Confessions of Martyn Shrewsbury for April and May 2017

The Confessions of Martyn Shrewsbury

Only those people who can really touch bottom can be human.
Therefore Meister Eckhart says that one should not repent too much of one’s sins because it might keep one away from grace.
One is only confronted with the spiritual experience when one is absolutely human. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 394

The ghosts of 1931 are rising. The image of a vast Tory majority is formed as polls in Wales suggest that the Tories will win a majority of seats in Wales. The local government elections suggest in Wales that the Tories are up. 13%. What is happening? The Brexit agenda has allowed vast sections of the electorate to be made into Tories. The means of transformation has been UKIP .It took them in and using immigration and racial prejudice as the potion of change. In its death throes UKIP turns to ban the burka and in Wales uses a campaign against the Welsh language to continue the process. In its death throes it is most dangerous . Nuttal is desperate his pledges becomes more extreme and intolerant. It's poison is more toxic than ever. Before it dies and it's remnants chooses between the Tories or a new reborn BNP it will convince the working class voters who voted for Brexit of the 'wisdom' of the market, the privatisation of the health service, and the shrinking of the state. The epitaph of the kippers will be. ." The midwife of 20 years of Tory rule" How many f**king times did i tell you ..You stupid idiots...how many times?....I told you so ad nauseum.....Over and over

"Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play “

The strangest thing I have noticed is how poor we are at understanding individual Psychology. Many but not all can not see how they are really frightened little children wanting to be liked, how each vote they gain, or approval they experience some how makes them feel whole. The right fails to understand the collective and often becomes harsh, uncaring and arrogant. Then there are those who lost a faith and found a faith. I mean those who raised in Catholicism all their life seek an alternative faith but never quite get there.

But enough of that ...in 2005 I stepped down as leader of the Wales Green party. I was burnt out, a frantic election cycle , the battering of the anti wind farm brigade, and a gentleman from a former Intelligence background and now Green Activist spreading rumours and seeking to discredit me. The Welsh party was much smaller it probably had only 300 members. We had contested 10 seats in the general election, contested over 35 seats in the Swansea Council elections of 2004 and built a solid party in Swansea of over 150 members. Within a couple of years the same naval figure had managed to shrink the party dramatically, and in the general, election that followed he managed to gain the lowest Green Vote in Swansea West ever recorded. 

I ceased political activity and developed a company training counsellors. That fell apart and left with large debts, a declining economy, and the growing realisation of my fundamental unhappiness  I sort to bury my head in the sand. I spent and spent, the funds dried up and finally I had an affair. This crisis occurred long after my role as a Green politician...yet if you read a certain account of my bankruptcy case you would imagine it had occurred at the same time.

I even saw one person post about me being “ a self confessed adulterer” how simplistic it sounds, how different it actually was. The implications and result of my bankruptcy have been repeatedly resurrected by anyone who wishes to dismiss any argument that I have raised. All I did was to keep on paying my bills that I needed to pay to maintain everyday life The large institutions, the credit card companies missed out and I was labelled a fraudster.I am almost tempted to create a Psychological Syndrome. I will call it the Shrewsbury projection. Its a process by which all that is wrong , all that is hated, all that is missing in someones life is absorbed into the motivations and meanings of anothers life. Julia Kristeva called it abjection.. It can be described as “There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desires, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself “ Victor Hugo described it as

No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity, No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce. Victor Hugo, "La Legende des siecles

What is indeed surprising is how so many people who seek to transform society, who try to understand why people do the wrong things at the wrong time find it impossible to resist beating their opponents with perceived insight into their psyche. To believe in rehabilitation but not for those they disagree with. Thead hominem argument is used with the precision of a Cruise missile. Please search the net you will find plenty of arguments using this cluster bombing approach, 

I tried a short period in Plaid Cymru . I was told that they were a Green party and yet while I found some excellent Ecosocialists there , I also heard things that made my self recoil, I heard defence of the badger cull, the expansion of aviation, the support for Nuclear power and the narrow hypocrisy of the Chapel mentality. I  left very quickly for much of the time within Plaid I had been urged to condemn the Greens, to issue a press release but I never felt happy to do that. I saw in my mind the faces of those who had supported me, campaigned with me and built the Green Party, people like John Matthews, Miranda LaVey, Owen Clerk amongst others. There is only one Green party, there are many pallid copies but the Green analysis is the only one that is valid, that thinks beyond the short term..

I returned to the Green Party in Autumn 2013. I was determined to be an ordinary member but once more I began to be involved. I became the agent in Neath for the General election of 2015 and was the agent in the Uplands by election in November 2014.

I have survived these years of turmoil because of two events. At my lowest moment when I least expected it I found someone who has been with me ever since and so I have never been cynical of love. 

The other reasons are three figures of Philosophy, Nietzche Heidegger and Sartre . One day the day I was declared bankrupt I watched three documentaries about them. You can find them above this paragraph.

As we near the local elections of May  2017 and the general election of 2017. I reflect how fortunate I feel to be observing and commenting from the sides. A recent controversy in which I exposed a candidate in Neath Council elections has caused some debate. As a Philosopher  I am quite aware of both Mill`s Utilitarian approach and of Kant`s theory of intention. I would always expose a candidate who could publish on his timeline a picture of three piglets in Santa Claus costume wishing Muslims  " A Happy Christmas2 and arguing that those who voted Remain should be shot. I have been called anti -British, unpatriotic and a Commie. I will always expose the racist, the bigot and the jingoist simplicity of the Right. I would do the same over and over again.

I loath those who defend the racist and the bigot  there are many of them out there. These are the same people who defend such behavior because of their own prejudice and lack of understanding. You too will be exposed in your time and however you disguise your prejudice I sbow it for what it truly is.

 I am however very glad that I cannot join my fellow Greens in any of those roles. I am delighted in fact but my faith, trust and support is there for you all. I hope for a Corbyn victory on June 8th and at least three Green Mps in the House of Commons. I will be taking part in another struggle, a guerilla struggle agaisnt the bigots and the racists. This will be a battle fought on social media and other ways as well. As Oscar Wilde observed "Every Saint has a past, every sinner a future and Nietzsche commented that our morality is  simply our wounds. How true they both are..........

Has this been a confession?, an explanation? a justification?  an apolgy? I dont know but I will conclude with Dylan`s quote form the Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest. and the words of Mark Twain 

“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

― Mark Twain

Well, the moral of the story
The moral of this song
Is simply that one should never be
Where one does not belong
So when you see your neighbor carryin' somethin'
Help him with his load
And don't go mistaking Paradise
For that home across the road