Gareth Jones

 I first became aware of Gareth Jones when I purchased a copy of the Dictionary of Welsh  Biography from Griff's bookshop in the early 1970s.  In a volume chock a block with forgettable nonconformist preachers his entry stood out.  Nowadays he's much better remembered than he was back then, the subject of a movie and a useful tool of anti-Russian propaganda.

None of this is Mr Jones's fault of course, read his actual work and you'll find nothing about a planned genocide of the Ukrainian people, rather he reported what he saw, a famine that affected all of the wheatlands, from Ukraine, through Russia and into Kazakhstan.

Now some facts - 

Western Ukraine, the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism and the main proponent of the genocide myth was not even part of the Soviet Union at the time of the famine, it belonged to Poland.

Famine was not unusual in Russia and Ukraine during the Tsarist and early Soviet period.  This was caused by natural problems of climate and disease and the rather primitive holdings and methods of the peasantry.  The Soviet solution was American inspired mechanisation and consolidation of land into collective farms.  In reality this turned out to be rather successful and the only famine subsequent to that of 1931/1932 was one in the late 1940s.

Agronomists agree that the failed harvest of 1931/1932 was the result of natural causes, although the Soviet reaction certainly greatly exacerbated the subsequent famine as it affected the steppe.  Grain was confiscated from the agricultural areas to feed the cities and the so-called kulaks, the class of richer peasants were persecuted and often deported.  In part this was a reaction to hoarding for profit, something that has happened in every famine in history.!

The idea that the famine was a deliberate attempt at genocide directed at the Ukrainian population by the Russians was born out of World War Two German propaganda. It seems to have become an article of faith for many in the West who are uninterested in alternative, more realistic narratives.

Taeogion?

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I was reading an article that claimed that Wales was far more servial (taeogion) at the commencement of the Queen's reign than it is today, but is that true?  After all in 1952 we had genuine working class parties and a real national movement, forces that made capital uncomfortable.  Can that be said of today's versions?  Much of Welsh industry was owned by the people - well in theory at least, and the newly established health service seemed less interested in enriching the drug companies than is true today.

Of course the article makes much of identity politics, but that seems more about getting into the elite rather than curtailing its power.  It's an odd world where Rishi Sunak's billionaire wife is somehow seen as more disadvantaged than that old bloke down the pub.  Infact most of the left's current obsessions seem to coincidence with the latest money making wheeze of the ruling class.

Anyway the late Queen's first visit to Wales after her succession was to Llandrindod Railway station, from where she proceeded by car to open the new Claerwen reservoir.  I dug out some cuttings - the photo is from the Daily Graphic, which was what the Sketch was still called in 1952.  I know the lad in the beret quite well, a stalwart Radnorian and still alive and kicking.  The paper also mentions the enhanced security measures in place as a result of the recent bomb attack on the Fron aquaduct.  Taeogion yn wir!

Our Radnorshire Folk

My great great grandfather was born in Llandinam around the same time as David Davies of the Ocean Coal Company - who is getting some mention on twitter today.  His son, my great grandfather, lived in Gwystre, a few doors from the family of Arthur Horner's mother. Both families ended up in Merthyr Tydfil - which was really the home of more Radnorians than any place on the planet at the end of the 19th century.

What I'm trying to say is that Radnorshire history is part and parcel of mainstream Welsh history.  Another example is the famous poetic dispute between Ieuan Dyfi and Gwerful Mechain resulting from Ieuan's misogynistic rant against his ex Anni Goch.  Far from being in the North or the distant West, Ieuan and Anni's affair went down in Presteigne and Norton.  Likewise the Red Book of Hergest found a home near Kington and Kinnerton, while Glyndwr's great victory was near Knighton and won by the men of Maelienydd.

Ffansis Payne opened my eyes to the deep history of Radnorshire while for many readers of the Radnorshire Transactions in the 1930s it must have been Mr Cole's transcriptions of Elizabethan wills, full of names like Tangwystl and Lleucu .... these were our Radnorshire folk.

Barbarossa

We tend to forget that when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 they were not alone - Rumania, Italy, Finland, Hungary and Slovakia were also active participants.  As the war proceeded SS units from the Baltic states, Ukraine, France, Spain, Bosnia, Croatia, Scandinavia, Belgium and the Netherlands were also involved.  Is it any wonder that the present war against Russia - just as Nato's previous onslaught against Serbia - can be seen as a continuation of the Second World War.  The only difference being that the Anglo-Saxons have this time thrown in their lot with the fascists.

For old timers like myself this is all pretty obvious, youngsters not so much.  I happened to catch a quiz programme on TV the other day where a second year geography student claimed never to have heard of the River Rhine.  Not much chance of understanding even the basics of world history there. 

Social Fascists?

What prospects for a truly independent Wales in a country that so readily swallows the mainstream lies about Covid and Ukraine?  The intellectuals are a lost cause, thoroughly indoctrinated, as they are, with "Western values."  Maybe there's some hope with the Brexit voting working class, who showed signs of independent thought over that issue at least

How to describe the Labour-Plaid hegemony? A term from the Thirties might fit the bill, Social Fascists ............ folk who spout Socialist platitudes but, when it comes to it, always support imperialism and the corporate state.  A Wales bedecked in blue and yellow flags is just the latest manifestation of all this.  One wonders what Gwyn Alf would have thought of it all?  I like to think his sympathies would have been with the miners of Donbas rather than the Nazi lovers currently eulogised by my myopic fellow countrymen.

Trying to be a little less blunt, I guess a good deal of the rank and file support for Ukraine stems from ignorance.  The country is seen as a minnow standing up to a giant although in reality, despite widespread economic looting by its elite, it still has one of the largest populations in Europe.  It is also a multi ethnic country seeking to forcibly impose the language of its Western regions on the national minorities.  It is a nationalism  that sided with Hitler during the war, carried out unspeakable atrocities on its Jewish and Polish neighbours and continues to celebrate the killers down to the present day.

One lesson from the last few months is that throughout the EU the ruling elites continue to hold the Russophobic views of their fathers and grandfathers.  Many countries in Europe were not victims of Nazidom, they were willing accomplices and this thinking has again come out into the open.

Here's a song by Chicherina celebrating the Donbas miners and their struggle.

The Radnor model

 

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Remember when the two Wales model, or was it the three, was all the rage.  Something about how modern day Wales was still influenced by the division between the Principality and the March. It didn't make much sense to me as anglicisation was always a process not an event.

Anyway this map which I came across in a new book about the March illustrates that things were a bit more complex than could be described by drawing a simple line on a map.  The cantrefi which later went to make up Radnorshire stand out as areas in the March which had resisted the Normans for 200 years, often successfully.  It says something about Radnorian independence .......... perhaps there is something to be said for drawing lines after all.

Nid ddoe y dechreuodd y rhyfel hwn

Mae'r fideo yn chwe mlwydd oed, gyda llaw.

Gagauzia

The Gagauz are a Turkic speaking but Orthodox Christian people mainly living near the Ukrainian border in Moldova.  Enjoying a degree of autonomy within Moldova: their fear has been that Moldova would be subsumed within the Romanian state;  their desire that they could find a home within the Russian Federation.  The current events in Ukraine make this wish a possibility.  If the Russians do absorb the Black Sea coast up to Moldova then the Gagauz and Bulgarian speaking borderlands could easily end up in Russia; with Moldova itself uniting with Romania.

Anyway, here is a popular Gagauz song.

Donbass

The usual virtue signallers were quick to add Ukrainian flags to their twitter accounts but more sickening than this was the way in which ordinary folk swallowed the war propaganda of the mainstream media.  I doubt if many Welsh folk had much clue about the origins of the war but anyway I'm reminded of Traudl Junge's words at the end of the film Downfall.  Ignorance is no excuse.  I like this song because it speaks of keeping faith with the generation who fought against the Nazis, the sentiment touches me.

The 1921 Census

At £3.50 for every household downloaded only the most well-heeled genealogist will be making much use of the recently released 1921 Census.  Never mind in two or three years it will be free, if the government allows us to live that long.

Despite the cost it is possible to dig out some information for free, especially if you are dealing with unusual names and known locations, for example I dug out a great great uncle of 70 who had recently married a 28 year old, and no, his name wasn't Sion White.

More usefully the site has a search facility that allows you to bring up all manner of sociological information without the need to cough up for cash.  For example you can search Welsh speakers by any number of criteria - age, sex, birthplace, occupation, current location etc. The search will give you the numbers and even the names.

Here are a few random results:

Wales had 1374 Welsh speakers born in Radnorshire, although only 141 of them were living in the county.  At this point we should remember that the Radnorshire of the registration districts did not coincide with the historic county borders.  Large chunks were included with Hay and Builth in neighbouring Breconshire, while other parishes were included with Kington in Herefordshire.  The Knighton sub-district included many English parishes, all this the result of a deliberate Victorian policy to tame the wild Radnorians by including them with more civilized folk.

Cwmteuddwr was still 25% welsh speaking in 1921, with Rhayader at just under 10% and St Harmon at 7.6% still exhibiting some vestige of the old native tongue. Nearby Llangurig was still 67% welsh speaking at this time and of course Welsh still dominated in the western parishes of Builth hundred. 

Most of the Radnorshire born Welsh speakers lived in the coalfield, 517 in Glamorgan, 52 in Monmouthshire - including my Gwystre born grandmother and 286 in Carmarthenshire. This last being a surprisingly high figure perhaps related to the opening of new pits?

Amongst the usual Joneses, Evanses, Davieses and the like, we find familiar local surnames such as Bywater, Bufton, Hamer etc.   It's a reminder that the process of language shift in Radnorshire was part and parcel of a general shift occuring in those parts of rural Wales open to the border.  Radnorshire wasn't different just further along the line.

An Irish Patriot in Radnorshire

The Irish War of Independence saw Cork born Sheila Browne commanding Liverpool's Cumman na mBan.  As such she engaged in various revolutionary activities: an arms raid, obtaining paraffin for arson attacks and transporting money to Dublin. Finally arrested she spent three months in jail before she was released through lack of evidence.

This was enough to obtain her a small military pension from the Free State government, although it might have alarmed the good folk of Radnorshire, where she was evacuated along with a class of Liverpool schoolchildren in 1941. Billeted in the wilds of Rhiwlen, Miss Brown now encountered some difficulties with the Dublin bureaucrats.  They wanted a person of sufficient stature to confirm her existence, but where, she complained, was she to find such a person when her only neighbours were mountains and her companions children?  Eventually she moved closer to civilization in Hundred House.

Miss Browne was clearly able through education and connections to cope with the red tape.  Sadly this was not true of Kate Evans, a miner's wife from the Irish community of Dowlais.  We've met Mrs Evans before, she was the leading light of a group who were obtaining explosives from the mines and transporting it to Ireland.  Eventually she was caught and jailed for 7 years.  The bureaucrats were unimpressed and wondered about her maiden name, some of her comrades could not be traced, the evidence of others was ignored while they engaged in an ill-tempered correspondence with an official who had had enough of their enquiries in other cases.  Mrs Evans, a widow in ill-health had her pension application rejected.

Mrs Evans wrote to De Valera complaining of being forgotten after suffering much for Ireland, her letter was passed back to the pensions office and ignored. It's ever thus for the working class.  Here's a song about Cumann na mBan:

Nothing on the Telly

One of the depressing features of present day Wales is how anglocentric professed adherents  of its national movement have become.  Oh sure they generally claim to be Europeans, whatever that means, but anything outside the Atlanticist bubble doesn't get a look in, they are good little followers of the BBC and the Guardian.

Personally I dumped my TV more than 20 years ago, disgusted by the one-sided reporting on the Balkan wars, a few years later I stopped buying the London papers.  I don't think I've missed very much.

There is plenty to see on YouTube, great Russian war films like 72 Hours, Come and See, and The Dawns Here Are Quiet ..... all with English subtitles; and popular shows like the superb Detective Anna - 98 episodes for anyone missing endless re-runs of Poirot and Miss Marple.

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Wales Today

The Covid era is dominated by agendas: big pharma - which has far too much influence over the medical profession - wants to make money; environmentalists want to shut down industry; eugenists want to rid the planet of useless eaters; comic-book billionaires dream of transhumanism and outer space.  Oh and the media remember who butters their bread and have mutated into mere propaganda machines.

If all that wasn't bad enough the real driving force are the West's deep states.  They see the pandemic as an opportunity to implement measures that would be impossible in normal circumstances - vaccine passports will quickly form the basis of digital identity cards and the disappearance of cash is just  around the corner.  Imagine what power, for good, but more likely evil, those two measures would give the state. When conspiracy theorists talk of chipping they are just a couple of years ahead of the curve.

Where does Wales stand in all this?  Let's be honest Wales is finished.  When the main nationalist party is just an echo chamber for globalist talking points what chance does Wales have?  They can't even do anything to stem the ethnic cleansing via cheque book that is happening in all the rural areas, worse than that they don't even want to.  There is an historic shift happening towards a multi-polar world, the West is rotting from the head, all of which escapes the notice of nationalists, fixated as they are on the Anglo values of the BBC and the blue check media.

Thank you.

Some more music from Ireland

The very talented Dea  Matrona.

The American Election

Of course the news media don't certify the result of the American election, that's the job of the electoral college and perhaps ultimately the Supreme Court.  The drama still has a few more scenes left to play

Let's assume though that Biden has won, there are quite a few positives to take away.  No more Pompeo or Pence for starters, although their replacements will be equally as satanic.  The white working class support for Trump dropped a little, no doubt disillusioned with the failure to drain the swamp.  Meanwhile black and Latino support rose, showing that men, especially, reject identity politics and are attracted to the idea of unity based on common economic interests, call it class if you like. 

Then you have 70 million voters who must be thoroughly disillusioned with crooked mainstream politics, that's a great engine for real change.  And finally some of the most obnoxious people on the planet think they've won a great victory, they'll be emboldened - really they can't help themselves - and will no doubt hasten a day of reckoning with their stupidity.

So what has any of this to do with Wales?  At least there is some interest in the US Election amongst the Welsh political class, although none of it advances much beyond echoing woke mainstream media talking points.  The world beyond the EU and the Anglosphere elicits little interest, and this at a time when global power is shifting away from the West.  Nationalists make the perfectly valid point that Wales is rich enough to be independent, whether it has the necessary leadership to bring that about is doubtful.

What's Happening

How many realise that the architect of the lockdown Neil Ferguson is an old boy of Llanidloes High School?  He's the same age as another OB, the actor who plays Ian Beale in the BBC soap Eastenders, perhaps they were contemporaries. Anyway, as in any mediocre soap, a blonde proved the downfall of Ferguson, while perhaps the country would have been better served if Mr Beale had been its chief advisor on matters pandemic.

The one reliable statistic amidst a deluge of facts and nonsense are excess deaths, the weekly comparison with this year's totals and those of previous years provided every Tuesday by the ONS. These show that up until week 13 of 2020 things were proceeding much as usual, there was a big jump in week 14 - but that was only marginally worse than the figure for week 2 of 2015.  For the last three weeks the figures have steamed ahead, peaking in week 16 (April 17) with a slight fall in week 17.  I'd expect them to fall again next week.

Of course these figures are time delayed by a week or so and the excess deaths  may also include victims of other diseases who avoided seeking prompt treatment for fear of contracting the virus. That said they do give an idea of the severity of the outbreak, serious but not overwhelmingly so, especially for the majority of the economically active.

COVID-19

The virus, while serious, is not so dangerous that it has replaced the old normal in the minds of many.

Remainers hope that it will derail brexit, Labour see the possibility of escaping what seemed like an inevitable decade of Tory rule and Nationalists dream that it might prove a wedge between Wales and Westminster.   For the climate crisis crowd empty skies and travel restrictions are a glimpse of utopia while authoritarians revel in the new rules and limitations on freedom. You feel that the "old normal" would be far from their minds if they were truly worried about their own imminent mortality.

The real danger for the majority is not severe acute respiratory syndrome or even the economic consequences of a prolonged lockdown, rather it is the opportunity the pandemic affords the West's kleptocracy - let's call them the deep state - to progress a wishlist that makes a reality of what was previously the preserve of science fiction novels, from the cashless society to chipping.

Americana 2

Americana

The Past is a Foreign Country

Spot the Welsh language poster in these film snippets of the Irish fascist party Ailtiri na hAiseirghe. There's an interesting book entitled Architects of the Resurrection detailing the activities of this group. Their policy basically saw the establishment of a Catholic, wholly Gaelic Ireland somewhat along the lines of Salazar's Portugal and the military conquest of the North.