“….children of the devil.”

As previously noted, the old Pope, Benedict XVI, upon his visit to Britain, alluded to the notion that the exclusion of God from the public sphere, lead directly to Hitler massacring the Jews. A subtle attack on the removal of what the religious perceive to be their ‘anchored morality’ provided by religion, substituted for new, “relative”, secular values, and a more open society. In my previous article, I try to counter this by providing Hitler’s Christian credentials, and point to centuries of Christian anti-Jewish sentiment that helped accommodate a negative view of the entire population of Jews. I wanted to elaborate on that particular Church-led sentiment in this article.

In the 12th Century a rather nasty little Benedictine Monk named Thomas of Monmouth started to spread the false rumour that Jews killed children, and made wine out of their blood, for ritualistic purposes. He concocted a story about a child named William of Norwich, whom, according to Monmouth, was ritualistically sacrificed by a Jewish community. The secretive but apparently extremely powerful Jewish community apparently selected a Jewish Council, to meet once a year, in order to select a country in which they would kill a Christian. They controlled the World (similar stories of Jewish World domination can still be read on conspiracy sites today). Monmouth apparently heard this story from a Christian convert named Theobald of Cambridge, who claimed the Jewish council were looking to reclaim Jerusalem, but could only do it, if they ritualistically murdered one Christian every year, and that this year, they had chosen William of Norwich.

After the rumours started, they gained pace. Spreading like fire, every unsolved child murder suddenly had a supposed Jewish element. The Jewish communities then paid the price, by being tortured into confession, and swiftly executed. A child called Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln was killed in Lincoln in 1255. A local Jewish man named Copin was accused of kidnapping, torturing, and crucifying the boy. He denied it, until he was imprisoned, and tortured, at which point he predictably confessed and implicated the entire Jewish community in a conspiracy. He was then executed.
Matthew Paris, another Benedictine Monk of the time, wrote on the murder, with disturbingly anti-Jewish rhetoric:

“This year [1255] about the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul [27 July], the Jews of Lincoln stole a boy called Hugh, who was about eight years old. After shutting him up in a secret chamber, where they fed him on milk and other childish food, they sent to almost all The cities of England in which there were Jews, and summoned some of their sect from each city to be present at a sacrifice to take place at Lincoln, in contumely and insult of Jesus Christ. For, as they said, they had a boy concealed for the purpose of being crucified; so a great number of them assembled at Lincoln, and then they appointed a Jew of Lincoln judge, to take the place of Pilate, by whose sentence, and with the concurrence of all, the boy was subjected to various tortures. They scourged him till the blood flowed, they crowned him with thorns, mocked him, and spat upon him; each of them also pierced him with a knife, and they made him drink gall, and scoffed at him with blasphemous insults, and kept gnashing their teeth and calling him Jesus, the false prophet. And after tormenting him in divers ways they crucified him, and pierced him to the heart with a spear. When the boy was dead, they took the body down from the cross, and for some reason disemboweled it; it is said for the purpose of their magic arts.”

- Note the parallels drawn between Little Saint Hugh, and Jesus. Between the Jews of the 13th Century, and the Jews blamed for the killing of Jesus. A ‘Jew of Lincoln Judge’ is given the pleasure of being compared to Pilate. ‘…. with the concurrence of all’ the boy was horrifically tortured. With the concurrence of all. The entire Jewish community.
The murder of a child, tortured and crucified, is presented as a Jewish tradition, starting with Jesus. It is supposed to present the Jews, as evil, and Little Saint Hugh as a martyr for Christ. It is a story to remind people of the apparent betrayal of the Christians by the Jews. Christian blood has always been placed on the hands of the Jews.

It wasn’t only in England that the idea of blaming a Jewish conspiracy for unsolved murders took form. It was only in 1965, that Pope Paul VI removed the Sainthood of Simon of Trent, admitting that there is no evidence to suggest a Jewish conspiracy in the boys death in Trento, Italy, in 1475. 15 Jewish members of the community were tortured and burnt at the stake. Jewish women were also tortured. Surrounding Jewish communities were violently attacked. And not a shred of evidence was provided connecting the Jews to Simon’s death. His father came up with the idea that Simon must have been kidnapped by the Jews, his blood used in baking the Passover Matzah.

In 1543, Martin Luther produced his work “On the Jews and their lies“. In it, Luther calls for Jews to be put to work as slaves, for Jewish schools to be burnt to the ground, for
Johannes Wallmann writes:

“The assertion that Luther’s expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have been of major and persistent influence in the centuries after the Reformation, and that there exists a continuity between Protestant anti-Judaism and modern racially oriented antisemitism, is at present wide-spread in the literature; since the Second World War it has understandably become the prevailing opinion.”

The Nazis held dear to the ideas expressed by Luther in this work. Luther is vicious in his criticisms and his ideas for the future. He helped to purge German towns of Jews, driving them from their homes and businesses with threats and intimidation.

Luther’s work is full of “I heard this about them…” and “Someone once told me this…” before launching into baseless accusations:

“I have read and heard many stories about the Jews which agree with this judgment of Christ, namely, how they have poisoned wells, made assassinations, kidnaped children, as related before. I have heard that one Jew sent another Jew, and this by means of a Christian, a pot of blood, with a barrel of wine, in which when drunk empty, a dead Jew was found. There are many other similar stories.

For their kidnaping of children they have often been burned at the stake or banished (as we already heard). I am well aware that they deny all of this. However, it all coincides with the judgment of Christ which declares that they are venomous, bitter, vindictive, tricky serpents, assassins, and children of the devil who sting and work harm stealthily wherever they cannot do it openly.

For this reason I should like to see them where there are no Christians. The Turks and other heathen do not tolerate what we Christians endure from these venomous serpents and young devils. Nor do the Jews treat any others as they do us Christians. That is what I had in mind when I said earlier that, next to the devil, a Christian has no more bitter and galling foe than a Jew. There is no other to whom we accord as many benefactions and from whom we suffer as much as we do from these base children of the devil, this brood of vipers.”

This practice of not only blaming the Jews for unsolved murders, but also the hatefilled rhetoric based on nothing of substance, became prevalent, and spread suspicion of Jews throughout Europe, leading to many murders of innocent Jewish people. Martin Luther, the reformers, as well as the Catholic Church leaped on this growing antisemitic movement, and vicious new rumours sprang up. The Papacy pounced on the antisemitism of the day, and institutionalised the growing suspicion and hate. Antisemitism was very much official Church policy.

In 1555, the new Pope Paul IV issued papal bull Cum nimis absurdum. In its opening phrase, the bull states:

“Since it is completely senseless and inappropriate to be in a situation where Christian piety allows the Jews (whose guilt—all of their own doing—has condemned them to eternal slavery) access to our society and even to live among us; indeed, they are without gratitude to Christians, as, instead of thanks for gracious treatment, they return invective, and among themselves, instead of the slavery, which they deserve, they manage to claim superiority.”

- The Jews, simply by not being Christian, are referred to as slaves. They are told they deserve slavery.
The Nazi precedent of forcing Jewish people to wear something that makes them identifiable as Jews, and inferior to the Christian population, was not a Nazi precedent at all. It began much earlier. The Nazis simply appropriated it. The Bull issued in 1555 states:

“Moreover, concerning the matter that Jews should be recognizable everywhere: [to this end] men must wear a hat, women, indeed, some other evident sign, yellow in color, that must not be concealed or covered by any means, and must be tightly affixed.”

- The Nazis are of course famous for the setting up of new Jewish ghettos in which they forced the Jewish populations of occupied cities and countries to live, in awful circumstances and conditions. But, much like forcing the Jewish population to wear identifiable clothing wasn’t a Nazi precedent, neither was the creation of Jewish ghettos. The Bull in 1555 states:

“…all Jews are to live in only one [quarter] to which there is only one entrance and from which there is but one exit, and if there is not that capacity [in one such quarter, then], in two or three or however many may be enough; [in any case] they should reside entirely side by side in designated streets and be thoroughly separate from the residences of Christians, [This is to be enforced] by our authority in the City and by that of our representatives in other states, lands and domains noted above.”

- The Ghetto of Rome was set up at this time, and Jews living throughout Rome were forced to move to it. Life in the Rome Ghetto was horrendous. It constantly flooded due to its location by the banks of the Tiber. The overcrowding led to apartments being built upwards, in dangerous conditions, by the inhabitants themselves, which blocked all sunlight, and often led to buildings collapsing and killing the inhabitants. It was the most undesirable part of the city of Rome, laced in poverty. Napoleon had freed the Jews from the Roman Ghetto, only to have the wall rebuilt and the poverty stricken conditions reinforced by Pope Pius VII in the early 1800s.

And so it continued. In 1823, the town of Velizh in Russia promoted the idea that a Jewish conspiracy led to the murder of a child. Local Jews were rounded up and imprisoned, released 12 years later on lack of any evidence.
In 1840, a Christian Monk was murdered in Damascus, and eight notable Jewish leaders were condemned to imprisonment, and torture, under which some died. The accusations were false.
In 1928, the Jewish community of Messena, New York, were accused and kidnapping and ritualistically murdering a Christian girl named Barbara Griffiths. She was then found alive, and described how she had become lost in the Woods and slept there.

By the 19th, 20th centuries, the suspicion had shifted from child-murdering rituals, to Jewish desire to control the World; through media, banking, left wing groups. The Papacy decided, in all its wisdom, that there was in fact two types of antisemitism…. ‘good’ antisemitism and ‘bad’ antisemitism. The good antisemitism was the Church’s crusade against the Jews trying to control the World. The irony of course being that the Vatican had controlled the World for the past 1600 years at the very least, and happened to be one of the most influential and wealthiest institutions on the planet. The idea of an international Jewish conspiracy can be found in 20th Century Christian literature, right winged literature, left winged literature, Islamic literature. It’s the new blood-libel. We seem unable to accept that it isn’t Jewish propaganda that has controlled our thoughts and actions for far too long, it is Christian propaganda.

Suspicion and hatred for the Jewish populations in Europe did not begin with Hitler. It was not motivated by secularism, by a lack of God in schools, by an attempt to separate Church from State, by Atheism, or by any other modern theories. It was the culmination of Centuries of antisemitic attitudes and rhetoric shaped by Christian communities both at local levels, by the evangelical reformers and by the Catholic Church. It wasn’t abandoned by the reformers of the 16th Century, is simply became more vicious when names with such power as Luther jumped into the argument. Hitler wasn’t reading Thomas Paine, Hitler was reading Luther. The Church, right up until the 20th Century openly preached and promoted antisemitism whilst aligning themselves with the Nazis. The Church’s attempts to deflect blame, shelter a deep rooted sense of guilt no doubt, over the fact that the attempt to eradicate the Jews entirely was the logical conclusion to 2000 years of vicious Church-made institutionalised antisemitism and blood libel.

The State of the Republicans: 2013

The end of the Romney campaign ushered in a new era for the Republicans…. apparently. They insisted they must change. Their appeal must broaden. Their hate-filled, politics of over-the-top Glenn Beck style fear had to go. They had to be presentable. Change or die! The old days of a Party of old, white, male, Christian, heterosexual, angry-at-everyone-who-isn’t-EXACTLY-like-them, funded by big corporations had to go. And so we were informed that a new breed of Republicans would appear. Ready to present a reformed GOP to the electorate. They were radically different from their predecessors.

So how’s that going?

Well, in November 2012, the residents of Texas’ first district re-elected Louie Gohmert for a fifth term in the House of Reps. If the Republicans are intending to break from the past, surely we’d expect Gohmert to perhaps be a little more moderate than his more radical Tea-Party-esque contemporaries. That’s what we’d expect. However, when asked about his opposition to any gun control legislation, Gohmert gave this rather odd answer:

“In fact, I had this discussion with some wonderful, caring Democrats earlier this week on the issue of, well, they said “surely you could agree to limit the number of rounds in a magazine, couldn’t you? How would that be problematic?”

And I pointed out, well, once you make it ten, then why would you draw the line at ten? What’s wrong with nine? Or eleven? And the problem is once you draw that limit ; it’s kind of like marriage when you say it’s not a man and a woman any more, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal?

There is no clear place to draw the line once you eliminate the traditional marriage and it’s the same once you start putting limits on what guns can be used, then it’s just really easy to have laws that make them all illegal.

- You read right. In a discussion about gun control, Gohmert managed to take a shot at same-sex marriage, by employing the insufferably weak slippery slope fallacy. I cannot work out which is more impressive; his ability to link gun control and same-sex marriage… two completely separate issues that in no way overlap, or his intense lack of sensibility in recognising that there is no reason to believe a slippery slope with either of the issues he’s commenting on. I could equally say “If we let women vote, what next, letting camels vote?” or “If we ban cocaine, why not ban cough medicine? Where does it end!!” It’s absurd and it is baseless. He isn’t the only Republican to use this fallacy recently. John Cornyn, the new Senate Minority Whip said:

“It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right…. Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife.”

- Yes. the Republican Senate Minority Whip has just compared a loving couple wishing to express that love via marriage, and wishing only to be considered equal under law….. to a man marrying a turtle. That’s the standard of top Republicans in 2013.

Back to Gohmert. The man who tried to link gay marriage to gun control, also claimed that the liberals are going to make Churches:

….hire whatever Satan-worshiper, whatever cross-dresser you think might be immoral, that’s against your religious belief. You are going to be forced to abandon your religious beliefs, and we’ve been seeing that with some of the requirements under Obamacare.

- Yes! Someone had to say it! Obamacare is simply a mask to make Churches hire cross-dressing Satan-Worshippers! It’s SO obvious. Wake up America!
The fact that this man gets the privilege to vote on gun legislation; a vote on the safety of your children in school, would be laughable if it weren’t so utterly terrifying.

Bobby Jindal won a 2nd term as Louisiana Governor in 2011. Since then, he’s been rather excitable at promoting misleading figures to promote an agenda of fear. Whilst one fifth of all residents of Louisiana lack health insurance, Jindal refuses to expand Medicaid expansion, claiming it would cost Louisiana $1bn over the next ten years. Quite where he gets this figure from, I’m not sure. Especially given that a Department of Health Report noted that Louisiana would actually save around $400mn over the next ten years, by expanding Medicaid. He appears to have invented his own figure, to scare people. Despite this, and despite a petition signed by…

Advocates for Louisiana Public Healthcare.

Advocacy Center.

Capitol City Family Health Center.

Capital City Alliance.

Citizens United for In-Home Support.

Coalition of HIV/AIDS Nonprofits and Governmental Entities.

Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, Harvard Law School.

Children’s Defense Fund-Louisiana.

Children’s Bureau of New Orleans.

DEAF Louisiana.

Doctors for America.

Depression & Bipolar Support Alliance, Northeast Louisiana.

Health Law Advocates of Louisiana.

HOPE For Homeless.
Along with 30 other groups, and countless more individual signatures….. Jindal refuses to expand Medicaid.

And then there is the apparent darling of the Republicans new bid for power in 2016; Marco Rubio.

“We’re bound together by common values. That family is the most important institution in society. That almighty God is the source of all we have.”

- Here, Rubio is subtly promoting the myth that America was founded a Christian nation, and that religion must be considered part of the fabric. A subtle hint that non-belief, cannot be considered an American value. Thus, in a single, tiny quote, we see the saviour of the Republicans alienate anyone who isn’t slightly obsessed with ‘God’ being a key component to Patriotism. So that’s 15% of Americans who claim no religion. That’s a lot of people to alienate, for a man promoted as the key to solving the Republican Party’s problem of appealing to minorities. Rubio is following the conservative trend of telling people who should and shouldn’t qualify as ‘American’. This in itself, is divisive.

Rubio also still appeals to tradition when dealing with same-sex marriage, insisting that marriage cannot be redefined. Seemingly ignoring all evidence that the current definition of marriage, is just one that has evolved over time, based on modern Christian understanding of the term, and differs from other cultures entirely. So, that’s gay people alienated, as well as non-believers.

Brand new Senator for Senator for Arizona, assuming office in 2013, Jeff Flake also doesn’t like the idea of two people in love getting married. Whilst despising ‘big government’ and the intrusion of the State into people’s lives, Flake voted in favour of a Federal Marriage Amendment, Constitutionally banning same-sex marriage. For someone so obsessed for getting government out of people’s private lives, Flake seems more than happy to use government power to ban love.

Back to Rubio. As well as not particularly liking gay people, Rubio voted against the Violence Against Women Act, stating:

“I have concerns regarding the conferring of criminal jurisdiction to some Indian tribal governments over all persons in Indian country, including non-Indians.”

- Essentially, a non-Native American male being tried under the law for sexually assaulting a Native American woman, concerns Rubio, because he doesn’t trust Indian Tribal Governments. And yet, he puts his full faith in the States to fund programs properly:

“These funding decisions should be left up to the state-based coalitions that understand local needs best.”

- So trustworthy are local areas in dealing with domestic abuse cases, that due to budget cuts, the Topeka, Kansas City Council and Mayor actually repealed the Domestic Abuse law, in a bid to start a bit of a war with the County Prosecutor. This came about after Shawnee County D.A Chad Taylor, moved to stop investigating domestic violence entirely due to budget cuts. This meant that the City of Topeka would have to take up the cases, which they couldn’t afford to do either. So their Council voted to repeal the domestic abuse act. Which, forced it back into the hands of Shawnee County. Taylor said:

“My office now retains sole authority to prosecute domestic battery misdemeanors and will take on this responsibility so as to better protect and serve our community. We will do so with less staff, less resources, and severe constraints on our ability to effectively seek justice.”

Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence said:

“I really do not understand this. It’s really outrageous that they’re playing with family safety to see who blinks first. People could die while they’re waiting to straighten this out.”

- All of this comes down to budget cuts. Shawnee County DA Chad Taylor refused to prosecute domestic violence cases, after facing a 10% budget cut, despite half of all cases being domestic abuse cases, which increased substantially in the past three years, without any extra funding from the County. How very trustworthy! Interestingly, Rubio voted against the Budget Control Act in 2011, and the Fiscal Cliff 2012. Rubio evidently trusts the localities to make funding decisions, which is much easier, if those localities don’t have any funds in the first place.

Rubio isn’t the only Republican with odd reasons for voting against the Violence Against Women Act. Steve Stockman, Representative of Texas’ 36th District announced his shameful reasons for voting against:

“This is a truly bad bill. This is helping the liberals, this is horrible. Unbelievable. What really bothers—it’s called a women’s act, but then they have men dressed up as women, they count that. Change-gender, or whatever. How is that—how is that a woman?”

Stockman also voted to repeal Federal laws that ban guns in schools. Why so? Well, given that among his campaign contributors are the ‘National Association for Gun Rights’ and ‘Gun Owners of America’, it perhaps isn’t that surprising that Stockman feels the need to put their interests above the safety of children. Just to make sure we all understand where his allegiances lie, here is incredibly ridiculous, almost comical campaign bumper sticker, tweeted for the World to see, by the man himself.

- I’m not sure if Stockman is calling for semi-automatic rifles to be inserted into the vaginas of every pregnant woman. I wouldn’t be surprised.

The scientifically illiterate are still abundant in the Republican Party. Marco Rubio once announced that he didn’t know if the Earth was made in 6 days or not, and that we’re never likely to know. But Georgia’s 10th District Rep. Paul Broun (planning to run for Senate in 2014) and, quite horrifyingly, serving on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology once took Rubio’s toying with Creationism one step further:

Earth is about 9,000 years old, it was created in six days as we know them”

- Broun also said of embryology, genetics, evolution, and the Big Bang theory:

“they’re lies straight from the Pit of Hell … lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”

- Broun also said of climate change:

“Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community. It is a hoax. There is no scientific consensus.”[

- Echoing his scientific illiteracy, Broun gives us enlightening views on politics, when brief mention of a National Security Force by President Obama, before the 2008 election:

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force, I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may _ may not, I hope not _ but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

- Yes. A US Representative, thinks the Earth was made in 6 days, evolution is a lie from the pit of hell, climate change isn’t man made, and convinced President Obama was going to create his own Hitler Youth, to take over America and create a Marxist haven.

Now to move on from bat-shit crazy, to slightly less crazy, Paul Ryan. The spritely Paul Ryan. You may think he’s irrelevant as a symbol of this great new era for Republicans, given that his ticket lost the Presidential election. But let’s not forget that Ryan is the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, in 2013. A pretty important position. He’s also Wisconsin’s 1st District House Representative. He looks young, he seemed fresh, he wasn’t the grey haired typical old Republican. Nor was he the gun tottin’ Sarah Palin slightly vacant Republican. He was paraded on the networks as a hero of fiscal conservativism, brave to speak out against Obama overspending! His brand new House Republican Budget released in March this year, which the brave, fiscally conservative hero claims will:

“end cronyism, eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse and returns the federal government to its proper sphere of activity”

- So it is worthwhile to note that the anti-big government, pro-deficit reduction Paul Ryan voted for the two Bush tax cuts (both considered a great failure, and added significantly to the deficit), the $700 bailout of the banks, and the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, whilst voting against Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Most of Paul Ryan’s economic voting record, has added significantly to the National deficit.
His House Republicans Budget, unveiled by Republicans on March 12, noted that $931 billion of the creatively accounted $4.6tn apparently savable over the next ten years, will come from counting the savings from ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars…. wars that Paul Ryan voted for in the first place. Economically, Paul Ryan doesn’t know where he stands.
Socially, despite absolutely no evidence to back up its claims, in 2009 Paul Ryan cosponsored the ‘Sanctity of Life Act’. A very odd little Act that sought to protect fertilised eggs, stating that the eggs:

“shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood”

Ryan also believes that abortion, in all cases, including rape and incest, should be made illegal, and States given the right to criminally prosecute women who have abortions, including for rape and incest.

Before being elected as Senator for South Carolina in 2013, Tim Scott was House Representative for South Carolina’s first district. During his time in the House, Scott cosponsored a truly horrifying Bill that would deny food stamps to poorest families, if a family member was taking part in strike action. The right to strike – a key component of a democratic society – used by the weak against the powerful, used to secure freedoms and security for generations, Tim Scott voted to essentially end. Threatening the poorest people in society; you either strike, or you eat. Scott is also convinced that the private health care system in the US is the greatest in the World, and that the Health Reforms of 2010 should be repealed. This is no surprise given that one of his main campaign contributors, has been Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the health insurance company. Among other campaign contributions, he has received donations from Goldman Sachs. Tim Scott is a politician, for the wealthy, by the wealthy. The Insurance Industry Candidate.
Speaking of complete contempt for the less wealthy, Mark Meadows, a member of the January 2013 intake for The House, and Tea Party favourite, representing North Carolina’s 11th District voted against the Sandy Relief Fund.

Dean Heller, the Senator for Nevada, who will hold that position until 2019, voted against the Health Care Reform, and against Fair Minimum Wage Act. Heller has also voted against subsidising renewable energy, whilst voting to support development of oil, gas and coal…. two of his top campaign contributors, are Alliance Resource, and Murray Energy…. two coal companies.

So, gay marriage leading to marrying an animal, Church’s having to hire crossdressing Satan-worshippers, manipulating figures to suit an agenda, a refusal to expand Medicaid to help the most vulnerable, evolution a myth from the pits of hell, refusal to protect victims of domestic abuse, including transgendered people, a desire to see women who have been raped imprisoned for having an abortion, guns in schools funded by the gun lobby, Obama trying to raise an army to enforce a Marxist Utopia, anti-renewable energy, candidates wishing to disenfranchise poor people and their right to strike, and wishing to repeal health reform whilst taking campaign contributions from the wealthiest insurance companies in the country.

This new Republican breed sound, and act, and speak, eerily familiar to the old breed.

The Ultimate Daily Mail Story:

Constructing the perfect Daily Mail article is an art form. Many have tried it. They’ve included homophobic rants by Richard Littlejohn, they’ve included attempts to subtly hint that all benefit claimants may be capable of killing children. The ingredients that go into the Daily Mail mixing bowl of bullshit news, include familiar topics like the evils of immigration, the evils of the NHS, the evils of scroungers, the evils of unions, the evils of Labour, how Thatcher saved the entire Milky Way, the evils of socialists, which celebrity looks fat today, kids in danger from the evils of teachers; but it’s rare to see so many ingredients that go into so many different Mail stories, rolled into just one story. It’s almost impressive. Which is why when it does happen, we should sit back, and appreciate it.

Enter Martin Robinson, a Daily Mail columnist, who has already written six Thatcher related articles today alone. One of which, is as close to the perfect Daily Mail article as you’re ever likely to find. It starts with this catchy little headline:

- Note the ingredients used, in just one headling: The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, and Teachers. Heroic, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Underneath the headline, we are presented with this little gem:

- So, that’s: The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, Teachers, and Ed Miliband.

The story was presented with this completely irrelevant picture:

- The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, Teachers, Ed Miliband, and a half naked lady.

The second picture of the Story was this:

- The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, Teachers, Ed Miliband, a half naked lady, The Soviet Union.

The story included the following:

“Craig Parr is employed at Labour leader Ed Miliband’s old school and has worked with the youngest and most impressionable pupils there, while the other teaches troubled and vulnerable children. ”

- The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, Teachers, Ed Miliband, a half naked lady, The Soviet Union, Kids in danger.

And it goes on, to link one man and one woman to the entire Labour Party:

“The teacher at Haverstock School in north London – nicknamed ‘Labour’s Eton’ – was pictured parading with a sick placard which read: ‘Rejoice. Thatcher is dead.’ “

“The school, situated in the fashionable London district of Camden, has been described as a finishing school for the Labour politicians of the future.”

- This is about as relevant as saying… “…the teacher, who once walked past a man who looked a bit like Ed Miliband, but has no other relevant connection whatsoever to the Labour leader….“

- The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, Teachers, Ed Miliband, a half naked lady The Soviet Union, Kids in danger, The Labour Party.

“On Facebook she appears in photographs holding a hammer and sickle flag and posing alongside the former Cabinet Minister Tony Benn.”

- The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, Teachers, Ed Miliband, a half naked lady The Soviet Union, Kids in danger, The Labour Party, Tony Benn.

And it goes on even more:

“The 27-year-old special needs teacher and union activist…”

“Mr Parr is a member of the Lambeth branch of the National Union of Teachers and has previously urged fellow teachers to strike.”

- The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, Teachers, Ed Miliband, a half naked lady, The Soviet Union, kids in danger, The Labour Party, Tony Benn, Unions.

Douglas Carswell, Tory MP for Clacton in Essex, said: ‘We must not have teachers working in schools with young people at the public’s expense who think it’s acceptable to behave like this. Such behaviour is wrong.’

- The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, Teachers, Ed Miliband, a half naked lady, The Soviet Union, kids in danger, The Labour Party, Tony Benn Unions, the taxpaying public.

And on….

Mr Parr, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, joined Haverstock School in September last year and was given the sensitive role of teaching children with special needs.

- The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, Teachers, Ed Miliband, a half naked lady, The Soviet Union, kids in danger, The Labour Party, Tony Benn, Unions, the taxpaying public, dangerous Socialists.

And on….

“Mr Parr, a member of Schools OUT, an association for gay and lesbian teachers, said pupils should be given a ‘balanced view’ of the world.”

- The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, Teachers, Ed Miliband, a half naked lady, The Soviet Union, kids in danger, The Labour Party, Tony Benn, Unions, the taxpaying public, dangerous Socialists, Homosexuality.

Finishing off, with a nice bit of angry far-right commentators, commenting about how Hitler was actually a Socialist (he wasn’t), and how deluded, dangerous, physically unnattractive Marxists with slightly bigger taxpayer funded breasts are targeting YOUR children!:

- The NHS, Breasts, Thatcher, Hitler, Teachers, Ed Miliband, a half naked lady, The Soviet Union, kids in danger, The Labour Party, Tony Benn, Unions, the taxpaying public, dangerous Socialists, Homosexuality, angry, paranoid right wingers.

So there you have it. The quintessential guide to writing the perfect Daily Mail article, courtesy of Martin Robinson, managing to mix all the ingredients into one story. An artist maybe. Or like a right winged modern day Buddha reaching the heights of Daily Mail Nirvana. Though, I have to say, I’m supremely disappointed that there is no mention of illegal immigrants or the EU. Perhaps it’s not the perfect Daily Mail article afterall, but it’s certainly as close as one is ever likely to find. Until tomorrow’s edition.

Bad day for bigots II

The President today gave a far more forceful and progressive Inaugural Speech than that of four years ago. He mentioned the word ‘gay’ for the first time in inaugural history, whilst discussing equality. He mentioned climate change. He mentioned equality in diversity, and being a friend of the poor along with support for the undocumented immigrant community. Words are of course, cheap. It would now be great if he backed up his words with actions, took on the insane American Right Wing, and left an enduring legacy.

After election night, I became aware of a vast array of tweets from those seemingly unhappy that Obama had been re-elected. You can see the flurry of right winged bigotry from election night, right here. As for today, it seems there has been another outpouring of insane, bigoted, putrid right winged sentiment coming out of the Twittersphere that i’ve come across. Here are a few of my favourites:

- Where would these far right lunatics be, without referring to someone they don’t like as either Hitler or Stalin? This genius goes one step further and suggests President Obama is both Hitler and Stalin. Communist and Fascist. Quite the achievement!

- Oh and Marx too. Obviously. What with bailing out the auto industry and the banking system. EXACTLY as Marx demands.

- Oh and Saddam too.

- YES! FACT! Except, it isn’t. The Nazis inherited gun restrictions from the former Weimar Republic. Actually, one of the first things Hitler did on coming to power, was to destroy all Union Power. Mitt Romney signalled his support for Ohio’s anti-Union laws in 2012. If you’re going to draw weak links to Hitler, at least get your research straight.

- This is sensible from Ken Stephens. Politics, and whom we elect should not be based on the candidates personal life.

- Oh Ken. The sensibility has suddenly been reduced to a big pile of bigoted ashes.

- It’s true. One mention in Leviticus that homosexuality is ‘abominable’. And it’s not like the Bible also endorses slaver….. oh wait: “When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property. (Exodus 21:20-21)“. I guess I can count on anti-gay Christian Americans to campaign for the re-introduction of slavery.

- Spirit of the Civil War still alive and well in 1860s/2013 Texas, I see.

So. That’s Hitler, Saddam, Stalin, Muslim, Communist, Fascist, Marx, Socialist, Kenyan, and Gay. The Right Winged Nut Jobs really did come out in force today to express their delusions. They provide great material, and i’m always thankful for them.

As to the Obama speech; I am inclined to be far more sceptical than four years ago. He still has to contend with a viciously regressive Republican Congress, and I’m a little concerned that his mention of climate change, and gay rights was simply a way to make the progressives sing his praises. In four years time, I hold out very little hope that there will have been any advancement in dealing with climate change, and no Federal recognition of the right to marry for homosexual couples. The President’s rhetoric really needs to be backed up by strong action, in spite of the opposition from the abusive far right.

Bad day for bigots

The Twittersphere is alive today, as it was last night, with the incoherent, fact-less ramblings of the bigots trying to grasp what happened to their crusade to turn America back sixty years. And we know why.
Obama wins the Presidency.
Tammy Baldwin is elected first openly gay Senator, for Wisconsin.
Gay marriage is legalised in Maine and Maryland by popular vote.
And recreational use of maurijuana is part legalised in Colorado and Washington State.
For liberal America, this has been a great day for progress.
It is, however, the worst nightmare for crackpot conservatives, whose bullshit amplifier; Fox News has spent the past four years referring to anyone slightly left of Hitler, as Communist, Marxist, Nazi, Muslim, anti-white, anti-American, Socialist, terrorist sympathisers in a seemingly ineffective attempt to scare people on a constant basis. Nevertheless, some people are hanging on to the bigotry that was dealt such a swift blow last night. Here are a few of my personal favourites:

- Hitler? Really? We are seriously suggesting President Obama….is similar…. to Adolf Hitler? REALLY?
As pointed out in an earlier article, it is incredibly easy to draw tenuous comparisons between any politician and Adolf Hitler. For example, the first thing Hitler did on coming to power, was to completely destroy all union power. Similarly, Mitt Romney pledged his total support for Ohio’s anti-union laws, he has also claimed that teachers unions ‘deaden’ student achievement. Clearly this means that Romney is a nazi who wants to kill 6,000,000 Jews and enslave the World. And by clearly, I mean…. not at all, because it’s massively fucking irrational.

Normally i’d ignore this, but I thought – perhaps naively – that I might engage one of these insane right wingers in order to try and figure out why Obama is basically Hitler. So I did. I asked why Obama is a ‘socialist’ or a ‘nazi’. The response? ….

- Oh, well that clears it up! Obama is like Hitler because Europe is too used to America being the backbone of our defence. How could I not have seen this before? Obamanazi!

The ramblings continued:

- His first comment is of course ludicrous. The point being, that taxing the wealthy is somehow punishment. The ignorance comes from the fact that this mentality basis itself on the idea that success, is entirely individual. It chooses to ignore the public schools that pay teachers next to nothing to produce an educated workforce, or the public funded roads that the successful use to transport, the police protecting their property. Tax is the price you pay for belonging to a civilised society. The most fundamental principle of which, is protection of the most vulnerable. It is not punishing success, it is helping to maintain the ladder for future generations to climb, rather than kicking it away so that people like Mitt Romney can afford a new yacht. Capitalism is by far the best method to allocate resources efficiently. But at its core, it is amoral. You regulate, and you tax, to prevent it from becoming immoral.
Onto the second point………Just like Hitler! Lying means he is just like Hitler. I cannot remember a time when a politician didn’t lie a little. Even before Hitler. There is quite obviously a different motive for someone to relate a politician they dislike, using a rather weak link, to Hitler. It is to perpetuate irrational fear. Nothing more. So I pointed out the massive inconsistencies in the Romney campaign rhetoric; which as pointed out in a previous article on here, is full of horrid little manipulations…… to which I was given the incredible reply:

- Yup. It is perfectly acceptable for a Presidential challenger to lie and manipulate, purely because he isn’t President yet. It is perfectly acceptable, apparently, for someone to manipulate you, to practically steal your democratic right to vote, on the basis of bullshit. That’s absolutely fine apparently, as long as he’s a contender.

He then finished his term as King of Bullshit Mountain, at about 1am British time, with this little gem:

- Naturally, a few hours after he posted this, I am smug.

A few other glorious tweets from the crazed American Right Wing:

- Right Winged American Patriotism. Swear allegiance to the Constitution and the democracy it so beautifully created….. unless things don’t go your way. And then, invoke the memory of slavery. Brilliant life choice.

- So, that’s half the American electorate who, according to Romney, are government dependent, and one girl who wants an abortion. Seems legit.

- Anti-homosexuality tweet from Christian fundamentalist group with very little support. Thankfully, there are very few anti-homosexuality tweets out there, when Tammy Baldwin had been pronounced the winner for the Wisconsin Senate seat. 99% of tweets were congratulatory, and supportive, hailing progress.

- God wanted you to vote Romney. Jesus is a massive fan of private health insurance.

- Okay…. Mein Fuhrer, suggests Hitler. Hitler was of course in control of a Party whose main goal was a State based on Nationalist principles built on the idea of a superior race. The economy was used to promote the image of the power of the State through the military. It was vehemently opposed to communism; a system based on the idea of total egalitarianism in which an economy reflects the necessity to disintegrate class structures, and has absolutely nothing to do with race, the military, the myth of the ‘Nation’ or anything else that a Nazi government desires. And yet, this crazed Right Winger merges the two polar opposite concepts, into one. And what’s the reason? Again, scare tactics. In reality, President Obama is can in no reasonable way be described as either a nazi, or a communist (even if Glenn Beck tells you differently).

- All true. Except…

Prime Minister, not President.

HE, is a SHE.

She is an Atheist.

- So in fact, none of it is true. But a career at Fox News seems imminent for this young lady, whose ‘make-shit-up’ strategy fits their profile perfectly.
Also, Australia has universal healthcare, no death penalty, evolution is taught in pretty much all schools, creationism is rejected, and compulsory voting. Sounds like an ideal country for right winged anti-universal healthcare, anti-atheism, creationist, death penalty supporting bat-shit crazy Republicans.

So, Romney concedes defeat. Fox News concedes that Obama won fairly. Even Donald Trump isn’t questioning the outcome. Lawyers aren’t questioning the outcome. No one is seriously questioning the outcome. Because that would be ridiculous. Unless of course, you’re an overly dramatic Republican, in denial, in which case….

- I don’t understand what God has to do with this? Are rational thinking people a threat? Let’s not forget that Jefferson was a Deist who did not believe in a personal God who intervenes in human affairs. Benjamin Franklin was an Atheist. And the Constitution and Declaration are specifically pro-enlightenment, and anti-religion in their content. The World is a much better place because of secularism and the ideals of the Englightenment.

- What I have learnt from this entire election from social media, is that the more vehement right winged Americans; whilst acting Patriotic, are actually very very undemocratic, very despotic, and only like it when they have power or their poisonous and largely discredited ideas control everything. They cannot accept defeat. They threaten. They scare. Their rhetoric is baseless but full of fear. They have no concept of ‘socialism’. If they truly understood it, they would accept that no President can be regarded as ‘Socialist’ since the beginning of the Union. Probably closest, was Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, every 20th Century Republican pre-Reagan, would be considered ‘socialist’ by todays’ Right winged American standards. To associate universal healthcare with the sort of feared Socialist totalitarian dictatorships of old, is disingenuous and a manipulation of facts (the fact being, that every industrialised country with a nationalised health service, out performs the US private system by a huge margin on every important measure; child mortality, life expectancy, per capita cost). Obama is simply a conservative in the old Disraeli tradition. One Nation Conservatism. He is in no way a socialist. He is just not a free market fundamentalist that appears to have infected the Republican Party as of late.
America, according to these people should always be ruled by overly religious, bigoted, free-market-fundamentalists….. nothing else is acceptable, and if America doesn’t vote in line with that, then they get angry, and threatening, and violent.

I am happy and relieved that the majority of the American public, have voted to defeat such a venomous ideology. They have quite overwhelmingly voted for progress, for tolerance, for dignity and for the majority rather than the wealthy few. Something we in Britain seem to have chosen to ignore, in 2010.

Four more years.

“The role of oxygen atoms in supply side economics”

The title of this blog is meaningless. It was composed by cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett to highlight scientific reductionism; the abandonment of theory, laws, interactions, and deeper understanding of the connections between chemistry, physics, and biology and even social sciences in an attempt to unify them all into a category, which almost always leads to the idea of social Darwinism. What Dennett is saying, is that to break down theories to their bare minimum, and then to attach them to other broken down bare minimum theories in an attempt to unify them, is meaningless at best, and very dangerous at worst.

Recently, the musician Frank Turner revealed that whilst his fans quite enjoy his apparently left leaning political ideals – he is actually a Libertarian. He accuses people of not understanding politics, if they believe that from this, he is a Republican/Tory. He also claims that Fascism, is a Left wing phenomena. Here:

“To start with, most people don’t seem to understand what the difference between left and right is. For example, the BNP are a hard left party.”

- For those of you who don’t know, the BNP (British National Party) is a fascist political party based on race. It has ties to neo-nazi groups, and its leader Nick Griffin once said:

Without the White race, nothing matters. Other right-wing parties believe that the answer to the race question is integration and a futile attempt to create ‘Black Britons’, while we affirm that non-Whites have no place here at all and will not rest until every last one has left our land.”

- He also denies the holocaust happened, believes that there is a Jewish conspiracy to destroy White Europeans, and is good friends with David Duke. For all intents and purposes, the BNP is a neo-nazi. Fascist, at the very least. Which suggests that Frank Turner believes that Fascism is a product of the Left.

This idea – that ‘National Socialism’ or Fascism are products of the Left – is not new. It represents a deeply reductionist understanding of the political spectrum, dismissing all theory and motive, and ending up with ‘well the Nazi’s controlled the State centrally. And enacted some social protections. As did Communist regimes. Therefore, the Nazi’s are a left wing party‘. It is a very very weak understanding of the difference between Right and Left. For the record, I do not place Fascism on the far right. I think the ‘right’ has changed incalculably over the years. And that both Right and Left are almost entirely different to their early 20th century counterparts. As noted in my previous article, the conservatism of Disraeli is similar to the social democratic principles of a politician like Barack Obama today; of which most of those on the right would consider ‘socialist’, whilst 100 years ago, would certainly not have been. The right has (for the sake of argument, though this assertion is debatable also) become a beacon of free market ideals, mixed with a dose of patriotism/nationalism. In that sense, it is not libertarian, as it seeks to strengthen national borders, rather than diminish them. Libertarianism is specifically the free, unhindered movement of labour, capital and goods. It recognises no national borders.

It is fair to say that Fascism and Socialism may have traits in common; central economic planning for example. But, then, so does Libertarianism and Communism; no government, free association, no borders. But the motives and the differences in organisation are enough to render them entirely at odds. The same is true of Fascism and the Far Left.

Turner seems to be suggesting that central economic planning, means far left. Theory, motive, and overriding political aims are ignored entirely. It is supremely reductionist and ignorant. The blurred lines between left and right when it comes to totalitarian dictatorships are often exploited by both sides. Ignore theory, and motive for just a second, and you can come up with all sorts of comparisons.
We can say that Hitler centralised power, providing a dictatorship of the German people. Marxist-Leninism calls for a similar ruler and control over the economy.
We could say that the Nazi’s use of the term ‘work shy’, followed by punishment for refusing jobs, is eerily similar to right winged austerity rhetoric coming out of the Republican/Tory camp.
We could also point out that Thatcher took on, and crushed the power of the trade unions in the 1980s, as did Reagan. Similarly, after coming to power Hitler banned trade unionism entirely.
Both comparisons miss the point; the reason Fascism differs entirely from the far left, is because it bases its entire being, its essence on a community based on race/nationality. The driving force of history, to Fascists, is shared heritage that must be preserved and perpetuated. The central economy of Fascist States thus works to this end and nothing else. When Hitler replaced the trade union movement and imprisoned German socialist leaders in the mid-30s, he created a new movement in order to control the working classes. He called this the ‘German Labour Force’. The name is significant. Before this, the trade union movement and the German communist/socialist groups associated with it, were international in their scope. They supported their comrades around the World. There were not understood in terms of national borders. Suddenly, they became the ‘German’ labour force. Their whole point, was advancement of the nation state. Alongside this new movement cloaked in patriotism, was a list of ‘un-german activities’. This included striking. Anyone who turned down a job in both the public or private sector was named ‘work shy’ and imprisoned. 8.3% of the unemployed were conscripted. It is important to note that a Fascist State depends on the strength of its armed forces, this is Nationalism, not socialism. Here is a song sung by the new ‘German Labour Force’….

“We demand from ourselves service to the end, even when no eyes are upon us.
We know that we should love our Fatherland more than our own life.
We vow that no one shall outdo us in loyalty,
That our life shall be one great labour service for Germany.
So in this solemn hour we pray for blessing on the oath we take,
We thank thee, Fuhrer, that we have now seen thee,
Do thou behold us as thine own creation?
May our hearts ever beat with thy heart’s pulses, Our lives find inspiration in thy love,
Behold us here! Thy Germany are we.”

- This highlights, again, the difference between Fascism and the far left. The far left bases its existence on class. It stands to obliterate class, ending in a completely classless society. Class is the driving force. Race, nationality, religion, sexuality and most other social constructs are not important. This is in stark contrast to what we see in this song. The German Labour Force had a purpose. That purpose was the advancement of the nation. The line: “We know that we should love our Fatherland more than our own life” is the key to the difference between Fascism and the far-left. The far-left is more often than not, completely obliterated by Fascist forces. The Fascism of Hitler attempted to destroy the far-left…. the Fascism of Saddam attempted to destroy the far-left. Fascism cannot abide the far-left. The two are vehemently opposed.

The Nazi Charter of Labour does not grant total control over the means of production to the workers, as you would expect if the Nazi’s truly were a party of the far-left. Instead, it states that the ‘leader of the enterprise’ (also known as the employer:

“……..makes the decisions for the employees and laborers in all matters concerning the enterprise.”

- This, along with the banning of trade unions, cut wages (from 20.4 to 19.5 cents an hour for skilled labour, and from 16.1 to 13 cents an hour for unskilled labour), the banning of strikes, the outlawing of collective bargaining, and the move to make the labour force a cog in the Nationalist machinery suggests unequivically that referring to the Nazi’s as a far-left party, could not be more ignorant of historical fact and the environment in which the left had to exist under a Nazi leadership.

Let us also not forget who supported, and who opposed Fascism. Communists and Socialists across the World opposed the Nazi’s. Between 1933 and 1939 150,000 Communists were imprisoned by the Nazis purely for being Far-left. A further 30,000 were executed. The oldest Communist party in Germany, the KDP started in 1919 (the biggest outside of Russia) was declared illegal by Hitler in 1933. All Communist publications were closed down. Other Socialist groups – The Baum Group, Red Orchestra, Home Front, the Uhrig Group – were routinely terrorised by the Nazis, imprisoned and executed. In 1944, there was a workers uprising in an attempt to inspire a socialist revolution, in which 200,000 workers were arrested. This isn’t far-left.
And yet, the support seemed to come not only from the Catholic Church, but also from big business. The Fascists in Spain were being aided by Ford and DuPont. Standard Oil also worked with Franco. US Steel and Alcoa supplied the Fascists with steel.
An exert from the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 1974 stated:

In Germany, for example, General Motors and Ford became an integral part of the Nazi war efforts. GM’s plants in Germany built thousands of bomber and jet fighter propulsion systems for the Luftwaffe at the same time that its American plants produced aircraft engines for the U.S. Army Air Corps….
Ford was also active in Nazi Germany’s prewar preparations. In 1938, for instance, it opened a truck assembly plant in Berlin whose “real purpose,” according to U.S. Army Intelligence, was producing “troop transport-type” vehicles for the Wehrmacht. That year Ford’s chief executive received the Nazi German Eagle (first class).
On the ground, GM and Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored “mule” 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich’s medium and heavy-duty trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served as “the backbone of the German Army transportation system.”….
After the cessation of hostilities, GM and Ford demanded reparations from the U.S. Government for wartime damages sustained by their Axis facilities as a result of Allied bombing… Ford received a little less than $1 million, primarily as a result of damages sustained by its military truck complex at Cologne.

- Are we saying that GM, and Ford are also far-left? Seriously?

Glenn Beck once claimed that ‘social justice’ was a term used by both the left and the Nazis, in an attempt to draw links between the two. And yet, one of the main strands of Nazism; harsh restrictions on trade unionism was adopted by the American Right Wing of which Beck belongs. It is illegal in the US for unions to ask other unions to picket alongside them. In 2001 a contractor named Ruzicka Electric hired to build a student centre at Lindenwood University were picketed by the union representing their staff for paying too low wages. In support of the union, other unions working at Lindenwood picketed alongside them. The Eighth Court and Supreme Court ruled that:

The picketing will be unlawful if there is an expectation or a hope or a desire that employees of the secondary employer will be induced or encouraged to take concerted action to quit working behind the picket line…Ruzicka Electric presented evidence that Local 1 agents, acting as observers at the neutral gate, engaged in picketing activity, asking neutral employees to refuse to work. If believed, this evidence establishes Local 1 engaged in unlawful secondary activity.

- It is thus illegal to ‘expect’ or ‘hope’ that another union might picket alongside your union. If Beck was truly anti-Nazi, he would recognise that limits to unionism is not only undemocratic, it is totalitarian in principle.

Motive is the key.

Economic centralising is meaningless without a purpose. The purpose of the Fascist centralised state is perpetuation of the Nation based on perceived heritage – be it race, religion, or any other man-made social phenomena that they claim is a natural way to order society. All economic planning in a Fascist centralised economy is geared toward the advancement of the Nation. It is a war economy. By contrast Left wing economic centralisation does not hold the Nation, or race to be a great natural truth that must be protected and advanced. It works to create a more equal society based on wealth distribution. It is international in its approach to social relations, and has absolutely no regard for perceived social heritage.

The Nazi’s certainly pushed social policies, and abhorred Capitalism when it suited them (we can call this left wing, if we wish), but they also promoted Nationalistic principles (we can call this right wing, if we wish). We can find Left leaning policies and rhetoric coming out of Fascist States, we can just as easily find Right leaning policy and rhetoric coming out of Fascist States.

Turner, whilst insisting that it is the rest of the World that doesn’t particularly understand political spectrum, makes a hugely ironic mistake. In an interview with ‘Moon and Back music’, he says:

“I consider myself a libertarian”

And yet, in 2011, in an interview with ‘Huck Magazine’ he says:

“I’ve got no problem with using taxes to pay for essential things like defence or the basics of a healthcare system.”

- It is my understanding of Libertarianism, that they believe taxation to be evil. A Libertarian system would include no taxation whatsoever. No healthcare system. No publicly funded anything. Libertarianism calls for free association without state coercion. It is the belief that taxation is theft (seriously ridiculous) and all government should be voluntarily funded, rather than collectively (because collective = evil). It is based on the premise that all wealth is individually obtained, and that the owner of wealth has no duty toward the rest of society. It is the ultimate in Hobbesian hell. A Libertarian’s fundamental beliefs are that individuals should be free to acquire property, without any State coercion, and form voluntary associations paid for by the individuals within the group, if they wish. The moment you believe in a tax payer funded program of any sort, you are not a Libertarian. Frank Turner is not a Libertarian, if he believes in any sort of state funded ‘basics of a healthcare system’. He’s just a little more Right Winged than Thatcher.

Turner makes the very fundamental mistake that a lot of commentators make when they attempt to attribute labels to political ideas; they reduce the complexity of methods and motives and aims and the roles of institutions, down to their simplest explanations. They do this, because they fail to note that ideology is dogmatic; free from the context in which they are placed. Whether a country be rich, poor, racist, liberal, democratic or totalitarian…. to ideologues, it doesn’t matter. We see this in the way that Communism was forced upon a largely unprepared agricultural Russia in 1917. The Nazi’s were neither a party of the left, nor the right. They incorporated methods for both, their motives were strictly Nationalistic, their aims were oppressive if they came into conflict with anti-Nationalist forces. This is neither a doctrine permitted by Marxism, or promoted by Friedman-ite New Right. Whilst the far-left strives for human equality, Nazism strived for human inequality in which the group (white German’s in this case) are superior.

Frank Turner, does not understand the very basics of political thought.

During the Bush years, Keith Olberman of MSNBC called Bush a Fascist. During Obama’s Presidency, Fox News have attempted to draw links between Obama and Fascism. It is simply propaganda in a simplistic attempt to discredit the Right or the Left, using very loose comparisons lacking any sort of context, without much thought and absolutely no analysis, drawn from flawed reductionism.

Losing the Left.

I don’t understand the Left wing any more. I consider myself on the Left and yet on foreign policy especially, I am labelled a neo-con (as well as an Imperialist who clearly loves to see the bodies of dead Iraqis – seriously, I get that a lot). But I have reasons why I believe my foreign policy views – namely, pro-Iraq/Afghanistan wars, and anti (in its current form)-Palestinian statehood are markedly Left leaning in comparison to those who consider themselves to be on the Galloway-esque anti-war left side of the isle. Those who vehemently opposed the Iraq war, now corner the debate. We are not allowed to present another case, without a barrage of ad hominem attacks.

It would appear to me that the Left wing has been horribly hijacked by the anti-war left. Anti-war is now synonymous with the left wing, though it seems hopelessly insincere in its apparent concern for the innocent people of Iraq and Afghanistan, or mistreated Gazan’s. It is only concerned, when the West is involved. It is anti-Western, anti-American, and based on that framework. The anti-war Left march through the streets of London against intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan. But when the Taliban unleashed the harshest form of Sharia in history; closing theatres, banning music and TV, and restricting an otherwise progressive and liberalised Afghanistan population of women who had embraced ‘Westernised’ fashion and culture, to their homes, behind veils, and enforced it through cruel punishments and barbaric 7th century ‘justice’ publicly executing women in the street…. the anti-war Left is eerily silent.

Which makes me wonder…. what is the point of the Left internationally any more? What do they stand for? They have become non-interventionist, based on the ‘sovereignty’ of National borders, regardless of the horrors within those borders…. which is a traditional conservative approach to foreign policy historically (George Bush, incidentally, before 9/11 was a non-interventionist conservative).

But beneath the thin veil of concern and care, lies a rabid anti-Americanism. With this spirit of anti-Americanism comes the usual suspects within a rhetorical framework of rough conjecture and just outright conspiratorial lunacy that undermines the Left substantially. The rhetorical framework is simple:
America – World’s largest terrorist organisation.
Military industrial complex.
Oil.
War criminals.
Imperialism.
Those are the five main components of anti-war rhetoric. And they have become synonymous with left wing rhetoric. There is no room for debate. All debate must be based on that framework. The framework itself, seems untouchable. They express outrage at the foreign policy of the Bush Administration, referring to the former President rather ridiculously as a new Hitler or they call for Blair to be tried as a war criminal, and then laugh without irony as manic right wingers refer to Obama as Stalin. Both are ludicrous positions to hold. Their anti-Bush, anti-Blair, anti-American, everything-the-West-does-is-for-oil, with a “the enemy of Bush/Blair/America is my friend” position on every conflict lacks context, lacks understanding of the situation at hand, the history of the events that lead to conflict, and quite tellingly of all, the anti-war left fails to provide any substantial alternative for military action against a country like Iraq under Saddam or Afghanistan under Mullah Omar. They are anti-sanctions and anti-intervention. What answer do they provide? Nothing.

I happen to believe that liberal democracy, secularism – along with rights that absolutely transcend cultures, the abuses of which cannot be defended in any meaningful way – is something to be fought for, and supported by those who can. The Left must support and defend those who fight for freedoms across the World. We must not forgive Fascism simply because it is shrouded in ‘faith’.

Their idols are familiar to us all, and yet severely lacking in integrity. I could again point to the inadequacies of Michael Moore and why his diatribes are damaging to the left due to their fundamental inconsistencies, manipulations, and out right lies. I have already done this once and so wont go into detail, though it can be seen here. I will however reiterate a point I made in that article, that Moore and the Left use to justify their non-interventionist position, it being that Saddam posed no threat to the US, and had never attacked the US. Moore makes this claim in Fahrenheit 9/11. It is often said that Iraq was a war of aggression against a nation that posed no threat. There are two worrying points to be made here:
Firstly, It is simply not true that Saddam posed no threat or hadn’t attacked the US. The suggestion that Saddam’s Iraq were innocent victims of an aggressive imperialist state, is nonsense, and yet no one actually knows this. In the 1980s Saddam had protected terrorist Abu Nidal. Seven Americans died when Nidal’s men, on Nidal’s orders attacked Pan AM Flight 73 in 1986. Nidal killed Israelis, and was one of the World’s most wanted terrorists. He also lived in Iraq from 1999 until his death in 2002. There is absolutely no way Saddam did not know about this. Iraq under Saddam, as posited by Samir al-Khalil in ‘Republic of Fear’ was a State in perpetual terror and very closely monitored by the government.
Did Saddam have ties to Bin Laden? There is no evidence to suggest that’s true. Was his regime a threat in others ways as well as providing support to Nidal? Yes. Uday Hussain’s media organisation printed constant threats, promoting attacks on the lives of any British or American civilians that Iraqi’s might come in contact with:

“American and British interests, embassies, and naval ships in the Arab region should be the targets of military operations and commando attacks by Arab political forces.”

- The fact is, Saddam’s regime, as a Nation was not powerful enough to attack the UK or US. They didn’t have the means, they didn’t have the WMDs. But they had the power and the network to finance and control terrorist attacks, to support terrorists like Nidal, and to promote fascist intolerence and violence against anyone who wasn’t like them.
They killed 5000 in Halabja. They’re responsible for 40,000 more deaths, of their own people. This regime was totalitarian, dangerous, murderous, and fascist.

Let us also not forget that whilst the anti-war Left insist that the Iraq war was ‘illegal’ because it had no UNSC backing (given that the security council insisted on recognising the Khmer Rouge as the rightful rulers of Cambodia, for twenty years after the genocide, they’re hardly to be considered the guardians of law…. and also, they’re not the guardians of law… they are a policy making body), we cannot ignore the fact that as part of the Genocide Convention, the UN had a duty to step in and remove Saddam from power. It is a legal obligation, in the midst of, or after a genocide has taken place. Which in Iraq, it had. Article II of the Act states:

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

- Parts A, B, C Saddam had met.
Article IV states:

Article IV: Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.

Article VIII states:

Article VIII: Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.

- It is my opinion, that genocide is the responsibility of the entire World, to put an end to. It is also my opinion that a leader loses his right to sovereignty the moment he commits genocide.

The Anti-War Left was again eerily silent in trying to enforce the UN Genocide Convention’s wishes whilst Saddam was wiping out the Kurdish minority in Halabja. And again with the Marsh Arabs. Two genocides they ignored. It is shameful but it is defended by a simplistic attack on the US. “They funded Saddam”. Well then they have a duty more so than any, to put a stop to it.

Interestingly, genocide most certainly took place in Bosnia in the 90s. And Britain’s initial non-interventionist policy cost lives. When we did eventually come to a consensus to intervene, a lot of the damage had been done. The US Ambassador to Nato, Robert Hunter noted:

“The failure of Nato to reach agreement on serious military action, can be attributed to the efforts of one allied nation: Great Britain.”

- The source of that failure by the UK, was the government’s non-intervention ideals of the time. That’s right. The anti-war left won, on this occasion. Rifkind, the Defence, and then Foreign secretary at the time, had the nerve when confronted by Bob Dole – a man injured during WWII, to say:

“You Americans don’t know the horrors of war”

- Anti-war, ignorant, and anti-American all in one. The Anti-war Left must be proud.

Whilst we were dithering over intervention policy, Srebrenica suffered 8000 deaths. Described by the International Criminal Tribunal as:

“They [members of the Bosnian Serb army] stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity.”

- How on Earth is this any different from what Saddam was doing, and how does anyone read it without a desperate need to stop it? The Al-Anfal Campaign; including mass executions, chemical attacks, and an attempt at wiping out an entire group of people (again, genocide and again, entirely ignored by the anti-war left) is no different to the massacres committed in Bosnia.

Non-interventionism has its consequences also. For those insisting that those of us who supported the invasion are responsible for innocent deaths, I say; you are no different. You were indirectly arguing for the prolonging of one of the worst dictatorships the World has known, in the name of some very insular version of “peace” that you have going on. It is a weakness of the mind to tell me how many innocent people died, whilst not considering how many would have continued to be tortured and killed had the regime been allowed to remain. Unless of course, you believe Saddam may have had a change of heart, and stopped his reign of murder. In which case, you’re deluded.

The left has to make a choice; does it support and defend liberal democracy, or does it tacitly, and blindly allow fascism simply because we ‘must respect other cultures’? Because right now, in the aftermath of Iraq, and with the growth of anti-war sentiment it seems to me that the anti-fascist left of the 1970s and 1980s, the guys who marched arm in arm outside the American embassy in London with Kurdish anti-Saddam rebels, the guys who wanted Saddam deposed as opposed to supported and propped up by the West, have become the 21st century fascist apologetics, and have abandoned their Kurdish allies. They make every excuse for horrifying acts of human rights abuses, all in their quest to insist that Blair is a modern day Hitler. They storm the streets as part of the ‘Unite Against Fascism’ movement in which they oppose home grown fascism in the guise of the utterly putrid EDL, yet have absolutely no concern with the growing Taliban fascist insurgency in Afghanistan. Nor do the UAF seem to equate the sentiments of militant Islam (and to an extent, ‘moderate’ Islam) with Fascism.
As noted in a previous article on the links between Islam and Fascism, I wrote;
If you go to the UAF website and search “Tommy Robinson” the leader of the EDL, you get countless articles attacking him. And rightly so. The man is a nazi. But, if you type the name “Anjem Choudhary“, you get no results whatsoever. Choudary is an anti-Westerner (but who doesn’t live in Islamic fundamentalist countries, choosing instead to live in the West he so hates) who will refer to Muslims in war torn countries as “brothers and sisters“. I hear that a lot. It’s a rather curious sentiment, because these people didn’t seem to quick to jump to the difference of the “brothers and sisters” when Iraq was run by the Hussein crime family. Or when Afghanistan was under the heavy hand of the Taliban. I am lead to the conclusion that the terms “brothers and sisters”, used as some sort of show of solidarity, is a mask. It seems to show support for individuals, yet what it is actually suggesting is that when you’re killed or tortured under a Islamic fundamentalist regime, it is fine, because you are simply a sacrifice in the name of the perpetuation of Islamic rule. Motive is important here. When Islamic regimes kill their own people, and their “brothers” in the UK keep quiet, the regimes notice that they can get away with it. No one seems to care. We must ‘respect’ the cultural differences that lead to genocide. When Saddam took out Halabja, there was very little condemnation in Western countries. No huge anti-Saddam protests through London. Saddam killed thousands on purpose. If an American bomb hits the wrong target, and kills innocents; suddenly Muslims in the UK come out in force against Western “imperialism“. Here is what Choudhary said on BBC Hardtalk:

Look, at the end of the day innocent people—when we say ‘innocent people’ we mean Muslims—as far as non-Muslims are concerned they have not accepted Islam and as far as we are concerned that is a crime against God.

- Fascism. But not according to the UAF.

The situation under Saddam. In 2002, an EU sponsored resolution adopted by the Commission for Human Rights noted:

“….systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.”

- Apparently not enough to warrant an overthrow, according to the anti-war Left. Maybe some more from the Commission on Human Rights might sway them?:

“….summary and arbitrary executions… and the use of rape as a political tool and all enforced and involuntary disappearances.”

- The use of rape. Rape. As a Political tool.
So, that’s……. rape, genocide, torture, enforced disappearances, threats, and the murder of children. But apparently, still not enough to warrant overthrowing. And yet, the anti-war left cry “peace” whilst ignoring all of it. Disgusting.

We often hear Iraq described as a ‘sovereign nation’ whose sovereignty was invaded by America. But as a leftie, I’d say sovereignty comes with responsibilities. The responsibility not to kill 40,000 of your own people. The responsibility not to have the entire population living in fear and suspicion. Once those responsibilities have been endlessly breached, once every UN resolution has been pissed on, then you lose your right to sovereignty. There was no country on Earth, in 2003, whose leader had lost his right to sovereignty more than Saddam Hussain.

And then there’s George Galloway. Hero of the ‘Stop The War Coalition’. His appearance in front of the US Senate is legendary. And yet, as apologists for fascist regimes go, he tops the list.

Galloway said in 2010 that he was always opposed to the Saddam regime. And yet, he’s on video meeting Saddam and saying

“I salute your courage, your strength, and everyone I have spoken to about meeting you wanted me to convey our heartfelt support”.

His idea of what makes a terrorist is simple. US/UK/UN = terrorists. Anything else = bravery. This apparent ‘bravery’ includes the blowing up of the UN building in Baghdad with military grade explosives, which was one of the “operations” of the “resistance” that Galloway called heroic. And who claimed responsibility for that attack? Abu al-Zarqawi. This operation killed de Mello. One of the World’s great humanitarians. And Zarqawi had him killed, not for his support of any war, but simply because he helped free East Timor from fundamentalist hands. Or in the words of the great “resistance”……. “a crusader that extracted part of Islamic land”. This has nothing to do with ‘imperialism’ (by the way, referring to a conquered area as ‘Islamic land’ is the very epitome of ‘imperialism’) or oil…. it is to do with mad religious fanatics who cannot cope with modernity, and liberalism because it threatens the power of their crazed religion. The great ‘resistence’ lead by al-Zarqawi also included the execution of US peace corps hero Laurence Foley. A man who dedicated his life to international aid work in India, in the Phillipines, in Bolivia, Peru, Zimbabwe, and Jordan. Galloway should be ashamed. But that isn’t all he should be ashamed of.
Galloway’s praising of the operations that killed American Soldier Casey Sheehan (calling them the ‘resistance’ again….. following the usual US/UK/UN = bad, anything else=bravery logic), and then going on anti-war marches with the kids mother, is a disgrace. And yet, that still isn’t all he should be ashamed of. As if being an apologetic for the ‘courage’ of Saddam, or the ‘bravery’ of people like al-Zarqawi wasn’t enough….

….Let’s also not forget that Galloway has been a long time supporter of Assad. He made a speech in Syria in which he said the Syrians were lucky to have Assad and their great democracy. Seriously. Syria was ranked second bottom for political freedoms in the World at this point. This was in the year before Lebanon gained some independence from the Syrian occupation. Galloway was referring to an illegal occupation force in the region as a ‘great democracy’. America helped to push through a UN resolution calling for the Syrians to pull out of Lebanon. I ask, who were the terrorists and resistance in that conflict?

More left leaning anti-war intellectuals choose to ignore Moore as a ‘film maker’ who needs to sensationalise. The problem is, he presents as fact, and a crowd who are just itching for some form of anti-American sentiment to latch onto, have found it, without questioning it. The anti-war intellectual class seem to be more inclined to give their ultimate praise to someone like Noam Chomsky. He’s a sort of hero of the university anti-war left.

At university, during a talk on ‘credible sources’ for thesis writing, our Professor told us that quoting Michael Moore would obviously not be acceptable, but quoting Chomsky would. I asked why. Chomsky to me seems to be a ‘thinking man’s’ Michael Moore. A bit more in-depth analysis, though still (if not more so than Moore) supremely misleading, and deliberately excluding facts, a man who absolutely cannot apply context to any situation beyond “American imperialism, for oil” and who has not written a single critical piece on the Saddam regime, nor the Taliban regime, a man who long ago became a holocaust denier, and apologist for the most evil regimes on Earth. Chomsky simply chooses to spout any mindless and ultimately inaccurate scare tactic to engage the already anti-American left into thinking they’ve found a faultless intellectual hero who wouldn’t lie to them. It is of course, nonsense. He has frequently lied. Let me give you an example.
We often criticise the far right for their irritatingly uniformed promotion of holocaust denial. Nick Griffin of the BNP famously decided the West had drastically over estimated the number of those killed in gas chambers in Nazi Germany, as part of a propaganda machine. We note holocaust denial as being a strong far right principle. But the left should also look closer to home. Chomsky presents sources as ‘credible’ and it seems to make his writing more plausible, and yet he once cited in an essay written at a time when the Khmer Rouge had killed at least 1,000,000 people

The response to the three books under review nicely illustrates this selection process. Hildebrand and Porter present a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources.”

- The cited authors in question once stated that:

“the notion that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea adopted a policy of physically eliminating whole classes of people was a myth fostered primarily by the authors of a Readers Digest book.”

- The problem here is that, they were entirely wrong. What Chomsky called “a carefully documented study” and “based on a wide range of sources” was actually based on a couple of visits to Cambodia, and their sources were almost entirely based on official Khmer Rough sources. A few years later, George Porter accepted he was wrong, and that the Khmer Rouge were responsible for millions of deaths. Chomsky never admitted his mistake in citing such weak authors. Chomsky goes on to defend the book, and seems to suggest a media conspiracy to keep it hidden from public view (rather than the fact that its premise, was based on really terrible research):

Published last year, and well received by the journal of the Asia Society, it has not been reviewed in the Times, New York Review or any mass-media publication, nor used as the basis for editorial comment, with one exception. The Wall Street Journal acknowledged its existence in an editorial entitled “Cambodia Good Guys”, which dismissed contemptuously the very idea that the Khmer Rouge could play a constructive role, as well as the notion that the United States had a major hand in the destruction, death and turmoil of wartime and postwar Cambodia.

- This one quote represents to me, the very epitome of what is wrong with the left wing today. It has become so manically anti-American that it has become an apologist for some of the most horrific totalitarian regimes on the planet, and that really doesn’t sit well with me. Chomsky is ignoring the millions of people who were systematically wiped out by the Khmer Rouge, as opposed to fighting them, as a left wing should be. This trend continued right up until today.
Similarly, in the “New War Against Terror” lecture in 2001 to M.I.T that:

Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that [in Afghanistan]… Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide… we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people.

- In fact, Unicef claimed the opposite. They point out that the intervention saved the lives of around 112,000 lives of children at risk from Taliban killings in the east of Afghanistan, whilst saving millions who would have otherwise died of starvation due to bad harvests that the Taliban had absolutely no plan for. Catherine Bertini, executive director of the UN World Food Program told the World that famine would be avoided because of the massive amounts of wheat (the biggest delivery in history) that year. During the war, the Taliban banned the World Food Program from the country for more than three months, creating conditions in which 6 million people were in dire need of food.
Bertini (not part of some hideous Western conspiracy to hide the Chomsky-truth) continues:

“There will be deaths, because the country was in a pre-famine condition this summer before the war started. But it will be isolated, and not large-scale.”

- Chomsky, again, doesn’t admit that he was wrong. His comments are still used as some sort of proof of the destructive nature of the US, yet the massive amount of aid that went into providing 90,000 tonnes of wheat, preventing a famine, goes unrecognised. The left should be proud of that achievement.
We should not take a man seriously, who, in the middle of his book “The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights” states that:

“Washington has become the torture and political murder capital of the world”.

- How ignorant. How conspiratorial and desperately narrow-minded. And mostly, how shameful.

Michael Moore – Apologist for Saddam, claiming he was no threat, had never threatened an American or attacked America. Anti-American undertones to all political diatribe.
Galloway – Apologise for Saddam, terrorists like al-Zarqawi and heads of State like Assad. Anti-American undertones to all political diatribe.
Chomsky – Apologist for the Khmer Rouge and completely ignorant of the extremities of fascist governments. Anti-American undertones to all political diatribe.
These are the heroes of the anti-war Left.

The heroes on the anti-war Left; whether they be a film maker who just emits facts to create entertainment, or be they ‘intellectuals’ who use weak research to boost their credentials, and over exaggerations to scare people, have made me deeply disenfranchised with the Left when it comes to foreign policy. What use is the Left if it spends its time only criticising its own governments (which is perfectly acceptable, and necessary; providing its criticisms are factual and not simply a manipulatory more intellectually sounding critique based on conspiracy, weak research, and ‘entertainment’) , without providing any sort of context for each individual conflict and burying them all under the same banner of ‘imperialism’ and ‘oil’. What use if the Left if it ignores the plight of millions of people enduring their entire lives under totalitarian and deeply fascist systems. Where is the solidarity? The sense of brotherhood? Why have the Left become increasingly Nationalistic in their sense of justice? “Sovereign nation”, “our troops”… all rhetorical devices to mask the horrendous human rights violations, on such grand scales, committed by the very nations they wish we just left alone, and understood the ‘cultural differences’ between us. Again, the Left needs to make a choice…. do we support democratic principles and provide our backing for democratic uprisings and revolutions (we can do this, without demanding military intervention; a point that seems to allude the anti-war left who insist I am calling for the bombing of every non-democratic state on the planet), or do we keep hailing those who are simply apologists for totalitarian regimes as our political heroes. Do we accept democracy is necessary, or do we ‘understand’ that regimes on the far extremes are ‘culturally’ acceptable (despite the majority of the populations of those countries living in perpetual fear of torture and death). Reinhold Niebuhr, the great American leftie (but neo-con by today’s anti-war Left standards) once said, quite rightly:

“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

- The Left, by my standards must fight for democracy; because in doing so it fights for justice, human decency, and political freedoms that we have always so strongly advocated. We must abhor Chomsky’s defence of the Khmer Rouge, we must shudder with disdain at Galloway telling Saddam that we admire him. We must fight to keep religion out of politics. It is poison. And we must never, as a Left wing that believes in social justice and humanitarian principles, allow a Taliban regime to control Afghanistan ever again. We must be the side that fights for democratic rights, social rights – regardless of race, gender, and sexuality – and economic protections. We must criticise our governments where necessary, but also be absolutely strong and resolute in our opposition to all forms of fascism, and determined to see it eradicated. That must be the call of the Left in the 21st Century. Not anti-war, for the sake of being anti-American.

We do not hear the positives that came from the war. We do not hear of the wonderful work being undertaken by Left Wing groups in Iraq now determined to create a stable, liberal, democratic society.
Yanar Mohammed, the Iraqi Feminist and head of “Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq” moved back to Iraq after self imposed exile for fear of her life, after the invasion by coalition troops. Her group now fights against sexual slavery and forced prostitution. It provides safe houses for victims of domestic abuse and those threatened with honour killings. She claims to have saved 30 women from honour killings. Under Saddam, those 30 killings would have taken place, and there would be nowhere for victims of domestic abuse or sexual slavery inside Iraq to turn to. At Saddam’s trial, a woman who didn’t wish to be identified testified against the Dictator, stating:

“I was beaten up and tortured by electrical shocks, I begged them, but they hit with their pistols. They made me put my legs up. There were five or more, and they treated me like a banquet.

The woman was 16 at the time. Where were the cries of outrage from the anti-war Left? From an apparently caring Left? How many actually knew of this?
Yanar Mohammed is pushing for the de-baathistisation of the Country’s attitudes to women. Another step in the right direction, and a signal that Iraq is far better off without Saddam or the Baath Party. The international Left should be recognising people like Yanar Mohammed and helping her cause, rather than focusing on endless criticism of America.

Azzam Alwash is the director of “Nature Iraq“, the Country’s first and only Environmental organisation. He is working to restore the marshes of Southern Iraq. The beautiful region, full of wildlife and natural wonder, considered by some to be the “cradle of civilisation” and the Garden of Eden, was destroyed by Saddam. The Marsh Arabs had supported a Shiite uprising against Saddam in the early 1990s. The marsh Arabs had lived in floating huts on a plethora of canals that were divided between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Saddam had thousands of the marsh Arabs tortured and killed, and their livestock slaughtered. The huts were burned, and the water was poisoned. As many as 500,000 fled the attack. Land mines were placed in and around the marshes to make sure no one would go back. For centuries the marshes of Southern Iraq were teeming with wildlife and aquatic life. After 1990, it was baron, drained, poisoned, and covered in land mines. The UN in 2001 named it as one of the greatest environmental disasters of all time. Alwash intends to re-flood the marshes and restore the wildlife. This would not have been possible under Saddam. Alwash would most likely have been tortured and killed for even suggesting it. The south was one of the places that the Iraqi people were delighted to welcome coalition troops in 2003.

So, if the anti-war Left want to describe me as a neo-con, then I wear that badge with honour, whilst knowing that my anti-fascism is far more in keeping with the traditional resolute left wing solidarity with the most oppressed people in the World, than the apologists who make excuses and lies for the atrocities committed by the governments they work so tirelessly to protect.

The Tory Party: One big PR disaster

Every morning, David Cameron must get out of bed, and feel as if he is walking through a storm without an umbrella. And instead of being soaked in water, he’s drowning in collective Cabinet shit. The Tory front bench, is a PR disaster, almost on a daily basis now. The media is totally in control of the image of the Tory Party. This is a sign of great weakness. There is no PR man controlling the public image of the Tory party any more. The days of painting David Cameron as a “Compassionate Conservative” are dead. The ball is now fully in the court of the media.

Even when we leave aside the fact that they have taken a weak economy that no one thought could get much worse, and made it far worse than anyone could have ever sat and imagined, the drivel that comes out of their mouths, and the antics they get up to, is enough to astound even the least interested in politics among us.

On the subject of the economy; growth had been downgraded from Osborne’s Office of getting everything entirely wrong, all the fucking time Budget Responsibility, five times. Three times before the Eurozone crises really started to take hold. The first time, the Tories blamed Labour. Everything was Labour’s fault. Then, in December 2010, when growth was downgraded again, they blamed the snow. Then the Royal Wedding. Then Europe. Surely the inherently racist Tory party can’t be far away from blaming black people?

Today, the Climate Secretary Chris Huhne, (admittedly, a Lib Dem, but that is so similar to Tory now, it really doesn’t need a distinguishing disclaimer) came out of a meeting with the big energy companies in the hope of striking a deal to bring down the cost of energy in the UK, as its rising rapidly out of control. Huhne’s interview with the BBC went something like this:

BBC: How did the meeting go?
Huhne: Very very very well!!
BBC: And what can we expect to happen?
Huhne: Well, if you switch providers all will be fine blah blah out of touch bollocks.
BBC: Did the energy companies concede anything?
Huhne: Well, if you switch providers all will be fine blah blah even more out of touch, skirting the question bollocks.
BBC: So it’s the consumer’s fault?
Huhne: Well, if you switch ….. you see where this is going.

- To sum up, Huhne thinks if we all switch to a cheaper tariff, we’ll all save money. The problem is, the difference between one company and another, is the difference between £1, and £0.99p. We know there are options, but the options are raping our bank accounts collectively. Ofgem reported last week, that the average profit margin for energy companies had risen from £15 per person in June… to……… £125 in September. That is vastly unacceptable. The bosses of these companies continue to blame wholesale prices of oil. Now, if profit margins had stayed the same, despite the rise in the price to the consumer, then they’d have a point. But you cannot increase your profit by such a huge quantity, and then claim it is the fault of wholesale prices. Huhne, is a PR disaster.

It goes without saying, that Theresa May and Kenneth Clarke are PR disasters, after the Tory Party Conference this year. For a quick refresher, May had used her speech to pour unnecessary and dangerous fuel onto the fire of a Nationalism that already burns far too bright in this Country. She was arguing against the Human Rights Act (a document so important, that May’s only argument against it, was an entire lie. She should be sacked for that alone). To do this, she said:

“The illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because – I am not making this up – because he had a pet cat.”

- The problem was, she had made it up. She is the personification of the Daily Mail. When you cannot find a legitimate reason to promote hate and anger; just make it up. When a Minister hasn’t checked their facts, has resorted to UKIP style populist politics to provoke anger and outrage and something that simply isn’t true, to then use the phrase “I’m not making this up” is so indescribably amateurish, one has to wonder how any of these people are in the position of power they currently occupy.
The story itself – the cat loving illegal immigrant – is wrong. Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary and May’s cabinet Tory colleague responded to her speech, by saying:

“I’ve never had a conversation on the subject with Theresa, so I’d have to find out about these strange cases she is throwing out.”
“They are British cases and British judges she is complaining about.
“I’ll have a small bet with her that nobody has ever been refused deportation on the grounds of the ownership of a cat.”

The Judicial Communications Office said this:

“This was a case in which the Home Office conceded that they had mistakenly failed to apply their own policy – applying at that time to that appellant – for dealing with unmarried partners of people settled in the UK”.
“That was the basis for the decision to uphold the original tribunal decision – the cat had nothing to do with the decision.”

- So, May was wrong. She made up the story. She lied. But it gets even better. Chris Huhne (the PR disaster mentioned previously) tried to send a message on Twitter to his friend, saying:

“From someone else fine but I do not want my fingerprints on the story”

- This is in relation, to being exposed as the person pointing our the “i’m not making this up” speech by May was eerily familiar to Nigel Farage’s (leader of Far Right UKIP) speech, in which he said:

“Should not be deported because – and I really am not making this up – because he had a pet cat!”

- Huhne notified a Guardian journalist to the exact, word for word quote “similarities” between the speeches. But accidentally tweeted to all of his subscribers that he didn’t want his fingerprints on this story. So, May is a PR disaster. Clarke is a PR disaster. And Huhne is a double PR disaster. Brilliantly, Nick Clegg waned into the argument by saying, quite beautifully:

“They were both right.”

- N’awww…….what a cock.

Until recently (having declared he wont stand for re-election) Tory MEP Roger Helmer is responsible trying to justify his speeding, by saying:

“No matter how fast you are going, you get people passing you.”

And an email to a 17 year old animals rights activist, with:

“I am not prepared to join the seal campaign, because while I agree that the culling of seals by beating them over the head is not very pleasing and aesthetic, I think it is probably fairly quick and humane…
“I challenge the use of your term “innocent baby seals”, because
(A) Seals are not morally competent, and therefore cannot be innocent or guilty;
(B) I think it is mawkish, sentimental and unhelpful to adopt a “Bambi” attitude to animals, or to seek to anthropomorphise them – I wonder if you would have the same sentimental view of rats or tarantulas? – if not, why not?
(C) In one sense the seals are guilty (without any moral responsibility), for damaging fish stocks and the livelihoods of local fishermen.
“Your sympathy for dumb animals does you credit, but my advice would be that you save your concerns for people rather than animals.”

And on the subject of date rape:

“…the victim surely shares a part of the responsibility, if only for establishing reasonable expectations in her boyfriend’s mind.”

- Roger Helmer, not only is one of the worst human beings I have ever had to displeasure to read about, but also, a massive PR disaster.

Liam Fox’s friendship with lobbyist Adam Werrity is a PR disaster for so many reasons, it’s almost too big a story to try to dissect. Needless to say, using public funds to pay a lobbyist, and to claim thousands of pounds of public money to allow a lobbyist to stay rent free in your flat, is never going to end well. Especially when you’re the Minister in control of the Nation’s defence system. When that same lobbyist, who is almost entirely funded by public money, is able to bypass official channels because he is friends with the Defence Secretary, and arrange meetings with private companies for commercial purposes; the Defence Secretary automatically becomes… not just a PR disaster, but a massive moron of a PR disaster. When that same lobbyist is given over £140,000 by a property investor with ties to Israel and an intelligence firm with links to Sri Lanka, whilst he accompanies the Defence Secretary as an “advisor”, on trips abroad, not only is the Defence Secretary a massive moron of a PR disaster, he is a dangerous PR disaster.

Oliver Letwin, Minister of State for Policy, photographed dumping confidential documents in a bin on St James’ park, a few months after saying no one wants to see a poor family from Sheffield going on holiday abroad. Oliver Letwin, PR disaster.

Caroline Spelman, Minister for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs plans in late 2010 to sell off a third of the 1.85 million acres of British forests to private investors for the sake of Hotel Resorts and Theme parks, only to have the Prime Minister admit he’d never given permission for that, and for the entire thing to be shelved. Where’s the communication?

George Osborne, who seems to keep being on TV insisting that the UK is leading the way out of the financial crises, that his plan will work, and that all will be fine. He says this, whilst the poverty rate increases – more on this point later – whilst unemployment is very very close to hitting the 3 million mark, whilst youth unemployment is at its worst since the 1980s (coincidentally at the time of the previous Tory government), whilst wages are stagnating, whilst output is dropping, whilst homelessness increases, whilst inflation is slowly getting out of control, whilst energy bills are now unworkable, and whilst dropping growth figures show that we are very very close to another recession. George Osborne is a PR disaster.

Philip Hammond, New Secretary of Defence, tells BBC’s Question Time, that allegations of his tax avoidance (he’s a multi-millionaire who said he’d continue to claim £30,000 a year of public money to fund his second home) by Channel 4′s dispatches were:

“Completely unfounded innuendo and unfortunately if you go into public life you have to accept that innuendo’s will be made against you to which you don’t always have the opportunity to reply.”

To which, the follow up question:

“So were the allegations that you’d moved shares into your wife’s name and that you took dividends rather than income, wrong?”

- was answered rather spectacularly by Hammond, with:

“Neither of those facts are incorrect”

- Unfounded innuendo one second, but absolutely true the next. Brilliant. Phillip Hammond, is a PR disaster, whilst also managing to be a smug twat about it.

How weak Cameron is looking. He needs an Alastair Campbell. His one attempt to attract an Alastair Campbell type figure, was Andy Coulson….. a massive PR disaster. They are one PR disaster after another, day after day, idiots running the Country and being exposed as idiots every time they show their contemptuous, nasty little faces.

The problem this represents for those of us on the left, is that the actual issues do not get publicised (perhaps i’m partly responsible for that, given the nature of this blog) enough. The BBC chose to almost entirely ignore 2000 people blocking the bridge the day of the NHS Bill moving to the Lords. The big issues, like the NHS bill, that have grave consequences for all of us that believe in a Nationalised, free health service, are put to one side, because Letwin uses a bin. And so, public discourse focuses almost entirely on the image of the Government, rather than the disastrous and dangerous ideological economic project they are inflicting on Country. Policy gets pushed aside, the underlying nasty nature of Theresa May’s made up cat story, is ignored. This can only work to benefit the Tories. Nobody voted for such a big NHS reform. Nobody voted for a huge hike in tuition fees. The Tories are getting away with shifting vast sums of wealth to very rich individuals and businesses, and the docile English population is too engaged in the fact that Liam Fox has a friend. Perhaps there comes a time when endless PR disasters can be used to benefit an unpopular government and its very undemocratic and ideologically motivated agenda.

It used to be Patriotism, but now “It’s just my opinion” is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Debate is perhaps the most intrinsically key ingredient of social progression that humanity is blessed with. Rationality is a tool that we have evolved beyond that of any other creature on the planet. We should use it wisely and we should be well informed before we jump to conclusions, especially if we have influence upon others.

I am increasingly finding myself developing opinions that put me at odds with a lot of people. On the Iraq war, I followed the Tariq Ali/Noam Chomsky anti-American stance to every murky corner that it lurked. Vast oil conspiracies, dealings with the Bin Laden family, America as an imperial aggressor against opponents that are just pawns. I still hold many of those views, but they become entwined the more complex certain situations seem to become the more scholars and writers you digest. With Iraq, I soon became very pro-war. I am still pro-war. I am certain that had we listened to the hysterical anti-war left for the past fifty years, the World would not be in a better place. Milosovich would have ethnically cleansed Bosnia, Saddam would be torturing and killing his way across the marshlands of southern Iraq whilst the Kurds similarly are systematically abused. The depth of public opinion seems to be focused more on what is popular to believe, than what is actually going on. It is popular to believe that Bush invaded Iraq for oil. It is popular to believe that immigration is an intense problem that destroys livelihoods of “natives”. It is popular to believe we must deal with the Nation’s debt immediately and that the Welfare State is a great evil. The truth is irrelevant to people who hold and perpetuate these opinions.

Sky News, one of the two key news channels, instead of engaging in thoughtful debate and new and provocative ideas, instead chooses to spend its time focusing a camera on Michael Jackson’s doctor. How uneasy this makes me feel. It’s not a fucking reality TV show. The sensationalism of the opening titles; “THE JACKSON TRIAL! ONLY ON SKY NEWS” as if it’s a movie. What a horrible development.

The weak level of debate, and the social cynicism that accompanies it, inevitably seeps into the political sphere and the democratic process, with debate at its core, becomes a sad reflection of the level of debate that can only be described as manically ill-informed populism. This weak, Labour went on the offensive, attacking the Tories because of who the Defence Secretary is friends with. That is essentially the story. It is a scandal that might last a week, if we’re lucky. It is essentially meaningless. It takes the heat off the fact that the official opposition; Labour, has offered no opposition to the dangerous moves the Coalition government has taken over the past 18 months. As the Governor of the Bank of England said last week, this could be the biggest economic crises Britain has ever faced. Our growth projection has been cut again, output has fallen again, unemployment is rising still, and Neoliberalism has hit such a crises that even the middle classes – whom the political class has attempted to win over for the past thirty years – cannot afford to pay their electricity bills any more. Why aren’t Labour fighting this? why are they focusing on why the Defence Secretary hangs around with? The dying level of debate in this country, and across the World, will only get deeper and more depressing, if the House of Lords is democratised. We should have a chamber of experts, to debate the issues between the most qualified and most informed. This serves two purposes; one.. it is quite obvious that humanity, on an individual level, cannot possibly know everything. This goes for politicians. It is counterproductive for progressivism for an MP like Blunkett to have been at the Home Office, Work and Pensions, and Education. Three different specialties cannot be perfected by one career politician. We need experts. Two… the point of this blog; the raising of the level of debate. Democracy is great, if you have all the information. Quite clearly, we don’t. A debate in the Commons on stem cell research is useless, if there are no experts to provide the information we all need. If we are to democratise the House of Lords, then we must still maintain a level of expertise in our political sphere. A Chamber of experts is my proposition.

I’m pretty sure we can’t rely on Labour to run a successful opposition campaign. They have become too suited, and too “centrist” (another word for ‘right winged’).
Where is the fight against referring to anyone with a supreme amount of money as “job creators”? – If anything we’ve learned that demand creates jobs, not the super rich.
Where is the passion in fighting NHS reform? I hear from doctors and the BMA and others in the profession all the time; yet nothing from the official opposition.
Where is the promise to really hit the banks?
I am bored of politicians treading a careful centre ground. It failed. Whilst the Country burns, Labour just like to say “Bad Tories”. Well, it isn’t good enough. The real opposition comes from the masses, who have had to listen and endure politicians across the spectrum, tell us that we must protect the “job creators”, that the “tough decisions needing to be taken” are the ones that affect those without great wealth only.
It is too much.
All they are doing, is applying a very weakly tied bandage to a system that didn’t work in the first place.
And they all do it, because they’re all funded by the very people they are all now protecting.
And then, they all have the fucking nerve to think that we should accept reform of Parliament, be proposed and implemented…. by Parliament.
We shouldn’t trust politicians, or the very wealthy, with a pair of scissors, let alone the entire World.

Don’t vote. It is the best way to cast a vote.

One of my favourite topics to debate is religion and its power over mankind. As you are all aware, I despise organised religion. Now, this doesn’t mean I despise religious individuals. I genuinely do not care what you believe, or where you choose to believe it. I do not submit to the view that England is a Christian nation. Move to England, believe what you like. I simply despise the concept of religion and the hold it has had over humanity for far too long.

Today, a Facebook friend of mine wrote on her wall, that Richard Dawkins is a Fascist and a Cunt. She is a psuedo-intellectual, who absolutely hates being brought up on anything she says. She expects any sort of provocative statement to be overlooked, and if you dare question her about the ill-informed, manically provocative statement, she’ll take a very passive aggressive stance and try to paint you as a bully, for questioning her. These people are everywhere. They are the Fox News brigade. They exist on the Right and the Left. The EDL is very similar. They make very provocative statements, find themselves unable to back it up because, frankly, their statements are usually ill-informed and dangerous, and then just blame the media for picking on them. They perpetuate a declining level of debate. Today, I questioned why Dawkins is a fascist? I asked if she’d read The Selfish Gene, and then read Fascist literature and to point out where the similarities lie. I pointed out that the true fascists belong almost entirely to those claiming to be fighting a religious cause. That the Abrahamic traditions themselves, are based entirely on Fascists principles. To illustrate this point, I will refer, for lack of a better source, to wikipedia entry on Fascism:

Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood.[3] To achieve this, fascists purge forces, ideas, people, and systems deemed to be the cause of decadence and degeneration.

- You could replace the word “fascists” in that description, with “Islamic/Christian/Jewish fundamentalists” and replace “nation” with “religion”, and it’d make the same point, and be absolutely accurate in doing so. The very basis of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, is exclusive, and around 2000 years ‘purging’ any contrary ideas, people, and systems that it simply didn’t like. Now, it is losing the power that it once had, but not for use of trying. My point had at least an attempt at rational thought, lodged firmly into it.
She said I was being a bully and aggressive and refused to actually discuss the point I made. I then pointed out that she’d still not answered my original point, to which she’d said “It’s just my opinion!”.

It used to be Patriotism, but now I’d say “It’s just my opinion” is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Now, it might just be me. Perhaps i’m the awful one who just doesn’t get it. But I am CERTAIN this is passive aggressive behaviour at its very worst. Putrid and vicious on the surface, but just a way to worm her way out of actually answering my original point. Here is the conversation, after the original argument:
Her:

One of my friends has just unfriended me based on what he read on that thread. So thank you for that. If this is not indicative of how damaging your unprovoked attacks can be I don’t know what is. I now have a tearful man on the phone saying he can’t bear to me on my list because of the unprovoked abuse it puts in his newsfeed and I don’t have sensible answer for him.

I’m really, really disappointed in you. Not just in the way you launched into me, but in the way you are now trying to accuse me of all sorts of things when all I did was express a view. You have me so wrong I don’t even know where to start. You’re way too suspicious. I’m not as complicated as you seem to think. Maybe you have been surrounded by headworkers, and that’s what has given you such a low opinion of people, but I’m not one of them. I speak, then I move on. Nothing more sinister than that. All I have done is be honest about how I feel.

I am baffled as to why you see such nefariousness in my comments. I’m not trying to occupy moral high grounds or anything else, I’m just speaking from the heart as I always do.

I’m not going to lie, I was just letting this all go over my head until Alan got upset. Now I’m going to make my excuses and head off out to cry to myself. I can’t believe your attack has cost ME a fiend. I’m devastated. I think a lot of Alan.

Please just show some respect? Whether you agree or not, whether you think people are idiots or not, it isn’t your place to tell people how to think or to make sarcastic, bombastic remarks to them for not sharing a view you hold.

I have never and will never be personally offensive to you for not agreeing with me. That doesn’t mean my passion is less ardent than yours, it just means I have been surrounded by aggressive, dogmatic people all my life and now most of them are dead I am enjoying the most peaceful existence I never dared ream about. I’m not going to be drawn in to petty rows online, because trust me, nothing you or anyone else here could say could ever come close to making me feel the way people in my ‘previous; life have.

I don’t know what your motivation is for the aggression and personal remarks – and you may say it isn’t intentional, but clearly it is coming across that way to have cost me a dear friend – but please be assured, if the intention is to pull me into a row I don’t want to have, you will never win. I don’t do bad feeling anymore. I’ve had too much of it than I know what to do with. I refuse to fight with people needlessly.

That’s it. That’s my last word. If you wish to believe your own words and think me some kind of warped moral crusader, then so be it. I can’t and won’t tell people how to think. But I’m certainly not going to fall out with anyone on account of a difference of opinion, and I am certainly not going to use my intellect as a weapon the way you have because that is ugly, unnecessary and not part of my arsenal.

This is not the life I live anymore and that extends as far as not allowing myself to have petty ego wars online.

I’m just sad that this has made me lose a certain respect I had for you.

Enjoy your weekend
D

- Now, to me, this starts first with a very passive aggressive paragraph about how I am responsible for the loss of a friend. The guy she refers to, I have never spoken to, I have never seen, I have never encountered in any way. To project this on to me, for simply trying to debate (honestly, I know when I’m being a bit aggressive in the way I argue, and for me, this was very very mild, to the point of me being actually quite half arsed in what I was saying. There was nothing vicious… though obviously, you only have my word on this), is ludicrous. To then tell me she’s “very very disappointed”, as if i’m a 15 year old being spoken to by my mother, is not just passive aggressive, it is condescending and patronising. She then plays the victim card brilliantly. Notice though, still not addressing my original point.

My response:

” If this is not indicative of how damaging your unprovoked attacks can be I don’t know what is. I now have a tearful man on the phone saying he can’t bear to me on my list because of the unprovoked abuse it puts in his newsfeed and I don’t have sensible answer for him.”
- I’m sorry but that is beyond pathetic. You are again taking a very passive aggressive stance.
You cannot sit and claim to be attacked with no provocation, when your initial statement was one of abuse. I simply asked you to quantify your reasoning. Which, you still haven’t done.

I am absolutely sick to death of very very passive aggressive people who publish controversial statements, and then backtrack and refuse to answer for them. The ones who can’t back it up. It is damaging to debate. It is weak minded and it is what leads to dangerous ideas; the idiots who think Bush is responsible for 9/11, the idiots who think Blair should be tried for war crimes, who then get challenged on their bullshit and hide behind “omg, you’re bullying me, it’s just my opinion”. Well it’s too much now. It has to stop because it is pseudo-intellectual bullshit that perpetuates false perceptions.
I genuinely do not care what your opinion of someone like Dawkins is. But if you honestly think you’ve taken a moral high ground, by referring to someone as a cunt and a fascist, and then just blatantly ignoring all arguments to the contrary, AND THEN subtly claiming my points were very EDL like. How is that not an attack on me? I think nationalism is just vicious and vile and insulting as a concept created by humanity, as religion. The people who use EDL tactics are the ones who make outrageous and abusive initial claims, and then refuse to back them up, mainly because they can’t.
This is not what I did. What I did initially was ask you why Dawkins is a Fascist. I asked you to provide me with evidence, to maybe read the Selfish Gene and then read Fascist literature and tell me where the similarities lie. A perfectly reasonable expectation, given the level of abuse and the vicious nature of your original statement. You cannot say irrational and vicious things, and just expect everyone to click “like”.
I refuse to be attacked, with the usual line of attack, which you’ve used, which is simply “I’m so disappointed in you, I thought you were intelligent blah blah …. why aren’t you as great as me?” It is patronising and it is condescending. I will ALWAYS challenge opinions I find to be shockingly irrational, if those opinions are vicious in nature, be it religious, nationalist or any other. There are certainly times I find Dawkins to be overly provocative. But he in no way deserves the title “Fascist”. But if you can substantiate why he’s a Fascist that would be great. I am STILL waiting for your logic.

“I don’t know what your motivation is for the aggression and personal remarks – and you may say it isn’t intentional, but clearly it is coming across that way to have cost me a dear friend – but please be assured, if the intention is to pull me into a row I don’t want to have, you will never win.”
- I am not going to let you blame me for you losing a friend. I actually resent that accusation, and if I were you, I’d tell him to man up, he doesn’t know me, he has never spoken to me, and if he is offended by a debate that absolutely doesn’t involve him, he needs a serious chat with himself. I wont take responsibility, nor apologise for that. And the fact that you’ve tried to pin that on me, is actually an utter disgrace.
It is not aggression. You’re the one who started the entire thing by referring to a man as a cunt and a Fascist. Where I come from, that’s a pretty aggressive line to take. My line is simply; I cannot tolerate stupidity, and I cannot tolerate those who try to worm their way out of a debate (which I started, without being aggressive, I merely asked for your logic) by either trying to paint the other person, as passively aggressive as possible, as some sort of nut job (the anti-war left are great at this tactic, as are the Tories), and then refuse to answer all questions that may compromise their dogmatic bullshit, with “omg it’s just my opinion”. The conversation we had, was basically:
“This man is a fascist and a cunt”
“Explain what you mean….”
“OMG YOU’RE A BULLY, IT’S JUST MY OPINION. YOU’RE LIKE THE EDL.”
What you did, constantly, was say just how much you hate aggression, and then continue to be as passive aggressive as possible. I asked my girlfriend to make sure it wasn’t just me, and she’s in agreement with me. Though she did note that I can come across as a bit intimidating during debates (a flaw I accept – though I still try to present a reasoned argument). My only expectation, is if someone makes a controversial and provocative claim, they should be able to logically back it up, if they can’t, they are simply perpetuating weak minded, useless debate, and that is wrong.

Whether you admit it or not, and whether you want to project a certain image from your past onto me or not, you started this with an aggressive and provocative statement. To claim you hate aggression and provocation is unbelievably hypocritical. My main problem, is the level of debate. The Country seems to be talking about some bloke the Defence Secretary walked through the Defence Department once. And i’m sat here thinking, who gives a fuck? Why is that even important? Why aren’t we all fighting against the destruction of the health service? Likewise, with the anti-atheist thing, what I meant by that is, you did what a lot of liberals do, and I’m starting to despise. They attack people like Dawkins or Hitchens as fascists or dogmatic blah blah, but they absolutely never have a bad word to say about organised religion. As I said in my first post on your page, Dawkins has never written a book that calls for the torture, rape and murder of non-believers. To say Dawkins is inherently fascist, but to ignore the basis of most organised religions; fear and death, is a horribly simplistic liberal technique that is beyond abhorrent. I do not feel me taking this stance is EDL-like. I am an Atheist, an out-spoken Atheist, it is a subject I take great interest in, I studied Theology, I have read the Koran on numerous occassions, I have read the Bible, I have studied Philosophy from Socrates to Sartre. And so I resent being compared to a bunch of racists who just don’t like Islam because people with slightly darker skin are its main followers. If you subtly suggesting I am using EDL tactics, isn’t passive aggressive, I don’t know what is.

“I’m just sad that this has made me lose a certain respect I had for you.”
- Ditto. Especially for accusing me of making you lose a friend. Again, disgusting.

- I don’t think I was overly aggressive or abusive, or intolerant in anything I just said. And so it goes…
Her:

Turn it in, Jamie – you’re just another sad, intolerant militant and everyone that witnessed the way you spoke to me today saw it.

The friend and I have talked it out and we’re fine, stronger than ever thanks to your wild and paranoid accusations, so despite your best efforts you have failed to make a dent in my day.

Go and wiled your quasi-intellect like a weapon over someone who can’t see through your barely concealed hate.

I’m actually laughing now reading your desperate attempts to make me appear to be someone I am clearly not. All you did was exhaust every bit of boring rhetoric in your arsenal. You’re far too arrogant to see your mistakes, because you have genuinely convinced yourself that I’m being ‘passive-aggressive’, which I find hilarious – anyone that knows anything at all about me and the way I operate knows that I have never and will never be that person; if I have a point to make, and I’m not getting through, I’m AGGRESSIVE aggressive.

Of course, you will write this off as whichever adjective you haven’t already overused today but I couldn’t care less. I pity you; you’re the worst kind of extremist. Dishonest, pompous and self-important. You will gradually alienate every person in your life until you are left with a handful of fellow dogmatics and the few of you will spend the rest of your days blowing smoke up each other’s arses. I can’t think of anything sadder. In the meantime, I shall be embracing the people in my life in spite of our differences, and will have a richer, happier life experience as a result.

I only hope that poor girl of yours realises just what a hypocrite you are before she leaves her life behind for you.

Enjoy thinking up warped reasons I have blocked you. I know that you know as well as I do that I simply can’t be bothered to entertain toxic people.

- My personal favourites:
“I have never and will never be personally offensive to you for not agreeing with me. “

Five minutes later:
” you’re just another sad, intolerant militant”
” I pity you; you’re the worst kind of extremist.”
“I only hope that poor girl of yours realises just what a hypocrite you are before she leaves her life behind for you.”

Brilliant.
The joyful irony of calling me aggressive, and then insisting my girlfriend is making a mistake, and that i’m an intolerant militant and the worst kind of extremist (the WORST kind…. worse than those who fly planes into buildings. I am, according to her, worse than Mohammad Atta. Amazing).

The flaws in her position are vast. She doesn’t elaborate on how i’m being ‘dishonest’ or what it is about me that is ‘extremist’ or why I might be a hypocrite. They are just empty abusive phrases designed for attack. The very thing she is trying to argue against. From her original position that Richard Dawkins is a Fascist cunt, to her ending that I am a militant aggressive extremist dishonest hypocrite, she offers nothing of substance. She is one big logical failure.

But this illustrates my original point. My last message to her, still wanting some form of debate. I still clinged onto the hope that she might present a logical argument. Instead, she chose to get very personal. This is what people tend to do, when they are losing. The EDL do it all the time. Religious nutjobs do it all the time. They get personal or aggressive. They absolutely worm their way around the actual subject of debate and just try to paint you as posing the debate in the ‘wrong’ tone. It is pathetic.

The level of debate in the Country and the World, at the most accessible and popular levels, is weak at best, and viciously ill-informed and dangerous at worst. For the most part, people form opinions through what they see in the most easily accessible parts of the media sphere. If the media support Iraq, the people support Iraq. If the media suggest Blair is a liar, the people believe it must be true. Opinions don’t tend to run too deep, unless you’re aiming at an intellectual level that expands beyond that of the mass media. For example, at the highest levels of debate, we have some great names. Tariq Ali, Christopher Hitchens, Tahereh Saffarzadeh, Chomsky, Krugman among others, are the leaders of the intellectual movement to advance debate and offer unique and exciting ideas. They challenge key perceptions. They always question. They never let a bad argument rest until it is totally destroyed. These are the people the World needs. These are the people we should be learning critical techniques from in order to advance the level of debate to a position that is currently alien to us.

A mad overly liberal calling anyone who disagrees with her a fascist militant dangerous extremist cunt, whilst insisting she’s not aggressive, is absolutely counter productive and should be fought at every opportunity.

The Liberal Democrat Delusion

The Liberal Democrat annual conference in Birmingham this year appears to be nothing more than a showcase of the deluded. The streaks of yellow in the crowd, drowned by the sea of blue on stage. “In Government, on your side” is the tagline. One wonders whose side? The student movement that pre-election Liberals managed to win over? The 80,000 who have lost their public sector job since the Coalition came to power? The pensioners who lost their winter fuel allowance? The kids from low socio-economic areas whose youth club is now closed? Whose side are they on exactly?

A lovely big Corporate tax cut, from 28% to 25% by 2013, suggests the ‘side‘ the Liberals are on, is not ‘our side‘ at all. If Corporate Tax cuts ever led to high growth, growing wages, a happy and fulfilled population, we’d all fully support it. But it never does. It leads to higher CEO pay, dodgy stock market gambles, stagnating wages, and Corporate politicians. A report by accoutant Richard Murphy, of Corporate tax rates and job creation, of OECD countries between 1997 and 2010, found that:

Analysis of the correlation between tax rates and growth in OECD countries (excluding the top and bottom outliers) finds that, at best, the relationship between the two variables is weak.

- This contradicts the Government, who said:

“The reductions in the rate of corporation tax and healthy financial position of UK companies in aggregate should help support further investment growth.”

- My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that we need to get away from this odd idea that companies and the rich are “job creators“. It is a concept imported from the US. Demand creates jobs, not the rich. Investors do not look at that extra 5% and decide to keep their money in their pocket. If the demand is there for a product, then the potential profit far outweighs that extra 5%.

This obsession with cutting the deficit fast, which is clearly causing my damage than good, places the Liberal Democrats firmly in the category of deluded Neoliberal dogma adherents. The downgrading of growth this year, by the IMF, from 1.7% to 1.1% along with rising inflation, high unemployment, and the failure of the private sector to take up the jobs the Government promised it was more than capable of doing, would force right minded people to rethink their policy, to be a little bit humble, admit you might have got it wrong, and try another way. But no. They insist there will be no Plan B. This is the Liberal Democrats greatest failure.

One particular Liberal Democrat delegate to the conference suggested that Internet Access was now a human right. As far as I was aware, ‘human right‘ is an absolute term. There are no shades of human right. Something cannot be a ‘bit of‘ a human right. So, that being said, certain Liberal Democrats now consider providing internet access, just as important as providing water to famine stricken third World countries. But clearly more important than education, health and housing, if recent policy decisions are anything to go by. Interesting.

I’d suggest first sorting out the Coalition’s policies that actually do have human rights implications, before trying to introduce new human rights concepts. Firstly, health care is a human right. I believe the entire World (other than right winged America, who appear to be under the impression that State funded life saving is wrong, but State funded execution is perfectly acceptable) considers healthcare to be a human right. And yet the Coalition’s policy of dismantling the NHS for, what I can only see to be the sake of Care UK, whilst not a new concept, seems to put that particular human right at risk. I blogged earlier last week on the gulf between the god-awful state of the American private system compared to our Nationalised system, and one has to wonder why we’d import any of the US model into our own. It is absolutely not about consulting with the experts on how to improve the NHS. If we look back to the previous Tory Government, Thatcher’s ‘NHS Community Care Act‘ was the first time in history that the BMA were excluded from policy discussions, the end result being a purchaser-provider split – an NHS market. Similarly, whilst Cameron is walking a very thin line between twisted logic, and outright lying to Parliament, the very Health professional groups he insists support his plans for the NHS, actually do not support him at all.
On September 7th, Cameron said:

“He may not like the truth but that is the truth and I have to say to him that is why you now see the Royal College of GPs, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Nurses all supporting our health reforms.”

- The Royal College of GPs then issued a statement, saying:

“As a College we are extremely worried that these reforms, if implemented in their current format, will lead to an increase in damaging competition, an increase in health inequalities, and to massively increased costs in implementing this new system.

“As independent research demonstrates, the NHS is one of the most efficient healthcare systems in the world and we must keep it that way. “‬

Similarly, the Royal College of Nurses, which Cameron insisted supported his reform proposals issued this statement:

“The Bill being placed before parliament next week has enormous ramifications for patients and for our members. While we acknowledge that the Government have listened to our members in a number of areas, we still have very serious concerns about where these reforms leave a health service already facing an unprecedented financial challenge.”

- When does propaganda, evolve to ‘misleading Parliament’?

Disease should not have a market value. Healthcare is a necessity, not a commodity. It isn’t simply Socialist reasoning that brings me to that conclusion, it is simple Market logic. A Market is based on demand. If demand falls, prices will fall, businesses that fail to adjust will go bust. Demand is based on an individual’s informed choice. An individual has no choice if he or she suddenly gets cancer. He or she is not in control all of a sudden. He or she may have a choice which provider to go to, but they don’t have a choice on the ‘commodity’ for sale. Buy or die. So, a healthcare company has no reason to drop their prices, because demand will absolutely never fall. This gives a great advantage to private health companies and insurers. There will always be profit to be made. Markets respond best to peoples desires rather than their life needs. So, the commodity might be a drug to treat cancer, it will never be the cure, because the cure is worthless to shareholders. This is evident with the privatising of the utilities sector in the UK.

Privatising that particular sector, a necessary part of life (heat, electricity, gas) will always result in demand that will never die. And so unsurprisingly, we’re now in a situation where there are six energy providers, charging extortionate rates and an energy secretary who continuously blames the consumer for not switching provider. Huhne (the energy secretary) took to the Lib Dem conference stage today and blasted energy companies for offering cheap deals to new customers whilst pushing the prices up for existing customers. In June he said:

“Consumers don’t have to take price increases lying down. If an energy company hits you with a price increase, you can hit them back where it hurts – by shopping around and voting with your feet.”

And yet today, he says:

“It’s not fair that big energy companies can push their prices up for the vast majority of their consumers, who do not switch, while introducing cut-throat offers for new customers that stop small firms entering the market.

- Isn’t this simply asking the consumer to perpetuate a system where new customers will be offered lower prices and then face huge hikes after a period of time? The first quote, seems to say “switch, you’ll find better cut throat deals, if you switch!” whilst the second quote seems to say “It’s not fair that you’ll get a better deal if you switch“.
- The question has to be, who do you switch too? None of the big six like to undercut each other by much at all. It is not the consumer’s fault that 18% of all households in 2009 were classed as ‘in fuel poverty’. These are households in which 10% of annual income HAS to be spent on fuel bills. From 2007-2009 35% of single pensioners were living in fuel poverty. The biggest pensioner group, the National Pensioners Convention warned in 2009 that due to the cost of heating their homes, in a cold snap during the winter; 12 pensioners could potentially die every hour. As people struggle even more to pay their energy bills due to this latest round of price hikes, we must assume the ‘big 6′ are having trouble staying in business? Well….no.

Centrica, which owns British Gas, posted pre-tax profits from Dec 2009 – Dec 2010, of £1.92bn. Its highest ever. 18% higher than the previous year. What Centrica tends to do, is rise prices very quickly when wholesale prices rise, but then refuse to lower prices, as wholesale prices drop. Profits from all six big energy companies far exceed £2bn, whilst prices for consumers have risen from an average of £572 p/a in 2003 to over £1000 in 2010. There is no excuse. Privatisation failed. Energy companies have proven that they find it impossible work in the interests of both investors and consumers. I cannot imagine anyone is deluded enough to argue that privatisation has benefited consumers.

British Gas, whose tag line is:

British Gas is the nation’s favourite Cheap Gas and Electricity Supplier

- Put up its price at the end of 2010, by 7%. In July this year, it then shocked everyone by putting up its price gas price by 18% and its electricity price by 16%. The other 5 followed suit, and now the average household will have to fork out around £200 extra for the annual fuel bill. Huhne, has done nothing. Whilst his party is partly responsible for kicking thousands out of work, stalling growth, stagnating wages, and rising inflation, the ‘energy minister’ has done nothing, but complain about consumers, and say ‘naughty gas companies’. And worst of all, he is part of a government that, in March, cut the Winter Fuel Allowance for households in fuel poverty. It isn’t like he was unaware that further rises in the fuel market might be on the cards. Even back in March, there were warnings. Helen Knapman writing for Money Saving Experts back on March 11th, wrote:

Energy prices are predicted to rise this year, prompting some experts to suggest you consider fixing gas and electricity costs.

- The Coalition Budget was made public on March 23rd. The Government had at least twelve days to reconsider cutting the Winter Fuel Allowance. They chose to cut it anyway. Unsurprisingly characteristic of the cowards in the Coalition, they kept the cut to Winter Fuel Allowance out of the Budget document. If Huhne wants to gain some sort of respectability back, for his beleaguered and battered Party, he should be arguing for a Nationalised Utility option.

Talk of ‘human rights’ is laughable, when you look at the record of the Coalition government. The right to education – which I’d consider a Human Right, has been tirelessly dismantled with the appalling Free Schools idea, and the cuts to EMA along with the trebling of Tuition Fees. To suggest, in a key note speech, cutting the benefits of the parents of kids who misbehave is a hideous indictment on the thought processes of Tories. Immediately, Cameron linked bad behaviour with low socio-economic regions. What ‘punishment’ do we give to rich parents of misbehaving kids? How do we punish the Bullingdon Club? Is it REALLY ethical, to make life even more difficult for struggling families, if their kids misbehave? Kids from towns where funding to youth clubs is drastically cut, where their jobs are never secure and where schools teach about five subjects, badly. If you take money away from the poorest and most underdeveloped areas, you force unemployment up, and you struggle to control inflation, whilst offering massive Corporate Tax cuts; expecting low-socio economic areas to respectfully suffer in silence, is economic warfare, and will always be matched with social unrest; be it in the classroom, or on the streets.

On Tuition Fees, Grant-Thornton (an international Tax and Advisory service) reported that contrary to the Coalition’s claims that the highest earners would be hardest hit by the hike in tuition fees, actually the richest kids will pay back the least given that they will be able to pay back the quickest, thus avoiding large interest rates. The middle earners, will pay back the most. A lawyer, in a scenario set out by the report, with a £40,000 debt, will pay back £68,00 overall. The middle earner, with a debt also of £40,000 will pay back £98,00 altogether, despite earning 34% less than the lawyer. The report points out that if rich parents pay the debt immediately, the rich kids pay no interest. So the middle earner is effectively subsidising the education of the rich. The Lib Dems tend to keep this quiet during Conference season.

It also contradicts the government, who claimed that Universities charging above £6000 tuition would be the exception rather than the rule. Grant-Thornton say:

Most universities have declared that they will be charging the £9,000 maximum or an amount close to it.

These levels have been struck as there seems to be a consensus of opinion that to charge less than the maximum would send the wrong signals about quality, and that the easier decision (or the decision that is likely to be ‘less wrong’) would be to charge the full amount.

If the Lib Dems unique selling point for 2015, is simply “You think this is bad, it’d be worse if the Tories were in power alone” is not going to endear mountains of voters to their cause. Voters look at results. We know that anything the Lib Dems claim they are doing to financially support the poorest, is offset almost entirely by rising inflation; which they helped cause with their dogmatic obsession with cutting everything, including the one thing that pulls Nations out of stagnating growth; demand.

Whatever they say, there were not just two options; Coalition, or Tories. The Conservatives in a minority government could not be doing what they are now doing. The divisive nature of Free Schools, the dismantling of the NHS, and the horrific speed of deficit reduction, that even the IMF is now a little bit worried (downgrading our growth forecast…..yet again) about the speed of deficit reduction, despite referring to fast deficit reduction as “essential” in 2010, the weak position on the banks, and cuts to winter fuel allowance would not have happened, had Lib Dems been allowed to vote freely as opposed to cowardly abstaining in order to preserve ‘strong government‘. More voters voted for centre-left parties, more voters voted for slower deficit reduction, than voted Tory and fast deficit reduction. There were other choices for government. Both Liberals and Tories put their money on fast deficit reduction and public sector cuts leading to growth and the resilience of the private sector in taking up lost jobs. Both have failed to materialise and that will be the legacy of Tory/Liberal Neoliberal economics. For me, the Liberal Democrats will always be associated with right winged economic vandalism.

There is absolutely no substance to anything the Liberals say, that rhetorically keeps them on the centre-left.

To finish, I am sick of hearing Liberal Democrats defend their ditching of the Student Tuition Fee abolition pledge, with “Well, you have to compromise in Government.“. If that’s the case, if it is the case that you can’t stick to your pledges due to hung Parliaments, then the Coalition should have presented a new, joint manifesto, which included NHS reforms, which included the Lib Dems u-turn on the speed of deficit reduction, which included cuts to Winter Fuel Allowances, which included disability cuts, which included VAT rise, and put it to the electorate in a second general election against Labour. What they shouldn’t have done, is presumed they now have a mandate to do whatever they like.

The frivolity of Prime Minister’s Questions.

There were laughs reverberating around the hall of the House of Commons today as Tory MP Nadine Dorries asked “Will the Prime Minister show the Deputy Prime Minister, who is the boss?” She raised the issue in conjunction with NHS reforms. Someone should inform Dorries that no one in the Country actually gave permission for these NHS reforms (when I say no one, I obviously exclude John Nash over at Care UK).

On a side note, for those who do not know Nadine Dorries, she attempted to prevent abortion providers giving NHS funded counselling to women, under that famous Tory justification-of-the-disgusting as “patient choice”. The amendment to the Health Bill, seeks to force the NHS to provide “independent” counselling to women seeking an abortion. The worry is, this opens the door for faith based groups to provide counselling to pregnant women. This isn’t beyond the realm of possibility, given that Dorries other anti-abortion campaign in 2008, was funded by Christian Concern for our Nation. This is a Christian fundamentalist group, who believe any kind of pro-equality legislation for homosexuality, is anti-Christian legislation. Here is what their site says:

Sexual orientation is being given increasing protection under equality legislation. Unfortunately this has led to serious consequences for Christians.

Here is its EDL style fear tactics, on Islam:

From the introduction of Sharia law and Islamic finance to the implications on freedom of speech and women’s rights, the presence of Islamism in the UK has great repercussions for all of us.

- They seem to be under the impression that the introduction of entirely Christian fundamental values is a wonderful thing, but any other religious fundamentalists must be great evils. I want neither. They also seem to be under the impression that we have a country controlled by Sharia and Islamic finance. How odd.
They have arguments against the scrapping of the Blasphemy laws (we genuinely still had blasphemy laws up until 2008 …… not 1534……2008!) on their site. They are shocked that anyone would support the scrapping of Blasphemy Laws. Speaking on the site, Andrea Williams defends the Blasphemy laws because they protect against “strident criticism” of God. That it protects against “sexual assaults against Jesus Christ. Making sexual overture towards Christ”…. sounds similar to the way Muslims reacted to the drawings of Mohammed…irrational, and dangerous. After much of what i’ve wrote on this blog, I guess if the laws were still in place, I could be prosecuted for it.
Anyway, This is who funds Dorries campaigns. That is who Dorries is.

Today, MPs voted overwhelmingly against it, and rightfully so. After such a crushing defeat, Dorries said:

“Actually, it was the most tremendous success. We lost the battle but we won the war”.

- One recalls Tariq Aziz in 2003, as the Ba’athist regime in Iraq crumbled, insisting that victory was imminent.

The laughs were justifiably aimed at the pointlessness of the question, and Cameron’s absolutely correct refusal to answer it, but to me it highlighted two problems:

I) Nadine Dorres has simply amplified growing concern on the Tory benches that the Lib Dems are diluting the message of Conservatism. This Blog by Conservative home echoes similar sentiments. It is vastly misguided in its anger. They seem unable to grasp the concept of not winning an election. They did not pass the post. They did not get a majority. They do not have a mandate to initiate deeply right winged, Tory principles. If the Deputy Prime Minister were to be suddenly struck down with a conscience, and said “We are not voting for anything you put forward any more“, the “boss” would appear incredibly impotent. The Country did not choose one boss or one Party. We did not elect a Tory government. We elected a mixture. Doubtlessly Nadine Dorres is simply annoyed with Clegg’s refusal to back her ludicrous religious fundamentalist anti-abortion campaign. What the Tories are doing now it seems, is attempting (as Conservative Home did in the blog I linked to) to use the diluting of Tory policies by Liberal Democrats, as a reason for weak growth. So, that’s the Lib Dems, Europe, the Royal Wedding, Labour’s legacy, and the snow, that the Tories have blamed for weaker than anticipated growth. Even so, the point remains valid; someone needs to tell those like Dorries, who seem to think they have some sort of inherent right to rule, that they didn’t win the election. This is not a Tory Parliament. Even to claim they won the most seats, is fallacious, given that more people voted for slower deficit reduction – Labour/Lib Dem – than voted for the pace now being forced upon us. As far as I can tell, the Lib Dem dilutions aren’t good enough. This is a very very Tory Government. Frustrated about being in Coalition with the Lib Dems? Tough. The public don’t want a very Right Winged government. Either you operate a minority government, or you deal with Coalition. You have no other choice.

One must wonder what the polls would be saying, if the Tories were able to cut even deeper and apply Tory principles where otherwise they are diluted by the Liberals. The Poll from Yougov yesterday, despite Lib Dem dilution, showed that when asked “Thinking about the way the government is cutting spending to reduce the government’s deficit, do you think this is… “
Only 35% said it is good good for the economy. 27% said it is being done fairly and 52% said it is being done too quickly. Even now, having not won the election, they still don’t have a majority of the country agreeing with their policy. They have no mandate. They do not understand this.

II) Prime Minister’s Questions last for thirty minutes every Wednesday. It is a chance for our nationally elected legislature to interrogate the government. Given the rapid nature of change in schooling, the NHS, the struggles facing people who are the victims of deep austerity, the Libyan conflict; It is simply a waste of a question, and a stain upon the fabric of Parliamentary Democracy for an elected representative, who has the opportunity to ask anything at all, to have the nerve to stand up and ask the Prime Minister to bitch slap his Deputy into place. I would have preferred for Cameron to have spent that wasted time laughing at the insanity of Nadine Dorries, instead answering questions about his apparent vast NHS reform support from The Royal College of Nurses, despite their Chief Executive Dr Carter saying recently:

….. we are telling MPs that this Bill risks creating a new and expensive bureaucracy and fragmenting care.
This fragmentation risks making inequalities worse, and preventing health providers from collaborating in the interests of patients. We must avoid a situation where existing NHS providers are left with expensive areas of care while private providers are able to ‘cherry pick’ the services which can be delivered easily.”

- Isn’t the dismantling of the NHS, and the Prime Minister’s refusal to accept the almost universal condemnation of the reforms, far more important to the future of the Country and the people who live in it, than Nadine Dorries personal dislike of Nick Clegg? She should be ashamed of herself to continuing the politics of theatre in a supposedly “honourable” National Legislature.
Shouldn’t we be asking why former Director-General for Commissioning and System Management for the NHS and now “health policy expert” on David Cameron’s personal NHS advisory group said this to a group of Private Healthcare lobbies, organised by private equity firm Apax:

“In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer. The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.”

- Doesn’t seem like the Lib Dems are fighting hard enough to me. Heaven knows what the Tories would be pushing for now, had they won a majority in 2010. It is unnerving to think about. Nevertheless, it isn’t a Tory government and so excessively Right Winged policies like that on the NHS, really need to be fully scrutinised during Prime Minister’s Questions.

Dorries isn’t the first. I blogged not long ago, on the subject of Loughborough Tory MP Nicky Morgan asking misleading and futile questions in Parliament, having emailed her to point out her pointlessness. She, oddly, blamed by anger at her helping to bring down the intellectual discourse that we expect from our Parliamentarians…… on my apparent sexism. To this day, I fail to understand her point, and cannot comprehend how someone of that level of stupidity manages to get elected. But it isn’t just restricted to the Tories. Labour and Liberals are just as guilty of weak and frivolous questioning in Parliament. It is one of the very reasons I am thoroughly anti-Lords reform. I do not want a second chamber full of mediocre career politicians trying to score points against each other. I am quite content with an appointed Lords based on merit and expertise. Another House of Commons, would be a disaster. I don’t care if it’s elected. It’s irrelevant. If all we can achieve by the Democratic process in this Country, is a Health Secretary funded entirely by the Private Health sector, and a mad old Christian who spends her time throwing darts at Nick Clegg, then perhaps Democracy isn’t all it is cracked up to be. We expect more from our politicians. It becomes increasingly obvious that people who spend their debate time, taking cheap shots at each other, should be not representing anyone, in any walk of life. They are not worthy of the office of MP.

We are told constantly of the importance of voting. That our ancestors fought for this privilege. Well, Parliamentarians fought civil wars, their brothers and fathers and sons were killed, for the supremacy of Parliament. Parliament must be worthy of our vote, because that is what wars were fought to ensure. Do we really think that the current Parliamentary tussling, complete with childish attacks and needless questions at the expense of serious debate and discourse, is truly worthy of the vote that is apparently so precious? The degradation of Parliament is circular, in that the mediocrity of our career politicians creates an air of ambivalence toward politics and the democratic process. In return, the disinterest of the electorate necessarily creates a system in which it becomes far easier for mediocre career politicians to enter politics. It is almost certainly the reason we need an unelected House of Lords.

Nadine Dorries may have raised a laughable question, but it illustrates a growing disease in Parliament. Prime Ministers Questions is a public arena, for rather bad theatre, than an arena for informed debate and intelligent discourse and holding the most powerful office in the Country to account, and that is a worrying state of affairs.

Michael Moore – An insult to the Left.

In the late 1700s the Queen of France, Marie Antionette was quite possibly the most hated woman on the Continent. Monarchical discontent had been building for quite some time, François Fénelon’s “The adventures of Telemachus” provided the lining for the future revolution in the reign of Louis XIV, but by the time Louis XVI was removed, along with his family and the Queen from Versailles, the anti-Monarch sentiment was deep and profound, but ultimately it was whipped up in the first place, by lies. Pamphlets had spread, like tabloids, printing and shaping the public mood, moulding public sentiment, guiding the people like sheep, printing lie after lie about the Queen. Eventually, her reign and her life were taken, and history began to judge her as a monster. History now, is less vicious on her. History actually quite likes her. An awful and ignorant Queen, but a harmless woman who loved her children. The power of the press was born.

Interestingly, in 2004, the press really had taken on an anti-George Bush tone. Tabloids depicted him as a monster who was only interested in oil. The people followed suit. Joke after joke was aimed at his apparent lack of intelligence. The anti-Bush tone was set firmly against a tide of anti-Iraq war sentiment. The common wisdom now, seems to be that Bush was only interested in oil. Now, having recently came out as a left wing supporter of the Iraq war, and being quite the critic of George Bush on many policies, not least his frivolous tax cuts which simply quickened the onslaught of recession; I tend to cringe endlessly when George Bush jokes are made; they seem too simple, and too ‘milked’. The lack of understanding many on the anti-war Left have, when it comes to the horrific nature of the Saddam regime, and their willingness to allow that particular regime to continue and calling it ‘peace’ simply affirms my belief that they are the real war criminals. One of the heroes of the anti-war left is horrendous documentary maker, Michael Moore. To sit and watch Fahrenheit 9/11, is to be shocked at its content when taken at face value. Though, when one sits and questions every point Moore makes, and investigates them for oneself, on even the most basic of levels, one is presented with a whole host of inaccuracies bursting out of that film. I will talk you through a couple.

One of the main claims by Moore in the film, and in fact most on the anti-war Left in the US and Britain, and a key theme of Fahrenheit 9/11 is that Iraq;

“never threatened to attack the United States. A nation that had never threatened to attack the United States. A nation that had never murdered a single American citizen.”

- Leaving aside the fact that Hitler didn’t attack the UK, nor did Milosovich attack the US, the point that Iraq had never killed American citizens or threatened to attack the US, is simply untrue. Whilst it might be true that Iraqi soldiers were not waiting for the command to storm Pennsylvania Avenue, to say that Saddam had never murdered a single American citizen is disingenuous at best and a complete manipulation of the audiences emotions, jumping on the bandwagon of anti-Iraq war sentiment at worst. It is a fact that the Saddam regime had funded suicide bombers against Israel, which killed Americans. It is a fact that the Saddam regime paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers who targeted Americans and Israelis. It is a fact that the Saddam regime gave refuge to terrorist Abu Nidal, a man who ordered the deaths of 16 people at Leonardo Da Vinci Airport in Rome from gunfire and killing two more when his men threw grenades at people boarding a flight to Israel. A man who said of himself:

“I am the evil spirit which moves around only at night causing … nightmares.”

It is a fact that Nidal’s men hijacked Pan AM flight 73 in 1986, and killed 7 Americans on board. It is a fact that Saddam hatched a plan to assassinate George Bush Sr in 1993 during his visit to Kuwait, with a massive car bomb that would have killed many many more, had the plot not been foiled. It is a fact that the Iraqi newspaper Babel, run by Saddam’s sun Uday, printed an article in 1997 an order to:

“American and British interests, embassies, and naval ships in the Arab region should be the targets of military operations and commando attacks by Arab political forces.”

- That sounds like a threat to me.
Another publication run by Uday, called Al-Iqtisadi, said:

“…The confrontation with the aggressors should transcend the means of condemnation and rejection, particularly in the Arab and Muslim street. They should use all means-and they are numerous-against the aggressors, including boycott, closing air and sea ports to civilian ships and airplanes that belong to the U.S. and its allies, striking their economic interests and establishments, and considering everything American as a military target, including embassies, installations, and American companies, and to create suicide/martyr [fidaiyoon] squads to attack American military and naval bases inside and outside the region, and mine the waterways to prevent the movement of war ships…

- Also sounds like a threat to me. It is bizarre that Iraq would have the nerve to refer to the US as aggressors, given the history of the Saddam regime in relation to the absolute genocide of the Kurds (the only war crime we can accuse the US of, in my opinion, is leaving Saddam in power for far too long)
Michael Moore played on his quote as if Iraq were innocent victims of American Imperialist aggression. He was wrong. Moore should apologise to the families of any American killed by an Iraqi funded Palestinian suicide bomber in Israel, for his crowd pleasing bullshit.

One wonders how the anti-war brigade would have responded during World War II. There is a scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 that show Baghdad before the invasion; a thriving city filled with people sitting at cafes and laughing in a care free manner. A happy child flies a kite. Everything seems lovely and joyful. And then the bombs hit! The insinuation is that media simply ignored the fact that Saddam’s Iraq was actually full of joy and that now you, having watched Moore’s film, know better! You are of course, not invited to investigate for yourself, nor are you given a picture of life elsewhere in Iraq. You are just asked to believe subliminally, that Iraq was a place of wonderment before the evil Americans destroyed it. The problem is quite severe here. Moore is responsible on the Left, for what we on the Left deplore institutions like Fox News for; total and utter misrepresentation:
If Moore had have focused on the Marsh Arabs instead of Baghdad, we would have seen a beautiful garden of Eden in the 1980s, filled with fishing communities and the most stunning natural wonders on the face of the Earth. Tiny islands, with one or two huts on each, like the waterways of Venice, but wider and lit up with the homes of families who had inhabited the marshes for centuries, floating between neighbours on tiny little home made rafts. He could then have contrasted that view of paradise, with now. In 1991 Saddam firstly had the water supply poisoned. This resulted in hundreds of deaths. Then, drained the marsh lands, purely because the Marsh Arabs were Shi’ites. He then rounded up the majority of the inhabitants, and had many tortured and killed. Paradise had suddenly turned into hell. It is now a desert. Since the 2003 invasion, there has been an effort by the Americans to reinvent the marshlands, and it is working. The Hammar and Hawizeh Marshes especially, accoring to USAID is back to 50% of 1970s levels, which is remarkable given the absolute destruction Saddam caused. Moore chose to ignore this.
To show a film reel of people drinking coffee and flying kites in Baghdad in 2002 is irrelevant beyond comprehension. It’s imagery is simply used to convey a prevailing theme, which is misguidance on a grand scale. Similarly, we could show film of happy Germans during the Holocaust, or happy Serbians during Milošević’s reign, it would be meaningless.

One of the bigger manipulations in the film, is the part where Moore says:

“out of the 535 members of Congress, only one had an enlisted son in Iraq.”

- Technically, the statement is true. Though it is true simply because of the emotive language. It is spoken by Moore in a sombre and disappointed tone, designed to provoke outrage. He is then seen stopping members of Congress and asking them if they’d be happy to send their children to Iraq. One of those Congressmen stopped by Moore was Republican Congressman Mark Kennedy (R-MN). Kennedy responds by pointing out that his son was en route to Afghanistan and his nephews had already served in the forces. This response was cut, and instead Kennedy is shown looking bewildered. When asked about this omission, Moore said:

“He mentioned that he had a nephew that was going over to Afghanistan, So then I said ‘No, no, that’s not our job here today. We want you to send your child to Iraq. Not a nephew.’”

- This is wholly disingenuous of Moore who absolutely knew exactly how the interview would come across, and that he was presenting one side of the story; in which Congressmen are selfish and evil, whilst other people’s families die in war. He had no reason to edit out Kennedy’s response, other than to promote his frivolous and sanctimonious crap. Further, Kennedy, whilst looking bemused by Moore in the film, actually offers to help Moore in the actual, unedited version:

Moore: Congressman, I’m trying to get members of Congress to get their kids to enlist in the Army and go over to Iraq.

Moore: Is there any way you could help me with that?

Kennedy: How would I help you?

Moore: Pass it out to other members of Congress.

Kennedy: I’d be happy to — especially those who voted for the war. I have a nephew on his way to Afghanistan.

Similarly in the film, Delaware Republican Michael Castle is seen on his phone waving away Moore’s calls to send his children to Iraq. He seems ignorant and refusing to answer the point Moore is making. The thing that Moore doesn’t tell you, is that Delaware Republican Michael Castle doesn’t have any children.

101 veterans served in the US House of Reps in 2005. 101 put their lives on the line for America. They should now stand outside Moore’s house and ask if the film maker is willing to do the same.

Aside from the glaring omissions and manipulations, the premise that Iraq was no threat and pretty peaceful before the invasion is itself gravely disturbing and bordering on criminal. Iraq under the Ba’athist regime was one of the most vicious and genocidal regimes in history. Perhaps the last great dictatorship of the 20th Century. To have followed the advice of the Michael Moore’s of the World, would have been to ignore the humanitarian disaster that was Iraq, and shout ‘peace’ on the streets, turning our heads to the suffering in the process.

The anti-war stance of Fahrenheit 9/11 was slowly blurred with an anti-Bush stance, as if the two are one in the same. As if being a supporter of the war means we must also support Bush, or vice versa. For example, in yet another sombre tone, Moore, sounding close to tears, says that the Bush regime:

“supported closing veterans hospitals.”

- This is vastly manipulative on so many levels. It is used to perpetuate the nonsensical idea that the Bush regime cared little about the soldiers sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, because their minds were on other things; oil. The problem is, it isn’t true. The Administration’s Department of Veteran Affairs did indeed propose to close certain Veteran hospitals, but only in areas with rapidly declining populations and under utilised equipment, where patients could be served better in hospitals close by. Along with this, the Administration proposed building new Veterans hospitals in areas with growing demand, and building new blind rehabilitation centers and spinal cord injury centers. None of this was mentioned in Fahrenheit 9/11.

I am slowly learning that even those who you believe have the same fundamental values as myself; a sense of social justice, redistributive wealth, freedom of expression, a desire to get to the truth – are often the people one should be most weary about. The black and white premise that the Left seems to attribute to the Bush regime; one of great evil, or to the Iraq war; one based on a lie, for oil, is often so disastrously simple and despairingly unconsidered, that it must not detract you from forming your own conclusions rather than pulling you into its merky waters of over reaction and over simplification, such as those on the Left who call constantly for Blair to be tried as a war criminal. The policy of non-intervention must be followed to its natural conclusion; Hitler would now rule Europe. Milosovich would have succeeded in genocide. Saddam would rule Kuwait. The Taliban would be funding terrorism and suppressing democratic change in Afghanistan viciously. That would all be the legacy of non-interventionism. It is a war crime in itself. I am almost certain that non-interventionism in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Serbia, in Hitler’s Germany, would have led to far more cruelty than interventionism.

Those in 18th Century France who had wholly legitimate complaints about the nature of the Bourbon dynasty, were unfortunately manipulated into a heartless and uncritical acceptance of every lie published by the anti-Antionette pamphleteers. Their simplistic acquiescence of everything they were told, by those whom they believed could never possibly distort the truth, or lie to them, because they seemed to be on their ‘side’, brought upon a decade or more of anti-intellectualism and what would have seemed like the death of the intellectual superiority of the Enlightenment.

We on the Left must learn to form our own opinions as individuals, as well as collectively. We must be able to disagree profoundly on matters that have for so long seemed so central to our uncodified doctrine. That is how we progress. We must engage on issues, and not just resort to blind acceptance of the prevailing wisdom of those on the Left who are most heard. That is how we unify. And unification of the Left, in a World that seems to be ever more dominated by the Right – in the UK, in Europe, slowly advancing in Australia, the Islamofascist regimes throughout the Middle East, and the dehabilitating and vicious nature of the American Republicans – is absolutely essential. We must not cling on to what can only be described as false prophets who perpetuate simplistic, one sided explanations and post them as objective truth. We must ignore the Michael Moores of the World. They absolutely damage and insult the intelligence of the Left.

My thoughts on Iraq and the Left Part II

This was originally part of the blog entry from yesterday, but it ended up all being too long. So here is Part II.

On the point of Blair being a liar, the issue over the 45 minute claim still haunts his Prime Ministerial career today. It all comes down to Andrew Gilligan. Conventional wisdom has it that the media should be questioned. Though apparently when a story involves the government, people tend to believe the media to be infallible and the government to be corrupt and shady. I on the other hand, find myself in a deep sense of unease at anything the media says, and especially around conventional wisdom. The fact is, people have chosen to believe Andrew Gilligan above anyone who disagrees with him, despite Gilligan lying to a Commons Select Committee, and changing his story numerous times. Why do we take his word as reliable? I would suggest it is because we like to believe our politicians are deeply corrupt. I am anti-Blair for a lot of reasons; his “modernisation” of the Labour Party was actually nothing more than a total capitulation to the financial sector, with grave consequences. Yet on this, I don’t think he maliciously lied. I think the JIC intelligence was false, and the 45 minute claim wasn’t considered important. In fact, so unimportant was it, that Blair didn’t actually mention it once. He didn’t mention it in Parliament. He didn’t claim it as fact. It was raised, I believe, twice in debates in Parliament, in passing. It was not the claim that the Government staked the entire war on. The removal of Saddam was absolutely right and necessary. Anyone who claims otherwise, does not understand the horrific nature of his rule. Comparing him to the Syrian issue at the moment, is irresponsible and ignorant. Saddam was not just another Middle Eastern dictator. He was one of the cruelest and most vicious dictators of the 20th Century. Up there with Hitler and Stalin.

The Left – including me – tends to question the motives of the media. Though there seems to be complacency in this urge to question the media, when the media seem to be revealing something about the government. We tend to believe the media and decide the government is lying. We of course have no proof, or evidence. Similarly, with the “sexed up dossier” we just assume Andrew Gilligan’s report on BBC radio, in which he claimed Downing Street deliberately sexed up the military capability of Iraq to justify war, was absolutely correct. Since, he has offered no support for this claim, it seems a little odd that we’d just take it as fact. Though we do, because we like to believe, for some odd reason, that our Prime Ministers are lying, scheming, murdering psychopaths. And yet, as pointed out earlier, Gilligan changed his story numerous times. Originally he had claimed that Alistair Campbell inserted the 45 minute claim. Then, in front of the Hutton Inquiry, Gilligan said:

“The only context in which my source mentioned Campbell was in the context of the transformation of the dossier.

“The allegation was made that the 45-minute claim was inserted against ‘our [the JIC] wishes’. But it is not a specific claim with a specific person’s name tied to it.”

- In his articles even today, he names Campbell as responsible, but under oath he refuses to use a name, because lying to Parliament isn’t exactly going to go down to well. The Tory MP Sir John Stanley of the Hutton Inquiry picked up on this, telling Gilligan:

“You are now making a dramatically, totally, totally different allegation. You have led this whole committee, and the wider public, up the garden path in a most staggering way.”

On being questioned further, into why he suggested the Government had lied, or that Campbell had placed the 45 minute claim into the dossier, despite him having no evidence, and despite Dr David Kelly not actually putting Campbell and 45 minute claim in the same sentence during any of their three meetings (three according to Gilligan, four according to David Kelly, lasting 45 minutes according to Gilligan, 90 minutes according to Kelly), Gilligan retracted the comment he’d made on the Today Program, that the Government probably knew the 45 minute claim was false before they put it in the dossier:

“It wasn’t my intention to give the impression the Government had lied.”

- How is it that an entire generation has clutched onto this man’s incredibly weak interpretation of investigative journalism, as being precisely factual? If anything, Gilligan is guilty of doing what he accuses the government of; lying, and “sexing up” evidence. There is no consistency in his story, there is no consistency between how he thinks the meetings between he and Dr David Kelly went, and how Dr David Kelly thought they went. That is probably why MPs branded Gilligan an “unsatisfactory witness“.

Gilligan then claimed the original source that the government used, for the 45 minute claim was wrong. Again, he had no evidence. He claimed the original source had been mistaken between the deployment time for weapons, and the deployment time for a Chemical and Biological missile. The problem is, the JIC rejected this as being ludicrous, because the original source for them had never once mentioned the word missile and only ever mentioned weapons. It would seem that Gilligan is making it up as he goes along, and those who believe him seem to be hailing him as a lone journalist taking on the big bad corrupt government. No one seems to be questioning him.

If we take Susan Watts testimony before the Hutton Inquiry, she claimed that she too had spoken to Dr David Kelly, as a reporter for the BBC. She had taken notes, and made a recording. When asked about Kelly’s statement that Alaistair Campbell had “sexed up” the dossier, she said that Dr Kelly’s comments on Campbell were no more than a glib statement” and “gossipy aside” for which there was no evidence whatsoever. Kelly was just guessing. A passing comment. She came forward after Kelly had killed himself. It’s a shame she didn’t present this before, to take the pressure off of Dr Kelly. It might have saved his life. In fact, if Gilligan hadn’t have emailed the Foreign Affairs Committee, to reveal that Dr Kelly was Susan Watt’s source (thus breaking the Journalist code of protecting the source), Kelly may still be alive today. Both Watts and Gilligan piled the pressure on Dr David Kelly. They sold him out.

The Hutton Inquiry told that Campbell had made notes on the Dossier, though not to deceive anyone, and that the Joint Intelligence Committee had agreed and consented to the final draft before it was published.

The Butler Inquiry concluded that the 45 minute claim was based on bad intelligence – which it certainly was. But, it also concluded that the government did not know it was bad intelligence before the dossier was published, as Gilligan had claimed.

To this day, Gilligan cannot be trusted to present an accurate story in his articles. In January this year, he wrote an article on the case of Ashraf Miah, a man convicted of child molestation. In his article, he names a certain Mosque as the place that Miah met his victims:

The court heard that Miah also taught at the hardline East London Mosque, controlled by the Islamic Forum of Europe, which also believes in turning the UK into a sharia state, though by different methods. The mosque has hosted many hate, extremist and terrorist preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda spiritual leader. Some of the victims were introduced to Miah via the mosque.

- The problem is, this is nonsense. The Telegraph, in which the story was published issued the following statement, five months later:

Our report “Extremist leader jailed for child abuse” (Jan 20) wrongly said that some of the victims of Ashraf Miah, described in a court report as a former teacher at the East London Mosque, were introduced via the Mosque. We are happy to confirm that the Mosque has no record of him ever having taught there and that there was no suggestion at trial of his victims having been introduced to him there.

The article he wrote was on his Telegraph blog. It has since been taken down, but a copy can be found here.
Now, that being said, and given that the article is still available to view, with his name attached to it, which he wrote, one wonders why after the Telegraph corrected the blatant lie, he tried to suggest he didn’t actually write it:

It is untrue to claim, as the mosque and its echoes in the blogosphere often do, including in its latest statement, that the Daily Telegraph has corrected any story I wrote about it: the correction was to a news-in-brief item (six months ago!) written by someone else. And if that 50-word piece, in all the tens of thousands of words we’ve written about the East London Mosque, is the only fault they’ve been able to find, I think we’re doing pretty well.

- As you can see from the link, it isn’t a 50 word news in brief, and the Daily Telegraph DID correct a story he wrote. He lied twice, about the same thing.

Private Eye found that Gilligan had been leaving comments on his own blog articles, under different names. I am not entirely sure how this man can be considered respectable and credible?

Back to the dossier. The general head of the Joint Intelligence Committee at the time, Sir John Scarlett approved the foreword to the September Dossier. He clearly didn’t have any reason to think it “sexed up”. He also vigorously denies being pressured to “sex up” the wording. He says there was no deliberate attempt to mislead, but admits he perhaps should have mentioned that the 45 minute claim related to weapons on the battlefield rather than missiles. It would be helpful if Gilligan provided evidence, rather than metaphorically standing in a crowd of his supporters and shouting “And and and Blair ate a baby!!!” to their thunderous boo’s and chants of “hang him!! War criminal!! Baby eater!!!“

We then have a host of half-arsed journalism, trying to roll out a conspiracy, that actually just isn’t there. For example, Jane Merrick writing for the Independent says:

Of the 45-minute claim in the dossier, he said: “I didn’t focus on it a great deal at the time… I mentioned it without any great emphasis and I mentioned it, I think, in reasonably sensible terms.” Yet in evidence to the Hutton inquiry in 2003, Mr Blair said: “There was absolutely no reason for us to doubt that intelligence at all” – suggesting it did carry great emphasis in Downing Street.

- What? How on Earth does “There was absolutely no reason for us to doubt that intelligence at all” suggest that the 45 minute claim carried great emphasis in Downing Street? Jane Merrick appears to be trying to find and point out a conspiracy that doesn’t exist. It suggests to me that the major failure in Downing Street, was that they glanced over such dodgy and weak intelligence, and just presumed it was accurate. It seems they took no notice of it. If they had, why wouldn’t they just omit it, because it’s pretty obvious it’d come back and bite them at some point in the future. These are not stupid people, there was a wealth of intelligence surrounding Blair. I cannot imagine they’d all sat in a room and decided to insert false, and incredibly damaging ‘evidence’. With the WMD claim, I cannot believe the Blair Administration decided to claim Iraq had WMDs, if they actually knew Iraq didn’t. They were not stupid people, surely one of them might have raised the issue of the fact that they’d go to Iraq and not find any? Surely they’d maybe plant something? It seems a huge leap to say Blair lied to take the Country to war, and then just didn’t bother covering that lie up. It is one of those conspiracy theories (along with the 9/11 inside job nonsense). I just cannot bring myself to agree with. Nor can I accept that Blair lied over Weapons of Mass Destruction; I think he genuinely believed Iraq was developing WMDs, especially given the evasive nature of Saddam’s regime in his dealing with Blix’s team of inspectors, who all concluded interestingly, that Saddam was not cooperating fully with the inspection team, as he had been instructed to do. The UN seemed to wish to issue resolution after resolution without having to act when he disobeyed. It isn’t a stretch to suggest he was hiding something, especially given that he had used chemical and biological weapons in the past. It is the equivalent of asking your friend where your bike is, he saying “I don’t know“, you asking if you can search his house, he saying “yes……but not the shed. You can’t look in the shed. “. It isn’t a great leap to come to a decision that perhaps he’s hiding something in that shed.

To sum up the last two blog entries, I ask myself one question. Has the Left abandoned its international ally, for the sake of the endless pursuit of Anti-Americanism? I am coming to the unnerving conclusion, that yes, the Left has become far too Nationalistic and Anti-American. The anti-war Left demands peace, shows pictures of dead soldiers and Iraqis, demands the end to war, so they can simply cover their faces and pretend the horror of what happens when you leave a man like Saddam in power just isn’t happening. They don’t hold photos of dead Germans during WWII and ask for an apology from the Churchill family. It seems war is only “legal” if the enemy might attack your country. Suddenly Nationhood is brought into the moral question. If they kill their own people, allow mass rape and torture, invade lands around them, support terrorism, then whomever says “enough is enough” is apparently guilty of war crimes. Yet when we leave these bastards alone, we end up with Rwanda. The anti-war Left does not march on London, with signs showing dead children, when a genocide like Rwanda takes place. They stay quiet and consume in silence. Their righteous bullshit condemns them. They are the war criminals.

The curse of Letwin

The Conservative Government REALLY need an Alastair Campbell. Desperately. They attempted to secure a Campbell figure to head their PR team, with the [sarcarm] brilliantly managed and executed appointment of Andy Coulson.[/sarcasm] It would take a top PR team most of the day, every day, to ensure Oliver Letwin, the Minister of State for Policy, keeps his grotesque mouth closed whenever someone from the press is around, because he betrays the idea that the Tories have change, or modernised, since, well, around the 19th Century. Letwin is a left over from a group of Etonians who clearly and misguidedly believe they have a right to rule by way of their heritage. It is an arrogance that the Cameron Government will never shake, because they are the living embodiment of that privileged arrogance. They have disastrously inter-breeded this mentality with a Thatcherite economic mentality that is as dangerous as it is out-dated. His disastrous face, screams contempt for anyone who isn’t Oliver Letwin. He is a PR disaster. It is one of the many reasons (another being massive incompetence and dishonesty – which we’ll come to later) that he was overlooked when the Tories were searching for a leader. Hell, they even chose Iain Duncan Smith, does anyone remember him?

With a face looking as if someone had created him out of the concept of pompous twat, Oliver Letwin has once more allowed the Conservative Party mask it currently shrouds itself in, to fall, revealing a Thatcherite brigade just as frightening and dangerous as their 1980s counterparts.

Letwin had told a consultancy firm, that his proposals for public sector reform should instill:

“some real discipline and some fear”

He said this, because he believes the productivity of the public sector has failed. It is a strange comment and angle to take, given that the private sector has spent the past four years creating sovereign debt crises’ everywhere it goes. Productivity is very difficult to measure in the public sector, because the public sector is not about creating anything. Investment in the public sector has seen waiting lists for operations down year on year since the last Tory administration. Teaching standards are also up. The public sector does not “make” things. So talk of productivity in comparison to the private sector, is futile and misleading. It strikes me as wholly patronising that a man such as Oliver Letwin has the balls to lecture public sector workers – teachers, doctors, nurses, firemen – on what “real discipline” is. They are not children. They also did not claim public money for ludicrous items like mortgage interest payments. Also, the public sector hasn’t spent twenty five years creating a system of easy credit to boost the excessive pay of CEOs and Managing Directors, whilst the average worker saw overall increase in wages? And then when the company or bank failed miserably, the “fear” was THAT pertinent that the CEOs are given massive pay offs and lovely big bonuses. All this, whilst the public sector is told constantly, and has been told constantly, from Thatcher, to Major, to Blair, to Brown and now to Cameron, that it is not good enough, that it must be modelled on a failing private sector built on squeezing productivity out through long hours, a mountain of stress, and all for less pay whilst the big boss is compensated for his little contribution to overall productivity with huge salary and bonuses; and that their jobs are always on the line. A private sector model should be as far away from inflicting misery on the public sector, as possible.

It isn’t the first time Letwin has revealed his hostility to those less fortunate. Earlier this year, he surprised and disgusted the most posh of Tories, Boris Johnson, by telling Johnson:

“We don’t want more people from Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays.”

- At least he recognises that the North suffered horrifically with the gutting of jobs and thus wealth during the Thatcher years. Though he seems to have suggested that it is perfectly okay for the wealthy Southerners to pay for expensive holidays and that holidaying abroad should be based on wealth. I expect he thought he was at home with Boris, and could reveal his true feelings, but sometimes posh Tory twats seriously misjudge the situation, and regret the fact that their well crafted public self has been set on fire by their real self. This seems to happen a lot with Letwin. And now on to why I referred to his as a hypocrite:

In 2005 Letwin used the phrase “Wealth Distribution” in a positive light! I know! I was shocked too when I first read it. A Tory, interested and supportive of wealth distribution? Surely not! Well, actually, not. 2005 was the year Cameron was trying to pose as being a “progressive conservative“, deeply contradictory term yet one he managed seemingly to work. Letwin clearly took on that contradictory term, by trying to fill out a left wing term with right winged substance in the hope that no one would scratch below the service. He said:

…….not by trying to do down those with most but by enabling those who have least to share an increasing part of an enlarging cake.

- In practice what this means is, a desire to scrap the top rate of tax for the richest, a desire to lower the Corporation tax rate to the lowest recorded level, a desire to allow companies like Vodaphone a get out of jail free card by writing off their tax debt, whilst at the same time cutting allowance for the disabled, the elderly, according to a report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary Letwin must be talking about the 16000 less police Britain will have after this Parliament; according to the leaks that the Guardian currently has; the Tory’s new director of policy Steve Hilton, suggesting abolishing maternity leave whilst also abolishing ALL consumer rights legislation. Just to reiterate….. this man, is the Nation’s DIRECTOR OF POLICY. Now i’m not saying these idiotic and deeply right winged ideas of Hilton’s are likely to become a reality. To suggest so would put me on the same wavelength as the manic Right Wingers who would constantly suggest that New Labour were about to ban England shirts and change the name of Christmas, or ban you from being white. Letwin must believe Hilton’s ideas will “enable” those with the least to a share of an increasingly large cake. Tories consider Hilton a genius…… not just because of his ideas (which aren’t in any sense a spark of genius) but also because he doesn’t wear shoes in Downing Street and they consider this “wacky”. In their defence, it is as wacky as most Tories are likely to see, given that they are born wearing business suits, slick back hair, and spend the next twenty years trying to hide the fact that their schooling experience is a plethora of homoeroticism cunningly disguised as a love of “Rugger“. It can’t have been too many years ago when gay and black people were described by most Tories as “wacky“. Hilton, like Letwin, is politically dangerous.

The reason why Letwin is hypocritical in his desire to do away with the idea that public money can actually do good, is because he used public money to claim over £80,000 for his Cottage in Somerset, in order to heat the place, empty the septic tank, £1000 in mortgage interest and most beautifully of all…… over £2000 to repair a leaking pipe underneath his tennis court. So much for “real discipline and fear“.

Either the Tory Party spend some time searching and investing in a decent PR figure, or they sew Oliver Letwin’s mouth closed, he is a liability to the Conservatives, and a liability to humanity.

The Afghanistan problem and the anti-war Left

There is an inclination on the Left (especially the Student Left) to be manically, and irrationally anti-war. There is no room for movement. They will call for Blair to be tried for War Crimes (here is a wonderfully simplistic sight, that calls Blair a monster). They will show the bodies of innocent people killed in Iraq or Afghanistan and demand Blair and Bush be hung for crimes against humanity, yet oddly they don’t wish to draw the same conclusion with Churchill, or Roosevelt; allied bombers are responsible for far more civilian deaths during World War II. Therefore, they are absolutely irrational, selective, and living in a dream World. They are patently anti-war. A man could be stabbing you, and they’d insist on “understanding” the differences, culturally, between the two of you, and then working on a diplomatic solution. Their determination to continue irrationally, and hijack the Left Wing, so that it encompasses anti-war into its way of thinking, is a veritable insult to those of us on the Left who are far more practical and logical, taking each conflict that arises as requiring different solutions, and that sometimes, war is the only way.

If you read Tariq Ali of the Stop The War group, he seems to completely exonerate Pakistan of any wrong doing, and put all blame for any problem in Afghanistan and Pakistan, at the door of America. It thus perpetuates the myth that religious evil persisting on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the support for that evil from the Pakistan ISI is somehow a problem we should “understand” at the very best, and just ignore at the very worst.

One must wonder if they think the lack of force used against the Interahamwe in Rwanda, was the right course of action, given that it was peaceful yet resulted in a genocide.

I absolutely support the war in Afghanistan. I think it’s a long term war, against an enemy that is relentless, and happy to use their own bodies to kill anyone who does not follow their religious doctrine. Had I been Prime Minister in 2001 after 9/11, i’d have made the same decision as Blair. Had I been Prime Minister in 2003, when all the intelligence was pointing to Saddam having WMDs, and the fact that he’d been obstructing Weapons inspectors, and had already broken well over 10 UN Resolutions, I’d have gone into Iraq too. People who will use religion as a justification for declaring war (which they did on 9/11/2001) should be hunted down on every corner of the Globe, and eliminated. We should not be taking their cultural ideals into consideration. Believe whatever you wish, but when your belief is enshrined in violence, your belief deserves to be wiped off the face of the planet. Believe in Fascism if you wish, but the moment you try to spread your vile system using violence, then it becomes a problem.

The attack against the World Trade Centre was not an attack against American aggression. Islamic terrorism had been growing for years. Those who support its doctrines do indeed wish their reading of Islam to become the accepted norm. This is evident with the killing of Ahmed Shah Massoud on September 9th 2001. Massoud was a great man by anyones definition. He fought the Soviets, helping to drive them out of Afghanistan, and then continued to fight the Taliban, and staunchly attacking their interpretation of the Koran. He was assassinated by radical Muslims two days before the 9/11 attacks. They didn’t kill him because he was American; he wasn’t. They killed him because he posed a threat to their perverted and dangerous doctrine.

After taking control of much of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban installed the most vicious and violent form of Shariah law that any Islamic nation has ever had to endure. For Massoud’s part in trying to destroy the Taliban regime, he was nominated in 2002 for a Nobel Peace Prize, and has a National Day named after him, in his honour. Can you imagine living in a country that was essentially free and modernising rapidly, to a Country that suddenly banned education, sports, and leaving the house without a male chaperon for all women? Can you imagine suddenly become a Country that forced all men to have a fist sized beard on their chin on pain of public torture if disobeyed? Where suddenly you could be put to death for owning a TV or sending a Christmas Card. A Country in which a woman would be publicly executed if she had been seen by a Male doctor, no matter how sick she was? That was not Afghanistan prior to 1996. But it was Afghanistan in 1996-2001? All this whilst they funded and trained extremists carrying out bombing missions against US Embassies.

According to a UN Report, most civilian deaths in Afghanistan since 2001, have been caused by the Taliban insurgency. They are also focussing their attacks on unarmed Aid workers. 76% of civilian deaths in 2009, according to the UN Report have been caused by the Taliban. They do not care who they kill. They want control of a country, for religious ideological reasons. Here are a group that helped carry out attacks on US embassies, harboured terrorists, helped to fund and plan 9/11, assassinated an opposition leader, refused to allow women the right to leave the house alone, carried out extreme torture and execution on a daily basis, and who would kill you and I, and I don’t think It’d be a leap to say they’d most certainly use chemical or biological weapons against the West or any anti-Islamic fundamentalist group, if they had the capability; all of this and the anti war left do not see it as sufficient to intervene? By that same reasoning, should we have left Milošević alone?

The problem on the Western Side, was that a lot of Muslims believed that whilst Terrorism was wrong, they felt a sense of “brotherhood” with Muslims in Afghanistan, and therefore felt it was a battle between the West and Islam. Which is a ridiculous argument. The Crusades are long dead. I am an Atheist, not a Christian. I couldn’t care less what religion a man in a desert in Afghanistan chooses to adhere to. The fact that Turkey supplied troops to the war against the Taliban also suggests this wasn’t a war on Islam.

There is another attack, that seems to have no actual end, or point to it. “Yeah, but America funded the Taliban in the 80s against the Soviets!”.
Absolutely. It was the wrong thing to do. The US created a Monster. I absolutely do not support the Reagan administration in pretty much anything it did. It funded Right winged terrorists throughout Latin America in an attempt to spread American Capitalism. But that was the Reagan Administration. The Foreign landscape was entirely different, and just because they created the monster for short sighted reasons, doesn’t mean that they should wash their hands of that monster 20 years later.

Afghanistan needs to be a fully functioning State. That is absolutely impossible with a Taliban presence. A Taliban presence means terrorism, which means mass instability across the region, and presents a worry for Pakistan with it’s Nuclear capability. A functioning State of Afghanistan, progression both economically and politically can only take shape without the Taliban.

The issue Afghanistan clearly has now, is Karzai isn’t exactly Mr Clean himself. In 2009, of the 66 polling sites in Kandahar, 100% of the vote came out in favour of Karzai. In the Zherai Awal Camp, 2,100 people are eligible to cast a vote for the Afghan President. Of those 2100………… 2300 apparently voted according to the polling report, and everyone of them voted for Karzai. Karzai’s opponent, Abdullah Abdullah refused to carry on the election, citing his lack of faith in the Government’s ability to allow a fair and free election. He has since started the Campaign for Change and Hope in Afghanistan, as a new Party for Democratic reform. The fact that that Campaign from Abdullah Abdullah is allowed to exist, a party for Democratic reform, shows that Afghanistan has come far, and is much better off, and certainly now on a decent path, which it would not have been on had the Taliban still been in control. In early 2001, Abdullah Abdullah travelled to Europe to ask for financial aid, to help Afghanistani people affected by the cruelty of the Taliban regime, he said without the aid of Pakistan and Bin Laden’s group, the Taliban would be history.

Karzai is currently offering to negotiate peace with the Taliban. The problem with that is, the Taliban do not want stability, or a functioning democratic state. They are not fighting to keep America out. That is simply a clever propaganda tactic. They are fighting to control Afghanistan and force a harsh environment where Shariah is the law of the land, and terrorism can be supported.

I think the objective is pretty clear. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are absolutely linked. The link extends to the stability of Afghanistan. The link extends to Pakistan and its Nuclear program. To build a free and democratic Afghanistan that isn’t ruled by oppressive gangsters supporting terrorism, and to ensure that particular group do not develop Nuclear capability, we must stay the course in Afghanistan and ensure its State becomes strong and capable of self defence. To allow the Taliban the opportunity to retake Afghanistan, would only lead to another 9/11 and another failed State that requires further intervention. Do it now, or try to do it again and again and again every few years.

We also have to win the propaganda war. There are doubtless section of Western Muslim community who actually believe that the Taliban are the defenders of Islam and the heroes fighting Western imperialism. Do they oppose Abdullah Abdullah? Do they oppose democratic change? Does the anti-war Left believe the only legitimate option for Afghanistan was an oppressive Taliban regime who would gladly light the fuse that blew up the West? To let that kind of Fascism persist, in my opinion, is a great evil. To turn a blind eye to it, as we did with Rwanda, is a great evil. It must be confronted.

It does not help the US’s case, that individual soldiers seem to believe they are above the law, and somehow manage to get acquitted for awful crimes. In my eyes the war is justified, but it has to be fought on the standards of the outcome it wishes to achieve; the rule of law, and stability. To forgo the judicial process for individual US soldiers who have committed crimes in Afghanistan, only adds fuel to the fire of mistrust and the entire anti-war left start to suspect the entire war effort as having sinister undertones. It doesn’t take long on the Stop The War Coalition website to come across an article mentioning oil; another argument I always find horrifically simplistic.

The biggest disadvantage the Taliban have, is the collective memory of a rather annoyed population who remember the dark days of 1996-2001. Rory Stewart, an expert on Afghanistan, write:

The Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek populations are wealthier, more established and more powerful than they were in 1996 and would strongly resist any attempt by the Taliban to occupy their areas. The Afghan national army is reasonably effective. Pakistan is not in a position to support the Taliban as it did before. It would require far fewer international troops and planes than we have today to make it very difficult for the Taliban to gather a conventional army as they did in 1996 and drive tanks and artillery up the main road to Kabul.

- With this in mind, there are now projects in Afghanistan that are community led rather than foreign aid led, to build a stable Country. But whilst these are small steps in the right direction, the shady Karzai regime has taken two steps back. The reason the Executive branch of the new Afghanistan Government has powers beyond that of the US President or the UK Prime Minister, is because strong leadership is needed in the first years following its foundation. In an era where the Taliban are winning the propaganda war, a weak executive and a strong Parliament could be potentially disastrous. Karzai needed to act decisively, and honestly. The quite obvious election corruption by the Karzai regime was one massive reason the executive branch of this new State could be endangered, but beyond that, he is calling for Taliban fighters to stop the violence and back to new government. For me, this simply tells the Taliban that they can’t be defeated, that the Karzai government and their allies in the UK and US are too tired to fight any longer and are willing to accept compromise. Progress in human rights, and the rebuilding of the State is under threat, with the apparent desire to appease the Taliban. As Karzai attempted to negotiate with the Taliban, they killed his brother, and other top ranking officials. The US is not helping matters, as Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary said the US would engage in political talks with the Taliban by the end of the year. Shortly after Karzai revealed that the US and Afghanistan was in “PEACE” talks with the Taliban, announcing to the press that the talks were “going well”, four suicide bombers attacked a police station next to the Afghan Finance Ministry. The Taliban admitted they carried out the attacks. I must concur with Col Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, when he said:

“The only possibility that (peace) could happen is if they as a movement are defeated and there’s no prospect of that happening in the near future.”

These are not people to be appeased, they do not want to be part of a democratic process. They don’t want to give people a choice on whether they’re wanted in power or not, they want absolute power, and rule by fear, torture and murder. They are a threat to their own people, and they are a threat to the World. And until we discover the true nature of the Pakistani ISI and their links to the Taliban, we may be a long way from defeating them, though it’s a necessity. On the subject of Pakistan, they must be treated with suspicion and watched carefully. According to a report by Matt Waldman of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University;

Directly or indirectly the ISI appears to exert significant influence on the strategic decisionmaking and field operations of the Taliban; and has even greater sway over Haqqani
insurgents. According to both Taliban and Haqqani commanders, it controls the most violent
insurgent units, some of which appear to be based in Pakistan

- With this sort of accusation, it is less surprising that Osama Bin Laden was found next to a military compound in Pakistan. I would feel almost certain in saying he was being protected by the ISI, and more than that; I’d say that Mullah Omar, the Taliban Leader, is also hiding in Pakistan under the protection of the ISI. Mullah Omar is a man who has said he will hunt and kill Americans like dogs. In fact, captured Taliban insurgent Muhammad Hanif made that exact confession. Hanif admitted that Mullah Omar is in the Pakistani city of Quetta. Obviously Pakistan have denied this, yet the US (who insist their relationship with Pakistan is strong and based on mutual trust) seem to think there might be some truth in it, given that the Wikileak earlier this year showed that the US diplomatic community believe the ISI to be a terrorist organisation.

There is no choice for the West. We either stay the course, regardless of how long it takes, and ensure this vile Fascist form of Islam is not allowed to take control of Afghanistan or any other Country, or we allow them to keep stabbing us, and just hope that one day they will suddenly understand that we have our differences, and they retract the knife despite having caused irreparable damage. I am not entirely sure what the anti-war Left propose we should do with the problem of Afghanistan.

That is why I fully support the war, and a continued campaign in Afghanistan.