World Wars, both of them entirely unnecessary, both of them funded and orchestrated by the same kind of people responsible for the fake pandemic and all the deaths and injuries from those safe and effective vaccines.

The First World War claimed an estimated 15 to 22 million lives, with another 23 million wounded. The Second World War claimed an estimated 70 to 85 million deaths, with another 15 to 25 million wounded. I got these figures from Wikipedia, so they may not be accurate. But I think we can agree that the two World Wars were the most devastating events in history, not only in terms of lives lost or bodies maimed, but also in terms of the social upheavals (marriages destroyed, families torn apart, communities dispersed, borders reshaped, livelihoods disrupted, psyches fractured) and the physical damage caused to beloved homes and irreplaceable architectural heritage.

Given that all this carnage was planned, arranged and successfully executed by a small group of identifiable conspirators - and it was - the question that naturally arises is: how did They get away with it?

Or, to put it another way: if you had been part of the elite circle responsible for massacring and dismembering millions and millions of innocent people, what measures would you have taken to persuade the survivors that this bloodbath was in fact a jolly good thing for which we should all be quietly grateful?

The reason I ask is a fascinating book I’m reading called Two World Wars And Hitler: Who Was Responsible? by Jim Macgregor and John O’Dowd. It convincingly demonstrates that the approved narrative on the world wars and their origins is a pack of lies. No, they weren’t started by nasty Germans with silly moustaches. They were orchestrated by a cabal of English and American financiers, aristocrats, businessmen and politicians who weren’t remotely bothered by the millions of lives that would be lost or the lasting damage that would be done. All this elite secret society cared about was destroying Germany (and, to a lesser extent, Russia) which it saw as economic threats - and then reaping the profits and exploiting the geopolitical gains once the carnage was over.

This isn’t exactly news by the way. It follows on from the work of Carol Quigley, Anthony Sutton, Guido Preparata and, before them, of historians such as the American Harry Elmer Barnes. In his 1926 book The Genesis of the War, Barnes became one of the first openly to question the ‘Germany bad’ narrative and poured scorn on the ‘court history’ of the mostly Oxford-based British academics claiming otherwise.

Barnes wrote:

There is no evidence that any responsible element in Germany in 1914 desired a world war, and the Kaiser worked harder than any other European statesman during the crisis to avert a general European conflagration.

But if this is really the case, how come so few of us are aware of it?

Mainly because the people and institutions who might have told us were already bought and paid for.

One of the key reasons for the success of this secret society - known in the early days as the Milner Group, after one of its more assiduous members, Alfred (later Lord) Milner - was that it controlled the financial system, the media and academe.

If it wanted a politician put in his place or needed the public whipped up into a frenzy on a particular issue, it could rely on papers like the Times (whose editor for 30 years, Geoffrey Dawson, was a close friend of Milner’s) to summon up a thundering editorial.

If it needed any figures of influence to be bribed it could rely on the bottomless pockets of the sympathetic Lord Rothschild (“Natty” to his friends) and his various banking fiefdoms in London and New York.

If it required royal support, it could call on first on the dissolute and profligate debauchee Edward VII (aka ‘Bertie’) and later on his son George V, both of them enthusiastic members of the club.

And when it needed tame stenographers to put a favourable gloss on all these shenanigans, it could call on the so-called ‘court historians’. These were the historians who, often in return for an Oxford professorship guaranteed to burnish their prestige and the virtual certainty of handsome book sales, were happy to prostitute themselves by promoting the official line and never asking awkward questions.

Any bestselling historian you’ve heard of, especially if he has ever held an Oxford chair, is almost certainly a ‘court historian.’

As Macgregor and O’Dowd write:

“It is a sad indictment of many academic historians today that they are all too accepting of the mainstream history narrative [….] Dependent for their salaries, research funding and future careers, the vast majority toe the official line. Those few who deviate from the carefully prepared ‘court history’ script are dismissed, deemed unemployable elsewhere in academia, and their careers and livelihoods effectively ruined.”

So this was the state of Britain - and the US: at the higher levels, they were joined at the hip - in the early Twentieth century. Does it sound or look vaguely familiar? It should do for the world we inhabit now is run by the same kind of people, with the same world domination agenda, using the same social programming/brainwashing techniques.

Once you are familiar with these techniques it becomes much easier to spot them retrospectively. For example, one of the classic tricks in the run up to a pre-planned war is to persuade the populace that war is something that they want and need - or that it is, at the very least, inevitable. The last thing you want is the mass of ‘public opinion’ going: “Wait a second. What’s going on here?? We didn’t ask for any of this.”

Luckily, public opinion is easily malleable. We got a taste of this recently during the Ukraine/Russia conflict, when opinion formers started pronouncing Kiev “Kyiv”, when a coke-snorting, playing-the-piano-with-his-penis comedian with only one green t-shirt in his wardrobe was suddenly being feted in Westminster and in all the newspapers as the world’s most heroic and principled leader, when villagers and trendy vicars who couldn’t place Ukraine on a map suddenly took it on themselves to attach blue and yellow flags to their homes and spires.

Here the mind control experts were employing techniques honed in their preparations for the First World War. Their big challenge in the run-up to August 1914 was that the British people had no particular beef with the Germans. Germany was seen as stolid but civilised, sensible and a nice place to go for your spa treatment. It was the French who were our natural enemies.

But little by little from the early 1900s onward, the British were persuaded by their bent politicians and media that Germany was their true enemy. Dire warnings were issued about the expansion of the German navy (which in reality was only enlarging itself because it could see what was coming); trivial incidents such as the 1911 “Morocco Crisis”, when a tiny German gunboat tried making a feeble protest against provocative Allied manoeuvring in supposedly neutral Morocco, were blown up by the newspapers as acts of inexcusable belligerence. [See also: the ‘Gulf of Tonkin incident’, which the Americans faked as their pretext for starting the Vietnam War]. By the time Britain declared war in August 1914, the populace had been worked up into such a pitch of Germanophobia that furious mobs roamed the streets in search of German targets to destroy, be they Bechstein pianos or, even less excusably, dachshund pets, which in a number of recorded incidents were stoned or beaten to death.

Even then, though, killing their Anglo-Saxon brethren did not come naturally to either side. This was most famously illustrated by the Christmas Truce of 1914 when tens of thousands of German and British troops at points along the Front met in No Man’s Land to exchange cigarettes, drink and souvenirs.

The scene is described here. It’s interesting to note that in most of the contemporary accounts quoted, it appears to have been the Germans who initiated the truce.

“It was a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white everywhere,” reported Private Albert Moren of the Second Queen’s Regiment. “About seven or eight in the evening there was a lot of commotion in the German trenches and there were these lights – I don’t know what they were.

“And then they sang ‘Silent Night’ – ‘Stille Nacht’. I shall never forget it; it was one of the highlights of my life. What a beautiful tune.”

The image of Germans lighting candles in their trenches and the sounds of their gentle singing drifting across the killing fields of No Man’s Land has become iconic.

Along the line, German soldiers held up white flags, or messages asking the Tommies facing them not to shoot. Men that had been engaged in desperate fighting days or even hours before had begun to feel illuminated by the Christmas spirit.

Soon they were singing together, trading jokes and the odd jovial insult or two.

Marmaduke Walkinton of the London Regiment described the scene: “A German said, ‘Tomorrow you no shoot, we no shoot.’ And the morning came, and we didn’t shoot, and they didn’t shoot.

“So then we began to pop our heads over the side and jump down quickly in case they shot but they didn’t. And then we saw a German standing up, waving his arms, and we didn’t shoot, and so it gradually grew.”

In at least one sector, there was also an impromptu game of football.

“Suddenly a Tommy came with a football, kicking already and making fun, and then began a football match,” wrote Lieutenant Johannes Niemann of the 133rd Saxon Infantry Regiment. “We marked the goals with our caps. Teams were quickly established for a match on the frozen mud, and the Fritzes beat the Tommies 3-2.”

Perhaps it won’t at all surprise you to learn that The Powers That Be weren’t remotely happy with this. They wanted slaughter not mutual love and understanding. Though no punishments were handed down for this unsanctioned fraternisation, measures were enforced to ensure it never happened again. First, the troops were moved to different sections of the line, to reduce the likelihood of their feeling residual kinship with the enemy units posted opposite. Secondly, casualty records across the front were regularly scrutinised so that senior officers could spot mini cease fires.

If one was detected, raids and patrols would be organised to foster the correct “fighting spirit” in troops.

It’s probably worth my reiterating the point that under most circumstances, people - even young men of ‘fighting age’ - would rather have a friendly chat than kill one another. To get them to kill requires relentless conditioning. And that conditioning is not an organic thing that arises from natural circumstances. It has to be directed from above.

Which isn’t, of course, the way we’re taught about war at school. Especially not about the First and Second World Wars which are invariably sold to us as examples of ‘just wars’ which ennobled all those who fought on the ‘right’ side in them.

At my fairly typical English public school, Malvern, this celebration of the glorious dead reached its apotheosis in the annual Remembrance Sunday service, which was taken more seriously than any other event in the school calendar. The school Corps lined up in military formation in front of the college war memorial (St George). A two minute’s silence was observed for the school’s fallen (462 in the First War; 249 in the Second). The Last Post was blown by a bugler from the rooftops. It was all very solemn and quite moving. In my day there were still plenty of Old Boys around who had served in the war, and whom you could see standing stiffly in their British Warms blinking back their tears at memories of the friends they had lost in combat.

What I hadn’t realised at the time is that this ceremonial was and is all part of the conditioning process. Sure we were honouring the dead. But we were also being brainwashed with a number of subliminal messages which I now realise were not just false but dangerous.

I think, for example, of how I would find it impossible to sing, without a catch in my voice, those lines from that classic Remembrance Day hymn, I Vow To Thee My Country. It’s sung to one of the most poignant and moving tunes in the English hymnal, taken from the Jupiter movement of Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite.

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love:
the love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
that lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
the love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
the love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

But wait. What is really going on here?

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the author of those lines was a senior British diplomat named Sir Cecil Spring Rice. Shortly before the war, Rice was posted to Washington as Ambassador to the US, his primary mission being to persuade Woodrow Wilson’s administration to abandon its position of neutrality and take sides against Germany. Rice would never have got the job unless he had been entirely sympathetic to the Milner group’s aims.

So here we have an example of one of the (albeit junior) architects of the First World War later being enlisted - a bit like the capable Mr Wolf in Pulp Fiction - to help with the clean up operation. Operation Turd Polish, as it really ought to have been known.

The commission might have gone like this: “Cecil, old boy. D’ye remember that splendid little poem you wrote just before the war, Urbs Dei, about what a jolly marvellous thing it is when a chap dies for his country? We wondered whether you could spruce it up to make it a kind of national anthem for the Fallen. Maybe if you lost some of the ‘thunder of the guns’ stuff in the first verse - still a bit raw, that - and made it a bit more vague and poetic. What we’re after is a proper tearjerker, which chokes you up every time you hear it. But also something that conveys the important message that your country’s call demands unquestioning obedience and that if you do end up getting the chop, well it’s no bad thing because of love, sacrifice, being tested, and all that.”

No. I know it didn’t really happen quite as I’ve described. But I hope you will forgive my poetic licence in pursuit of my broader point, viz: one of the chaps whose job it was to ensure that thousands and thousands more young men (in this case American volunteers) were fed into the meat grinder also wrote the anthem explaining how totally marvellous and noble it was to die in this way.

I’m similarly sceptical of the oft-quoted lines from Lawrence Binyon’s For The Fallen.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Yes, of course, it’s comforting to think of the war dead being frozen in a state of eternal youth andbeing perpetually memorialised as a kind of perk for having had their lives cut so brutally short. But though I’ve no doubt Binyon’s sentiments are sincere and heartfelt, they also constitute the most spectacular propaganda win for people who actually caused all those premature deaths.

As Horace well knew when he wrote the sarcastic lines “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (which he only survived to write because he’d taken the sensible decision to run away at the Battle of Philippi), dying for your country has nothing to recommend it.

What both Rice’s and Binyon’s verses serve to do is gloss over this fact with a layer of slightly mawkish sentiment. Yes, it’s a lovely thought, and perhaps a way of dealing with loss by presenting sacrificial death as a kind of victory. But it’s also a massive ducking of the issue. All these men, in fact, died for nothing. And anything that distracts from that fact is doing them no favours - but is participating in the cover up.

Another example of this collective cover up by the cultural Establishment are those neat graveyards, lovely maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, with their uniform headstones in Portland stone. These were devised by committees of the great and the good, including three of the most eminent architects of the day Sir Herbert Baker, Sir Reginald Blomfield and Sir Edwin Lutyens, with Rudyard Kipling as literary adviser and Gertrude Jekyll as garden designer.

Immaculate, dignified, striking, enduring: yes. But also yet another element in the ongoing, massive and all-encompassing snow job operation to erase from the world any sense that those wars might have been a criminal act planned by the very class of people who dreamed up all those magnificent memorials (the Menin Gate, etc) and picturesque cemeteries.

Why do I know about the Menin Gate, even though I’ve never been there? Because it’s one of the myriad aspects of the First World War which has been thrust relentlessly into our consciousness in the years since. For any half-way educated European certainly, the First World War has been inescapable.

Here are some of the various ways in which the First World War has entrenched itself in my own thoughts over the years: thrilling to the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves; grinding in school English classes through the eloquent misery of the War Poets, few of whom survived; not knowing much about the 60s anti-war musical Oh What A Lovely War! except that it was a Thing and had something to do with Joan Littlewood; blood-bathing in the Götterdämmerung war porn of Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel; feeling very melancholy after exposure to RC Sheriff’s Journey’s End and again by its Royal Flying Corps movie version Aces High; being frustrated by the very sketchy details of Jay Gatsby’s mysterious war service past; “Lions led by donkeys”; knowing that the survival time of a second lieutenant on the first day of the Somme was shorter than a May fly’s; meeting Harry Patch, the machine gun battalion veteran who outlived them all; never getting round to reading All Quiet On The Western Front for fear of being too depressed, especially in the scene where they bayonet one another; putting on a bad Australian accent to recite the ‘How fast can you run?’ ‘As fast as a leopard’ lines from Gallipoli; exploring the impressive reconstruction of the trench section once captured by a young Lieutenant Rommel in what is now Slovenia; getting cross with Jon Snow, the silly leftist news presenter, for wearing a white poppy instead of a red one; feeling sorry for the brave horses in War Horse; laughing at the slug-balancing act in Blackadder Goes Forth; spotting anachronistic black people about to go over the top in Sam Mendes’s 1917; trying to track down poppies at the last minute for various Remembrance Days; recommending my father in law to go to see Days of Glory - about North African units fighting for the French - and him having accidentally gone to see the comedy Blades of Glory by mistake; relishing the fantastically cynical, horribly realistic Royal Flying Corps quartet of novels (Goshawk Squadron, etc) by Derek Robinson; watching various politicians on the TV news laying wreaths at the Cenotaph memorial in Whitehall; finally getting round to seeing Kirk Douglas in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory; trying on my military re-enactor brother Dick’s French infantryman’s horizon blue uniform, including the Casque Adrian helmet; feeling rather sad that Alain-Fournier, author of one of my favourite novels, hadn’t survived to write any more because he was killed in the trenches…

For something none of us ever experienced, the First World War has taken up an awful lot of our collective headspace. You could argue that this is no more than the fallen deserve - and that is certainly what we have been trained to think. But I now wonder whether it hasn’t also been a case of what the CIA calls ‘flooding the zone’: overwhelming the target audience with so much disparate information that they are rendered incapable of processing it.

What I notice about all the examples I’ve given above - whether they invite us to focus on the ugly details of trench warfare or the exhilaration of survival or the sense of futility and waste or the incompetence of the commanders or the insufficient reverence of public figures or military tactics, uniforms and equipment - is that not one of them, not a single one of them, vouchsafes the only information that really matters.

The First World War (the Second too) was a blood sacrifice staged by our Satanic elites to kill as many of us possible while increasing their world domination. And the supposed goodies - the ‘Allies’ - were in fact the baddies.

I don’t remember being told that in any of my school history classes. Do you?

What I do remember quite clearly, though, is how puzzled I was when first exposed to the official narrative on “How the First World War started.”

The reason the flower of England’s youth were sent in wave after wave to drown in mud, get mowed down by machine guns or blown to smithereens by shells was that a student from a far-off Central European country that no one gave a toss about had assassinated some Archduke and his wife in a place called Sarajevo.

Sorry? Excuse me? Nearly a million of my countrymen were sent to die because of that?

It made no sense to me when I first heard it, around the age of 13. I suspect I probably wasn’t the only child to have that initial gut-reaction. That would explain why the English school curriculum at the time spent so many hours of history classes on the First and Second World origins narrative: to grind all that scepticism out of you, and wear you down to the point where you’re like: “Yeah, whatever. All right. I surrender. The Germans started it all, for reasons I still don’t quite understand. We were the goodies. These were just wars. Can we move onto another subject, now?”

Anyway, I think there are some useful lessons we can learn from all this. Here are some of them.

The People Who Run The World Are NOT Incompetent

They’d love you to believe otherwise. That’s why They gave you “Hanlon’s Razor”, the apocryphal aphorism that urges “Never attribute to malice that which adequately explained by stupidity.”

But conjuring two World Wars out of nothing is no mean feat. And subsequently persuading the world that they were just, necessary and the other side’s fault must surely earn our grudging respect as an achievement of diabolical genius.

Yes, Everything Really Is A Conspiracy

Usual disclaimers apply - but essentially: Yes. If it’s in ‘the news’ it’s probably a psyop.

The ‘purple-pilled’ get very upset when you tell them this. Consider the recent furore in Awake circles over the vexed question of whether ‘Lucy Connolly’ was a crisis actor/intelligence services operative or just an ordinary mum who happened to have been unfairly banged up in prison for an unfortunate tweet.

“Not everything is a conspiracy,” the “She’s just a lovely, ordinary mum” faction crossly insisted. They accused the “She’s a spook” camp of being divisive and paranoid and over-imaginative.

But there’s a problem with this ‘divisive and paranoid’ slur. In order for it carry weight it would have to be demonstrably the case that conspiracies by malign elites against the people are rare, indeed exceptional. All the evidence shows, however, that such conspiracies are in fact the norm.

What all the evidence also shows is that the elites’ primary control mechanism is collective mind manipulation, so that ordinary people are continually fooled into believing stuff that isn’t true. Stuff like, say, “It was the Germans who started the two World Wars but it’s OK. The good guys won.”

To persuade the public of such untruths, against all evidence, required devilish ingenuity, massive resources and deception on an almost unimaginable scale.

Are we now supposed to believe that once the two wars were over, the people responsible suddenly decided: “Well that’s all our naughtiness worked out of our system. We’re going to behave nicely from now on. No more lies; no more killing; no more psyops…”?

Politicians were never on our side

There’s a widespread delusion - call it the “Where are the titans of yesteryear?” fallacy - that if only we had better politicians, like the selfless, principled grandees from the good old days, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

This delusion is the product of bad historians and short memories. Look at the various MPs in the Conservative and Liberal governments in the run up to World War I, for example, and you discover they fit into two basic categories: stupid and evil.

The majority were the stupid ones had no idea whatsoever that a tiny, elite, Anglo-American secret society was pushing their country into a war no ordinary person wanted or needed. So were useless when it came to preventing it.

The minority were the evil ones (such as Sir Edward Grey, Herbert Asquith and Winston Churchill) who were more or less fully aware that they were doing the bidding of the secret society. But they didn’t mind one bit, either because they shared its aims, or because they were going to be rewarded for it, or both. So they lied, cheated, dissembled, faked, postured and backstabbed till they effected their controllers’ desired outcome.

That was early 1900s. Nothing has changed since.

If You Know Their Name, They Are In The Game

One of the great disappointments when you look into true history, as opposed to fake history, is realising how thoroughly compromised were most of the people you used to admire. Churchill is the obvious example. But there are plenty of others.

Take the author John Buchan. His The Thirty-Nine Steps used to be one of my favourite adventure yarns. But with hindsight that book is the purest Milner group propaganda. The hero, Richard Hannay, a veteran of the ugly South African wars (in which the British invented the concentration camp) uncovers on the eve of the war a dastardly plot by an evil German spy network which has penetrated deep into the British Establishment. Buchan, who had been Milner’s private secretary in South Africa, was employed during the war to produce a propaganda magazine called Nelson’s History of the War dispensing fake history.

I have my doubts too about the author of another classic novel of that period, The Riddle of the Sands. Erskine Childers was an upper class Irishman and fanatical British imperialist who served in the Boer War, but who later turned against the Empire and was shot by firing squad for having supplied guns to the Republican rebels during the Easter Rising. But there’s something deeply suspicious about the plot of The Riddle of the Sands in which two English sailors exploring the shallow waters, mudflats and secret inlets of the Frisian Islands accidentally stumble upon an imminent seaborne invasion of Britain by a concealed fleet of German tugs and barges.

The book was published in 1903: eleven years before the outbreak of war, at a time when almost no one - apart from the Milner Group conspirators - saw Germany as a threat. Childers himself described it as “a story written with a purpose” written from “a patriot’s natural sense of duty.” It clearly did the trick because it was frequently cited by Churchill an excuse to build up British naval power. But who planted the plot idea in Childers’ head?

All ‘Freedom’ Movements Are Co-Opted

There’s a good example in Paul Cudenec’s superb essay Wars, Resets and the Global Criminocracy.

During the First World War, one of the groups wheeled out to support the criminocratic agenda was a wing of the Suffragette movement.

Apparently in return for agreeing to stop their militant activities, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were handed a government grant.

Emmeline declared her support for the war effort and began to demand military conscription for British men, while Christabel Pankhurst demanded the “internment of all people of enemy race, men and women, young and old, found on these shores”. [15]

And the suffragettes were among those women who handed white feathers to males not in uniform, including teenage boys as young as 16.

They Are Psychopaths

In May 1915 the British passenger liner RMS Lusitania was sunk without warning in breach of international by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland with the loss of 1200 lives, including 128 Americans. The resultant furore at this ‘brutal act of wanton slaughter’ was what turned hitherto reluctant US public opinion in favour of joining the war with Germany.

Which was the plan all along. The ship - in breach of US law - had been secretly loaded with munitions beforehand. And the British Admiralty, which had cracked German naval codes, deliberately sent Lusitania at reduced speed into an area where U-20 had already sunk two ships.

Five days before the sinking of the Lusitania, as Fergus O’Connor Greenwood recounts in 180 degrees: Unlearn the Lies You Have Been Taught to Believe, the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom Walter Heinz Page sent the following note to his son:

“If a British liner full of Americans be blown up what will Uncle Sam do? That’s what is going to happen?”

The US later used the same playbook at Pearl Harbour, allowing eight of their battleships to be sunk or damaged and over 2000 of their service personnel to be killed in the ‘surprise’ Japanese attack which would hasten America’s entry into the Second World War.

See also: 9/11

They Invent The Lies; But We Do Their Dirty Work for Them

During ‘Covid’, lots of Awake people expressed astonishment that our doctors, whose job it supposedly is to care for our health and to ‘first do no harm’ instead chose to push on the unwitting populace an unnecessary experimental drugs procedure that would end up killing them or injuring them.

But it’s not just the doctors who betray us. So too does every other ‘prestigious’ profession. Bankers conceal the corrupt nature of the financial system; politicians routinely lie about everything; scientists promote fantastical bollocks about climate change; accountants cook the books for evil corporations; media types regurgitate Cabal propaganda as ‘news’…

…And the historians. Surely not them as well? What could be more innocuous than a career delving into the mysteries of the past and, through diligent research, explaining to students and other readers what really happened?

Few historians do this, though. Certainly not the ones who get the professorships and sell books in quantity. The price they pay - and are more than happily prepared to pay - for success is to cover up for their dark overloads.

It is thanks to historians, more so perhaps than to any other profession, that the psychopaths responsible for the worst crimes in history continue to get away with murder.

Nihil Sub Sole Novum

But perhaps the most important lesson of the Two World Wars is this: everything you thought was new and shocking They’ve been doing - and getting away with - for years.

Psyops did not begin with “Look him in the eyes and tell him the risk isn’t real.”

Conspiracies did not start with JFK.

False Flags did not begin with 9/11.

Confected atrocity stories about beheaded babies in Gaza or murdered children at ‘Taylor Swift’ ballet classes in Southport? Just consider all the stories circulated in the Allied media in 1914 about evil, spike-helmeted Teutons raping nuns and bayoneting nurses.

Wear a mask? A carbon copy of “Always carry your gas mask” in 1939. As Carol Quigley recounts in Tragedy & Hope, the threat of airborne gas attacks was a chimera. The purpose of ubiquitous and enforced gas masks was to psych the populace into a state of anxiety and obedience.

False flags like 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombings, 7/7, etc? Both World Wars were rife with Allied false flags, including attacks by Allies dressed up as Germans in Poland and, of course, the ‘allow it to happen’ variant as used more recently in Gaza, at Pearl Harbor.

As well as being arguably the worst crime in history, the First and Second World Wars were also perhaps its biggest and most successful brainwashing exercise. They were the testing ground for all the psychological manipulation techniques still fooling us - most of us - today.

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Because I love you all and want you to be happy, I’d like few things more than if you were ALL able to join me at my James Delingpole Birthday Bash on August 1st.

Unfortunately, numbers are strictly limited. So please don’t be one of those people - I’m the procrastinating type myself, so I know whereof I speak - who sends me a pleading message a few days before the event saying: “Can you squeeze me in?” Because tragically I might not be able to help.

Here’s why I think you’ll enjoy it. The main event is me doing a live Delingpod with Bob Moran and the conversation is going to be great. You know it is. Apart from my brother Dick - who’ll also be appearing, obvs. - there’s probably no one with whom I have a greater rapport than Bob. And, gosh, do we have a lot to talk about: chemtrails, death jabs, dinosaurs, Satanists, the New World Order etc. All the stuff, basically, that you can’t discuss with your Normie friends, but which here we’ll cover freely and frankly because, hey, you’ll be ...

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Christianity 1 New Age 0

If you haven’t already - I’m a bit behind the curve here - I urge you to watch this car crash encounter between Christian apologist and scholar Wes Huff and ‘ancient civilisation’ researcher Billy Carson.

It’s an excruciating experience - probably best to watch it on double speed - for a couple of reasons. First, the hapless podcast host/debate moderator Mark Minard is somewhat out of his depth and is also clearly embarrassed at having one of his guests (Carson, sitting right next to him) eviscerated in front of him by his other guest. This causes him to interrupt the debate at intervals and expound well-meaningly but not very interestingly on his own half-baked views on the mysteries of the universe. You feel a bit sorry for him but you do rather wish he’d shut up.

Second, and mainly, it’s painful to watch Carson being outclassed and outgunned by someone who knows and understands his purported field of expertise so much better than he does. Carson was reportedly so upset by the encounter that he ...

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How Not to Lose It at Your Dad's Funeral

“How did you manage to keep it together at your Dad’s funeral?” some sympathetic souls have kindly asked. This was in response to a recent piece I wrote on the experience of delivering my father’s eulogy. I thought, rather than reply individually, that I would turn into it into another article which some of you might find helpful.

  1. Celebrate the life rather than mourn the death

When I was planning my father’s funeral service, my immediate thought was to choose lots of appropriately sad music: Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’; poignant hymns like The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended; and so on. Luckily I realised that this would probably be a mistake.

At a funeral, the congregation is already sad enough that someone they love has died. You really don’t need to twist the knife by tormenting them with music guaranteed to reduce them to tears: the tears will flow quite naturally anyway.

So for the intro music, I chose something jaunty: The Dambusters March by Eric Coates. As well as being an affectionate nod to my Dad’s National Service career (when he served in the RAF), it’s a popular, jolly, sturdy tune that puts a smile on your face. This made wheeling the coffin down the aisle much less painful.

You probably need one solemn, slow hymn to acknowledge the gravity of the moment. My father had already settled this by naming Eternal Father, Strong to Save as his chosen hymn in the Death Book we gave him to fill in, at his leisure, while he was still alive and well. (Death Books are very useful. Every elderly person should have one: they’re your last chance to declare how you want to be buried, who you want delivering your eulogy, etc. They also forestall family arguments after you are gone: your wishes having been expressed, the decision already made).

But one depressing hymn is enough. The others should be rousing ones that offer everyone the chance to sing their hearts out and relieve some of that pent up emotion. We agreed on Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer and Jerusalem. We did wonder whether it was really appropriate to include two such belters. But Gary, the excellent vicar at Christ Church, Malvern, confirmed them as suitable choices. A funeral service, he explained, needs to move in waves: a quiet, contemplative, mournful bit in the middle, book-ended by outbursts of life-affirming, death-conquering exultation.

We played the old man out to the tune of JSB’s Sheep May Safely Graze. I mean, it’s such a classic why would you not?

  1. Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

From the moment I woke up on the day of my father’s funeral, I knew I had but one mission: to give my beloved Daddy the send off he deserved. Just writing that word ‘Daddy’ has brought tears to my eyes, which is why it certainly wasn’t going to be allowed to sneak into my eulogy. My job was not to feel sorry for myself but to deliver an oration worthy of the man.

Also, I’m the eldest sibling. When you are the first born - of five - it’s a job for life. No matter how much your brothers and sisters may subsequently eclipse you in terms of fame, fortune or distinction, whenever you gather together you will always instinctively observe the pecking order you had as children. Therefore, as top dog, you have to set an example. You have to be like a Napoleonic-era naval captain on the quarterdeck of his ship-of-the-line. No matter if there is carnage all around you as your decks are swept with grape, your masts are shattered and your ensign is shredded into a tattered rag. Others may fall but you must keep a cool head.

  1. Pretend It’s Not Happening

Of course, keeping a cool head is easier said than done. But for me it seemed to follow quite naturally from my decision to prioritise my delivery of the eulogy. I entered a kind of trance state in which I felt at one remove from the events around me. When the hearse rolled up with my father’s coffin inside, for example, I quickly fought off thoughts like: “Oh no. That’s my dead Pa in there and he’s not coming back.” Instead, I thought, “Gosh. This is all so intense I’m not even going to try to process it. I’m going to act as if it’s more like a dream.”

It works really well as a strategy, I find. The only problem is afterwards when you realise you haven’t really dealt with any of the emotional issues that might have been alleviated had you allowed yourself to sob and weep. Just now I had a relapse of my various ongoing health problems. Michelle, my wonderful osteo, said my cranial rhythms were so constricted it was as if I were suffering from concussion. She ascribed this - because she had come across it before with other patients - to unresolved grief.

  1. Be a Christian

You should try this sometime, if you haven’t already. Having a strong Christian faith makes SUCH a big difference to how you see death. Not for one second, no not for one fraction of a second, have I imagined that I’m not going to be reunited with my father again at the Resurrection. This is a great comfort to me.

I realise that to an atheist this will seem merely like a delusional cope. But crazy as it may seem, we Christians genuinely believe this stuff. It’s not a position we’ve merely adopted because the Bible tells us so or because we find it to be an agreeable way of dealing with the fact that we’re all gonna die. No. Knowing that there’s an afterlife, that death has been conquered through Christ’s sacrifice, is the essence of everything we think and do. We don’t feel superior to those who think otherwise. Just a bit sorry for them because, goodness, it must be hard living in a world as increasingly demanding as this one and believing that this is all there is.

  1. You Need Dick

Among the qualities I didn’t inherit from my father were a meticulous attention to detail and ability to organise things. Luckily my brother Dick did, which is why things went so smoothly. In military terms, I would be the greenhorn platoon commander desperate to find new ways of getting all his men shot; Dick is the grizzled sergeant who makes sure they don’t.

I had just two jobs - funeral service; eulogy - while Dick took upon himself at least a dozen, from collecting copies of death certificates, informing the various utilities, and booking the church and the grave slot, organising the wake - and the music and photos and sound equipment for our Dick and James tribute - to the tricksy business of dealing with a landlord who, understandably, would much prefer it if the estate went on paying rent for all eternity.

This is the advantage of coming from a large family where there is a range of children with different skill sets. I always knew that having lots of brothers and sisters was a blessing. But I never knew quite how much till my father’s death brought us all together more closely than ever.

So that’s my final piece of advice. If you can and it’s not too late: have lots of children!

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How to Deliver the Most Important Speech of Your Life
First, Throw Away Your Script...

I have just delivered the eulogy at my father’s funeral. Was it the most important speech of my life? Well, definitely up there. You only get one shot at giving your old man the send-off he deserves, so you need to get it right.

The temptation on these occasions - and this applies equally to events like daughters’ weddings, best man’s speeches etc - is to make your excuses in advance. “People will understand if I don’t deliver. These occasions are so fraught. You never know how you’re going to react,” you may tell yourself. Sure. But do you really want to spend the rest of your life castigating yourself for how much better you could have been?

You could, of course, play for safety. Type out your speech in advance and read it from a script. This will skirt a lot of potential pitfalls: you can rehearse it so you feel comfortable with it; you’ll have timed it so it won’t overrun; you’ll know you’re not going to say anything clumsy or embarrassing because, perhaps with the help of a trusted adviser, you will have carefully edited it in advance; you (or your paid speechwriter) will have tailored it perfectly with a beginning, middle and an end.

But you will never deliver much more than an average speech. This is first because, unless perhaps done by professional actors, scripted readings never sound as natural or engaging or easy-on-the-ear as unscripted ones. Second because a first-rate speech is a living, breathing thing which responds to the moment. And third because nothing is quite so stimulating to the creative impulse nor thrilling to the nervous system nor makes a speech so exciting to deliver as the terror of going out before an expectant audience and not knowing quite what you are going to say.

Obviously, you’ll need some idea of what you’re going to say. If you don’t know roughly what you want to say you shouldn’t be giving a speech. But this isn’t such a problem as you might think because you do already know what you want to say. What you want to say is the single most important thing that needs to be said about the given topic.

In the case of my father, for example, the important thing was this: he was very special.

But almost every one thinks their Dad is special. What I then had to do was work out what exactly made him so special. Otherwise, I would be in danger of regurgitating a splurge of platitudes and, worse, failing in the one job you have when delivering a funeral oration: capturing the measure of the man (or woman) whose life is being celebrated.

A few ideas came to mind. His bloody mindedness. His pathological aversion to following rules. His insatiable curiosity. His joyous discovery in 1965 when the first of his children was born was that his main purpose in life was to build an empire of Delingpoles.

My father loved being the Delingpole patriarch. (It’s a niche role. There really aren’t many of us). And he liked the idea that rather than preparing his children for the world, it was the world’s job to adapt itself to Delingpoles. Though his five children were all very different, they were very recognisably of the species.

That was my next conundrum. What does a Delingpole look like? I decided they had two defining qualities. One, a very distinctive sense of humour: sometimes warped, often inappropriate, invariably piss-taking. Two, a stubborn determination to be themselves regardless of the personal cost in terms of embarrassment, financial security or ability to gain social acceptance.

Now I had my main theme. I make it sound easy but this is only because I am writing about it after the event. What I haven’t yet mentioned is the hours and hours - and hours - of time I wasted, thrashing about in my head and devising all manner of extraneous verbiage which would end on the cutting room floor.

If I’d read a piece like the one I’m now writing, I could have saved myself an awful lot of trouble. The thing you need to keep in mind when you are constructing a speech is how little time you have to say what needs to be said. So there’s no room - or very little - for anything that is not essential to the main theme.

Oh, and don’t worry about jokes. Or off-the-cuff digressions. Or topical remarks. These will all occur to you naturally in the moment, once you’ve had a chance to assess your audience and the general mood. They don’t need to be worked up in advance: indeed they shouldn’t be because then they turn into darlings. And the only thing to do with darlings, you may remember, is to kill them.

With speeches - as with essays - you won’t go far wrong if you stick to the old, basic, tripartite structural rule:

First, say what you are going to say; then say it; then say what you have just said.

Rules are made to be broken, as we’ll see in a moment. But that one keeps you honest and focused on the task in hand, viz, not skittering around like a crazed dog looking for more exciting new ideas to cram in, but finding ways to amplify your main point so as to enable your audience more fully to appreciate it.

Remember, unlike you, your audience haven’t been living with this speech for the last umpteen weeks. This is their first exposure to it. So what may seem to you like overkill may to them feel more like light understatement bordering on incomprehensibility.

And given that your audience are mainly the people on whom the success of your speech stands or falls, you want them onside. This means not just giving them a line of argument they can clearly follow - even if they are elderly and half deaf, which is not uncommon among funeral congregations - but also making them feel wanted and part of the occasion.

That’s why, early on in my address - but not before I’d got over The Hump - I told everyone present that they were part of the family. “Today you are all honorary Delingpoles”, I said. And I meant it because the fact that they’d all turned out to say goodbye to my father on the hottest day of the year told me all I needed to know: that all of these people were discerning enough to have recognised something special in my father; likely he felt the same way about them. It’s worth remembering that at funerals when you’re not close family you can feel a bit of an imposter. “Should I really be here among so much private grief?” you wonder. A quick acknowledgement from the lectern is a reassuring thing to hear.

Now you’re wondering what The Hump is. This is the name given by my old - and now sadly deceased - friend Brian Robinson for the nasty part at the beginning of a speech which you always dread and somehow have to get past. Once you’ve over The Hump, you’re cooking with gas. And The Hump itself need not be a problem, Brian (a former actor turned professional speech coach) advised. You just need to acknowledge its existence and tackle it head on by preparing for it and dealing with it rather than ignoring it and hoping it will go away.

My biggest challenge, I decided, would be to find an anecdote which simultaneously grabbed the audience’s attention, set the tone of the eulogy (affectionate, amused, upbeat, funny not sad) and didn’t outstay its welcome.

On these occasions - seriously: try it! - I find that appealing to God makes all the difference. I prayed for His help in delivering a eulogy worthy of my father. And God came up trumps by supplying me with the perfect anecdote.

It went roughly like this.

“The first time I realised my father was different was 52 years ago when I was sent off to board at a prep school only about half a mile from where we are now. All the other eight year olds knew how to kick a football, pass a rugger ball and catch a cricket ball. I could do none of the above because my father had never shown me. But I was the only boy who knew the Latin name for the common European wall lizard.”

The reason it works is because it’s funny (well I think so), it hints at the theme which will be enlarged on in the body of the eulogy, it makes a geographical connection with both the location and the audience, it doesn’t last more than a minute, it’s easy to remember (as deep-seated personal recollections always are) and it ends with a clearly defined punchline.

But you’re still not over The Hump just yet. First you must make the transition from your grabby intro to the speech proper. This isn’t easy because you’ve likely paused to allow the audience to appreciate the punchline of your opening anecdote, giving them a chance to laugh as they’ve probably been gagging to do because funerals can be so tense. So how do you do this?

Well the solution I came up with, more or less on the spot because at this point I was letting nervous energy and divine providence take care of the heavy lifting, was to acknowledge what an awesome privilege but also a terrifying responsibility it was to be the one who has to deliver your father’s eulogy. I then observed how very much my father would have disapproved of my trying to do it without any notes, it being such a huge risk to take at an occasion so important - and surely, I ought at least to have a safety net ready just in case.

“But it’s your fault, Pa,” I said. “You bred us this way!” Which is true. He did. He never stopped trying to give us advice on the courses we should take in life but we never ever listened to him and I think he took pride in our utter obliviousness to his wishes. It was a sign that we were the free spirits that he wanted us to be and hoped we would be.

From that point on it was almost plain sailing. All we needed now was a pay off: something to reward the audience for their patience and give them the sense of a speech satisfyingly concluded; but also, more importantly, something that left you with the feeling: “Yes. This was truly special man we’ve just been celebrating. And we’re all going to miss him greatly.”

I decided to break the “Say what you’re going to say; say it; say what you have just said” rule by introducing a sub theme. This was because I had belatedly realised that I had something else very important I needed to say about my father. It had only occurred to me in the weeks after his death when my head was suddenly awash with memories of him and I was trying to make sense of them, trying to work out who he really was. You think you know your father when he is alive but you don’t because you are too busy taking him for granted. Only when he has gone do you start asking yourself: “Who actually was this person whom I’ve now irretrievably lost?” When he’s alive he’s your dad and this relationship colours everything you think about him. But when he’s gone you find yourself trying to understand the world as it might have been from his perspective instead of from yours.

What stood out for me was what a blinder he had played with the cards he’d been dealt in life. Anyone - well, almost anyone: probably not my father who was never much cop at bridge - can win a hand when they’re holding all the Kings and Aces. But it’s how you play the average hands or the shitty hands that are the truer mark of character. Though my old man was born to a life of relative privilege - it was neither easy nor conventionally successful. He suffered bouts of depression; he was cruelly cut out of his father’s will; his first two marriages ended in divorce; his business ventures failed; he had never wanted the career that was forced on him by his father and would have been much happier, probably, as an academic or some kind of maverick, independent researcher or author. Yet no one in that church would have considered him a failure for one second. Because he wasn’t. On the contrary, he repeatedly turned what could have been disaster into triumph by resolutely focusing on the main prize.

And what was this main prize? Hard to define, exactly, but we all had a sense of it in our hearts because it was why we were all there celebrating the life of a man who in his various ways had meant so much to us. As I wrote in my Spectator tribute - which, rather sweetly, the undertaker Georgia placed in his coffin so he could digest it at leisure - I grew almost weary of being told by people who had met him what delightful company my father was. He was both interesting (RAF Chinese language specialist; racing driver; guppy breeder; reptile and amphibian collector; inveterate traveller; etc) and interested, always curious in other people, always wanting to find out more. That’s why on his gravestone, we shall be inscribing one of his favourite catchphrases: “What else do you know?” His desire for new information was insatiable.

This led naturally to my conclusion. I quoted the epitaph on Sir Christopher Wren’s tomb. A bit of a cliche, but apposite. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Wren’s epitaph referred to his greatest creation, St Paul’s Cathedral. My father’s to the place he occupied in the memories of all those people - perhaps 150, not bad for a 91-year old who’d outlived all his friends - who’d come to the church to see him off.

Goodbye Pa. We’re going to miss you terribly. But you’re going to live on in all sorts of ways that you could never have imagined. This piece, for example. Someone, somewhere is going to find it useful or comforting or even inspirational. And it’s you they should thank for that, not me.

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Don't Feed The Demons!

The other day someone wrote something infuriating on the internet which required an angry rebuttal. This happens to me quite a lot, as I suspect it does to you. I had many pressing things to do that morning which demanded my attention - a tribute to write for the Spectator about the death of my beloved, favourite hunter Carpenter; arrangements to make for my father’s funeral; and any number of urgent gardening tasks to fulfil in order to keep my wife happy.

But really this angry rebuttal could not wait. So, poisoned keyboard at the ready, I set about my work. The problem was that no matter how hard I tried, I could never strike a sufficiently satisfying note. I tried cattily sarcastic; then loftily superior; then cool, restrained but implacable; then charming and conciliatory but not really. Numerous drafts and far too many minutes later, I was still no closer to my goal - probably because I wanted to achieve too many contradictory effects simultaneously. On the one hand I wanted to crush, humiliate, mock and destroy. On the other I wanted to set the facts straight in such a way as to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that The Truth was on my side. I also wanted to show myself to be the better person: the good guy in this ugly feud with whom everyone reading it should identify.

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Writing/Articles/why-we-can-t-all-get-along?preview=1

Then suddenly I realised - “****!” - I’d just missed the first fifteen minutes of my gym class. So carried away had I been my righteous desire for vengeance over something ineffably trivial and forgettable that I had stopped myself doing something that was actually good for me; something I had been looking forward to all morning; something far more valuable and life enhancing than getting involved in yet another silly, pointless, worthless row with some nonentity.

At times like this, I’m reminded of the words of David in Psalm 37.

Leave off from wrath; and let go displeasure; fret not thyself else thou shalt be moved to do evil.

Nothing useful would have been achieved had I responded to the person who had irked me. However cunningly I had phrased myself, they would have still taken umbrage and would have been confirmed in their view that I’m loathsome, arrogant, entitled, petulant, controlled opposition, closet MI5 etc.

This is because many - though not all - of the people who have a go at you on social media are not doing so in good faith. They’ve already made up their mind what they think about you. At this point, even if you were to walk towards them across a lake, heal their genital warts and transform all their bottles of Tesco plonk into Chateau Cheval Blanc ‘47, they’d still have you down as an obvious Wrong ‘Un.

Again, the scriptures have some invaluable words to say on this subject.

And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.

Yes, specifically this is Jesus - in Matthew 10:14 - advising His disciples how best to spread the gospel. But like so much in the Bible - which I consider to be an instruction manual on how to navigate a fallen world - it carries many broader, practical implications.

Nobody is universally liked. Not even Jesus. (Indeed, especially not Jesus). So there’s no point trying to win battles with the people who hate you because all it does is leech away the valuable time you’d be better off spending on the people who like you and are receptive to your message.

I’ve written already about the destructive spats which have arisen of late in the Awake Not-a-Community. No doubt they feel incredibly important to the people participating in them. But the majority - I suspect, the vast majority - of Awake types are thinking: “What IS this crazy shit? Why do we have to take sides in this argument that is being thrust in our face like it’s the Wars of the Roses and we have to declare for the Yorkists or the Lancastrians on pain of death? Why can’t we just have another podcast or post where we learn something useful about the real baddies we’re facing in this epic struggle between good and evil, either that or one that’s fun and where can at least have a laugh?”

So it’s to this majority that in future I shall try to direct my energies. Note that word ‘try’, because I doubt very much I will always succeed. The problem with these little hate-fests is that they are so incredibly seductive. We all need our dopamine hits - the Cabal have trained us to do this by giving us iPhones and social media and so on - and just as the Normies have their kickyball to get them all worked up, distracted and controlled, so we in Awake world have our periodic witch-hunts and bouts of purity spiralling and hanging-drawing-and-quarterings.

And sometimes it’s FUN being bitchy and spiteful and appearing to win. I look at some of Milo’s ripostes on Twitter and think: “Go Milo! You so totally OWNED that awful person!” Owen Benjamin, another character I admire, is pretty good at this stuff too. But it requires a lot of dedication and effort. You have to be perpetually on it if you want to keep the whole swarm of those pesky mosquitos continually swatted. And what I’m wondering is: is it really worth the time and energy?

What I also wonder - hence the title of this piece - is: “And isn’t it just feeding the demons?” Whenever I’m tempted to pile into one of these spats, I hear a voice in my head going: “But what’s the point of reciting Psalm 37 every day if you’re going to treat it like empty words which you can casually ignore?” Then I hear the counter argument in my head which goes something like: “Oh come on! You’re allowed a bit of leeway. Spiking people who deserve it is satisfying and fun. Your fans love it because it shows you being witty and on-brand. You’re not a monk, for goodness sake. You’re a high class edge lord.”

I trust the first voice, though, more than I do the second. What I know about demons - which I believe are totally real, of course - is that they feed off negative energy. They love generating rows and they have several millennias’ worth of experience to show them exactly which buttons to press in order to achieve the desired effect. If they can lure you into the fray by saying “Hey - it’s naughty but you’re good at it and you know you love it!” then that’s the bait they’ll use. But they’re equally adept at appealing to what you think is your better nature, viz: “My motives are pure. I am a selfless servant of the truth and it matters not how many people I upset nor how much glorious martyrdom I suffer at the hands of those doubters who think I have gone too far, for I am the paladin of justice and right is on my side.”

Of course, having made this argument I recognise I have now made myself an open target for those mosquito swarms. “Yeah but last month you said this…!” or “But you’re always accusing people of being Controlled Opposition.” True but - re-read the piece, moron! [sorry God] - I never said I was a saint. I do aspire to be one, for that is the Christian ideal, but being a sinner I fail more often than I succeed. That’s one of the reasons I have to write pieces like this one. I need to remind myself, and anyone else who will listen, that this spiritual battle we are fighting ought to be front and centre of everything that we do and think; and that the moral and behavioural restraints that Christianity seeks to impose on us are not there (as the devil would pretend) to turn us into sanctimonious prigs in thrall to a capricious sky fairy. Rather, these restraints are there to help us and protect us and make us better.

That is what I meant earlier when I talked about the Bible being a practical survival guide. It’s an advice manual full of tips that really work in day-to-day life. As an example of this let me tell you what happened recently after someone really had a go at me in the comments on Substack. He called me out as a liar, a fraud, a ‘Chaos Agent’, implied I was only using scripture to give myself a kind of fake ethical legitimacy, that I was making a mockery of my audience, etc etc. It could have been quite hurtful. Actually, it was quite hurtful - especially coming from someone whose intelligence and scholarship I admired, and with whom I’d hitherto had friendly dealings on my podcast.

So, naturally enough, my immediate urge was for dire vengeance. In my feverish, injustice-traumatised brain I began working on the perfect killer riposte.

Then I thought. “Wait a second. Those demons really are desperate for your attention and you’re in strong danger of giving it to them. Surely there is a better way?”

And there was. Listen to my latest podcast with Robert Frederick (aka Hidden Life Is Best). I think you’ll love it because it’s really, really good. But it would never have happened if I’d fed those demons.

https://locals.com/jamesdelingpole/feed?post=8012229

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