Talk:Keston Institute

Right-wing front organisation
Like the UK's Taxpayers' Alliance, the Keston Institute is clearly a highly political, right-wing 'front' organisation, in blatant contravention of its charitable status. Rather than impartially studying the effects of totalitarian states on religion, as claimed, it clearly has always adopted a politically biased, right-wing approach to the matter. There is a strong bias towards attacking socialist, progressive regimes rather than focusing on the effect of right-wing politics in and on religion. This is shown in the Institute's latest newsletter, in the link, in which Vladimir Putin is portrayed in a positive light - a position unacceptably right-wing even by today's Conservative Party standards. It was also shown in the Institute's highly influential condemnation of 'psychiatric abuse' in communist regimes in the 20th century. As a result, 'psychiatric abuse' became a general byword, in English, for abuses of psychiatry under communist regimes. Somehow the widespread and much criticised abuses of psychiatry within Western states and satellites were, to this day, never deemed worthy of the same phrase - an odd, anomalous and irrational state of affairs. The Keston Institute has punched well above its weight, historically, playing a key role in disseminating anti-communist propaganda worldwide, and making London, Britain and the world more receptive to monetarist theory and totalitarian intolerance of socialism. It played a key role in undermining the Cold War global balance of power between political right and left, resulting in gradual mass disempowerment of electorates worldwide, and paving the way for the West's creation and funding of Islamist extremism in the name, ostensibly, of shared religious belief, but also, perhaps more tellingly, anti-communism.--5.150.92.174 (talk) 15:09, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

The London Borough of Bromley - the background
Keston is a small village in the London Borough of Bromley, a large, semi-rural borough on the south-eastern outskirts of Greater London. Altho included administratively within Greater London, Bromley retains some rustic practices and attitudes. It is dominated not only by the Conservative Party but by a species of Conservative that rebels constantly against the Party line as being, in its view, too 'soft,' too liberal. This does not necessarily reflect the views of the local electorate, which is kept in check by corrupt local institutions of the kind found in repressive states. It is sometimes observed that London boroughs are rather like small autonomous states, both in their populations and in the degree of difference observed between them when crossing local boundaries. Bromley's radical son, H.G.Wells, made a series of crusty remarks about his birthplace, perhaps reflecting the wider experience of local progressives historically. It was the London Borough of Bromley which led the way in experiments in the privatisation of council housing, key in a raft of privatisation policies never voted for nor approved by a majority of the British electorate, and opposed even by the overwhelming majority of Conservatives. The 'housing transfer' was effected legally by a 'vote' amongst the hapless local council tenants themselves, in a once-for-all 'election' resulting eventually in the loss of democratic control of the borough's social housing stock. The 'election' was of the type globally condemned in places like Cambodia and Tunisia, wherein most if not all of the available literature advocates one particular voting outcome. Thus Bromley has been a fulcrum for the undermining of democracy. It was in Bromley that local people started to notice friends and relatives coming away from local churches with strange, anti-progressive attitudes attributed eventually to the local influence of Keston College via the clergy. Had the Rev. Michael Bordeaux initiated his unilateral attack on the prevailing world order a few miles away in rural Kent, he might more easily have been dismissed as a rustic crank, but Bromley's relatively recent and incomplete inclusion within the metropolis no doubt acted as a sort of magnifying prism, giving indirect access to the global zeitgeist. The area now covered by the LBB also has a dark history going back to Elizabethan times. It was at Scadbury that Thomas Walsingham, 'England's first intelligence mastermind,' had his manor. It was Walsingham who effected the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, by allegedly uncovering the Babington Plot to release her from captivity. Historians tend to overlook the fact that the reality of the Babington Plot depends entirely on the say-so of England's nascent intelligence agency and its first master, in an era when false confessions were routinely obtained by torture. The writer Christopher Marlowe was a guest at Scadbury Manor prior to his mysterious murder. The Manor, like a number of local buildings critical to popular history (the Crystal Palace, High Elms mansion, Cane Hill Hospital, the Robin Hood, Holy Trinity Church), was mysteriously burnt down.--5.150.92.174 (talk) 15:04, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Veracity, context and balance
No-one is disputing the reality of the Keston Institute's accusations against communist regimes, which are in the broader context of Third World governance and repression (altho, as mentioned above, 'First World' governance sometimmes leaves something to be desired). What is at issue is the Institute's selective focus on those regimes and the predictable effect thereof on on popular thought, politics and culture. The Keston Institute spread alarm and panic about Soviet excesses at a time when the public were (as they remain) largely ignorant of Franco's genocidal labour camps, for example, or CIA involvement in undermining democracy in Latin America and Africa. Religious people are particularly prone to denial of political content and bias in their focus, a state of affairs engendered partly by religion itself, with its peculiar meandering between de facto political content and apolitical pretensions, and partly by the individuals' plausible and key belief, in many cases, that they have chosen an apolitical lifestyle.--5.150.92.174 (talk) 11:38, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

The Rev. Michael Bordeaux
So why is this particular Church of England priest at first hidden then conspicuous in his politics and opposition to the left? Perhaps because he is very much part of an Oxford-based elite who disproportionately dominate British affairs thru a combination of methods and attributes: supreme self-confidence, an effective mutual support network, and the use of 'the Queen's English' in a rather indomitable, hectoring tone ('ra-ra-ra-ra') calculated to dismay and rattle all opposition. Along with the Russian language, the use of concealed influence was no doubt a factor in his wartime spy training, a skill he has come close to mastering.--5.150.92.174 (talk) 11:47, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

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 * What role did they play in the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, where, when and how, what does this even mean? Цйфыву (talk) 22:44, 6 September 2022 (UTC)