The ghosts of Christmas present Christmas is always a time of heightened emotion in Britain. The airwaves are filled with pop songs specially composed for the festive period and the same irritating tunes are endlessly looped in supermarkets and department stores. Short of total isolation there is no escape from the Christmas vortex. Families get together again and work colleagues get drunk at office parties as the country winds down until the New Year. It is a time for relaxation and excessive eating and drinking. However, as happiness is on the order of the day and enjoyment is in great demand such heightened expectations also produce their opposite, as the lonely, the excluded, and the poorest are confronted by the stark contrast between hype and reality. At London’s busiest shopping intersection in Oxford Circus, Danny, a former Speakers’ Corner regular wields a megaphone. He stands self-confident and righteously appeals to the bustling mass of passers-by not to buy any C...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51