Saturday Commentary and Review #122
Poland: Success Story, Eco-King Charles III?, Censorship Industrial Complex Is Worse Than Thought, Charles de Gaulle Speaks Candidly on UK/EU/US, UK Legend John Peel
It’s now considered déclassé to believe that nations have a collective consciousness and they own a certain set of values and possess traits that define them as it sets them apart from the rest. Some critics will argue that this leads to stereotyping (a fair criticism, but stereotypes more often than not have validity), while others will reject the idea that a collective can share in anything as intangible as values, insisting that it must be limited to the individual and the individual alone.
I do not mind being perceived as déclassé, because I believe that a lot of old ideas retain their merit, even if changing social mores disapprove of them. I do believe that nations do have collective consciousnesses, and that this plays a significant role in how their countries are run, what they choose to focus on, how they develop (or fail to develop), and so on. Not all nations nor countries have a collective consciousness as many are new, or are very diverse, lack shared culture and histories, etc.
South Korea is an excellent example of people with a shared national consciousness. Their history of domination by Japan has seen them develop with a laser-like focus these past few decades as this historical sense of persecution and injustice has fueled their drive to succeed.
Another excellent example of this is Poland and the Poles. Wiped off of the map in the late 18th century in a series of partitions by more powerful neighbours, it returned to life after WW1, only to see it partitioned once again by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. Communist domination followed for the next four and a half decades. The Poles once had a significant empire, covering large swaths of Central and Eastern Europe. Would they ever return to greatness?
This may not be a revived Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (although some are hoping that it can become version 2.0), but Poland has become post-communist Europe’s greatest success story. Anna Gromada celebrates her country’s achievements:
But eastern Europe’s economic prospects were rapidly revived by the economic integration that took off in Europe in the 1990s. Reunified Germany wanted to have something akin to “the west” in its immediate eastern neighbourhood even if this required a degree of political heavy-lifting elsewhere in the EU. France was much less keen on adopting post-communist orphans in a united Europe.
Like China in the 1990s, eastern Europe embarked on its capitalist journey as a simple subcontractor. Ready parts would be parachuted in like sealed Lego sets to be assembled by a cheap and docile workforce that simply followed the instructions before exporting the completed products with low added value to richer countries. At this stage, the low cost of labour drove foreign investment. From 1992 to 2014, wages in Poland slid from 63% of GDP – the level of today’s unionised Germany – to 46%, second lowest in the EU. Car factories in Germany paid workers €3,122 a month, almost four times as much as their Polish, Czech, Slovak or Hungarian colleagues, who made €835 for similar work.
“We built capitalism without capital,” Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, who was Poland’s prime minister in 1991, told me a quarter of a century later – when I questioned what appeared to my generation to be an economic model based willingly on semi-dependency. It replaced a communist-era coerced economic dependency on the east – courtesy of Soviet tanks.
In those first few years after the end of communism, Poles rushed to Germany to buy goods in order to sell them back home for a profit, often resorting to smuggling in order to avoid to pay duty. There was a television program on German TV about border police, and every episode had at least one segment where the border officers would arrest Poles who were attempting to smuggle goods across the border back into Poland.
The game changer was joining the EU:
For eastern Europe, the 2004 accession to the EU came as a long-awaited escape from the trap of history. It opened a cashflow for governments, freedom of movement and a vast labour market for workers, and elite universities for overeager girls like me.
Poland did an excellent job in protecting some of its existing industries (like its shipyards) where smaller countries entering the EU failed to do so. It helped that Poland has a large population, giving it a critical mass and lending it weight in negotiations.
Opening the border to Polish workers also allowed Poland to offset the inevitable rise in unemployment that accompanies trade liberalization and economic restructuring. IIRC, some two million Poles passed through the UK alone in the last two decades. I remember being on the Gatwick Express (the train that takes you from Gatwick Airport to Victoria Station in Westminster in London) circa 2007, and all the employees serving food and drink on the train were young Polish females.
The following is very, very important:
Others benefited even more. Between 2010 and 2016, Poland received 2.7% of GDP as EU transfers annually, and sent 4.7% as profits to western investors. The gaps were even larger for smaller countries: 2% to 7.5% for the Czech Republic, and 4% to 7.2% for Hungary.
You will often read in western media that these countries get a lot of money from the EU budget annually. This is correct, but it leaves out the rest of the story, whereby the money that they receive is greatly outweighed by how much money flows to companies based on Western Europe. These transfer payments have been proven to be quite profitable for these corporations.
Poland, like the Czech Republic (I refuse to call it “Czechia”) also had a bit of luck in that it sits next to Europe’s economic behemoth, Germany:
From 2004, Poland’s and Germany’s economic cycles intimately aligned, as if in a compatible but unequal marriage. This paid off during the 2008 financial crash: Poland remained an island of growth in a sea of continental recession – largely because Germany, its main contractor, weathered the storm. Germany is almost as important to Poland as the next six of its trade partners put together. Fully 28% of Poland’s exports go to Germany. Less than 6% of German exports go to Poland.
Continuous economic growth and a move up the value chain:
Poland has experienced uninterrupted growth over three decades, the longest in European history. Its GDP has increased tenfold nominally, sixfold when corrected for the cost of living. It has a record low unemployment rate of 3%, lower infant mortality than Canada, higher female life expectancy than the US and less violent crime than the UK . And now you don’t get lost on Polish highways either.
The change is symbolised by, guess what, the car industry. It turned out that eastern Europe did not after all have to be just the assembly line: it could do without the Lego sets. Poland, and others, started clambering up the value chain. Our factories were soon producing high-quality components on the spot rather than importing them from somewhere in Bavaria or Hessen. Poland began to export not just finished cars, but engines, then electric car batteries.
Polish confidence (or overconfidence?):
Economically, the surface current still looks like the old model of Polish subcontracting, relatively cheaper labour and a slow clamber up the value chain. But it masks undertows of a new economic relationship in which Germany faces competition from its eastern back yard. A Polish-Finnish firm recently launched pioneering satellites with cloud-penetrating technology. The US army has just procured 10,000 Polish Manpad missiles (man-portable air-defence systems) after they proved more effective than American Stingers. The Polish army sourced nanosatellites newly invented by a local company. Some Polish start-ups, such as molecular diagnostics firms, are being sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. And the Polish electric car Izera will hit the market in 2026 with plans to produce 60% of components locally.
No wonder that, although it does so with velvet gloves, Germany uses its EU muscle to try to impede Polish strategic infrastructural investments such as new nuclear power plants, inland waterways and the development of a container port in Szczecin-Świnoujscie – an obvious competitive threat to German ports.
Globally and locally, economic cooperation based on a centre-periphery division of labour is being challenged. When your assembly line grows in power, it starts coming up with its own Lego sets. China-US rivalry may soon be echoed in regional (and friendlier) miniatures, such as a Polish-German divide. As eastern Europe grows in power, it is questioning its role in the pecking order. The region has learned the hard way that if you are not at the negotiating table, you are on the menu.
The Poles do have a chip on their shoulder regarding Germany, and have a visceral hatred of Russia. It’s these two forces that have driven them to succeed, and their success is to be commended.
The Poles also view themselves as belonging to the club of great European nations which counts among its members the French and the Germans. They believe themselves to be on the same level as these two, with history getting in the way of their rightful place.
At the same time, the Poles have positioned themselves as Anglo-America’s most reliable European continental allies (see: war in Ukraine) in order to offset the Franco-German condominium in Brussels. Warsaw is hoping to shift the centre of European power slightly to the east.
The notion that the British Monarchy has no value in the modern era is belied immediately upon first arrival in London. The city is a tourist mecca, and the biggest draw by far is the Monarchy, whether it be their palaces, institutions, or legacies. The royals bring in A LOT of money. At the same time, they contribute to the country’s unique charm (despite the conduct of some of its most notable members) and are an important part of its branding.
It puzzles me when I encounter Brits who want to do away with the royals. A British Republic would be a lesser entity than what it is now. This doesn’t even touch upon the role that this institution plays in regards to historical continuity. British republicans strike me as a petty lot, and I say this as someone who is not fond of their royals at all.
Britain has been in decline since the Edwardian Era, switching roles with its rebellious prodigy, the USA, becoming its (very) junior partner. Post-Brexit Britain is awash in a national malaise, with many blaming Brexit and others blaming ineffectual government. Even though the global financial centre known as “The City” continues business activity at full steam, much of the rest of the country is falling behind even parts of once-communist Eastern Europe. Where once Britain “ruled the waves”, its ambitions are now tempered by reality, reduced to a much smaller scale.
Aris Roussinos supports the Monarchy, and has publicly called for King Charles III to act upon his idiosyncratic interests in farming and ecology by using his new role to promote a renaissance in family farming. This is ambition on a small scale, but it does serve to answer ever-louder questions heard in Britain these days about how to use their land, and how to address the worsening housing crisis.
To supporters like myself, inclined to hail him — partly seriously and partly ironically — as a post-liberal figurehead, a champion of small family farms and a lost way of life, the King may still signal a renaissance of sorts. To his detractors, he represents all that is wrong with the 21st-century establishment. Some view him as the herald of top-down bureaucratic eco-austerity for the masses while the elites preserve their wealth and contentment; others see his recent capitulation to the race grifters and betrayal of a loyal family servant as evidence of all that is most destabilising and harmful about modern British life. There are two kings within Charles waiting to be crowned, just as there are two rival Britains struggling to be born.
The power of symbolism:
When our king is anointed as God’s chosen in the great stone sepulchre of the British people, we will witness something strange and literally magical. So divorced from modernity as to be almost incomprehensible, we will witness, like puzzled anthropologists, the ancient rituals of our own lost British tribe. The choice of music, of court dress and of religious benedictions that will attend this descendant of both Vlad Dracul and Mohammed, in this most Catholic ceremony of a Protestant country, are rich fodder for grandstanding and debate. All politics, all power, is at heart symbolic, resting on ancient foundations like a modern church on ancient monoliths: only once or twice in our lifetimes will the state draw back its robes and reveal her hidden mysteries to us.
King Charles “The Odd”:
How is Charles to rule and bring this strange duality, the ancient and the modern, into public life? For decades, he was mocked as an eccentric, a weirdo who talked to his plants and praised the rustic hardships of traditional peasant life from within his palace walls. This urge to call him weird as an insult, springs from the same source as the eye-rolling ironic epithet “normal country” levelled at Britain. Instead, it is a compliment. Britain is not a normal country, whatever that would be, and thank God.
From the beginning of recorded history, Britain has always been viewed as a place strange and apart from the rest of Europe and the world, an insular realm of eccentric people and half-understood customs. In the awkward adolescence of his reign, between the inheritance of his role and his donning of the crown, Charles has perhaps hidden his own essential weirdness, in an attempt to fit how he felt modern Britain wants him to be. It is only now, as he prepares to assume the role, that Charles has begun to let his weirdness show.
In its true meaning, wyrd is “fate”, the supernatural destiny imposed on all men, just as Charles’s destiny, long-delayed, has finally settled upon him. We must encourage, through Charles, the wyrd’s manifestations in public life.
A champion of the old ways:
King Charles, tireless promoter of traditional craftsmanship, could make the still-little-known case to the public that it is precisely because Britain’s housing stock dates from before the 20th century, and was built with traditional breathable materials such as lime, that insulation with modern impermeable materials, as Insulate Britain promote, would worsen the problem. This simple truth, well-known to heritage professionals, has been entirely neglected. And who could have a better pulpit to make the case for a better way forward? For if Britain’s largely Victorian houses could be insulated using traditional materials by a scaled-up, newly-trained workforce of high-skilled, high-wage craftsmen, a major political and economic problem could be resolved according to the methods Charles has spent a lifetime promoting.
Similarly, the recent collapse of much of Britain’s intensive agriculture model has heightened the growing clash between those who believe it is the way to food security, and those who believe it is despoiling Britain’s fields, forests and waterways; nor does it keep the nation fed and healthy, nor our farmers in business. As a longstanding advocate for the small family farm, King Charles can bridge this gap: instead of lecturing the nation on how to do better, he could show how the best nature-friendly farming systems work by converting Buckingham Palace’s 40 acres of private gardens into a working small farm. Imagine a rural oasis of hay meadows and rippling fields of grain in the centre of the capital, a haven of wildlife watched over by our benign farmer king. Through taking action, the king can become a living bridge between the capital and the countryside, the old ways and the new.
It’s not ambition on a grand scale, but it is an interesting proposal that addresses issues currently plaguing the country, and that fit within the King’s own peculiar interests.
In the past, we’ve discussed how the utopianism of the early Internet was naive in retrospect thanks first to its commercialization, and then its weaponization by governments, specifically intelligence agencies. We were all so young then.
Like him or hate him, Elon Musk has done us a great service by drawing back the curtain at Twitter to show us just how much it was in the clutches of various arms of the USGov and military. The Twitter Files have shown us how incestuous the relationships are between Silicon Valley, US Intelligence agencies, and NGOs, and how they have converged to restrict speech for millions of users, not just in the USA, but worldwide as well.
Mainstream media has done its best to either ignore or downplay these massive revelations, because they do not serve their interests. Here are a few examples:
The most common reason why people have subscribed to my Substack is because of their distrust of mainstream media. By now, you clearly see through their tricks, right through to their agenda. This is why you’re looking at the three images above and thinking “bullshit” in your head.
What is now being referred to as the “Censorship Industrial Complex” is actually worse than any of us have imagined it to be, per
:My name is Andrew Lowenthal. I am a progressive-minded Australian who for almost 18 years was the Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom of expression, and open technology. My resume also includes fellowships at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. For most of my career, I believed strongly in the work I was doing, which I believed was about protecting and expanding digital rights and freedoms.
In recent years, however, I watched in despair as a dramatic change swept through my field. As if all at once, organizations and colleagues with whom I’d worked for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting “disinformation.”
A power will insist that rights be extended in order to destabilize enemies and competitors, but will insist that rights be retracted in order to consolidate and preserve its own power. Think about the campus radicals of the 1960s who began the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and how they used it over time to gain political power. Now think about how these types, now in power, wish to restrict the freedom of speech of those that they oppose. They will insist that speech that is “harmful” or “hateful” shouldn’t be considered free speech (and therefore not protected), or that it is “disinformation” and should be blocked.
This is exactly what is happening now on the internet, and not just in North America.
After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally, and we are just getting started. Some organisations are legitimate. There is disinformation. But there are a great many wolves among the sheep.
I underestimated just how much money is being pumped into think tanks, academia and NGOs under the anti-disinformation front, both from the government and private philanthropy. We’re still calculating, but I had estimated it at hundreds of millions of dollars annually and I’m probably still being naive - Peraton received a USD $1B dollar contract from the Pentagon.
In particular, I was unaware of the scope and scale of the work of groups like the Atlantic Council, the Aspen Institute, the Center for European Policy Analysis and consultancies such as Public Good Projects, Newsguard, Graphika, Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub and others.
Even more alarming was just how much military and intelligence funding is involved, how closely aligned the groups are, how much they mix in civil society. Graphika for example received a $3M Department of Defense grant, as well as funds from the US Navy and Air Force. The Atlantic Council (of Digital Forensics Lab infamy) receives funds from the US Army and Navy, Blackstone, Raytheon, Lockheed, the NATO STRATCOM Center of Excellence, and more.
NGOs in bed with corporations, the military, and intelligence agencies. For those of you reading my series on Colour Revolutions, this should sound both eerily familiar and very concerning.
Incestuous relationships that run counter to what the term ‘civil society’ is purported to represent:
We have for a long time made distinctions between “civilian” and “military.” Here in “civil society” are a slew of military-funded groups that mix and merge and become one with those advocating for human rights and civil liberties. Graphika also does work for Amnesty International and other human rights campaigners. How are these things compatible? What is this moral drift?
Twitter emails show consistent collaboration between military and intelligence officials and elite “progressives” from NGOs and academia. “They/them” signatures mingle with .mil, @westpoint, @fbi and others. How did the FBI and the Pentagon, once the avowed enemies of progressives for their attacks on the Black Panthers and the peace movement, their war-mongering and gross over-funding, begin to fuse and collude? They join together in election tabletop exercises and share hors d’oeuvres at conferences put on by oligarch philanthropists. That cultural and political shift was once a heavy lift, but now it is as simple as cc’ing each other.
Narrative policing and ‘civic listening’:
I also underestimated just how explicit many organizations were regarding narrative policing, at times blatantly drifting from anti-disinformation to monitoring wrongthink. Stanford’s Virality Project recommended that Twitter classify “true stories of vaccine side effects” as “standard misinformation on your platform,” while the Algorithmic Transparency Institute spoke of “civic listening” and “automated collection of data” from “closed messaging apps” in order to combat “problematic content”, i.e. spying on everyday citizens. In some cases the problem was in the title of the NGO itself - Automated Controversy Monitoring for instance does “toxicity monitoring” to combat “unwanted content that triggers you.” Nothing about truth or untruth, it’s all narrative control.
Government and philanthropic oligarchs have colonized civil society and proxied this censorship through think-tanks, academia, and NGOs. Tell this to the sector, however, and they close ranks around their government, military, intelligence, Big Tech, and billionaire patrons. The field has been bought. It is compromised. Pointing that out is not welcome. Do so, and into the “basket of deplorables” for you.
The Twitter Files also show just how much the NGO and academic set had been absorbed into the inner Big Tech elite, upon whom they pushed their new anti-free-expression values. It accounts for some of the antagonism toward Elon Musk, who kicked them out of the club, to say nothing of all the “townies” he let back on the platform. (Musk’s disruption, whilst an improvement, is clearly inconsistent and brings its own problems).
Online censorship is to be conducted in the name of “fighting disinformation” in order to help governments and mainstream media reassert their traditional control over narrative formation and domination.
“Information Terrorism” (and InfoTerrorists) are the natural next step in this progression.
Click here to read the rest.
Remember when France wasn’t the messenger boy for the USA? It was only twenty years ago that Jacques Chirac rejected French participation in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Together with Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, they presented a united front against the folly of invasion, and were proven right to do so.
Being right is no defense, however, and Chirac’s successor, Nicholas Sarkozy, willingly delivered France to Atlanticism. His successors in office have not strayed from this course, despite the occasional yelping of “strategic autonomy” for Europe.
France’s greatest statesman of the 20th century was Charles de Gaulle, a highly intelligent man who proved to be very prescient as well, as we see in these excerpts (translated from French to English by
) from “C’était de Gaulle” by Alain Peyrefitte:On the UK putting their nukes under US supervision, rejecting British membership in the European Common Market (the precursor to the EU), and what the Brits would be if allowed entry into the organization:
I had made the principle decision to close the door of the Common Market to the English, both because they are not economically ready to enter, and because they are not really politically willing. I felt that Macmillan would let himself be tied up at Nassau. He went there defeated. And sure enough, it happened. He resigned himself to placing his nuclear strike force in a multilateral force under American command.
Not only will nothing change in NATO, since it will still be the Americans who will command; but the nuclear force of the English, which had aspirations of becoming somewhat independent, will completely cease to be so. Until my return to office, Great Britain lived with the idea that it was the privileged sister; it would not have an independent nuclear strike force, but it was the only one with a finger on the trigger of the American force, which gave it a dominant position in Europe and allowed it to play on the rivalries of others, notably the Franco-German rivalries. In short, it thought it could lead all Europeans by the nose. For the past three or four years, as we have been taking steps to equip ourselves with our own nuclear strike force, it too had started to want one for itself. But it had not provided the means. And now, it has definitively given up on it.
Yet I had insisted with Macmillan, at Champs six months ago, at Rambouillet fifteen days ago, on the necessity of not remaining dependent on America. He had told me that it was his sentiment and that of the youth. But he fell headfirst into the trap. England is now nothing but a satellite of the United States. If it enters the Common Market, it will only be the Trojan horse of the Americans. That would mean Europe renounces its independence.”
On the USA seeking pliant European politicians unlike himself:
"The Americans will never be able to resist promoting the career of a Jean Monnet to the fullest extent, because they see in him their man, and opposing de Gaulle, because they perceive in him a man who resists them. However, they should understand that the best ally of the United States is not the one who bows down to them, but the one who knows how to say no to them."
On disengaging from NATO:
AP: "Do you think we can just disengage from NATO like that without the Americans shooting us?"
CDG: "Of course, we can! That's exactly what we're doing, step by step. We're distancing ourselves from the Americans while remaining good friends. The friendship remains, as evidenced by Malraux's recent trip. The Americans know, or at least should know, that one does not rely on what is weak. One only relies on what is firm."
AP: "Do they really know that?"
CDG: "They should. But in reality, they always have the temptation to rely on what is weak rather than what is strong. In all the underdeveloped countries, they are tempted to prop up rotten regimes that are favorable to them, and even more so because they themselves have corrupted them, rather than supporting tough regimes that arise from a genuine popular will; because they fear such regimes. During the war, they relied on Pétain, or Darlan, or Giraud, against de Gaulle, who embodied the will of the nation. And even we ourselves, how many times have we been tempted to rely on the Glaouis and other Bao Dais?"
On his conception of Europe:
"Our policy, Peyrefitte, I ask you to emphasize it well: it is to achieve the unity of Europe. If I insisted on reconciling France and Germany, it is for a purely practical reason: it is because this reconciliation is the foundation of any European policy.
But what kind of Europe? It must truly be a European Europe. If it is not the Europe of peoples, if it is entrusted to a few technocratic organizations more or less integrated, it will be a history for professionals, limited and without a future. And it is the Americans who will take advantage of it to impose their hegemony. Europe must be independent. That is my policy.
This does not mean that it should not have allies. It must have them, given the global threat posed by communism. However, it must exist on its own, for itself.
The Americans favored Jean Monnet's Europe as long as it was a means for them to maintain or expand their hegemony. When they see that their influence risks decreasing instead if Europe becomes a powerful body that could do without them, they are less enthusiastic.
The goal is to create Europe without breaking with the Americans, but independently of them."
He returns to this theme after a pause, as if he feared that I did not understand
"Europe can only be created if there is a European ambition, if Europeans want to exist on their own. Similarly, a nation, to exist as a nation, must first become aware of what differentiates it from others and must be able to assume its destiny.
The sense of national identity has always been affirmed in relation to other nations: a European national sentiment can only be affirmed in the face of the Russians and Americans. The idea of Europe, since the end of the war, has progressed thanks to the threat from the Russians. Now that the Russians are weakening, and fortunately so, we have the opportunity to toughen up towards the United States, and it is our duty; otherwise, the so-called integrated Europe would dissolve into the Atlantic entity, that is to say, American, like sugar in coffee!"
On Churchill:
After the Council, I point out to the General that the English have not always been "the poor English." If they are now, is it not because they don't have a Churchill?The General calmly repeats a lesson he has already given me:
"Oh! Make no mistake! Churchill was magnificent until '42. Then, as if exhausted from too great an effort, he passed the torch to the Americans and faded into the background."
Candid de Gaulle is a delight to read. Click here to read the rest.
We end this weekend’s Substack with a long profile of a titan of British (and American) popular music, BBC Radio DJ John Peel.
Peel might have seemed an unlikely ally at the onset of punk rock. Not only was he heavily identified with the psych/prog period punk purported to erase, but he was already in his late thirties. Yet more than any other media figure, he’d straddle the eras and the styles.
On his May 19, 1976 show, Peel played “Judy Is a Punk” off the Ramones’ debut album. On his next program, he aired three more tracks from the LP. “A lot of people phoned in,” Peel remembered in a 1990 interview with Radio Four’s Sue Lawley. “The switchboard was jammed, which as we know isn’t a difficult thing to happen to it, but people phoned in and said, ‘You must never do this again.’ And then they wrote in afterwards and said, ‘You must never play any of these records ever again.’ And of course I always find that very exciting and then played a great deal more of them.’”
By December 10, one show alone featured cuts by the Ramones, the Damned, Eddie & the Hot Rods, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Television, Pere Ubu, the Saints, and the Sex Pistols. The following year, he played the Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” on four separate occasions, despite a BBC ban on the single. For one of those plays, he sneaked it onto his Festive Fifty favorite records of the year at #61. Another took place when he played Never Mind the Bollocks in its entirety.
He didn’t quite overhaul his playlists overnight. For a year or so you could still hear Gentle Giant, Jackson Browne, and Uriah Heep, even as he welcomed newcomers like the Clash. But as the new wave became a tidal wave, he later claimed (again in his interview with Sue Lawley), and quite possibly exaggerated, “The whole audience changed in the space of about a month. The average age of the audience dropped by about ten years.”
I have downloaded quite a few of his Peel Sessions over the years.
Click here to read the rest.
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Deneen can be pretty hit or miss, but I thought his piece today in Unherd was excellent.
https://unherd.com/2023/04/js-mill-and-the-despotism-of-progress/