Stephen J McAuliffe – Everything that is good and pure and noble, all the great music; art; and poetry will, in time, by necessity, be subverted and perverted by the self-serving so-called elites. For these agents of the State see us as mere units to be exploited and kept in perpetual darkness.

However, from time to time a great voice emerges to point out the brutality of the faceless men who steer the monolithic ship of state, and when this happens the dangerous message must be negated; or if too powerful and resonant a message, as William Blake’s undoubtedly was, then the intention must be reversed. Thus does the poem Jerusalem (which was actually Blake’s preface to the poem Milton) become twisted into a patriotic hymn for fat sons of privilege who without any discernible irony belt out the lines:

“And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?”

The irony being of course, these sons of stolen privilege are drawn from the very bloodlines that profited from those same dark satanic mills.. And so the intention of Blake’s poem is purposefully corrupted by the lineal descendants of those who put our ancestors to work firing the furnaces of their pitiless industry. This is the reversal of intention. In short, it’s a con-job.

Blake’s vision of the attainment of Jerusalem, was set to music a century after writing, and before long it was relaunched as a patriotic hymn; an alternative national anthem: re-packaged, re-booted and re-branded. And once this nifty cultural enclosure act was complete, mythical Albion was relaunched as Albion plc. Continue reading →