76 Arrested in London Die-In for Garner

Why can't the majority of black people and the rioters accept that the reason blacks are much more likely to get into trouble with the police is because they are much more likely to commit criminal acts, both serious and petty, and the reason they are much more likely to be harmed is because of the way they interact with the police, resisting arrest or even assaulting the officers?

The question is rhetorical. They don't accept this because it's always difficult for every human being to recognise one's faults - or, as in this case, the faults of the group one identifies with. For rioters and looters there are added motives: regardless of whether they really believe that Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin et al were victims of the police or of their own behaviour, they get a reward, material or psychological or both, from screaming and stealing.

Now the "protests" have come to London. Last night at the Westfield Shopping Centre (Europe's largest), in West London, demonstrators staged a "die in" over the death of Eric Garner and clashed with the police. 76 were arrested, which is an indication of the high numbers involved in this ridiculous pantomime.

But it wasn't just idiotic, it was deeply damaging. In such a bad economic climate, shops lost thousands of pounds of revenue from Christmas sales. And dozens of police and security guards were deployed, who could have been used to fight the crime that these "protesters" are implicitly supporting and now committing.

High-end stores and outlets at the shopping centre in Shepherd's Bush were forced to close, with terrified customers and staff barricaded inside, as no fewer than 600 militants staged a mass "die in" by sprawling on the floor in the centre’s atrium from 6pm yesterday. They chanted Garner’s last words as he was restrained by chokehold: "I can’t breathe!".

I wish we could easily gather so many people to demonstrate for worthy causes instead.

Several of these criminals "charged around" in front of terrified shoppers.

The arrests were for criminal damage and public order offences.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “Shortly after 8.20pm, a group of protesters broke away from a larger group and attempted to force entry to the shopping centre assaulting security staff and causing damage to property... one man was further arrested on suspicion of assault."

A shop worker said: “It was pretty scary. They were charging around and we just didn’t know what would happen next. We thought, to protect everyone, we would lock the doors."

Witnesses commented that it was over the top.

Some questioned the point of the “die-in”, and a police officer told a demonstrator: “This is the worst protest ever. There’s no message.”

Hungary: How to Overthrow a Government Voted by the People

My friend and colleague Alessandra Nucci has translated this article from the Italian website Riscossa Cristiana.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The policies enacted by the Orban administration, in defense of national interests against the world's great capitalists, are being fought by underhanded means and by resorting to street protests organized and financed by foreigners. The lie about the “internet tax”.

by Kovács Andras - Edina Karossy

The street demonstrations against the Orban administration which are taking place in these days are useful to the European Union and the United States who aim to carry out a coup d'état. Why? Because Viktor Orbán isn't doing their bidding. It isn't the Hungarian people who want to topple the government. Last April the government was re-elected to office by two thirds of the people! Our enemies are strangers to Hungary, who want to interfere with the inner workings of the country. They use well-oiled mechanisms, they are financed by George Soros and they will stop at nothing in order to preserve their power and their profits on the Hungarian market. They find traitors to our homeland – the opposition – who are willing to lend their support, for a price, and they appeal to “simple people” who believe them.

Viktor Orbán wants to tax multinational corporations who gain many benefits in Hungary but don't pay taxes, or pay very little. Besides this, they also exploit their employees, they take all their profits out of the country and then make it impossible for small and medium-size companies to operate. Prime Minister Orban also wants to tax the banks which, with foreign currency credits, have deceived thousands of families and ruined their lives. Orban has lowered the cost of electricity, gas and water and wants to continue to lower it, to further lighten the Hungarians' utility bills, but the providers of these services are Israelis who live in France and Germany and who do not want to lose any profits.

Another reason for contention lies in the potential gas pipeline that would come from Russia, bypassing Ukraine, through Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, and as far as Austria (the southern flow).

So you see it's a matter of damages to consolidated interests (the enormous profits risk being lower) by all these activities by the government. They find them annoying, which is why they interfere.

George Soros finances various organizations belonging to the opposition, as well as opposition leaders Gyurcsány Ferenc and Bajnai Gordon. Then we have André Goodfriend, American chargé d'affaires, who is extraordinarily active in the internal affairs of Hungary. Here, by the way, I would like to add that the same “Good Friend”, acting as Consul General in the years 2009-2012, did his best to bring down the Syrian government. And now he wants to tell the Hungarian people what to do.

They make up stories about fake corruption and make false accusations against the government – which they are never able to prove or witness to – mixing up the news, recruiting traitors among Hungarians who are ignorant and are ready to create a stir; after which they let the West know that the Orbàn government is unacceptable and that the 2/3 outcome in the elections doesn't count.

During the peace marches organized in favor of the government there was never any violence, any incident. Indeed, there was a particularly peaceful atmosphere, people sang and talked and were of good cheer. Quite the contrary of the current demonstrations against the Orban government, where there is evidence as to how some of the participants beat up some journalists, spit in their faces, destroyed the headquarters of the FIDESZ party (the party of the Prime Minister) causing huge damages; and they knew no limit in shouting curses and vulgarities. You can see the difference between the two crowds from a mile away, they are the opposite of each other, civility as opposed to incivility incorporated with anarchy.

This incivility was what also characterized the demonstration against the internet tax ”organized” by Gyurcsány Ferenc and by the people who are backing him, financed by Soros and which Goodfriend took part in. First of all the internet tax was a pretext, because without a motive that appears to damage almost everyone there would have not been so many people in the street at the request of Gyurcsány, whose popularity has lately taken a dive. Under the slogan “don't tax the Internet” he managed to move a small crowd. But the fact is that the bill of law said that the tax was to be paid by the providers and was not to be passed on to the users, and it was capped at 3 euros. But there are always people who don't know all the details and are ready to make a stir. So here you have your news fit to publish all over the world about how unhappy the Hungarians are and how unacceptable the Orban administration is, etc.

This scenario and succession of events are comparable to the coup d'état in the Czech Republic, where with the same methods they toppled the Necas government, and also to the events in Ukraine and those of the Arab Spring (Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria). Unfortunately they always manage to camouflage their secret activities, while besmirching the image of whoever is against them, after which it is difficult for us outsiders, common people, to understand who was right.

This is why we must reflect on the news that is broadcast and consider events from different points of view. Otherwise we too will end up by believing our enemies.

For the moment we Hungarians who support the Orbán government do not intend to demonstrate, but await the development of the entire matter. If the foreign attacks do not cease, then it is our intention to take to the streets and show how close we are to our government, and how much we want to defend it.

Thank you for reading this article. I wish you all the best.


Contacts: bundi01@vipmail.hu

The Tragedy of Replacing God with Unchecked Democracy

Published on American Thinker

by Enza Ferreri


I'm not sure how conservative Americans will view the recently-published book Democracy as a Neocon Trick (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) by Alexander Boot.

It’s a very unusual work, in that, whereas critics of America are generally on the Left end of the political spectrum and those on the Right tend to unquestionably defend the “land of the free”, this is a criticism of the US from a non-Leftist viewpoint, indeed from a traditional, conservative, Christian, pre-Enlightenment viewpoint.

I don’t agree with everything the author says about America, but he’s such a brilliant philosopher in so many respects that whatever he writes is worth exploring.

Born in Russia, Alexander Boot became a nuisance for the Soviet authorities. Pursued by the KGB, he emigrated to the USA in 1973 and then to Britain in 1988, where he now lives.

I've been reading his blog almost daily since I've discovered it almost two years ago. When I found it I thought I had struck intellectual gold. Then I started reading his books. We’ve become friends.

You don't find many thinkers these days with Boot’s ideas, so he needs an introduction.

For a long time I’ve been unhappy with the lack of a constructive alternative to the new Left’s program. Islam is a major problem, but it’s only a symptom. Why did the West throw its doors wide open to it? What’s the disease of which Islamisation, multiculturalism, political correctness and all our other social evils are symptoms?

Boot provides the general framework we need. It's not just a critique of Islam, or socialism, feminism, environmentalism, "gay rights", the European Union, unrestricted immigration, the welfare state, public education, nationalised healthcare, our degenerate culture and corrupt political system, although it is all of these things.

Through his lens we acquire an answer and a reason for all the many ways we have arrived at the present surreal situation in which we are overjoyed at the prospect of being subjugated by Islam, are not unduly bothered by our future extinction as a race and collapse as a civilisation or worried about turning our countries into Third World outposts and our cities into replicas of Sodom and Gomorrah.

We need to understand where we went wrong, at what point we lost our compass - totally. The ideas about how advanced, enlightened, developed, free and prosperous our Western society is were obviously largely based on false assumptions if it all leads to the current Alice-in-Wonderland reality and suicidal urge.

Alex Boot identifies the crucial moments of this gradual process as the Renaissance with its humanist philosophy replacing God with man, the Reformation making everyone his own priest and turning Christianity into a subjective experience, and the Enlightenment sowing the seeds of totalitarian thought conducing to socialism, egalitarianism and Marx.

It's difficult at first, after the prolonged indoctrination transforming history and philosophy into tools of propaganda, to come to terms with Boot’s ideas of the superiority of the Medieval over the modern world.

But once I got going, I could write about nothing else. Each book I’ve published since, though perfectly capable of standing on its own, is but another chapter in an ongoing attempt to ponder the shattered temple [of Western civilisation], to understand why it was destroyed and by whom… Each of my books focused on one aspect of modernity, be it culture, religion or economics. This one is about politics, which in today’s West is dominated by totemistic worship of a mythological ideal that is misleadingly called liberal democracy.

This is how Boot sets the scene for his new book.

Democracy, he says, became deified. Like God, whose cult it has replaced, it's infallible and it cannot be questioned, only worshipped.

Boot is not opposed to democracy (in its etymological sense of rule by the people) but to unchecked democracy.

Among all systems of government that have existed, the one that most approaches Boot's ideal is Britain's historical constitutional monarchy.

"God, king and country" represents the Church, monarchy and Parliament.

In case of conflicts among them, the highest authority on earth remains the Church, accountable only to God.

The Parliament's division into two chambers is essential. The lower chamber, House of Commons, is the democratic part of the whole system. It’s elected by the people to represent their interests.

But it must be checked by other authorities: the monarch, whose power ultimately descends from God, and, in a fine balance between the monarch and the people, the upper chamber of Parliament, the hereditary House of Lords, composed of members of the aristocracy who, due to their historical ties to the land and territory, can be counted on to be able to go beyond their personal interest in favour of the public one. Importantly, their not being elected guarantees that they’re not corrupted and swayed by desire for votes.

This is why Boot views unfavourably the current moves to make the House of Lord more dependent on and controlled by elected politicians.

After what we've seen on both sides of the Pond, unelected power counterbalancing elected power seems the right solution.

Politicians’ giving people all they want even if it bankrupts the state and ruins the economy, namely an unsustainable welfare state epitomised by the free Obamaphone lady in the infamous video, is no less than a freebies-for-votes bribery exchange.

Not content with that, politicians have imported their own voters from other countries - Mexico and Central America to the US, Asia and Africa to Europe -, thus creating their made-to-measure electorate.

In the end, the "rule of the people" has become the final undoing of the people.

Boot is right on this. If this is not sufficient argument against democracy without proper checks and balances, I don't know what is. Unchecked democracy, not unlike communism, requires an unrealistic dose of trust in human beings.

A desirable measure would be to limit universal suffrage. Not allowing people who economically depend on the state to vote would reduce clientelism. Voting age should be increased.

Another point in Democracy as a Neocon Trick is that politically the West before the advent of the dreaded modernity comprised organic states that developed gradually, not through revolutions.

And, crucially, the central state had little power, which was taken over by the intermediary, local authorities like parish, guild, village commune, township and clan.

This reflects the relative importance that Christianity attributes to the state and the individual. The former is transient, the latter eternal. Christianity, therefore, has an intrinsic tendency to protect the freedom and dignity of the individual, with its spiritual value, against the power of the state.

What the Church called "subsidiarity" dominated the political scene: it was localism, the devolution of power to the lowest sensible level.

The West is synonymous with Christendom, it’s the part of the world that became Christian and built its entire civilisation on Christianity.

This polity centred around God. Its final purpose in every sphere, political, social, cultural, economic, aesthetic, was to make it as easy as possible for every individual to achieve salvation.

What about neocons, then?

Well, if democracy has become a religion (the American religion), and if Tocqueville - with his book Democracy in America (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) explaining what the new religion was about and extolling its virtues - is its St Paul, neocons are, according to Boot, its belligerent missionaries.

He thinks that worship of liberal democracy has today become an ill-advised messianic policy aggressively followed by many Western countries but especially the USA and, to a lesser degree, Britain. And neoconservatism is the political movement mostly responsible for this urge to export democracy to every corner of the world with whatever means.

He compares neocons to Trotsky and his followers, who, through the concept of "permanent revolution", wanted (and still want) to make the whole world communist.

For him neoconservatism is a misnomer, as the movement has much more in common with socialism than real conservatism. “Cryptosocialism” would be better.

Both reject with hostility two millennia of Christian civilisation and want to create paradise on earth, using violence as utopians do.

In fact, as the Marxist striving for the perfect society has proved to be the most tragic and catastrophic failure in mankind’s history, so the neocon-inspired American policies in the Middle East have replaced unsavoury but secular regimes with fanatical Islamic ones, and unleashed the violent potential of that part of the world that the necessary tyrannies of the likes of Saddam, Mubarak and Gaddafi kept under control. And neocons are still at it, wanting to transform Syria into another Iraq.

And it’s not finished. Blinded by the adoration of purely superficial resemblances of democracy, neocons have been tricked by Russia - Boot's not-so-beloved country of birth - into believing that democracy vanquished, history ended and Russia can be a potential ally of the West.

Maybe Boot is not to everyone’s taste. To some, his criticism of the country that, unlike Europe, is still strong on Christian faith will appear harsh and unwarranted.

But his message still offers a lot to reflect on. It’s obvious that we are light years away from where we’d like to be, and that all the promises of rational Enlightenment have materialised only, at most, in the techno-scientific sphere. Even the economy, where we thought we would be strong and which, in a Godless and material world, attracted most efforts, has turned out to be a house of cards.

We really need to approach our problems from a completely different angle, as Boot would put it not physical but metaphysical.

From Killing the Rich to Taxing The Rich

[T]he suppression of the minority of exploiters, by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday, is a matter comparatively so easy, simple, and natural that it will cost far less bloodshed… and will cost mankind far less.

Lenin wrote this in The State and Revolution (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

In the end, 66 million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1959: tortured, shot, starved, frozen or worked to death. This figure was calculated by Professor of Statistics I. A. Kurganov and quoted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

Others say that the figure is 45 million, still others 20 million. The lower figures may be due to the fact that they only refer to deaths caused by Stalin, and don’t include the pre-Stalin and post-Stalin periods of the Soviet Union.

None of them includes the tens of millions of deaths of the Second World War.

If 60 million were indeed killed from 1917 to 1959, an average of 2 million were killed during each year of Stalin’s horrendous rule – or 40,000 every week (even during “peacetime”).

If the real number is 20 million, that still means 1,830 deaths every single day.

And they were not just “the minority of exploiters”, as Lenin put it. They were peasants, workers, middle class people.

That eventually was the blood and human cost that Lenin considered “natural” and negligible.

It’s useful sometimes to remember the sources of the ideas of people who are currently in the political arena. It makes it easier to make sense of what they say, which at times would seem incomprehensibly against common sense.

Thursday’s Question Time program on BBC1 hosted among its panel Labour's MP and Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. On that occasion the Labour Party, Lenin's heirs, showed through their representative how to adapt the Bolshevik leader's ideas to our modern – for them regrettably less revolutionary and cloak-and-dagger - times.

"Kill the rich!" has been replaced by "Tax the rich (to death if possible)!”

After all, one of the first punishments that Lenin recommended just after the October Revolution was "confiscation of all property”, along with confinement in prison, forced labour and all the other niceties.

Lenin's grandchildren have to content themselves with 40-45 (50 at most when they are in government) per cent of people's income. How small and disappointing it must seem to them! But they bravely react to disappointment by pushing for more, as they always do on Question Time.

Some panellists on Thursday reassured us that the well-off will not feel the difference if more money is extorted out of them, sorry I meant top tax rates increase.

I suppose it must be the same way of thinking of conscientious thieves when they decide to burgle a wealthy household: steal the money where it is and where there is so much of it that its absence won't have consequences.

Ah the joys of democracy, where two wolves and a lamb can vote on what to have for dinner.

But what Labour doesn't disclose is that new and higher taxes initially introduced for top earners trickle down to the middle classes and even the working class. An example is the Stamp Duty tax, whose burden has increased on UK low and middle income families trying to buy a new home.

A couple of people in the audience claimed that they would be happy to pay more tax, if it helps children, disabled and such.

If they were telling the truth, the easy solution would be not that taxation is increased - as these people can't expect to impose their preferences on others - but that they give to charities. In that way they will be surer that their money does go to finance their chosen goal and not, like taxpayers' money, into redundancy payments of hundreds of thousands pounds, salaries for optimisers, facilitators, equality commissioners, communication officers, other assorted bureaucrats and various useless public sector employees.

One of the main reasons why anything run by the government is hopelessly cost-ineffective is because the state invariably employs many more people than are necessary for the job.

It does so because it's a way to increase its power, which is its main goal. The more public sector employees, the greater the public sector and the more people dependent on the state. That also translates into more votes. Parasitism and clientelism are the name of the game.

The broadcast ended on a humorous note, when a totally useless panelist (impossible to fathom why he was invited), the ridiculous - but unfunny – comedian Omid Djalili admitted that he hadn't understood the last question from the audience, but in all truth he hadn't got the others either.

Indian Church Destroyed, Arson Suspected

A church was destroyed by fire in India in a suspected arson attack:

A mysterious, early morning fire destroyed one of East Delhi's big churches, St Sebastian's Church in Dilshad Garden, prompting allegations of foul play by the Christian community.

Police have registered an FIR against unknown persons under section 436 (mischief by fire with intent to destroy house) of IPC.

The blaze started in the early hours of Monday and reduced to ashes the church's interior, including the altar, the Holy Bible, Cross and all images and statues. Several churchgoers stood outside the charred remains of the 13-year-old shrine the entire afternoon, protesting against what they believed was a planned assault.

Delhi archbishop Anil Couto has in a memorandum to PM Narendra Modi and home minister Rajnath Singh demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident. Couto also alleged that the police took a long time to react to the fire and were late in sending officers and forensic units to collect evidence.

Archbishop Couto, in his memorandum, demanded that the government must repair the building before Christmas, ensure that policemen guilty of dereliction of duty are punished and that special police investigation teams are set up to trace the guilty.

Members of various churches held a candle light vigil on Monday evening, and about 2,000 Christians protested outside the church on Tuesday morning.

A statement from the the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese said that the entire interior of the Catholic St Sebastian's Church, which was built in 2001, was reduced to ashes and that forensic samples retrieved from the inside of the church still smelt of fuel oil.

"The Christian community... and civil society have decided to protest at the offices of the police commissioner... to focus attention on the attempts to polarise the people in Delhi state, which goes to the polls soon, and the continued persecution of Christians in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and other tribal and rural areas," the press release added.

Several phone calls to police officials went unanswered.

One of the first to arrive on the scene, around 6.30 in the morning, was the parish priest, Father Antony Francis. Another priest of the church, Father Stanley, said that there was an overwhelming stench of kerosene in the entire church when he arrived there, and explained: "Traces of it could be seen floating on water with which fire tenders had flushed our church. Undoubtedly this was planned vandalism."

Local Christians, about 1,500 families, recall one instance of vandalism against the same church. "In 2010, this church was stoned by some people. We still don't know why. So this assault is not new but is still terribly upsetting," said Roby Matthews, a regular at St Sebastian's.

Persecution of Christians in India is not new but indeed recurring, amidst authorities' inaction. Below is just a very brief, incomplete sample of past attacks.

RECURRING ANTI-CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE IN INDIA

Only a few days ago, some 25 Hindu fighters broke into the Calvary Apostolic Church congregation in the town of Bangarapet, in southern India, during a Sunday church service.

The church was vandalised, and 8 worshippers were injured in the attack, some seriously.

"The whole scene of a mob assaulting my believers was shocking and very frightening," described Pastor Robert Solomon D'Souza. "First they destroyed the furniture in the church and then started beating up believers who were gathered in the church for worship."

In June, a couple was hacked to death after converting to Christianity.

Last March, a court in India found 3 people guilty over the rape of a Catholic nun. The nun was raped by a Hindu mob in Kandhamal district, Orissa state, in 2008, days after riots caused by the death of a Hindu religious leader.

Although Left-wing Maoist rebels in the state claimed responsibility for the killing, hard-line Hindu groups blamed the minority Christian community for the death.

More than 30 people were killed in the anti-Christian violence, dozens of churches and Christian institutions were vandalised, and clergymen attacked. More than 25,000 Christians were made homeless by the violence.

Further back in time, AP reports:

In 1999, an Australian missionary and his two sons, aged 8 and 10, were burned to death in their car in the eastern state of Orissa following a Bible study class. In 2007, violence against Christians flared again in Orissa, with at least 3 people killed.

Black Deaths Matter only if the Killer Is a White Cop

On 18 October, black 29-year-old Jermaine Jones was standing with a few friends on a street in Berkeley, next to Ferguson, Missouri, when he was shot dead.

Three witnesses - his black friends, also wounded - told the police that an unknown black male fired shots at them.

Jones’s sister, Margaree Dixson, was also fatally shot a half-mile away a few hours earlier, and the police suspect another unidentified black man for her murder too.

Why aren't Ferguson protesters who are holding banners saying "Black deaths matter" protesting these African-American siblings' deaths? Because they were caused by fellow blacks and not white cops.

Fox News contributor Deroy Murdock has created the chart above, based on FBI figures and research by University of Missouri–St. Louis criminologist and former LAPD officer David A. Klinger.

From 2003 through 2012, Klinger counts 1,265 murders in his city. In about 90% of cases the murder victims were black.

Among these 1,138 decedents, roughly 90 percent (1,025) were slain by other blacks. Klinger found 32 blacks killed by cops, with 22 of them shot dead by white officers. So, across 10 years, white cops killed a whopping 2 percent of St. Louis’s black homicide victims. Investigations indicated that all of these police killings were legally justified.​

“While I understand the people are concerned about the use of deadly force by the police, by far — about 50 to 1 — more blacks in St. Louis are killed by other blacks as compared to white police officers,” Klinger told KMOX-TV.

World's Worst Animal Sacrifice Is Hindu

We rightly criticise Islam, but in doing so we must not forget the barbarism of some other non-Christian religions.

While, after the coming of Jesus, in the parts of the world that adopted Christianity animal sacrifices have disappeared, they are still practised elsewhere to this day.

The largest-scale massacre of animals is not to be found in the Islamic world but - this may be a surprise for some - in Hiduism.

Perhaps we should think of this next time we hear that Eastern religions are good for animals.

What animal equality campaigners have called a "slaughterhouse under the open sky" and "the world's largest mass animal sacrifice" is a religious festival to honour the Hindu goddess of power Gandhimai, that was held over the weekend at her temple in the remote village of Bariyapur in Nepal, near the Indian border.

Sword-wielding Hindus poured into Bariyapur, where the Gadhimai killing started on Friday at midnight and lasted two days, Friday and Saturday.

On the previous occasion in 2009, the "festival" of blood attracted a million Hindu worshippers from India and Nepal and an estimated 300,000 animals were killed, either by having their heads chopped off or by having their throats slit. This year the number of animals massacred was expected to be over half a million.

It always begins with the ritual killing of five animals: a goat, rat, chicken, pig, and pigeon. Buffaloes are then slaughtered throughout the first day.

As animal campaigners say and common sense tells, the untrained butchers cause a great deal of suffering to animals.

On Friday, thousands of animals' dead bodies and severed heads started piling up in a large field near the village where devotees were carrying out the sacrifices. The reason for the bloodbath lies in the Hindu belief that the goddess Gadhimai, pleased through the suffering and death of these animals, will give their killers health and prosperity.

"It is very festive here, everyone is excited," maintained Mangal Chaudhary, the head priest at the slaughter site.

"It is very bloody... you can hear the animals moaning," Rameshwor Mehta, 50, who was waiting to offer his prayers, told the media.

Sita Ram Yadav, a 55-year-old farmer, said the atmosphere was "like a carnival". He added: "I am offering a goat to Gadhimai to keep my family safe. If you believe in her, she grants your wishes."

Manoj Shah, a 45-year-old Nepali driver who has been attending the event since he was 6, explained: "It is the traditional way. If we want anything, and we come here with an offering to the goddess, within 5 years all our dreams will be fulfilled."

Animal campaigners and human beings with a minimum of compassion have denounced the brutality with which thousands and thousands of animals find death in the Gadhimai festival.

The director of the Indian branch of the Humane Society International describes the scene thus: "Pools of blood, animals bellowing in pain and panic, wide-eyed children looking on, devotees covered in animal blood, and some people even drinking blood from the headless but still warm carcasses."

Animal Welfare Network Nepal was is in Bariyapur to protest against the barbaric ritual, while a campaign to ban the massacre has attracted support from British actress Joanna Lumley and French cinema legend Brigitte Bardot, who has petitioned Nepal's president to end the "cruel tradition" .