According to early reports, Yesterday's Black Friday broke all sales figures records, up 14.5% on last year. A festival that started in the USA, coming as it does the day after Thanksgiving, it is now consuming Europe. And that is indeed the nature of the beast: consumption. It is perhaps the first festival that was founded on the religion of consumerism. Such a quasi-religious festival had to have been born in the Anglosphere, where capitalism is bound to the Reformation and the ensuing Puritan tradition that gave birth to economic and social liberalism. Was it not that theologian beloved of the American descendants of Scotsmen and Northern Englishmen, John Calvin who said, 'Greed is good, greed works'? Something like that anyway. I'm glad we got shut of them after the Restoration. Anyway, Black Friday is now being exported. Even in the usually anti-capitalist France, Black Friday has been promoted relentlessly this year. The French term for this is 'vendredi fou', although it tends to be kept in English in line with the European Union's attempt to reduce all European languages to dialects of English, although the Wikipedia site claims this is translated as 'vendredi noir', showing again how that site is written by spergy but dim sixth formers.
Black Friday's name does not, contrary to popular myth, come from the fact that herds of African American Negro Afro-American Coloured Persons of Colour spend this sacred day of shopping stampeding through American department stores throughout America. During one such stampede at a Walmart store in Nassau County, New York in 2008, a store worker was trampled to death by a herd of such Negroes as he opened the doors to let them in. It shows the biggest fanatics of the new religion tend to come from certain ethnicities, although there are also quite a number of underclass Whites among their numbers. Yet it demonstrates better than any social experiment why the elites wish us to breed with the Negro, as per the Kalergi Plan, for real life is better than any petri dish. Left to either capitalist or socialist globalists (for are they not one and the same?), the man of tomorrow will be the ultimate consumer, without history or culture or identity, save the pseudo-history Hollywood feeds him as entertainment, the corporate culture of sportsball and shopping and the identity given to him by his favourite sportsball team shirt.
In 2014, Walmart was named as the most dangerous place to shop on Black Friday. Walmart is also the preferred store of Negroes. Yet Black Friday's name actually originally comes from the Philadelphia police, who had to deal with the chaos of hordes of shoppers and American football fans descending on the city the day after Thanksgiving. The term caught on, because retail stores in the post-Depression, post-war 1950s went 'in the black' during the Thanksgiving shopping spree, having been 'in the red' for most of the year. The shopping spree was intensified throughout the 1970s and '80s. Since then, the term has been promoted relentlessly through intensive advertising to manipulate people into buying things they do not really need because they happen to be 'on sale' that particular day. Of course, prices are often elevated some weeks beforehand in order to reduce them back to the price they were originally. I can also not help wondering if that awful song from 2011 that went viral on Youtube by Rebecca Black 'Friday' was not pushed, as ever, by corporate interests publicising Black Friday.
Black Friday also shows us that all this establishment talk about sustainability and environmental friendliness is pure unadulterated bullshit. Talk of climate change, carbon footprints and veganism are meaningless distractions from the real issues. The entire globalist way of life is unsustainable. Mass consumption means the depletion of finite resources and needless and excessive waste. Firstly there are the goods no one really needs to be replaced every five to seven years with the last one scrapped; then there is the gaudy packaging thought up by the marketing team that goes straight into the bin and on to add mass to the floating islands of plastic in our seas; and of course the products need to be shipped around the globe so that the oil barons and sheikhs get their cut and the air is filled with sulphur dioxide, benzene, nitrogen oxides and carbon MONoxide, which are the bad gases.
And yet there is some resistance to the religion of consumerism. There are the false religions of the Left, of course, who wave their fists in the air and occasionally smash the windows of a few shops (which have to be sent to the tip as more waste), but who similarly and hypocritically promote globalism, mass immigration and after a good day's protesting, go and congratulate themselves in Starbucks before binge-drinking themselves into unconsciousness. The Aut Right equally talk of a cultural revolution and a return to tradition, but, as my friend the poet Juleigh Howard-Hobson has also noted, what they want is a return of Reaganism and that means a return to Reaganomics and a compounding of the present consumerism. We proper Rightists recognise that this sort of soft-Left libertarianism - a repackaging of classical liberalism in post-modernity - leads back exactly to where we are now. History has proven this.
Ironically, a real dissenter can be found in the world of business. The Yorkshire brewery Samuel Smith's, which also owns a chain of public houses, is famous for implementing traditional values in its brewery and pubs, so much so that the Leftist Guardian and Daily Mirror newspapers wrote a hit-piece on the co-owner Humphrey Smith two years ago after he banned swearing in his establishments, calling his traditionalist policies an 'illiberal regime'. Many of the unsubstantiated claims in the articles from anonymous (probably invented) sources have been put on the Samuel Smith's Wikipedia as fact. Humphrey Smith refuses to engage with the press. Just a couple of weeks ago, Smith also banned laptops, smart phones and payment by credit card from his establishments, music and television having been banned fifteen years ago. This is not to say that Humphrey Smith is not without fault, for his decision not to allow a temporary bridge for pedestrians on his land following the collapse of a bridge in Tadcaster was bizarre. Equally, the brewery uses the Yorkshire white rose as its logo, which the ruling of a court case seems to have given the brewery sole rights to its usage, despite the Yorkshire rose having been a symbol of Yorkshire for centuries prior.
While the Leftist media has emphasised negativity in Smith's policies, there are many positives. The ban on music, television and credit cards means performing rights, licencing and card fees are not paid to the providers, which means beer can be sold more cheaply. And Samuel Smith's pubs are substantially cheaper than their competitors. The ban on music, television and smart phones also encourages conversation. After all, is not the reason to go to a pub to socialise in real life? The advent of the smart phone has also killed the pub quiz, as everyone can look up the answers in a materialist world where an abstraction like honesty no longer has value. The ban on swearing cuts down on abuse and discourages unsavoury types from frequenting their inns. One would therefore expect to see less diversity on the premises. Indeed, this is the case. While having a few beers with the Treasurer of the National Front in diversity-ridden Leeds last December, I noticed a refreshing lack of diversity in the Angel Inn, which had a very pleasant atmosphere.
Traditional people and traditional values go hand-in-glove. It is no coincidence that the brewery has been handed down from father to son through the generations since it was founded by Samuel Smith himself in 1758. The present owners are the brothers Oliver and Humphrey, the latter described sneeringly by the This Is Money website as a 'hereditary ruler'. Yet it shows an aristocratic sensibility. They still have coopers making the oak casks and dray horses delivering the ale in Tadcaster. What is the significance of this? It means local people are being given creative work to do that is close to nature - work that is meaningful and that has a renewable product at the end of it, around which our communities have been built. It means a historical continuity that keeps us in touch with our ancestors. It means people being treated as people instead of as machines on some production line where the sun does not reach, creating products no one really needs to be marketed as a must-have bargain every Black Friday.
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