Various matters in addition to my new and wonderful novel.
1 Free Food and Drink
The Committee of the Libertarian Alliance request the pleasure of your
company at:
Happy Free Market Christmas 2010: The Libertarian Alliance Christmas
Reception for the UK's Free Market and Civil Liberties Movement
Wednesday 22 December 2010
Drinks and Canapé Reception 6.00-9.00pm
National Liberal Club
One Whitehall Place
London SW1A 2HE
The dress code for this event is lounge suit or smart casual. RSVP Dr.
Helen Evans at hsevans@btinternet.com
2. Christmas Greetings
Please accept my best wishes for a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New
Year. If you celebrate some other festival at this time of year, do enjoy
that one instead. Bear in mind that, if you think the world is already an
awful place, it will be worse come next Christmas. So tuck into that
turkey while it's still in the shops and you can afford it.
3. The Churchill Memorandum
Now to the main reason for my message. Though I promised it for the 20th
January 2011, copies of my new novel, The Churchill Memorandum, are now
available - or are subject to postal delays. Anyone who wants to buy a
copy, anywhere in the world, can expect to have it delivered within three
to five working days.
But why should you want to buy The Churchill Memorandum? The short answer
is that it is probably a very clever and entertaining story, owing much to
John Buchan, to Sapper, and to the early Ian Fleming - and with a few
ironic bows to George Orwell. If you like this sort of thing - or if you
are just a very conservative English nationalist - you will enjoy The
Churchill Memorandum.
Why, you might even see it as a satire on the Wikileaks scandal - though I
wrote it last September.
Let me turn now to a longer answer. All through my life, nearly everyone
has accepted the Churchill Myth. This is that Germany in the 1930s was
crying out to be crushed, and that only one man had the wisdom and resolve
to do this. And so, by some act approaching the providential, once we were
properly at war with Germany, Winston Churchill came to power. During the
next five years, he was the most determined and implacable enemy of German
aggression. At the end of that war, his country was bankrupt and the place
it had held in the world for the previous quarter millennium was now
unsustainable. But so what? This had, after all, been our "Finest Hour".
And if England was now to decline, America was there to pick up the fallen
torch of world power. After a slight rearrangement of positions within it,
the "Anglosphere" would continue through the 20th century, spreading
right, truth and justice.
I first realised what crap all this was in 1981. I was an undergraduate,
and had accidentally agreed to write my dissertation not about the
Byzantine Empire, but about the Second World War. I began my research in
no doubt of the Churchill Myth. I was surprised to see how quickly and
completely it fell apart. Germany was never a threat to England. The War
ruined us financially and morally - not least because the deal Churchill
made for fighting it was that the left should be given control over
domestic policy. It massively aggrandised a morally corrupt and viciously
Anglophobic America, and brought about a Bolshevik occupation of Eastern
and Central Europe. As for the crimes committed by the National
Socialists, these were made conceivable only once a total war had been
fought and lost.
Anyone who thinks the Second World War was "the Good War" is deluded. It
was a catastrophe from which our civilisation may never recover.
The Churchill Memorandum helps advance this case by imagining what might
have happened if Hitler had died in 1939 and there had been no War. My own
view is that, alive or dead, he was no threat to England. But I make this
much concession to the established wisdom by assuming that the man is
dead. No War means no collapse of British or Japanese power, and no
breakout into the world of the comparably if differently evil Soviet Union
and United States. It also means the cooling of German National Socialism
into something half-Franco, half-Hapsburg.
Go forward twenty years, to 1959, and England is still England. The Queen
is on her throne. The pound is worth a pound. All is right with the world
- or with that quarter of it lucky enough to repose under an English
heaven.
Rejoicing in this happy state of affairs, Anthony Markham takes his leave
of a nightmarish, totalitarian America - an America where Alan Greenspan
is summarily executed as an enemy of the people, and Harry J. Anslinger is
the President. Markham has a biography to write of a dead and now largely
forgotten Winston Churchill, and has had to travel to where the old drunk
left his papers. But little does Markham realise, as he returns to his
safe, orderly England, that he carries, somewhere in his luggage, an
object that can be used to destroy England and the whole structure of
bourgeois civilisation as it has been gradually restored since 1918.
Who is trying to kill Anthony Markham? For whom is Major Stanhope really
working? Where did Dr Pakeshi get his bag of money? What connection might
there be between Michael Foot, Leader of the British Communist Party, and
Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan? Why is Ayn Rand in an American prison,
and Nathaniel Branden living in a South London bedsit? Where does Enoch
Powell fit into the story? Above all, what is the Churchill Memorandum?
What terrible secrets does it contain?
All will be revealed - but not till after Markham has gone on the run
through an England unbombed, uncentralised, still free, and still
mysterious.
You can buy copies of The Churchill Memorandum for a mere £9.99. Order
yours now from here:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-churchill-memorandum/14310600?prod
uctTrackingContext=author_spotlight_91479272_
or here:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/seangabb
Oh, and please don't forget the novels of my friend Richard Blake, who
remains more critically-acclaimed and internationally best-selling than I
am. For details of what to buy and how to buy it, consult the sig file
below.
Regards,
Sean
--
Sean Gabb
Director, The Libertarian Alliance (Carbon Positive since 1979)
sean@libertarian.co.uk Tel: 07956 472 199
Skype Username: seangabb
http://www.libertarian.co.uk
http://www.seangabb.co.uk
http://www.hampdenpress.co.uk
http://www.richardblake.org.uk/
http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com
http://www.facebook.com/sean.gabb
http://vimeo.com/seangabb
Wikipedia Entry: http://tinyurl.com/23jvoz
Buy these novels by Richard Blake: "Conspiracies of Rome"
<http://tinyurl.com/l8uj8r> ("Fascinating to read, very well written, an
intriguing plot" Derek Jacobi); "Terror of Constantinople"
<http://tinyurl.com/n9ugw3> ("Nasty, fun and educational" The Daily
Telegraph); "Blood of Alexandria" <http://tinyurl.com/356mwdr>. "Sword of
Damascus" will be published in June 2011. Buy them for your own enjoyment.
Buy them as presents for your friends and loved ones.
Friday, 17 December 2010
Dear Harold,
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