My Lords,
I rise to raise the question of penal law and law breakers as such and to question whether a modern society is wise to speak in terms of law-breakers at all. A modern nation looks after everybody and never punishes them. If it has a police force at all, the police force is the Salvation Army and gives hungry and thirsty people cups of tea.
If a man takes diamonds from a shop in Hatton Garden you simply give him another bag of diamonds to take with him. I am not joking. Such is the proper social order for modern Western Europe, and all prisons ought to be abolished throughout its territories. Of course the Soviet Union and the United States could include themselves in these reforms too.
Kindness and helping people is better than punitiveness and punishing them, and a constructive endeavour is better than a destructive spirit. If anybody is in need, you help him, you do not punish him. Putting children into care and other forms of spiritual disinheritance ought to be stopped. Borstal ought to be stopped and the workings of the Mental Health Act which empowers seizure of people by the police when they are acting in a way likely to be harmful to themselves or others ought to be looked into.
What are you? Soulless robots?
Schoolmasters who are harsh with schoolboys who later as a result burn down the schoolhouse ought to be more human. Schoolboys in any case are at present treated with an indescribable severity which crushes their spirits and leaves them unnourished. The police ought to be totally prevented from ever molesting young people at all or ever putting them into jails and raping them, and putting them into brothels or sending them out to serve other people sexually against their wills.
The spirit ought to be left free, and chaining it has injured the creative power of the nation.
The young unemployed ought not in any way to have become separate from governmental power, but ought to have been given enough to live on out of the national wealth to look after themselves and never ask themselves even to think of working while there is not work to be had.
Trade Union thinking on this subject is wrong. Leisure is the point and working is wrong, being in any case the curse visited by God on Adam and not blessed. The Upper Classes are right and should be restored to vogue and favour more than is the present custom to do.
Automation in the factories and universal leisure for all and a standing wage sufficient to provide life without working ought to he supplied for all, so everybody becomes a leisured aristocrat. Aristocrats are Marxists. The Lord Chancellor holds the Order of Lenin.
The fulfilment of industrial life is Tonga and the South Sea Islands and not the Satanic Mills at all.
Shops ought to supply goods without payment, the funds to pay for the goods being paid by the State, so that all motive for stealing vanishes.
And in a completely reorganised Modern society Women's Lib would be realised by girls being given a house of their own at the age of twelve, with three quarters of the wealth of the State being given to the girls in houses of their own, to support them, so that marriage would be abolished and a girl could have as many husbands as she likes. She would, of course, be free to choose only one, should she choose to do so.
The men receive the remaining quarter of the national wealth to support them, and can, if they like, live in communal huts.
The full prospects of industrial civilisation ought to be realised: it is a boon; it should be called a boon; it should be used as a boon. The free spirit in schools should be preserved so that Sir Isaac Newton returns to us.
Sweden and France have modernised themselves, all other nations in Europe, including Britain, should follow their example. A nation endowed with industrial power should use it for benefit.
There are other points in which a modernising nation modernising itself could improve its administration: for instance, lunatics could be looked after individually, and it could be found out what world is missing from them and the world which is missing from them could be restored.
The madness of the Cold War could also be removed by the whole human race, since it is quite evident that neither Communist nor American exists, but only persons. What makes it abundantly clear is the saying of Little Audrey, who laughed and laughed because she knew that only God could make a tree.
Mr Brezhnev and Mr Carter are really the same person: one lunatic certifiable, or in American terms one nation indivisible, with prisonment and lunacy for all.
In a word, the entire human race can banish the Cold War, with one word, by simply saying, "You do not exist." This fact ought to be recognised in practice, with logical recognition by the systems concerned, so that the aims of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament can be realised, and there can be disarmament throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
Insight into the truth of this statement must be acknowledged so that logic may take hold of the mind.
The CIA should be banished from Western Europe, and Eurocommunism should be substituted for the present Bosses of the European Common Market as the prevailing social and economic system in Europe.
The Portuguese Revolution should be defended and emulated through Western Europe. President Carter should be brought to a full halt, in his "Fulton Speech" programme for Europe, in which he mentions Paris, Rome and Lisbon by name.
There should be revolutions throughout Latin America, in accordance with the wish of His Holiness the Pope; and the CIA should be driven out from every nation of Latin America.
The original Indian nations should be restored to Sovereignty. It goes without saying that all prisoners throughout all these areas are released from prison and no longer whipped and tortured.
Since the so-called Protestants who govern Britain, or claim to govern her, are spiritless papal bumboys if they cannot take charge of themselves to find the spirit, the confidence, the power, to decide to remove British Arms and all Protestants from Ulster. They should forthwith find the said confidence and power to remove them. There is no point in what calls itself British Protestant Authority remaining in spiritless limbo any longer.
All soldiers and police throughout the Northern Hemisphere should disappear. They and their functions are no longer necessary and are out of date.
Such is the future which the human race requires and desires.
It is very silly to ask every generation to moderate itself and palliate with old institutions and old fogeys when what is needed is modernisation. The plea that the Establishment should be preserved is the plea that the old ogres should be allowed to gobble up the younger generation. You may preserve the Establishment, but only if you introduce new institutions when they are needed. The modernisation of British Railways is a case in point.
The total abolition of Law and Order is needed, and the Police turn into the Salvation Army as already observed and always help people. There are no prisons or punishments.
These points are the chief requirements for the future of the human race. They should be realized briskly and with discipline.
It can be noted that since the Police and Bourgeois Bosses are and have been anti-aristocratical, this House is indisputably Marxist and inherits the banner of the Red Army of the Soviet Union.
The habit of arresting young people and raping them in gaol is part of the plot which is designed to destroy the human race by making it subserve dead spirits instead of live ones; it is a craven fear of nature, arguing a mind and spirit cringingly afraid, unalive and not itself.
No wonder that, in these circumstances, the best and most creative products and political movements have not proceeded out of Europe, but out of Africa where these practices do not prevail. Europe has been slighting herself; she has not been giving of her best to herself or to humanity.
Forward the creative spirit! Leave people as nature made them, not indoor products of ersatz suffocation. And have the courage to do so.
It is noteworthy that Tommy Atkins lost every war he has fought for the past years by reason of these spiritual attritions; and that the United States and the CIA lost the war in Vietnam because they were spiritually subservient to death for these reasons.
The Ancient Greeks fought naked: they did not have solitary confinement cells; not in the senses that we do so today, although the captives from the Athenian expedition to Syracuse were subjected to extreme hard labour in slave conditions.
Naked bathing on beaches or in rivers ought to be universal. What is right is right: if for reasons of present law or custom, or inward spiritual slavery, people do not reach these standards. it does not mean that they ought not to reach them.
And is it not better to defend the city before it is fallen? Better than to arrive too late and defend only what would have been, if it had not already gone? But the fact is that all oppressions can always be overthrown, and that it is never too late to overthrow them.
After the oppression has declared itself, its harms to mankind are known; it is then easy to reprove them and, hapless in its revealed injury to mankind, it is powerless to defend itself against the accusation of its guilt, and has to yield. It is helpless: the accused prisoner at the bar: hammer blow upon hammer blow of accusation and reproof can be hammered into it, and, like a fallen boxer, it cannot get up to defend itself.
Lord Wells-Pestell (interrupts):
My Lords, would the noble Earl give way for a moment. I dislike doing this intensely, but the noble Earl has been speaking for 10 minutes. There is a Standing Order in your Lordships' House which requires a Member to speak to the Motion before the House. If the noble Earl will allow me to say so, I doubt very much whether it could be held that what he is saying is relevant to the Question before the House, which is on victims of crime. I must point that out.
Earl Russell (continued):
Such is the present position of the United States after the war in Vietnam: the whole human race can accuse it every day. The helpless, which were physically or spiritually imprisoned, can then stand up and point the finger; revealed injuries to mankind can now stand up and accuse, with whatever rebuke pleases them.
The State authorities of Europe and the United States must now admit that they have done these deeds and practise no longer the harm they have wrought.
Let them grant the gift of gifts, the gift of life, and not wait till death has shown his hand.
People who have been imprisoned by the CIA in Latin America, or are so imprisoned today, cannot stand up and answer for themselves. It is meaningless to ask them to be gifts: the gift must proceed from you to them. If you want a man to stand up and be a man, and not be a figleaf or a shadow of himself, you have to grant him the spiritual gift to be able to do so; for the American nations of Latin America this is a genuine reality.
And the same goes for all classes of oppressed persons in Europe. Reproof, or the concept of rebuke, guilt, and morality, are no use to him. Accused all the time by the pride of life and vigorous gentlemanliness which governs him, the man is all but paralysed.
And the young people are accused by older persons, or older established institutions which will not remove themselves, of being pitiless pride of life to older persons. The same law applies: rebuke, guilt, morality are no use to them.
Get the pitilessness removed: and do not cause the older person, or the police, in the name of the older person, to prostitute the younger person out of unforgiveness. The punishment for such conduct is the guillotine.
Cause this murder of young people to cease: abolish all institutions or spirits which cause such things.
What is not granted at present is the gift of life. The older person is not granted the gift of life to be generous, kind, forgiving, or merciful to the younger person, and the younger person is forced in self-defence to defend himself against the older person.
This spirit will have to leave Europe, and Latin America; and so will all the institutions which exemplify it. A relationship of extreme cruelty results, delightful to all those who relish the experience of sadism. The older person can continue at his pleasure to prostitute the younger person unless the younger person can find a way of answering him and get out of the trap.
This spirit or happening is confined to England, and to the English spirit. It does not happen to Free Americans who are not subject to the powers of envy ingrained in the British Class System, which gives such spirits power.
Free Americans banish this spirit, and when Americans complain of the British Royal Family for being pampered, decadent and snobbish, are they not right?
The Police Doll which prostitutes people is probably the responsible author of these evils; the Doll of Love, which says to the person: You are exile from Love: you must prostitute yourself.
It is the British Doll, which praises and cherishes the British Jesus Christ, which is all right so long as He is praised, but not so funny if He is condemned or out of grace. The American has only to say to the Doll, "The late Jesus Christ," and the entire Doll disappears.
This unpleasant, cruel and disgusting machine ought to be stopped.
Will you give the young people of England a better chance, please? This machine has given a lot of trouble to a great many people in the past twenty-five years, and the British people should not be so supine as not to reply to it: they should invoke the Spirit of Free America and banish the spirit in question.
Get up British Lion: restore your free spirit.
God means a person's hymen; and he or she has only to say, "You do not know my hymen" and the spirit which works damage and has power or control over the person, vanishes.
Not only prostitution, but also slavery; this machine can invoke, endorse, or create paralysing moral inhibitions which prevent people from co-habiting with others, or frustrate their desires, or their power to remain with the lady whom they love, or remain fertile.
It is evident that, if you had a man in your power, through such spiritual happenings, you could in fact physically castrate him; or if you had a young girl in your power, you could forcibly sterilise her. This sort of menace to the procreativity of the human race, or the liberties of the person, ought not to be tolerated. It is far too insecure.
Young people ought to be free to go on with their lives and pursue the gaining of their livelihoods free of such molestation.
It is not safe for the human race to be thus menaced. You can enslave the man; you can fill him with moral obligation to you; you can pursue him to the ends of the cosmos; you can threaten him with death at long range if he frequents the company of a person other than yourself; you can, on occasion, make him love you more than his girl; you can inflict every kind of suffering on him.
The inordinate oppression of the world which created the War in Vietnam over the past thirty years, with its immense uncompassion, has now blamed the young man for its sins, and prostituted him for its own uncompassion. Its own guilt is a thing which it is unable to bear, and it punishes him for it precisely because he opposes it; which causes it to declare itself (as well as punishing him for its own uncompassion) which it dare not admit to itself.
The arrival of VE-Day prostituted Pre-War England. If oppression hangs on as hard as this, we cannot have so much as a new bus line without being accused of immorality.
After your deeds, my dear Britain, would not repentance improve you?
But you will have to ask yourself, not the young man and his lady to do so for you. You have no credit, no spiritual credit. No Angel will listen if you try to name bastard, or cad, or bounder, or totter, or anything whatever which you dislike. The young man and his lady are not to indulge Britain, or repent of her sins for her; it could only spoil her chance of Heaven if they did; thus the condition of the affair. No, she must repent herself. And nothing else will do but her repentance.
Meantime not a word she says will ever be heard; nobody would believe it. If anybody wished to introduce the Deity into the conversation, let him recognise that only His Holiness the Pope is qualified to deal with British self-will. Seven hundred years of hatred of the French and Irish too, ill become Britain's chill bosom.
It needs to be spelt out that you must not punish the young people for England's sins but only your established authorities. Punishing the wrong people dodges repentance, it does not complete it.
Can we have some action please?
Lend a hand, stop cursing and start blessing. Speak well of people and not with malevolence and leave this bosom of usury of yours. This British spirit is so contemptible that no one could even attempt to stoop to hearing it.
It is the heavenly virtues, faith, hope, charity, lovingkindness, compassion and mercy which people hear: they hear Joy and Happiness. they do not hear the hideous virtues. God has not been let into Britain, because the only divine authority which Britain accepts is the Temporal Anglican Authority, which never repents. You will require to welcome the French and Irish into your counsels, if you want to get anywhere and not ceaselessly rely upon yourselves.
The official rating of the human race in the Northern Hemisphere is TOAD.
Until they have prayed for some better grace and found and-produced some better repentance by their deed, they will not deserve a better world.
Turn from your old, cruel, usurious ways to defend the young man and his lady; choose their kindness, their happiness. their peace, their rejoicing, their mercy. There is no point in you at all unless you put merciful young persons under the age of thirty in charge of your affairs; you will not get anywhere until you do.
Go where mercy is, not where he is not; young and merciful people have a stake in the future, which is greater than yours; yield all authority to them and cause State Ministers to accede to their requests.
If you do not agree to do so, you will have tacitly acceded to the power and canon of UNmercy; and it will be possible to obtain the public vote, with the support of the Angels, for the extirpation of mankind in Hydrogen-Bomb War, and you will have no power to petition against it.
If you do not allow other people to enjoy mercy and happiness, you can be extirpated for wasting the life which has been given you.
Consequently you will let the young people pass without let or hindrance to the fullest power in the State. Cabinet Ministers can just receive their advice, and agree to anything that they request.
The wisdom and kindness of the old are there to assist the young, not to impede them. Guillotine on earth, thunderbolts in Heaven are the punishment for any attempt to impede young people.
Put the burden where it is required to be put and not where it is not required to be put; extracting duty and willing zeal from the older authorities of the State in favour of the young people, whose requests you should not regard it as legal or proper to refuse.
Then the division between Parliament and people, which has been appearing, will be ended. Stick in the mud fellows who are not willing, can be asked to join.
It may be expected that most people will support these proposals, because they are, after all, in everybody's own interest.