What is Rowling worth? Like most things to do with dough there is what you are told and then there’s the truth. Rumour has it that she earns 100 million quid every eight months. Whatever the actual figure you can take it that a lorryload of fivers is delivered to her door every month. That being the case why didn’t she settle with the family of the late Adrian Jacobs, whose work she stole, when she had the chance, before the whole shamozzle got out of hand? It is said Neil Gaiman who supplied the mere physical attributes of the hero and nothing else was paid a figure of 10 million quid. He denies it of course. Hard to prove one way or another but Rowling and her boys seem to be able to prove anything. How wonderful it must be to be able to lay claim to absolute truth on anything and have nearly everybody believe you too. The pope doesn’t get that! Idiots believe them too which is rather depressing we have to say. Jacobs’ case is “unsubstantiated, unfounded and untrue,” they tell you. We are in the land of heroic couplets with this sort of drivel. Rowling’s lawyers, Blair/Schillings, wrote the script. Bloomsbury came out with exact same cant when they were asked for a comment in the WTW London High Court case. Clever boys?

Adrian Jacobs’ family may even get a hearing if the Home Office doesn’t get in on the act and remind the judge that he is in bat for England as well as the law… and her image abroad… and all that. Students of the Widgery trial, that is now proven to be a sham after the recent apology by England for Bloody Sunday, will know what we mean.  What would the neighbours think if the canonized Rowling had feet of clay after all?

If we take leave to examine these words one by one we can see they amount to so much hot air, and we, The Bogside Artists, have heard them before and from the same source.

“UNSUBSTANTIATED”:  Means “unsupported”, “unverified”, “not factually proven.” (Encarta)
The Willy the Wizard people claim otherwise and have set up the actual writ they served on Scholastic Inc, New York for all to read. You can access it here;

http://thresq.hollywoodreporter.com/2010/07/harry-potter-willy-wizard.html

Seems to be a lot of substantiation there if you ask us!

“UNFOUNDED”:  Means  “Not supported by evidence”, “not established” (Encarta). More of the same don’t you think? Were it established it would be all over wouldn’t it? It seems clear that the Willy the Wizard people are seeking to establish their claims and will hopefully get their chance to do so in a court of law. This is begging the question isn’t it?  Begging the question means assuming  as already proven what you have set out to prove. People do that… lawyers mostly.

“UNTRUE”: A tricky one this. What is truth asked pilot of its Personification? He got no reply. In law you have to prove something to be true on the basis of evidence. Fair enough, even if many things are true for which there is no evidence and can be no evidence. This is also begging the question since if the claims were proven to be true there would be no ‘claims’ as such since the truth would already have been substantiated, proven and true.

What we are doing here is called thinking for oneself incidentally, a preoccupation much frowned upon by Harry Potter fans and fast becoming as obsolete as harpsichord recitals. Our conclusion? Rowling’s lawyers need a new script, one not designed to convince the gullible they have mastery of words and their usages when it is patently clear they do not. All three words amount to the same thing…  simply “unproven”. Proving is exactly what the WTW are trying to do and what Rowling’s wordsmiths are trying to prevent.

We are also totally convinced that the claims of made by the Willy the Wizard team are verifiably true. That means that Rowling and Little are lying in their teeth and this in turn raises the question… why didn’t they settle much earlier on when they had the chance? Then they would have had only us to deal with. And who is going to listen to us whistling in the dark when the very mountains tremble at the sound of Schillings and Blair? The answer to that is quite simple too. They are arrogant and stupid little people who have a blind faith in their ability to con whoever they want, whenever they want, however they want, as they have been doing for years.

We take this opportunity to make it public that our hat is in the arena with Willy the Wizard and its much sinned-against author Adrian Jacobs because we KNOW beyond any shadow of a doubt these men are telling the truth. We say this because we KNOW the true source of the story. As artists standing for freedom of expression we have no option but to tell the truth as it is known to us.  Not to do so is to lie by omission.

One of the greatest exponents of the uses and abuses of the media and the gullibility it thrives on was the late, great Malcolm Muggeridge. Here, in an essay on the “death-wish of liberalism’ he puts in a nutshell the mindset of the liberal “success-at-any-cost-to-others’ that is the basis of the Harry Potter plagiarisms.

Nobody dares question the mythic Rowling or her assertions any more than they once questioned the tyrannical oligarchy of the USSR. Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. But it is a salutary exercise to reflect on Rowling’s ‘idea-on-a-train’ nonsense not to mention her immaculate public image and indeed those of her elusive mentors and accomplices in light of the following:

I recall in their yellow jackets a famous collection in England called the Left Book Club. You would be amazed at the gullibility that’s expressed. We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most outrageous fantasy. We would tell them, for instance, that the shortage of milk in Moscow was entirely due to the fact that all milk was given nursing mothers – things like that. If they put it in the articles they subsequently wrote, then you’d score a point. One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn’t rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant. I never got over that; it always remained in my mind as something that could never be erased. I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media’s prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still. That’s when I began to think seriously about the great liberal death wish.

Way back in 2005 Sir Terry Pratchett observed the following in a letter concerning a BBC interview with Rowling which he considered suspect;

“And then there’s my question. Why didn’t the interviewer ask it? Here’s the world’s best-selling fantasy writer who has just said she hadn’t thought she was writing fantasy and also that she doesn’t really like the stuff. She goes on to say that she didn’t finish TLOTR or the Narnia series and has issues with Lewis. No problem there, but all this revelatory stuff just floated past, apparently unexamined. I’d like to know how an author can write in a genre she doesn’t like– really. I’d like to know what she thinks she *is* writing. “ (Terry Pratchett Published August 2, 2005.)  Sir Terence Pratchett is an extremely successful fantasy fiction writer.

NB; Without having heard of Pratchett we ourselves made exactly the same observation that you will find in one or several posts on this blog.

Pratchett who suffers from Alzheimer’s was royally pilloried for his intelligence. Pilloried let it be said from two sources – Rowling’s Private Army of bloggers and the establishment that, representing bourgeois interests in the publishing and media industries protect their ‘golden cow’ with a viciousness that would put the three-headed Cerberus to shame. Nobody of any note, to our knowledge, came out in Pratchett’s defense. (http://www.sfsignal.com). They attacked the man and ignored what he had said by means of what we have christened the “BLOGASMEAR”. (The blogasmear is a blog comment whose singular purpose is to discredit the commentator and his usually rational argument by discrediting him as a person. The devil’s work in other words.)  He was ‘jealous’. It was a case of “sour grapes”. And so on. Some of these were pitched in by the usual congregation of the Potter-Gullible who figure success is the only criterion of worth; and, of course, by the juvenile fantasists who have been told by Rowling-Little in so many words - “All you need my child is a good idea to come into your head, a pen and a jotter, and abracadabra! off you go to the land of wealth unimaginable.”  You have to pity parents who have to talk their kids out of this nonsense as much as you have to pity anyone who has bought into it.

Sadly, Pratchett like so many others has accepted much of the other drivel put out by Rowling’s PR men or he would have taken his observation to its logical conclusion viz; reason has clearly established that this woman Rowling is telling lies. Why would she do that? If she has told lies about her ignorance of what genre she was writing in, a lie that insults anyone with an IQ of three or under, just how many other lies has she told? Did she even write the stuff all by herself? And finally; …. where the hell did she steal it all from? Or how about…. Who is in it with her? Her pet hate is bigotry she informs us, to give one little instance, but that devoutly held principle clearly did not stop her insisting that nobody who was not a Brit was to work on her films. Indeed contradictions abound in Rowling’s remarks even those she scripted all by herself that make Pratchett’s sane remark wilt like a rose in methane by comparison. There are answers to all of these questions in existence if you are brave enough to step out of the ranks of the iconolaters to find them… and many of them are answered right here. Fans of Pratchett should at least give that author the respect of listening to him because his question remains hanging in the clouds for all to see.

Pratchett seems to have had about as much affect on the sane wing of British journalism as Moses had on the revelers cavorting around the Golden Calf. What deliberately obscures the whole issue of course is the belated doctrine of precedents that has been used by Rowling’s army to smokescreen the real issue – Plagiarism. “Belated’ is the key word in that sentence. Why prattle about precedents now? Why not way back then, say around book Two? Might it have something to do with the Willy The Wizard case that currently seeks a hearing in the High Court? 

Those who support plagiarism on principle would find it intolerable in practice if it happened to them that is; that’s if any of them was even capable of producing something good enough to be filched. None of them are although most of them we may assume believe they are. Or are they really so magnanimous in their views that they would happily send a congratulatory note to the burglar who ransacked their house commending him on his skill and knowledge of locks and praising his profound knowledge of lock precedents? Incredibly, among their ranks you will find respected journalists to whose deluded brains both Pratchett’s comments and our own have failed to gain admittance. Meanwhile, the great authoress who wrote diddly-squat prior to her magical visitation by an ‘idea’ if you please (indeed the first volume of Potter is a blatant attempt to present the hero as a mere ‘idea”), has her private army of bloggers to keep her safe from all menacing scrutiny. They have their lairs all over the net where they invite comments in order to filter out the enemies of Rowling-Little. Interpol has become Interpotter whose mission it is to hoodwink the public and protect Rowling from scrutiny by the use of fallacious argument, misinformation and downright lies. These manipulated idiots, paid and unpaid, have no problem coming out to bat for Rowling,… for Queen and Country? or have they simply sold their souls? Place your bets.

The Bogside Artists in any case will go on telling it as it is as we have been doing in paint and word for many years in dedicated protection of the one right that alone matters to any artist worth his or her salt…..FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Long may it be kept safe from the likes of Rowling-Little-Blair-Schillings et al.