Dan Atkinson is an interesting writer on economics. He writes for the Mail on Sunday, but also co-writes with the Guardian's llead economics writer Larry Elliot. Their book 'Fantasy Island' was a frightenly prescient work and their rather bleak world view has been largely vindicated by recent events (much more on the money than Anatole Kaletsky for example, who although very intelligent, has in my opinion been discredited by the turn of events in the global economy).
Dan Atkinson has written a thought provoking article on the ramifications of the recent financial storms shaking the US and UK:
"The week that China began to rule the world
By DAN ATKINSON
Just as the first guns of August 1914 blew away a world dominated by the European empires, so may the past nine days of sheer madness in the financial markets have marked the point at which the established developed economies - of which the United States is the undisputed leader - lost control of the world economy and its future.
Despite all the talk of a 'global financial crisis', the convulsions that began in August 2007 and have shaken us ever more violently since have been concentrated in the so-called Anglo-Saxon economies - chiefly Britain and America.
It is a 'global crisis' only in the sense that a baseball competition that comprises mainly Americans is the 'World Series'.
NEW ORDER: The crisis has shifted the balance of power on Wall Street in China's favour
To admirers, these are the go-getting economies that have been happy to see bog-standard activities, such as manufacturing, mining and agriculture, emigrate to the developing world while concentrating on financial services and the 'creative' industries such as advertising, film-making, music and the media.
To critics, they are the 'Ponzi economies', so-named after American fraudster Charles Ponzi whose 'investment' scheme paid returns to existing members not from successful investments but out of the subscriptions of new members.
Britain, America and, to a lesser extent, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and others have become addicted to debt.
This addiction has been fed by a financial services industry bloated to many times its natural size, and itself in need of huge amounts of borrowed money. The City and Wall Street, having asset-stripped domestic industry, set about lending consumers the money to buy imported goods that we no longer make.
In a final twist, the money is often borrowed from the same countries, such as China, that are selling us the goods.
The Anglo-Saxon economies, say the critics, are in the position of the dissolute aristocrat who can wear fine clothes for only as long as his tailor is willing to offer credit. At some point, the tailor is going to want cash.
Actually, after recent events, it does not much matter whether one is a critic or not.
The Anglo-Saxon model of turbo-charged finance, minimal banking regulation, gung-ho borrowing and ever-more-complex 'financial securities' has crashed into insolvency on both sides of the Atlantic as surely as any ill-advised business venture.
Northern Rock's nationalisation in February was merely the starter course in what has turned into a banquet of bail-outs.
US mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken into public ownership, lumbering taxpayers with £3trillion of liabilities, all on top of tens of billions of pounds of 'liquidity' (money, to the rest of us) supplied on easy terms by the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Board to the very people who got us into the mess in the first place --the banks and others.
On Friday came the showstopper - that fervent new convert to the socialist cause, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, announced another wave of nationalisations.
Not of institutions, this time, but of the reeking sewage in Wall Street's stables - the estimated £1trillion-plus of bad debt sitting on banks' balance sheets as a result of their own reckless greed in lending to 'sub-prime' borrowers who were unable to repay.
Having learned of this latest example of the sort of government interference that they supposedly detest, the Masters of the Universe in London and New York jumped for joy and share prices rocketed.
Like very much better-paid versions of British Leyland workers in the Seventies, bankers and brokers took the arrival of taxpayers' money as the signal to return to their bad old ways - in this case an addiction to inflated asset prices.
With Mr Paulson, his boss President George Bush and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke tossing the trillions around in a casual manner - and Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown and the Bank of England Governor Mervyn King acting similarly but on a smaller scale over here - it would be tempting to see these emergency measures as a show of strength. But chronic weakness is at the root of the 'rescue packages', in two ways.
First, they are as much about looking after Britain and America's creditors as about protecting ordinary British or American people. In return for their goods, China and other developing economies have taken vast amounts of sterling and dollar denominated paper - shares, currency, bonds - whose value they naturally wish to see preserved.
As with any other creditors, they want to know their money is safe. And to make it so, Britain and, particularly, America have piled up yet more borrowing.
Like spendthrifts shifting debts from one credit card to another, the Anglo-Saxon economies are on the fast track to ruin.
Second, and perhaps more important in the long run, the deeper weakness disclosed by the colossal bail-outs is that neither Britain nor America really believes in its own economic ideas any more.
When the chips are down, no one, not bankers or brokers, Ministers or officials, really thinks that the financial markets know best.
No, this is not a 'global financial crisis' - it is a crisis that hurts countries in relation to how close they moved to the Anglo-American model in which the financial tail wags the industrial dog.
Yet the sun is probably setting even in the less indebted and more productive developed countries such as Japan and Germany.
The dominance of the Group of Seven countries - America, Britain, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and Canada - is no more guaranteed than was that of the pre-1914 British Empire.
Indeed, it was only a few hundred years ago that China, India and the Middle East were global players, while Europe was a backward, disease-ridden region on the edge of the world.
As Europe expanded it was thought to be the weakness of the 'mysterious' East that it was good at weaving carpets, writing poetry and the like, whereas the 'practical' West was good at making things.
The current British notion of a 'creative economy' turns this on its head.
Ultimately, however, our own weakness has less to do with the work we do than with one simple four-letter word - debt. It is because we and the Americans owe so much money that power and influence are slipping away from us to our creditors.
There was an early warning of this on the evening of October 19 last year in Washington, when the G7 finance ministers invited to dinner a number of developing countries that operate so-called sovereign wealth funds.
These are, effectively, government-run investment schemes that offend against G7 notions of free enterprise - or did, before the above mentioned nationalisation spree.
The G7 rather hoped that these countries would sign up to a code of conduct that would force them to act like ordinary commercial investors.
Chillingly for the developed countries, the dinner guests were uninterested in the views of their hosts (and, mainly, debtors) whom they more or less ignored.
As for the nine days that have just gone by, the bad news is that they have shown the British and Americans vainly trying to shore up a mountain of debt with what amounts to more debt.
The good news? These nine days may well be studied in the schools of the future as the moment when there was an irreversible global power shift.
If so, take heart - you are living through history.
The only problem is that, from now on, you and your leaders no longer control it."
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Our political parties are corpses and democracy as we used to know it is quite dead - Peter Hitchens
Peter Hitchens on what he views as the centre left's domination of British politics:
Our political parties are corpses and democracy as we used to know it is quite dead
Peter Hitchens
I expect the Labour conference this week will be very like a funeral I once attended, in ice-cold rain, under black skies, in the shadow of a Victorian prison, where the heavy clay soil was so wet that the grave had to be held open with steel props in case it closed up with a gigantic squelch before the final prayers were over.
In short, it will be so gloomy that it will almost be funny.
Like the world banking system, Labour has gone belly up and can survive only if it is rescued by outsiders and entirely rebuilt.
What’s more, this is the second time this has happened to the decrepit party in two decades.
Two years ago, it seemed invincible and it was the Tories who were a despised and failed brand.
Now it’s indefensible and the Tories have mysteriously become, if not popular, then bearable. What happened? Why the sudden, violent swing?
The cold, miserable truth is that both our major political parties are corpses, their original purposes long forgotten, their loyal members driven away or sidelined, their traditional voters taken for granted.
Every so often, by a mysterious process, one of them is declared electable and the other is declared unelectable.
And we, the voters, do as we are told. By whom? For what purpose?
Labour really died around 1983, in the years of Michael Foot.
It was then invaded by young men and women, sometimes smirking, sometimes scowling, bleeping with the latest electronic devices and attired in costly suits, accompanied by spivs with suitcases of bank notes.
It was like watching a stately, traditional company being taken over by asset-strippers.
Its older inhabitants underwent a callous process of humiliation and scorn, while its honoured brand-name was turned to other uses by people who had never much liked it anyway.
Now that’s over. What began in the age of the bleeper has ended in the age of the BlackBerry.
The costly suits and the dodgy donors have migrated, for the moment, to the Tory Party. Who knows where they will go next? Back to Labour? Or somewhere else?
Funnily enough, those Tories who have much of a memory will remember their party’s similar death.
They will recall Blackpool in the autumn of 2003 - unbelievably, only five years ago - when poor Iain Duncan Smith sat alone, much as Gordon Brown does now, listening to the whispers of a thousand plotters planning to get rid of him.
He knew, as Mr Brown does, that he was finished.
But, as the son of a Spitfire ace who had himself been raised in the military code, he saw no honourable way to go except to wait for his enemies to come and kill him. This they duly did.
The assassination of IDS was one of the strangest and most important moments in British politics.
IDS did actually represent the force and mind of the Tory Party, bewildered and demoralised, after its wholly unjust 2001 defeat.
He became leader because none of the supposed ‘big beasts’ of Toryism liked Tory voters or party members, or shared their views.
And most of the medium-sized beasts preferred to go away and make some money, rather than have pails of lukewarm swill chucked over them by a media who were then wholly in the pocket of New Labour, just as they are now in David Cameron’s pocket.
What happened next is so fascinating that everyone missed its significance.
The Michael Howard palace revolution against IDS was a blatant takeover of a Right-wing party by the ‘Centre-Left’ establishment.
It was played out almost entirely on the airwaves and in the newspapers. MPs did what they were told by the media.
It was made easier because the ‘Centre-Left’ media have always inaccurately portrayed Mr Howard as being Right-wing.
He isn’t. He is actually a conventionally liberal career politician of the sort you find near the top of both big parties.
After IDS had been utterly destroyed, it was made plain to all Tory MPs (with the help of the media elite) that they had better not stand against Mr Howard for the leadership.
So nobody did. And he was ‘elected’ unopposed in a way that makes Vladimir Putin look like a fervent democrat.
Compare the absence of media fuss about this with the bitter media condemnation of Labour for installing Gordon Brown without a vote.
The Tory Party had been put into receivership. Its supposed owners - those who voted for it and supported it - had lost control over it.
The ‘Centre-Left’ establishment, Britain’s permanent government of media types, politicised moneybags and their approved pundits, had taken over, and their task was to make it as unconservative as possible, as quickly as possible.
Mr Howard made it plain that his coronation was the end of anything remotely Right-wing.
He ruthlessly sacked two candidates, Danny Kruger in Sedgefield and Adrian Hilton in Slough, for making apparently Right-wing remarks that could be (and of course were) misrepresented in the ‘Centre-Left’ media.
Then he went a great deal further, and sacked Howard Flight, the serving MP for Arundel, for a similar offence.
Mr Howard almost certainly had no legal power to do this, but once again the ‘Centre-Left’ media decided it was not a scandal.
The imposition of the liberal careerist David Cameron on the Tory Party, once Michael Howard had finished being the establishment’s caretaker, was also achieved by the ‘Centre-Left’ media.
They adopted Mr Cameron as their candidate and propelled him to victory despite a very poor start to his campaign and an equally poor performance on live TV, later on, up against his more conservative rival, David Davis.
You’ll notice that it is the same people, that ‘Centre-Left’ combo of media types, who did a similar job on the Labour Party back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Interestingly, that revolution was much more about image than about reality.
The Tories have genuinely dropped most of their remaining conservative positions.
Labour remains a very Left-wing party. Most of its radical 1983 manifesto has in fact now been implemented, though in more subtle ways.
The only lasting deep change in Labour policy since the Eighties has been the party’s lobotomised conversion to support for the EU and globalism in general.
Nationalisation hadn’t mattered for years, the old industrial unions were as dead as the industries they helped to ruin, and the H-Bomb wasn’t an issue any more.
Labour’s real ‘Clause Four’ - its bilious hatred of selective state schools - remains untouched. What’s more, it has now been openly adopted by the Tories as well.
The rule nowadays is that you cannot become the government unless you bow to the views of the ‘Centre-Left’ media elite, especially the broadcast media elite.
That elite speaks for the 1968 generation which fanned out in the Seventies into the civil service, education, entertainment, the law, the arts, rock music and - above all - the media.
We no longer have elections where two evenly matched parties go into a fair contest with competing ideas and it is over only when the last vote is counted.
Instead, we have wild swings in which the approved party goes into the Election with a giant poll lead and then wins the Election with a mad, crushingly enormous majority over the unapproved party.
And the winner is always the ‘Centre-Left’, which claims to be moderate but is in fact a swirling cauldron of wild Sixties Leftism - anti-British, anti-family, anti-Christian, anti-education and pro-crime.
But if you dare to oppose this stuff, they’ll call you an extremist.
British democracy, as we used to know it, is quite dead. It just needs to have a new funeral every few years.
Our political parties are corpses and democracy as we used to know it is quite dead
Peter Hitchens
I expect the Labour conference this week will be very like a funeral I once attended, in ice-cold rain, under black skies, in the shadow of a Victorian prison, where the heavy clay soil was so wet that the grave had to be held open with steel props in case it closed up with a gigantic squelch before the final prayers were over.
In short, it will be so gloomy that it will almost be funny.
Like the world banking system, Labour has gone belly up and can survive only if it is rescued by outsiders and entirely rebuilt.
What’s more, this is the second time this has happened to the decrepit party in two decades.
Two years ago, it seemed invincible and it was the Tories who were a despised and failed brand.
Now it’s indefensible and the Tories have mysteriously become, if not popular, then bearable. What happened? Why the sudden, violent swing?
The cold, miserable truth is that both our major political parties are corpses, their original purposes long forgotten, their loyal members driven away or sidelined, their traditional voters taken for granted.
Every so often, by a mysterious process, one of them is declared electable and the other is declared unelectable.
And we, the voters, do as we are told. By whom? For what purpose?
Labour really died around 1983, in the years of Michael Foot.
It was then invaded by young men and women, sometimes smirking, sometimes scowling, bleeping with the latest electronic devices and attired in costly suits, accompanied by spivs with suitcases of bank notes.
It was like watching a stately, traditional company being taken over by asset-strippers.
Its older inhabitants underwent a callous process of humiliation and scorn, while its honoured brand-name was turned to other uses by people who had never much liked it anyway.
Now that’s over. What began in the age of the bleeper has ended in the age of the BlackBerry.
The costly suits and the dodgy donors have migrated, for the moment, to the Tory Party. Who knows where they will go next? Back to Labour? Or somewhere else?
Funnily enough, those Tories who have much of a memory will remember their party’s similar death.
They will recall Blackpool in the autumn of 2003 - unbelievably, only five years ago - when poor Iain Duncan Smith sat alone, much as Gordon Brown does now, listening to the whispers of a thousand plotters planning to get rid of him.
He knew, as Mr Brown does, that he was finished.
But, as the son of a Spitfire ace who had himself been raised in the military code, he saw no honourable way to go except to wait for his enemies to come and kill him. This they duly did.
The assassination of IDS was one of the strangest and most important moments in British politics.
IDS did actually represent the force and mind of the Tory Party, bewildered and demoralised, after its wholly unjust 2001 defeat.
He became leader because none of the supposed ‘big beasts’ of Toryism liked Tory voters or party members, or shared their views.
And most of the medium-sized beasts preferred to go away and make some money, rather than have pails of lukewarm swill chucked over them by a media who were then wholly in the pocket of New Labour, just as they are now in David Cameron’s pocket.
What happened next is so fascinating that everyone missed its significance.
The Michael Howard palace revolution against IDS was a blatant takeover of a Right-wing party by the ‘Centre-Left’ establishment.
It was played out almost entirely on the airwaves and in the newspapers. MPs did what they were told by the media.
It was made easier because the ‘Centre-Left’ media have always inaccurately portrayed Mr Howard as being Right-wing.
He isn’t. He is actually a conventionally liberal career politician of the sort you find near the top of both big parties.
After IDS had been utterly destroyed, it was made plain to all Tory MPs (with the help of the media elite) that they had better not stand against Mr Howard for the leadership.
So nobody did. And he was ‘elected’ unopposed in a way that makes Vladimir Putin look like a fervent democrat.
Compare the absence of media fuss about this with the bitter media condemnation of Labour for installing Gordon Brown without a vote.
The Tory Party had been put into receivership. Its supposed owners - those who voted for it and supported it - had lost control over it.
The ‘Centre-Left’ establishment, Britain’s permanent government of media types, politicised moneybags and their approved pundits, had taken over, and their task was to make it as unconservative as possible, as quickly as possible.
Mr Howard made it plain that his coronation was the end of anything remotely Right-wing.
He ruthlessly sacked two candidates, Danny Kruger in Sedgefield and Adrian Hilton in Slough, for making apparently Right-wing remarks that could be (and of course were) misrepresented in the ‘Centre-Left’ media.
Then he went a great deal further, and sacked Howard Flight, the serving MP for Arundel, for a similar offence.
Mr Howard almost certainly had no legal power to do this, but once again the ‘Centre-Left’ media decided it was not a scandal.
The imposition of the liberal careerist David Cameron on the Tory Party, once Michael Howard had finished being the establishment’s caretaker, was also achieved by the ‘Centre-Left’ media.
They adopted Mr Cameron as their candidate and propelled him to victory despite a very poor start to his campaign and an equally poor performance on live TV, later on, up against his more conservative rival, David Davis.
You’ll notice that it is the same people, that ‘Centre-Left’ combo of media types, who did a similar job on the Labour Party back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Interestingly, that revolution was much more about image than about reality.
The Tories have genuinely dropped most of their remaining conservative positions.
Labour remains a very Left-wing party. Most of its radical 1983 manifesto has in fact now been implemented, though in more subtle ways.
The only lasting deep change in Labour policy since the Eighties has been the party’s lobotomised conversion to support for the EU and globalism in general.
Nationalisation hadn’t mattered for years, the old industrial unions were as dead as the industries they helped to ruin, and the H-Bomb wasn’t an issue any more.
Labour’s real ‘Clause Four’ - its bilious hatred of selective state schools - remains untouched. What’s more, it has now been openly adopted by the Tories as well.
The rule nowadays is that you cannot become the government unless you bow to the views of the ‘Centre-Left’ media elite, especially the broadcast media elite.
That elite speaks for the 1968 generation which fanned out in the Seventies into the civil service, education, entertainment, the law, the arts, rock music and - above all - the media.
We no longer have elections where two evenly matched parties go into a fair contest with competing ideas and it is over only when the last vote is counted.
Instead, we have wild swings in which the approved party goes into the Election with a giant poll lead and then wins the Election with a mad, crushingly enormous majority over the unapproved party.
And the winner is always the ‘Centre-Left’, which claims to be moderate but is in fact a swirling cauldron of wild Sixties Leftism - anti-British, anti-family, anti-Christian, anti-education and pro-crime.
But if you dare to oppose this stuff, they’ll call you an extremist.
British democracy, as we used to know it, is quite dead. It just needs to have a new funeral every few years.
Zionism: A Conservative Defense - Peter Hitchens
Peter Hitchens writes a nuanced, complex and provocative defense of Zionism based on conservative principles (worth reading in full):
Zionism: A Defense
A prominent conservative argues that cultural and political kinship make Israel the West’s natural ally.
Peter Hitchens
Conservatives should support the State of Israel on principle, just as the globalist Left seeks to defeat Zionism on principle. The legions of political correctness would usually approve of a state founded as the result of a classic “national liberation” struggle against a classic “colonial oppressor” and ought to endorse a country so profoundly secular in so many of its institutions and so dominated by social-democratic political and cultural thinking. Especially, they should be enthusiastic about a nation whose whole reason for existence is profoundly anti-racist.
But they don’t and they aren’t. The Left will readily forgive Irish Republicans for terror and even for Catholicism. They remain sentimental about Fidel Castro despite the show trials and the dungeons. They will pardon South Africa almost everything, including an incorrect attitude towards AIDS. But all the categories flip over and upside down when it comes to Israel and Zionism. Why? Here are some suggestions, offered in the spirit of inquiry.
Despite its socialist appearance—kibbutzes, female soldiers, and the rest—Zionism is a profoundly conservative idea, based on the re-creation of an ancient nation and culture. It is also globally conservative, requiring a definite and uncompromising form of national sovereignty and an implicit rejection of multiculturalism. Israel stands—alone in its region—for placing the rule of law above the rule of power. Its destruction would be a disaster for what remains of the civilized world. Yet it has never been so threatened.
The recent Iraq war has done substantial damage to Israel’s hopes of survival, damage that was implicit in the pro-war case from the start. Those Zionists who supported the war made a serious mistake. The marketers of political and diplomatic cliché have expressed surprise that George W. Bush fulfilled his earlier pledge to pursue the road map to peace. How wrong they were. Even as the doomed Abu Mazen is carted off the stage in a bruised heap, the absurd effort to find a Palestinian Authority chieftain who both has any power and believes in compromise continues. If they had been paying attention, they would have realized that the globalist faction in the Republican Party has for many years been ready to sacrifice Israel in return for a settlement with the Muslim world.
It is strange how few have put together the two most frightening events of the year 2001, even though they took place within days of each other. The first was the Durban conference of the United Nations, supposedly “against racism.” The Muslim world chose to turn this gathering into a scream of hatred against Israel and against its protector America, so much so that the U.S. and Israeli delegations walked out. Just a few days later came the attack of Sept. 11. It has always interested me that this event was swiftly followed by, of all things, the payment of America’s back dues to the UN and the first open White House declaration of support for a Palestinian state. The War on Terror was strangely irrelevant to what had actually happened, with its clumsy ill-directed blows against Afghanistan and Iraq and its embarrassed refusal to confront Saudi involvement in terror or notice Palestinian street celebrations of the Manhattan massacre.
The alteration in policy towards Israel and the amazing pressure that must have been put on Ariel Sharon to swap his mailed club for an olive branch are by contrast real, accurately directed, and vastly significant. The trouble is, they are acts of appeasement rather than of resolution. This is serious, and if Washington is wrong (as I believe it is) about the Palestinian cause’s real capacity for compromise, it will turn out to be a grave step towards the dissolution of the Israeli state—not by frontal military action but by demoralization, destabilization, and de-legitimization.
The Israeli state has many flaws that only a fool would deny. Terrorists, still not fully disowned and in some cases actually revered, were prominent in its establishment and then in its governing class. It has engaged in pre-emptive war and has driven people from their homes through fear and massacre. Some of its responses to terrorist attack have been clumsy, lazy, and incompetent. Its present Prime Minister is severely tainted by indefensibly ruthless and inhumane past actions. Its political system is designed to enthrone factions, some of them repellent. The most important fault of all is that Israel should never have been founded, and should never have needed to be founded. But this last fault is an involuntary one, and is the reason for many of the country’s other troubles. It is no good blaming Israel for existing when its foundation was a desperate response to mechanized racial murder. Nor is it any good for supporters or opponents of modern Israel to pretend that the National Socialist massacre of Jews did not change the argument about Zionism for as far ahead as it is possible to look.
If the world were as liberal idealists imagine, Zionism ought to have been forgotten long ago as a foolish idea, a cranky and hopeless project as unrealistic as Esperanto. And if mankind were ruled by reason, then Zionism would indeed have gone the way of Esperanto. You might have thought that secularism, by making Judaism a matter of involuntary race rather than one of voluntary religion, would have resulted in near-total integration and assimilation. This did not happen. The opposite did. It is therefore important to remember that most right-thinking people believed with utter certainty that assimilation would happen and Zionism would fail. They believed this, during the years before 1914, in a period of history similar to our own because of its illusory stability and its materialist optimism. They continued to believe it in an era similar to the one we are just entering, the years of nervous anticipation and fear of war between 1918 and 1939.
The projected “National Home for the Jews” endorsed by Britain in 1917 was never intended to become a nation. It was to be part of the British Empire, not ruling itself but governed benignly from London, a permanent way station on the proposed land-route to India and a glacis protecting the Suez Canal from any power that threatened it from the north. The British Empire accepted the Zionist scheme because it provided Britain with an excuse to straddle one of the most important pieces of strategic property in the world.
This arrangement would have safeguarded the Arab peoples already living in the neglected Ottoman sanjaks that were arbitrarily glued together to form the Palestine Mandate, an entity even more artificial than Iraq. Under British government, Arabs were not given the right to rule Jews, and Jews were not given the right to rule Arabs.
When the idea was first put forward, there was plenty of room for both peoples within wide frontiers. For at that stage nobody had planned to set up the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which first came to birth as the Emirate of Transjordan, hacked in a hurry out of the original Mandate. This was another accident along the way, following the diplomatic game of pass-the-parcel, which began when the French ejected the British client “King” Faisal from Syria in July 1920. They had won the territory at the peace conference and did not share T.E. Lawrence’s enthusiasm for Hashemite chieftains.
To console Faisal, London gave him the throne of Iraq instead, inaugurating another permanent crisis. This displaced his brother Abdullah, who had originally been promised the Baghdad throne. Abdullah, a monarch with no realm, urgently needed another kingdom to reign over. He complained noisily and was given Transjordan to soothe his wounded feelings. Thus three-quarters of the original Palestine Mandate, the entire area east of the river Jordan, was snatched away from the projected “National Home” before it had even begun. The famous West Bank was seized illegally by Transjordan in 1948, allowing that country to change its name to Jordan. So when Israel occupied it in 1967, it merely passed from one illegal occupier to another. Though it is not widely known, this very area was originally designated for “close Jewish settlement” at the San Remo Accords, which defined the original Mandate and which remain the only agreed international document defining sovereignty over this territory. Even the Golan Heights, now claimed righteously by Syria, were originally within the Mandate and became part of Syria in later Anglo-French horse-trading.
There is a general assumption that Israel at some point stole its territory from a legitimate Arab state. Many of Israel’s critics seem to believe that there was at one stage a sovereign country called “Palestine” out of which the Jewish nation was unfairly carved. But no such country ever existed; Palestine was never the name of anything but a Roman province. The only previous title—for so many centuries that it had no real rival claimant—had belonged to the Ottoman Empire. From the Ottomans it passed directly to the British. When Britain, bankrupt and demoralized, scuttled from the region in 1948, Israel grabbed as much as it could of this dubious legacy. Arab armies in turn seized as much as they could.
Israelis unquestionably perpetrated unforgivable massacres and drove people from their homes. Had things gone the other way, there would have been other massacres, other refugees. Wilsonian ideals of national self-determination can take on a blood-stained tinge, just as much as imperialism, if not more so. When a colonial power vacates a disputed territory, such horrors are likely. But this was in 1948, a year after the partition of India and Pakistan, another shameful scuttle by Britain. All the refugees from that vast upheaval have found new homes. It also came shortly after the expulsion of millions of Germans from East Prussia, the Czech lands, and from Western Poland. Those dispossessed in these savage deportations have long since resettled, and no serious movement demands their return home. Why, uniquely, are the Arab refugees of 1948 still the focus of international demands for the restoration of lost lands?
There is one key difference that keeps this issue alive, especially on the Left, which mostly has not even heard of the German expulsions and would probably defend them if it had. Israel is not like other countries because it is a Western nation carved out of Middle Eastern territory. This leads us to the uncomfortable truth—unwelcome to modern Zionists who shudder visibly at any mention of the word—that Israel is the last major European imperial colony on the face of the earth. In its struggle for survival in a world that already has enough reasons for disapproving of it, modern Israel has sought to stifle such thoughts.
But a European colony it is. What distinguishes Israel from its Arab neighbors is no longer its general prosperity and physical modernity. Oil has evened up these differences in the past decade, and, while serious squalor persists in many Arab countries, so do middle-class comfort and good, functioning services. The difference runs much deeper. Israel’s people are European by culture and law, imposing that culture and law on a region where cousin marriage and tribal loyalty are normal, while pluralism, tolerance, party politics, and the rule of law are abnormal. In this, the new state is the direct heir of the British officers who governed the area as undisguised colonists between the two global wars—and from whom it has inherited much of its legal system, not to mention a chain of imperial fortresses still used by the Israeli army.
This makes Israel the permanent ally, in the Middle East, of the world’s lawful and free countries. This alliance is based on cultural and political kinship, factors that cannot be altered by a tyrant’s death or a coup d’état. Washington may be able to buy the friendship of one Arab or Muslim regime or another with arms and cash. But as soon as that regime falls, the investment of years is wasted if the new rulers are hostile.
I suspect this difference, far more than the ethnic and religious ones, arouses the hostility of Arab regimes. We do not really know what the Arab and Muslim peoples think, since such states do not have free public opinion as we know it. We do know that an ugly anti-Semitism previously largely unknown in the Middle East, has been deliberately and crudely encouraged by Arab regimes trying to find an outlet for the justified discontents of their own poor. We also know that there has been no desire for permanent compromise and genuine peace between even the supposedly moderate Arab regimes and Israel. The state of relations between Israel and Egypt, for instance, is frigid, nervous, and held in place mainly by American subsidies, and this despite Israel’s handover of territory of enormous strategic value. In fact, the Israeli-Egypt “peace,” artificial and without friendship between governments or peoples, is a standing warning to those who fantasize about a “new Middle East” or a harmonious two-state solution.
The hostility is bitter, kept alive by semi-official and official media and, in a nasty new development, it is now often crudely racialist, though nobody is supposed to mention this. The Western Left would drive a Holocaust-denier from any campus that employed him, but the thought police who search the minds of their domestic opponents are unmoved by the blatant anti-Semitism of the Arab terror organizations. Many who denounce Islam for its intolerance draw back from this condemnation when that intolerance is directed against Zionists. By a peculiar process of mental dishonesty so outrageous that it works, Zionism is often equated directly with German National Socialism by critics of Israel. The only reason for this absurd, disproportionate, and cynical claim is that it neutralizes the fundamental case for Zionism, namely that Germany’s policy of systematic massacre was unique, and that the Jewish case for a Jewish sovereign state is therefore unique.
Conservatism is realistic, honest, consistent, and opposed to cant. It takes the side of the particular and the ancient. It sees virtues in Western civilization against its rivals. It penetrates the disguises in which history advances itself and is not fooled by passing appearances. It does not seek perfection, but it does try to be principled. On all these grounds, and because that country is threatened as never before by shallow and ill-considered idealism, conservatism should consider Israel an ally.
______________________________________________
Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the London Mail on Sunday.
Zionism: A Defense
A prominent conservative argues that cultural and political kinship make Israel the West’s natural ally.
Peter Hitchens
Conservatives should support the State of Israel on principle, just as the globalist Left seeks to defeat Zionism on principle. The legions of political correctness would usually approve of a state founded as the result of a classic “national liberation” struggle against a classic “colonial oppressor” and ought to endorse a country so profoundly secular in so many of its institutions and so dominated by social-democratic political and cultural thinking. Especially, they should be enthusiastic about a nation whose whole reason for existence is profoundly anti-racist.
But they don’t and they aren’t. The Left will readily forgive Irish Republicans for terror and even for Catholicism. They remain sentimental about Fidel Castro despite the show trials and the dungeons. They will pardon South Africa almost everything, including an incorrect attitude towards AIDS. But all the categories flip over and upside down when it comes to Israel and Zionism. Why? Here are some suggestions, offered in the spirit of inquiry.
Despite its socialist appearance—kibbutzes, female soldiers, and the rest—Zionism is a profoundly conservative idea, based on the re-creation of an ancient nation and culture. It is also globally conservative, requiring a definite and uncompromising form of national sovereignty and an implicit rejection of multiculturalism. Israel stands—alone in its region—for placing the rule of law above the rule of power. Its destruction would be a disaster for what remains of the civilized world. Yet it has never been so threatened.
The recent Iraq war has done substantial damage to Israel’s hopes of survival, damage that was implicit in the pro-war case from the start. Those Zionists who supported the war made a serious mistake. The marketers of political and diplomatic cliché have expressed surprise that George W. Bush fulfilled his earlier pledge to pursue the road map to peace. How wrong they were. Even as the doomed Abu Mazen is carted off the stage in a bruised heap, the absurd effort to find a Palestinian Authority chieftain who both has any power and believes in compromise continues. If they had been paying attention, they would have realized that the globalist faction in the Republican Party has for many years been ready to sacrifice Israel in return for a settlement with the Muslim world.
It is strange how few have put together the two most frightening events of the year 2001, even though they took place within days of each other. The first was the Durban conference of the United Nations, supposedly “against racism.” The Muslim world chose to turn this gathering into a scream of hatred against Israel and against its protector America, so much so that the U.S. and Israeli delegations walked out. Just a few days later came the attack of Sept. 11. It has always interested me that this event was swiftly followed by, of all things, the payment of America’s back dues to the UN and the first open White House declaration of support for a Palestinian state. The War on Terror was strangely irrelevant to what had actually happened, with its clumsy ill-directed blows against Afghanistan and Iraq and its embarrassed refusal to confront Saudi involvement in terror or notice Palestinian street celebrations of the Manhattan massacre.
The alteration in policy towards Israel and the amazing pressure that must have been put on Ariel Sharon to swap his mailed club for an olive branch are by contrast real, accurately directed, and vastly significant. The trouble is, they are acts of appeasement rather than of resolution. This is serious, and if Washington is wrong (as I believe it is) about the Palestinian cause’s real capacity for compromise, it will turn out to be a grave step towards the dissolution of the Israeli state—not by frontal military action but by demoralization, destabilization, and de-legitimization.
The Israeli state has many flaws that only a fool would deny. Terrorists, still not fully disowned and in some cases actually revered, were prominent in its establishment and then in its governing class. It has engaged in pre-emptive war and has driven people from their homes through fear and massacre. Some of its responses to terrorist attack have been clumsy, lazy, and incompetent. Its present Prime Minister is severely tainted by indefensibly ruthless and inhumane past actions. Its political system is designed to enthrone factions, some of them repellent. The most important fault of all is that Israel should never have been founded, and should never have needed to be founded. But this last fault is an involuntary one, and is the reason for many of the country’s other troubles. It is no good blaming Israel for existing when its foundation was a desperate response to mechanized racial murder. Nor is it any good for supporters or opponents of modern Israel to pretend that the National Socialist massacre of Jews did not change the argument about Zionism for as far ahead as it is possible to look.
If the world were as liberal idealists imagine, Zionism ought to have been forgotten long ago as a foolish idea, a cranky and hopeless project as unrealistic as Esperanto. And if mankind were ruled by reason, then Zionism would indeed have gone the way of Esperanto. You might have thought that secularism, by making Judaism a matter of involuntary race rather than one of voluntary religion, would have resulted in near-total integration and assimilation. This did not happen. The opposite did. It is therefore important to remember that most right-thinking people believed with utter certainty that assimilation would happen and Zionism would fail. They believed this, during the years before 1914, in a period of history similar to our own because of its illusory stability and its materialist optimism. They continued to believe it in an era similar to the one we are just entering, the years of nervous anticipation and fear of war between 1918 and 1939.
The projected “National Home for the Jews” endorsed by Britain in 1917 was never intended to become a nation. It was to be part of the British Empire, not ruling itself but governed benignly from London, a permanent way station on the proposed land-route to India and a glacis protecting the Suez Canal from any power that threatened it from the north. The British Empire accepted the Zionist scheme because it provided Britain with an excuse to straddle one of the most important pieces of strategic property in the world.
This arrangement would have safeguarded the Arab peoples already living in the neglected Ottoman sanjaks that were arbitrarily glued together to form the Palestine Mandate, an entity even more artificial than Iraq. Under British government, Arabs were not given the right to rule Jews, and Jews were not given the right to rule Arabs.
When the idea was first put forward, there was plenty of room for both peoples within wide frontiers. For at that stage nobody had planned to set up the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which first came to birth as the Emirate of Transjordan, hacked in a hurry out of the original Mandate. This was another accident along the way, following the diplomatic game of pass-the-parcel, which began when the French ejected the British client “King” Faisal from Syria in July 1920. They had won the territory at the peace conference and did not share T.E. Lawrence’s enthusiasm for Hashemite chieftains.
To console Faisal, London gave him the throne of Iraq instead, inaugurating another permanent crisis. This displaced his brother Abdullah, who had originally been promised the Baghdad throne. Abdullah, a monarch with no realm, urgently needed another kingdom to reign over. He complained noisily and was given Transjordan to soothe his wounded feelings. Thus three-quarters of the original Palestine Mandate, the entire area east of the river Jordan, was snatched away from the projected “National Home” before it had even begun. The famous West Bank was seized illegally by Transjordan in 1948, allowing that country to change its name to Jordan. So when Israel occupied it in 1967, it merely passed from one illegal occupier to another. Though it is not widely known, this very area was originally designated for “close Jewish settlement” at the San Remo Accords, which defined the original Mandate and which remain the only agreed international document defining sovereignty over this territory. Even the Golan Heights, now claimed righteously by Syria, were originally within the Mandate and became part of Syria in later Anglo-French horse-trading.
There is a general assumption that Israel at some point stole its territory from a legitimate Arab state. Many of Israel’s critics seem to believe that there was at one stage a sovereign country called “Palestine” out of which the Jewish nation was unfairly carved. But no such country ever existed; Palestine was never the name of anything but a Roman province. The only previous title—for so many centuries that it had no real rival claimant—had belonged to the Ottoman Empire. From the Ottomans it passed directly to the British. When Britain, bankrupt and demoralized, scuttled from the region in 1948, Israel grabbed as much as it could of this dubious legacy. Arab armies in turn seized as much as they could.
Israelis unquestionably perpetrated unforgivable massacres and drove people from their homes. Had things gone the other way, there would have been other massacres, other refugees. Wilsonian ideals of national self-determination can take on a blood-stained tinge, just as much as imperialism, if not more so. When a colonial power vacates a disputed territory, such horrors are likely. But this was in 1948, a year after the partition of India and Pakistan, another shameful scuttle by Britain. All the refugees from that vast upheaval have found new homes. It also came shortly after the expulsion of millions of Germans from East Prussia, the Czech lands, and from Western Poland. Those dispossessed in these savage deportations have long since resettled, and no serious movement demands their return home. Why, uniquely, are the Arab refugees of 1948 still the focus of international demands for the restoration of lost lands?
There is one key difference that keeps this issue alive, especially on the Left, which mostly has not even heard of the German expulsions and would probably defend them if it had. Israel is not like other countries because it is a Western nation carved out of Middle Eastern territory. This leads us to the uncomfortable truth—unwelcome to modern Zionists who shudder visibly at any mention of the word—that Israel is the last major European imperial colony on the face of the earth. In its struggle for survival in a world that already has enough reasons for disapproving of it, modern Israel has sought to stifle such thoughts.
But a European colony it is. What distinguishes Israel from its Arab neighbors is no longer its general prosperity and physical modernity. Oil has evened up these differences in the past decade, and, while serious squalor persists in many Arab countries, so do middle-class comfort and good, functioning services. The difference runs much deeper. Israel’s people are European by culture and law, imposing that culture and law on a region where cousin marriage and tribal loyalty are normal, while pluralism, tolerance, party politics, and the rule of law are abnormal. In this, the new state is the direct heir of the British officers who governed the area as undisguised colonists between the two global wars—and from whom it has inherited much of its legal system, not to mention a chain of imperial fortresses still used by the Israeli army.
This makes Israel the permanent ally, in the Middle East, of the world’s lawful and free countries. This alliance is based on cultural and political kinship, factors that cannot be altered by a tyrant’s death or a coup d’état. Washington may be able to buy the friendship of one Arab or Muslim regime or another with arms and cash. But as soon as that regime falls, the investment of years is wasted if the new rulers are hostile.
I suspect this difference, far more than the ethnic and religious ones, arouses the hostility of Arab regimes. We do not really know what the Arab and Muslim peoples think, since such states do not have free public opinion as we know it. We do know that an ugly anti-Semitism previously largely unknown in the Middle East, has been deliberately and crudely encouraged by Arab regimes trying to find an outlet for the justified discontents of their own poor. We also know that there has been no desire for permanent compromise and genuine peace between even the supposedly moderate Arab regimes and Israel. The state of relations between Israel and Egypt, for instance, is frigid, nervous, and held in place mainly by American subsidies, and this despite Israel’s handover of territory of enormous strategic value. In fact, the Israeli-Egypt “peace,” artificial and without friendship between governments or peoples, is a standing warning to those who fantasize about a “new Middle East” or a harmonious two-state solution.
The hostility is bitter, kept alive by semi-official and official media and, in a nasty new development, it is now often crudely racialist, though nobody is supposed to mention this. The Western Left would drive a Holocaust-denier from any campus that employed him, but the thought police who search the minds of their domestic opponents are unmoved by the blatant anti-Semitism of the Arab terror organizations. Many who denounce Islam for its intolerance draw back from this condemnation when that intolerance is directed against Zionists. By a peculiar process of mental dishonesty so outrageous that it works, Zionism is often equated directly with German National Socialism by critics of Israel. The only reason for this absurd, disproportionate, and cynical claim is that it neutralizes the fundamental case for Zionism, namely that Germany’s policy of systematic massacre was unique, and that the Jewish case for a Jewish sovereign state is therefore unique.
Conservatism is realistic, honest, consistent, and opposed to cant. It takes the side of the particular and the ancient. It sees virtues in Western civilization against its rivals. It penetrates the disguises in which history advances itself and is not fooled by passing appearances. It does not seek perfection, but it does try to be principled. On all these grounds, and because that country is threatened as never before by shallow and ill-considered idealism, conservatism should consider Israel an ally.
______________________________________________
Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the London Mail on Sunday.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Did the Soviets trigger the Six Day War?
Nice conspiracy theory that says the Soviets triggered the 1967 Six Day War. Not completely impossible it's true, judging by this.
Foxbats Did Fly over Dimona
by Daniel Pipes
Fri, 24 Aug 2007
Foxbats Did Fly over Dimona
by Daniel Pipes
Fri, 24 Aug 2007
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Labour should dump compassion - Matthew Parris
Very interesting article from Times columnist Matthew Parris (Dan I think you'll enjoy it):
The Labour Party should dump compassion
Christianity has not done socialism any favours. The Left must embrace progress and winners, not the workshy and the weak
It's time to ask not who should lead the Left in Britain, but where they should be led. Does socialism have a future? Little seems to be coming from the old warhorses of the left-wing intelligentsia these days, so, as the party conference season gets under way today, I thought I'd have a bash myself.
Socialism was never set in stone. In postwar Britain it has been evolving, and a powerful influence on this evolution, especially under the leaderships of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has been something called “Christian socialism”: the belief that the democratic and liberal Left may have something to learn from, and contribute to, New Testament morality: the working out of God's purpose on Earth. After all, didn't Jesus say “sell all that thou hast and give to the poor”?
I'm not suggesting that most politicians on the Left are consciously motivated by biblical injunction, or are even active believers. It's more subliminal. Ours remains a predominantly Christian culture, with Gospel beliefs about fairness, mercy and helping the poor, sick and weak, embedded deeply among our values; as is a tendency to ennoble suffering, and a guilt about wealth.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, all of us have drunk deep at this well. It does not take the subtlest of minds to make a connection between these values, and the socialist political imperative to redistribute wealth, and care for all classes. Both aim, in their outcomes, for humanitarian goals.
Background
But this apparent convergence of purposes is a deception. Far from reinforcing true socialism, Christian socialism has ambushed it, subverting its original message and wrecking it as a viable philosophy of government in a market-driven age.
Marx is about power. Christianity is about charity. Marx is about the authority of the collective. Christian liberalism is about the individual conscience. Marx is about justice. Christian humanitarianism is about mercy. The common causes in which Christians, liberals and socialists have tried to reconcile their differences - personal freedom, the redistribution of wealth and the beneficent State - have in Christian hands proved ruinous to the socialist idea: softening its head, picking its pocket, throwing good money after bad, nursing the weak and neglecting the winners, hearkening to disability and turning away from ability, and leaching its energies into a welter of simpering charitable causes. For most of the second half of the 20th century, Western socialism has hovered around the bedside of the victim, the loser and the marginalised. To win, it should have been outdoors, exhorting the strong.
This wheelchair socialism has sucked the Centre Left into spending people's taxes on unproductive causes, and associating itself with failure rather than success. Nietzsche characterised the driving Christian ethic thus: “It lived on distress...” H.L.Mencken added: “God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.”
It's not for me, here, to defend or attack the Church's absorption with the Prodigal Son rather than his industrious brother, the single lost sheep rather than the rest of the flock; or the way Christianity has made victimhood on the Cross both its mascot and its guiding light. I simply observe that this has absolutely nothing to do with what Marx was trying to say. Socialism was a most unsqueamish creed. If it wished to redistribute wealth, that was not for reasons of mercy but because Marx saw capitalism as a machine doomed to seize up: whereas mankind would fire on all cylinders if labour realised and exercised its potential muscle, and all men pulled together.
A socialist true to these roots, sitting in a modern British Cabinet, and faced with a decision whether to channel Treasury money into (a) scientific research; (b) transport infrastructure; (c) free bus passes for pensioners; or (d) a subsidised national paternity-leave scheme, could weigh socialist arguments for any or all of these purposes; but Christian charity, compassion, or a human-rights-based notion of “fairness” would not be among them.
Properly understood, socialist priorities should never be divorced from considerations of how most effectively to motivate citizens, oil the cogs and drive the pistons. Marx would have been contemptuous of the workshy and mildly uninterested in the disabled.
Nor would he have shared Christian socialism's tenderness for the outcast, for individual conscience, and for liberty. Socialism should see little value in personal freedom except in so far as it contributes to the collective good.
Central to socialism is the power of the collective (for the moment, the State): the power to improve the common lot, overriding the individual where necessary. This case for muscular government has always been stronger than we free-market liberals have wanted to acknowledge. Perversely, as socialist movements flounder everywhere, the case for muscular government is actually getting stronger.
This is not an ideological movement I would join, and in a post-industrial age its fixation with organised labour is redundant, but in other ways it remains a perfectly modern if brutal idea that deserves a confident voice in the century ahead.
Not that you would know it from the state of the Labour Party. I'm not in the business of advising Gordon Brown on how to save his skin; that battle is lost. The next election is lost. The election may come sooner than we think - how many more Siobhain McDonaghs wait to fall on their swords?
After that election, a Left Opposition will need to find a voice. It will not hear it from the Manse. It needs to find a crowd. They will not be discovered sleeping rough. It needs to find a class. They will not be the underclass. It needs to find a national purpose. Fairness and Equality will not suffice; Sure Start is not enough.
There's no point trying to out-smooth David Cameron or out-compassion Nick Clegg. Away (the socialist should say) with caring and diversity: let's hear about investment, not subsidy; progress, not equality; about Crossrail (what's the betting Mr Brown cancels it?); about how Britain generates its own power, how we rescue our rail network from impending insolvency, how we get from London to Scotland by train in two hours, and how we stop the planning system throttling every big project; about how we develop a global positioning system that the Americans don't control, how we pay for better highways and uncongested streets with proper road pricing, and how we research and market carbon-free transport, heat and power.
Unless you believe in big, costly, muscular and intrusive government, your voice in all such national causes must be muted. There's a damn good case to be made for strong-arming by the State, and only the Left can make it. This is not a time for Bonhoeffer and playgroups, but for a Left which believes unashamedly in taking command."
The Labour Party should dump compassion
Christianity has not done socialism any favours. The Left must embrace progress and winners, not the workshy and the weak
It's time to ask not who should lead the Left in Britain, but where they should be led. Does socialism have a future? Little seems to be coming from the old warhorses of the left-wing intelligentsia these days, so, as the party conference season gets under way today, I thought I'd have a bash myself.
Socialism was never set in stone. In postwar Britain it has been evolving, and a powerful influence on this evolution, especially under the leaderships of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has been something called “Christian socialism”: the belief that the democratic and liberal Left may have something to learn from, and contribute to, New Testament morality: the working out of God's purpose on Earth. After all, didn't Jesus say “sell all that thou hast and give to the poor”?
I'm not suggesting that most politicians on the Left are consciously motivated by biblical injunction, or are even active believers. It's more subliminal. Ours remains a predominantly Christian culture, with Gospel beliefs about fairness, mercy and helping the poor, sick and weak, embedded deeply among our values; as is a tendency to ennoble suffering, and a guilt about wealth.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, all of us have drunk deep at this well. It does not take the subtlest of minds to make a connection between these values, and the socialist political imperative to redistribute wealth, and care for all classes. Both aim, in their outcomes, for humanitarian goals.
Background
But this apparent convergence of purposes is a deception. Far from reinforcing true socialism, Christian socialism has ambushed it, subverting its original message and wrecking it as a viable philosophy of government in a market-driven age.
Marx is about power. Christianity is about charity. Marx is about the authority of the collective. Christian liberalism is about the individual conscience. Marx is about justice. Christian humanitarianism is about mercy. The common causes in which Christians, liberals and socialists have tried to reconcile their differences - personal freedom, the redistribution of wealth and the beneficent State - have in Christian hands proved ruinous to the socialist idea: softening its head, picking its pocket, throwing good money after bad, nursing the weak and neglecting the winners, hearkening to disability and turning away from ability, and leaching its energies into a welter of simpering charitable causes. For most of the second half of the 20th century, Western socialism has hovered around the bedside of the victim, the loser and the marginalised. To win, it should have been outdoors, exhorting the strong.
This wheelchair socialism has sucked the Centre Left into spending people's taxes on unproductive causes, and associating itself with failure rather than success. Nietzsche characterised the driving Christian ethic thus: “It lived on distress...” H.L.Mencken added: “God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.”
It's not for me, here, to defend or attack the Church's absorption with the Prodigal Son rather than his industrious brother, the single lost sheep rather than the rest of the flock; or the way Christianity has made victimhood on the Cross both its mascot and its guiding light. I simply observe that this has absolutely nothing to do with what Marx was trying to say. Socialism was a most unsqueamish creed. If it wished to redistribute wealth, that was not for reasons of mercy but because Marx saw capitalism as a machine doomed to seize up: whereas mankind would fire on all cylinders if labour realised and exercised its potential muscle, and all men pulled together.
A socialist true to these roots, sitting in a modern British Cabinet, and faced with a decision whether to channel Treasury money into (a) scientific research; (b) transport infrastructure; (c) free bus passes for pensioners; or (d) a subsidised national paternity-leave scheme, could weigh socialist arguments for any or all of these purposes; but Christian charity, compassion, or a human-rights-based notion of “fairness” would not be among them.
Properly understood, socialist priorities should never be divorced from considerations of how most effectively to motivate citizens, oil the cogs and drive the pistons. Marx would have been contemptuous of the workshy and mildly uninterested in the disabled.
Nor would he have shared Christian socialism's tenderness for the outcast, for individual conscience, and for liberty. Socialism should see little value in personal freedom except in so far as it contributes to the collective good.
Central to socialism is the power of the collective (for the moment, the State): the power to improve the common lot, overriding the individual where necessary. This case for muscular government has always been stronger than we free-market liberals have wanted to acknowledge. Perversely, as socialist movements flounder everywhere, the case for muscular government is actually getting stronger.
This is not an ideological movement I would join, and in a post-industrial age its fixation with organised labour is redundant, but in other ways it remains a perfectly modern if brutal idea that deserves a confident voice in the century ahead.
Not that you would know it from the state of the Labour Party. I'm not in the business of advising Gordon Brown on how to save his skin; that battle is lost. The next election is lost. The election may come sooner than we think - how many more Siobhain McDonaghs wait to fall on their swords?
After that election, a Left Opposition will need to find a voice. It will not hear it from the Manse. It needs to find a crowd. They will not be discovered sleeping rough. It needs to find a class. They will not be the underclass. It needs to find a national purpose. Fairness and Equality will not suffice; Sure Start is not enough.
There's no point trying to out-smooth David Cameron or out-compassion Nick Clegg. Away (the socialist should say) with caring and diversity: let's hear about investment, not subsidy; progress, not equality; about Crossrail (what's the betting Mr Brown cancels it?); about how Britain generates its own power, how we rescue our rail network from impending insolvency, how we get from London to Scotland by train in two hours, and how we stop the planning system throttling every big project; about how we develop a global positioning system that the Americans don't control, how we pay for better highways and uncongested streets with proper road pricing, and how we research and market carbon-free transport, heat and power.
Unless you believe in big, costly, muscular and intrusive government, your voice in all such national causes must be muted. There's a damn good case to be made for strong-arming by the State, and only the Left can make it. This is not a time for Bonhoeffer and playgroups, but for a Left which believes unashamedly in taking command."
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
War - What is it good for?
Peter Hitchens on ariel bombardment in general and Dresden in particular:
"Personally I am against this kind of war, which may achieve victories in the short term, but damages those who use it in the long-term. For it is the long-term that matters. Using bombs knowing that they will kill innocents is a deliberate act, and it is silly to pretend otherwise. Britain's decision to embark on the even more explicitly deliberate bombing of German civilians, taken in May 1940 and intensified hugely afterwards, is a serious stain on our national record. I think the knowledge that we used such methods has done serious damage to our general moral state ever since, and contributed to our post-war decline and diminishing self-respect, even though we have tended to try to deceive ourselves about what we did. It is still thought to be pretty bad taste to talk about this.
The whole business is made somehow worse by the fact that the bombing was carried out with selfless courage by some of the bravest young men who ever lived, the bomber crews themselves, who believed they were helping to win the war and had quite enough to think about without wondering what their incendiaries and high explosive were doing, thousands of feet below. Their contribution to defeating Germany is debatable. My own view is that it probably did not shorten the war at all, but I doubt if this can ever be resolved. The casualties among those flyers were appalling, the worst since the mass human sacrifice of the flower of British youth on the Somme in 1916, and just as wasteful of young talent and hope. As for what happened when their bombs hit the ground, most people prefer not to know.
And who can blame them? The details (unhinged mothers carrying the shrivelled corpses of their bomb-baked children around the country in suitcases, immense clouds of bluebottles gathering on the rubble as the thousands of dead decomposed) are beginning to be published in mainstream histories and they are deeply distressing to anyone who possesses an ounce of human sympathy. The fact that most of the victims were the German urban working class ( who as Social Democrats had been Hitler's principal democratic opponents) makes it difficult to claim that the bombing was some sort of judgement on the Nazis. I'd like to see how much courage most of us would have shown faced with a similar regime, and how we would then have felt if we'd been bombed to bits, or baked and suffocated in cellars, for the misdeeds of a government we loathed and feared.
The protests of George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, against this method of warfare were sneered at, at the time, but seem to me to have been both honourable and right. Bell was no simpleton pacifist. He was a long-term friend and contact of German Christians who opposed Hitler, and if the British government had taken more notice of him and of what he told them, the July plot against Hitler, or something like it, might have succeeded and saved us a year of bloody war, as well as preventing Stalin taking over much of central Europe."
"Personally I am against this kind of war, which may achieve victories in the short term, but damages those who use it in the long-term. For it is the long-term that matters. Using bombs knowing that they will kill innocents is a deliberate act, and it is silly to pretend otherwise. Britain's decision to embark on the even more explicitly deliberate bombing of German civilians, taken in May 1940 and intensified hugely afterwards, is a serious stain on our national record. I think the knowledge that we used such methods has done serious damage to our general moral state ever since, and contributed to our post-war decline and diminishing self-respect, even though we have tended to try to deceive ourselves about what we did. It is still thought to be pretty bad taste to talk about this.
The whole business is made somehow worse by the fact that the bombing was carried out with selfless courage by some of the bravest young men who ever lived, the bomber crews themselves, who believed they were helping to win the war and had quite enough to think about without wondering what their incendiaries and high explosive were doing, thousands of feet below. Their contribution to defeating Germany is debatable. My own view is that it probably did not shorten the war at all, but I doubt if this can ever be resolved. The casualties among those flyers were appalling, the worst since the mass human sacrifice of the flower of British youth on the Somme in 1916, and just as wasteful of young talent and hope. As for what happened when their bombs hit the ground, most people prefer not to know.
And who can blame them? The details (unhinged mothers carrying the shrivelled corpses of their bomb-baked children around the country in suitcases, immense clouds of bluebottles gathering on the rubble as the thousands of dead decomposed) are beginning to be published in mainstream histories and they are deeply distressing to anyone who possesses an ounce of human sympathy. The fact that most of the victims were the German urban working class ( who as Social Democrats had been Hitler's principal democratic opponents) makes it difficult to claim that the bombing was some sort of judgement on the Nazis. I'd like to see how much courage most of us would have shown faced with a similar regime, and how we would then have felt if we'd been bombed to bits, or baked and suffocated in cellars, for the misdeeds of a government we loathed and feared.
The protests of George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, against this method of warfare were sneered at, at the time, but seem to me to have been both honourable and right. Bell was no simpleton pacifist. He was a long-term friend and contact of German Christians who opposed Hitler, and if the British government had taken more notice of him and of what he told them, the July plot against Hitler, or something like it, might have succeeded and saved us a year of bloody war, as well as preventing Stalin taking over much of central Europe."
Sarah Palin - The Debate
Ok then! On the Right of this debate we have none other than Melanie Phillips, declaring her admiration and support for Republican VP Sarah Palin:
A Star is Born
The woman is a natural. Watch her performance last night here -- and you'll see why the left is in such a panic.
Middle America has found its champion: someone who embodies its values and makes it proud to hold them. She has pulled off something that the left assumed was as likely a development as the sun rising in the west: she makes conservatism attractive, optimistic and fun. She is totally authentic, the real deal: she turns the values of small-town America that she so proudly embodies into a lethal boomerang against the sneering elitists who scorn them. The repercussions will cross the Atlantic: British Tories who have tried to reinvent conservatism as social liberalism may well be sucking their teeth if Sarah Palin actually makes it to the White House.
Well okay, say her detractors, so she’s a good performer -- but she’s still way out there in fruitcake-land because she’s a creationist. Well, if she is I’d like to see the evidence -- because so far all I’ve seen is one statement by her which falls far short of supporting creationism, plus enormous confusion and ignorance among commentators about what creationism actually is. As far as I can see, all she has ever said on the subject, as reported in the Anchorage Daily News two years ago, is that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schools. The following day she explained that all she had meant by that was that discussion of alternative views should be allowed to arise in Alaska classrooms: ‘I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum’.
She would not push the state Board of Education to add such creation-based alternatives to the state’s required curriculum. She simply didn’t think that any views should be excluded on the basis of religious or scientific opinion. It seemed that she had never even thought much about creationism. She was simply expressing a liberal view about the flow of ideas.
But here’s where the confusion among commentators kicks in. Palin is a Christian, which means she believes that the world had a Creator. She shares that belief with other Christians along with Jews and Muslims the world over. Unless one takes the view that all religious belief is certifiable, there is nothing remotely odd about a person of faith believing in God. Indeed, one might say this is a prerequisite (unless one happens to belong to the Church of England). But various commentators have committed the howler of assuming that belief in a Creator is creationism. Not so. Creationism is very specifically the belief that the world was literally created in six days. Millions of believers in God agree that this is absurd and irrational.
Then there is the further confusion – fomented in large measure by the astoundingly ignorant assertions made by lawyers and judges in the various US court cases over the teaching of creationism in American schools – that creationism is the same thing as Intelligent Design. It is not. Intelligent Design simply holds that life could not have originated spontaneously, but must have been at source the product of some kind of purposeful force. It does not deny evolution, rather the claim that evolution somehow spontaneously created itself. It is a view held by growing numbers of scientists, several of great distinction, and arises out of the very complexity of life that science has uncovered. Whether or not this is a well-founded theory it cannot be argued that, like creationism, it stands in opposition to science and reason. Yet the furore over Sarah Palin has persistently elided both creationism and ID with each other and with her actual belief in a Creator.
Maybe she is a creationist – but so far it’s just another smear."
And on the centre Left here is Oliver Kamm, no Palin fan, disagreeing with Melanie Phillips on more or less everything:
"I'm sorry to write yet again on this subject. But before moving on, I'll comment on a relevant and enthusiastic post about Sarah Palin, entitled "A star is born", by the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips on her Spectator blog. And before doing that, I'll say a word about the author herself.
I know, like and respect Melanie. She has shown a good deal of courage in expounding her views on, among other things, the threat of radical Islam - an issue of immense importance on which she is essentially right, and about which she has been writing for a long time. I'm very much in disagreement, however, with her view that "if liberal values and democracy are to be defended, their Christian roots have to be vigorously defended, upheld and reasserted". On the contrary, one of the most vital principles of liberalism is the secularist insistence, codified in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom of 1786, that there be no religious test for public office.
Christianity has proved compatible with literally any ideology, even in recent history: consider the racist justifications for apartheid offered by the Dutch Reformed Church; the Social Gospel preached by the Baptist reformer Walter Rauschenbusch; or the strong Tory pro-appeasement sentiments of Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1930s. I'm not concerned in public affairs with people's beliefs about first and last things, but only with whether they accept the implict social contract on which a free society depends. Moderate religion, whether or not you find its doctrines credible, accommodates itself to secular education and secular government, and is thereby a matter of private conscience.
And here we come to the issue of Melanie's post. Melanie believes that Sarah Palin is the victim of a smear campaign to suggest that she is a biblical Creationist. For my part, I'm not convinced - because the relevant data are not in the public realm, as far as I can see - that Governor Palin, whatever her faith, has made her accommodation with the secular principles that are integral to American goverment. The reason I'm not convinced is that she is on record, in public debate for an elected post, as stating that Creationism should be taught alongside evolutionary biology. This is not disputed by Melanie.
I've said nothing about whether Ms Palin is herself a Creationist; I don't know whether she is or not. But if she believes that religious dogma belongs in science education - possibly for a non-religious principle, such as not offending the sensibilities of believers - then her position is illiberal and must be opposed. To raise this question is not a smear, as Melanie believes. It's an important issue of public policy. And because Melanie has certainly and demonstrably misunderstood both the science and the pseudoscience in question, I hope she will reconsider her views."
A Star is Born
The woman is a natural. Watch her performance last night here -- and you'll see why the left is in such a panic.
Middle America has found its champion: someone who embodies its values and makes it proud to hold them. She has pulled off something that the left assumed was as likely a development as the sun rising in the west: she makes conservatism attractive, optimistic and fun. She is totally authentic, the real deal: she turns the values of small-town America that she so proudly embodies into a lethal boomerang against the sneering elitists who scorn them. The repercussions will cross the Atlantic: British Tories who have tried to reinvent conservatism as social liberalism may well be sucking their teeth if Sarah Palin actually makes it to the White House.
Well okay, say her detractors, so she’s a good performer -- but she’s still way out there in fruitcake-land because she’s a creationist. Well, if she is I’d like to see the evidence -- because so far all I’ve seen is one statement by her which falls far short of supporting creationism, plus enormous confusion and ignorance among commentators about what creationism actually is. As far as I can see, all she has ever said on the subject, as reported in the Anchorage Daily News two years ago, is that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schools. The following day she explained that all she had meant by that was that discussion of alternative views should be allowed to arise in Alaska classrooms: ‘I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum’.
She would not push the state Board of Education to add such creation-based alternatives to the state’s required curriculum. She simply didn’t think that any views should be excluded on the basis of religious or scientific opinion. It seemed that she had never even thought much about creationism. She was simply expressing a liberal view about the flow of ideas.
But here’s where the confusion among commentators kicks in. Palin is a Christian, which means she believes that the world had a Creator. She shares that belief with other Christians along with Jews and Muslims the world over. Unless one takes the view that all religious belief is certifiable, there is nothing remotely odd about a person of faith believing in God. Indeed, one might say this is a prerequisite (unless one happens to belong to the Church of England). But various commentators have committed the howler of assuming that belief in a Creator is creationism. Not so. Creationism is very specifically the belief that the world was literally created in six days. Millions of believers in God agree that this is absurd and irrational.
Then there is the further confusion – fomented in large measure by the astoundingly ignorant assertions made by lawyers and judges in the various US court cases over the teaching of creationism in American schools – that creationism is the same thing as Intelligent Design. It is not. Intelligent Design simply holds that life could not have originated spontaneously, but must have been at source the product of some kind of purposeful force. It does not deny evolution, rather the claim that evolution somehow spontaneously created itself. It is a view held by growing numbers of scientists, several of great distinction, and arises out of the very complexity of life that science has uncovered. Whether or not this is a well-founded theory it cannot be argued that, like creationism, it stands in opposition to science and reason. Yet the furore over Sarah Palin has persistently elided both creationism and ID with each other and with her actual belief in a Creator.
Maybe she is a creationist – but so far it’s just another smear."
And on the centre Left here is Oliver Kamm, no Palin fan, disagreeing with Melanie Phillips on more or less everything:
"I'm sorry to write yet again on this subject. But before moving on, I'll comment on a relevant and enthusiastic post about Sarah Palin, entitled "A star is born", by the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips on her Spectator blog. And before doing that, I'll say a word about the author herself.
I know, like and respect Melanie. She has shown a good deal of courage in expounding her views on, among other things, the threat of radical Islam - an issue of immense importance on which she is essentially right, and about which she has been writing for a long time. I'm very much in disagreement, however, with her view that "if liberal values and democracy are to be defended, their Christian roots have to be vigorously defended, upheld and reasserted". On the contrary, one of the most vital principles of liberalism is the secularist insistence, codified in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom of 1786, that there be no religious test for public office.
Christianity has proved compatible with literally any ideology, even in recent history: consider the racist justifications for apartheid offered by the Dutch Reformed Church; the Social Gospel preached by the Baptist reformer Walter Rauschenbusch; or the strong Tory pro-appeasement sentiments of Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1930s. I'm not concerned in public affairs with people's beliefs about first and last things, but only with whether they accept the implict social contract on which a free society depends. Moderate religion, whether or not you find its doctrines credible, accommodates itself to secular education and secular government, and is thereby a matter of private conscience.
And here we come to the issue of Melanie's post. Melanie believes that Sarah Palin is the victim of a smear campaign to suggest that she is a biblical Creationist. For my part, I'm not convinced - because the relevant data are not in the public realm, as far as I can see - that Governor Palin, whatever her faith, has made her accommodation with the secular principles that are integral to American goverment. The reason I'm not convinced is that she is on record, in public debate for an elected post, as stating that Creationism should be taught alongside evolutionary biology. This is not disputed by Melanie.
I've said nothing about whether Ms Palin is herself a Creationist; I don't know whether she is or not. But if she believes that religious dogma belongs in science education - possibly for a non-religious principle, such as not offending the sensibilities of believers - then her position is illiberal and must be opposed. To raise this question is not a smear, as Melanie believes. It's an important issue of public policy. And because Melanie has certainly and demonstrably misunderstood both the science and the pseudoscience in question, I hope she will reconsider her views."
Monday, September 08, 2008
Beware of statistics
BBC News is running a weekly ongoing series of articles that describe and illustrate common misconceptions (and manipulations) of statistics using examples from the news and ads.
There's an index of these articles here.
There's an index of these articles here.
Friday, September 05, 2008
US Election - check, please!
I last posted this link 4 years ago, but it's that time again. Anyone interested in the US election should bookmark this site.
http://www.factcheck.org
Because right now the focus is on the Republican National Convention, it may look like it's particularly pro Obama, but if you scroll down, you'll see that they go after the anointed One's lies and distortions too.
(Oh, and in the interests of declaring my own bias - "Obama '08!!!!")
http://www.factcheck.org
Because right now the focus is on the Republican National Convention, it may look like it's particularly pro Obama, but if you scroll down, you'll see that they go after the anointed One's lies and distortions too.
(Oh, and in the interests of declaring my own bias - "Obama '08!!!!")
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