Author: Alexander Boot

It’s appearing on archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2013/08/wtfwjd-well-hed-neither-swear-nor.html

No one has ever accused President Obama of consistent behaviour, but still.

First he announces that, because of Russia’s beastliness in granting asylum to Edward Snowden, he’s cancelling his Moscow summit with Putin.

Then, in the next breath, he declares that he’ll still attend the G20 meeting in St Petersburg.

I’m confused. Cancelling a meeting with a fellow head of state is tantamount to declaring that Russia is sufficiently hostile to America’s interests to preclude any civilised contact. An enemy, in other words, or at least a potential one.

Yet attending an economic meeting in the same country sends an opposite signal, namely that America’s interests are the same as Russia’s or at least not so divergent as to preclude any civilised contact. Russia is a friend, in other words, or at least an ally.

Hence one may conclude that Obama sees nothing wrong in treating as an economic partner a country that boasts history’s first major criminalised economy. It’s only Russia’s welcome to a minor NSA clerk that upsets him.

However, I know of some Channel Island financial firms that refuse to accept Russian funds. And some Manhattan condominiums refuse to sell units to Russians whose source of finance is suspect, which is to say most Russians who can afford Manhattan condominiums.

Can such outfits apply stricter moral standards than a US president? One gets the impression that, as his administration’s finances get tighter, Obama’s moral standards become looser.

The president made his confused feelings known on an appropriate platform: a comedy chat show hosted by Jay Leno. The Russians, said Obama, really get him going: “There have been times where they slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality.”

If by Cold War mentality he means opposing the West all over the globe, then the Russians don’t just do that “at times”. To make sure the fish had bitten, they led the West on for a couple of years after 1991, when, according to our neocon friends, history had ended and democracy had triumphed all over the world.

Since then it has been business as usual. In fact, the much cherished ‘collapse of communism’ was nothing but a transfer of power from the calcified Party to the more flexible KGB. Hence the subsequent change of language, and hence also the continuation of the same policy by different means.

But forget the Cold War. What really makes Russia wicked in Obama’s eyes is its ban on the propaganda of homosexuality to children.

“I have no patience for countries that try to treat gays or lesbians or transgender persons in ways that intimidate them or are harmful to them,” he said. He then implicitly accepted the parallel Leno drew between this legislation and the Nazi Holocaust.

This foul parallel is offensive, stupid and factually ignorant. The Nazis didn’t ban Jews from teaching Judaism in schools. They murdered six million of them. Equating the two events, in however remote a fashion, betokens an atrophied moral sense and never developed mental faculties.

The Russians had their own Holocaust, outscoring the Nazi version several times over. During the 40 years from 1917 Putins’s first employer, of whom he’s still self-admittedly proud, massacred 60 million Soviet citizens, and quite a few others.

It would have been appropriate to mention this in the context, but Obama’s moral indignation doesn’t go that far. He did however hint at the possibility of boycotting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Again, he took exception to Putin’s promise that the law against homosexual propaganda will be enforced during the Games. This got the bandwagon rolling, and many others, including our own Stephen Fry, have jumped on.

“We wouldn’t tolerate gays and lesbians being treated differently,” said the president.  “They’re athletes, they’re there to compete.” 

True. But Mr Obama ought to have asked his advisors what events they’ll be there to compete in. That way he would have avoided the embarrassing remarks that came next:

“And if Russia wants to uphold the Olympic spirit, then every judgment should be made on the track, or in the swimming pool, or on the balance beam, and people’s sexual orientation shouldn’t have anything to do with it.”

Any judgment made “on the track, or in the swimming pool, or on the balance beam” would be irrelevant to the Winter Olympics, for none of those is featured there. It’s more like ski slopes and skating rinks, Mr President.

But never mind the details; it’s the thought that counts. Messrs Obama and Fry may not like the idea of protecting children against homosexual propaganda, and they’re all in favour of eliminating the word ‘perversion’ from our dictionaries. Fair enough.

But Putin never said that homosexual athletes would be banned. All he said was that he’d want them to restrict their urge to convert tots to the delight of homosexuality. Surely it’s no hardship to refrain from doing so for a fortnight? “They’re there to compete,” after all.

I’m in favour of boycotting the Sochi Olympics too – but not for such spurious reasons.

Taking part in the event would be tantamount to endorsing an evil regime that tortures, murders or imprisons dissidents and journalists, runs a Mafia economy, supresses civilised liberties and conducts an assassination programme all over the world. Decent people, or countries, would besmirch themselves by having anything to do with such a regime.

But one of Russia’s few just laws shouldn’t be used as the reason for shunning her any more than, say, Saudi Arabia’s much harsher anti-homosexual laws should be held as the grounds for banning her oil imports.

Moreover it’s at best hypocritical and at worst immoral to boycott the Sochi Olympics while attending the Petersburg G20. But then it’s not democracy that governs the West these days. It’s moral relativism, abetted by PC totalitarianism.

 

 

 

 

 

‘Social democracy’ is among the most pernicious word combinations known to man, which is worrying. After all, most Western countries are social democracies now.

‘Social’ in this context means ‘socialist’, which is demonstrably bad news by itself. Whenever this approach to life was tried independently from democracy, it produced a swift calamity typically accompanied by unrestrained violence on a scale hitherto unknown to man.

Democracy adds a delayed-action mechanism to the primed socialist bomb, but it’ll still go off sooner or later. For socialism attempts to repeal economic laws rooted in human nature.

The underlying assumption is that if ideology contradicts human nature, it’s the latter that has to change.

Alas, human nature never stops proving that it’s created by an authority infinitely higher than any political dispensation. Only that authority could effect a meaningful change, and so far it has been refusing to do so.

Thus social democracy reliably produces a huge class of those whom the late Oriana Fallaci called ‘Mr I-Know-My-Rights’.

These people learn that they can provide for themselves not by working hard but by voting right (or rather Left). Elect a social democratic candidate (these days are there any other?) and subsistence is guaranteed. Things like food, accommodation, clothes, pensions, medical care become free.

Well, not exactly free because someone still has to pay for them. Except that the ratio of payers and payees keeps shifting away from the former. If in most Western countries this ratio used to be 5:1 not so long ago, these days it’s perilously close to 2:1 – or worse.

One reason for this is an aging population; another is, well, human nature. Most of us like the idea of getting a greater return for a smaller effort, or preferably no effort at all. Because of this universal trait, the availability of social benefits and the number of those desiring them exist in a symbiotic relationship.

A gap develops, and it can only be closed by promiscuous government spending financed by the printing press.

There’s no shortage of government officials eager to resort to this trick: social democracy breeds not only a certain type of voter but also a certain type of politician. Those prepared to sell their votes have no shortage of those willing to buy.

The outcome of this is clearly visible all over the Western world. But Detroit, which three weeks ago filed for bankruptcy, provides a useful microcosm.

In 1960 Detroit had a population of 1.6 million, 70 percent white, 29 percent black. The difference between the two groups was merely chromatic: they all worked hard, mostly in the motor trade. Detroit, then the fourth largest US city and the world’s automotive centre, was prospering.

But then the ‘social’ part of democracy kicked in, and the blacks were told that society owed them a debt for the injustices they had suffered 100 years earlier. The repayment could be claimed by earning without working.

Since work was now optional, education became unnecessary. In any case, much as socialists strive to change human nature, they’re fearful of developing human minds. After all, educated people could notice that an average politician is capable of committing several solecisms in one sentence.

Meanwhile in order to pay for the new entitlements the city had to raise taxes, especially those on property. These are now the highest in the country.

The hard-working people reacted in a highly predictable way: they ran away to sunnier economic climes. Moving in instead were people who didn’t know how to work but did know how to vote.

Now the city’s population is 707,000, with 85 percent of them black. Except that most of these aren’t the same people who used to work on Ford and GM assembly lines.

Skin colour, when it’s just that, matters only to racist pond life. Skin colour, when it becomes an ideology, matters to everyone.

Detroit has the highest murder rate in America and the lowest literacy: only seven percent of pupils can read properly. For every six OAPs there are only four people of working age.

How many of those four are actually working is anybody’s guess. The official unemployment rate is 10 percent, but of course such statistics can be massaged in any number of creative ways, such as excluding part-time workers or people on sick benefit.

Such creativity can distort the picture beyond recognition. Sick-benefit statistics in Britain, for example, show that the country has more invalids than in the wake of either world war. The cynic in me suspects that many of those beneficiaries should really be classified as unemployed – but honest accounting is contraindicated to dishonest politicians.

Mutatis mutandis, the situation in Britain is closer to that in Detroit circa 2013 than to Detroit circa 1960. How much closer depends on whom you’re listening to, but the parallels are there for all to see. The same ideology that corrupted Detroit’s blacks is indiscriminately corrupting all races in Britain.

The time bomb that’s social democracy is ticking away and one is tempted to say it’s up to us to stop it from going off. But then one looks at the available political options, and the temptation dwindles away.

On the eve of his inauguration, Iran’s in-coming president Hasan Rouhani spoke from his moderate heart:  “The Zionist regime has been a wound on the body of the Islamic world for years and the wound should be removed.”

Now this statement might in some quarters be said to belie Rouhani’s widely acclaimed moderation. One begins to harbour ugly suspicion that perhaps he’s not as moderate as he was widely portrayed after his election victory two months ago.

The suspicion becomes even uglier when one tries to picture ways in which the desideratum of removing the wound can be achieved. The Muslim devil, just like our own, is in the detail.

For the body of Islam to be healed, Muslim countries must first secure military victory over Israel. Imagining for the sake of argument that they have the wherewithal to do so, what would be the consequences of the medical procedure?

It doesn’t take much suspension of disbelief to realise that every Israeli who doesn’t manage to flee will be murdered in all sorts of imaginative ways for which Islam is so justly famous. This is the outcome Rouhani desires and towards which he no doubt will tirelessly toil.

This brings into focus the question I asked two months ago: “Exactly how moderate is Rouhani anyway?”

Barristers are trained only ever to ask a question in court to which they already know the answer. My query followed that legal technique.

The answer is, there’s no such thing as a moderate Muslim. There are only Muslims and non-Muslims, those who are Islamic in the same sense in which Leon Trotsky was a Jew or Richard Dawkins is a Christian. Born to a religion, they neither follow its practices nor live by its doctrine.

Such chaps may very well be moderate. What they can’t be is Muslim. For there are over 100 verses in the Koran that directly call for the murder of apostates, infidels, Jews – you name it. Free will not being at the top of the list of Islamic virtues, the dictates of its scripture must be followed to the letter on pain of death.

Thus a ‘moderate Muslim’ is an oxymoron, a bit like ‘a young person’, ‘a Christian atheist’ or ‘Dave the Tory’. And a Muslim cleric is as likely to be a moderate as he is to make the GQ’s best-dressed list.

Far be it from me to suggest that everything is relative, but some things definitely are. Moderation is one of them. My moderation may be your radicalism, his licence and their fascism.

Yet since the 1979 Islamic revolution Iran has been generally regarded as rather immoderate even by Muslim standards. By comparison, the Shah with his torturing secret police began to look like a humanitarian trying to get in touch with his feminine side. At least he drank decent wines and never threatened to develop nuclear weapons and blow up half the world.

Since then, whoever was democratically elected in Iran, the country has always been run by its Supreme Leader, first Ayatollah Khomeini then, after his death in 1989, Sayyed Ali Khamenei.

It’s the Ayatollah who decides who’s allowed to stand for the presidency of the Shi’ite republic and, by a multitude of variously subtle mechanisms, who’s allowed to win. In this type of democracy, it doesn’t really matter who wins. It’s all the same Shi’ite. Moderation really isn’t part of it.

Now the moderate Mr Rouhani wishes to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and murder everyone there. Here his cherished dream has to deviate from that of any decent Westerner.

The strategically inclined individuals among us realise that Israel is the West’s bulwark in its historical confrontation with Islam. Should hot lava yet again burst out of the volcano that is the Muslim world, Israel will be the West’s only reliable ally in the region.

Those whose thinking goes beyond pragmatic geopolitics remember that Israel and Christendom share much of their canon. Israel also acts as guardian of the sites held as sacred by Christians, and it takes little imagination to picture the devastation of such sites should the Muslims vanquish.

And those who think along neither geopolitical nor religious lines proceed from a purely aesthetic judgment.

All knowledge, wrote Descartes, comes from comparing two or more things. Comparing Israelis with, say, Palestinian Arabs, a Westerner is bound to see that the former are more or less like him, while the latter might as well have come from another planet. He will also notice that while the Israelis manage to turn a desert into an orchard, the neighbourhood Muslims are more likely to turn an orchard into a desert.

For these and many other reasons, we must take Hasan Rouhani at his word. Muslim leaders aren’t like ours: they tend to mean what they say. Occasionally they even do it.

So next time we read about Rouhani’s moderation in The Guardian, let’s reach for that grain of salt – and think what we must do about both Iran and The Guardian.

Hitler was a monster who murdered millions. Much as we deplore that outrage, we must grudgingly accept that there wasn’t much wrong with Adolf’s love of dogs. He was almost British in that respect.

Stalin was a monster who murdered even more millions than Hitler. However, because of that one can’t take exception to his liking, even appreciating, real music. One may even lament that our own ‘leaders’ prefer listening to the anomic, anti-musical stuff screamed by tattooed plankton to the accompaniment of the same three chords the world over.

Putin is still lower on the monstrosity scale than either Stalin or Hitler, but then he has at least 12 productive years ahead of him. Considering his apprenticeship in the KGB, history’s most murderous institution, and his propensity for either imprisoning dissidents or bumping them off, he may still match Stalin’s achievements.

Yet this doesn’t mean that every piece of legislation ordered by Putin and passed by his rubber-stamp parliament is ipso facto bad. For example, I quite like Russia’s flat 13-percent income-tax rate. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had it here? Why, we wouldn’t even bother to cheat.

Of course the Russians pay other, less publicised taxes in the form of bribes, kickbacks, protection money, extortion by every government official from a traffic cop to a financial inspector. But that’s a different story, one that has nothing to do with the arguments pro or con flat income tax.

By the same token, any decent person will be appalled by the frequent assaults on homosexuals in Russian streets. These are conducted with the acquiescence, sometimes participation, of the police, and the perpetrators are seldom prosecuted, never mind convicted.

Such abominations, however, don’t cast aspersion on the intrinsic value of the law recently passed by Duma, the country’s legislative body. The law in question bans the promotion of ‘non-traditional’, meaning homosexual, relationships to children.

When it was passed a couple of months ago, all progressive mankind was up in arms. Not counting myself a member of this elite group, I’m tempted to ask why. Do they think it’s a good idea to promote homosexuality to children? Perhaps they do, which is part of what progress is all about.

The rest of us wouldn’t mind having such a law here, along with one banning the promotion of heterosexuality as well. One could even be so subversive as to suggest that perhaps it would be more productive for our schools to teach little tots how to read and write, rather than how to use condoms for contraceptive or prophylactic purposes.

Such shocking beliefs aren’t shared by the good folk who own British gay bars and clubs, including those run by the influential G-A-Y Group. If these chaps equate sexual licence with liberty, they ought to ponder the fact that the first major country liberalising homosexuality was Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1934, a place and time not otherwise known for a laissez-faire attitude to life.

Be that as it may, gay drinking establishments in London and Manchester are now refusing to stock Stolichnaya and Russian Standard vodka brands. Considering that the latter alone sells 2.9 million cases a year, and that clubs of that orientation still constitute an infinitesimal proportion of its business, the damage done to the Russian economy will be mostly symbolic.

And the customers at those venues will be better off, for they can now switch to better vodkas than either Russian product.

I would especially recommend the superb if little-known Sterling Tanqueray, made by the same people who make the gin. Absolut, Finlandia and Smirnoff Black aren’t bad either, and Grey Goose is excellent, if overpriced. In fact, Gerry’s off-licence in Soho carries 130 vodka brands, and most are at least Stoli’s equals.

The only real casualty in this vodka war is the truth. For rather than opposing the neo-fascist Putin regime for its brutality, suppression of the free press and playing fast and loose with elections, it is now being criticised for one of the few things it has got right.

In their desperation some conservative Christians, feeling betrayed by their own governments, even turn to Putin as their last hope. This is misguided intellectually, though understandable emotionally.

Criticise Putin’s regime and boycott Russian products by all means. But do so for real, not spurious, reasons.    

 

 

It’s appearing on archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/‎

John Humphries is in hot water with his employer, the BBC.

The Radio 4 Today presenter said on air that “the welfare state is in crisis”. He then complained of “dependency culture that has grown steadily over the past year.”

For this he was chastised by the BBC Trust, and quite right too. What wasn’t right is that afterwards some pundits accused the BBC of “blatant Left-wing bias”.

Instead they should be telling the presenter to get his facts straight. The welfare state is no crisis whatsoever. In fact it’s doing extremely well. Because of this, it’s the rest of us who are in crisis, but the BBC is right to ignore such trivia.

Unlike Mr Humphries who saw fit to bite the hand that feeds him, the BBC is loyal to its employer, the state. The modern state, to be exact.

And the very nature of the modern state demands that it expand its power above any other consideration. The welfare state serves this purpose famously: by transferring money from those who earned it to those who didn’t, the state transfers more power its own way.

This is innate to the post-Enlightenment state, based as it on the premise that all men are created equal before the state, just as they used to be deemed to be equal before God.

“Democracy,” wrote Aristotle, “arose from men’s thinking that if they are equal in any respect, they are equal absolutely.” This presumptive absolute equality had to be extended to economics.

Even the least successful layers of the population had to have their expectation built up, for otherwise they could unplug themselves from the democratic process, thereby weakening the political class’s hold on power.

Therefore the promise of wealth, or at least comfort, had to be substantially divorced from the ability to earn it. Since in reality the two go hand in hand, the political class came to be judged and rewarded on its ability to create the illusion of a narrowing gap between ability and expectation.

As failure to do so could spell its own demise, success in this illusion-building endeavour first became the main determining factor of political success, and eventually the only one.

Thus R.G. Collingwood’s analysis of the collapse of the Hellenic economy presages the collapse of ours:

“The critical moment was reached when Rome created an urban proletariat whose only function was to eat free bread and watch free shows. This meant the segregation of an entire class which had no work to do whatever; no positive function in society, whether economic or military or administrative or intellectual or religious; only the business of being supported and being amused. When that had been done, it was only a question of time until Plato’s nightmare of a consumers’ society came true; the drones set up their own king and the story of the hive came to an end.”

To make matters worse, enlightenment economists established a parallel between universal suffrage and private enterprise in people’s minds. Both were supposed to be based on individual responsibility for one’s future, either political or economic.

This was a simulacrum of Christian individualism, perverting it first by shifting it into a purely politicised material arena, and second by trying to legitimise a dubious political idea by letting it bask in the borrowed warmth of a sound economic one.

As a result, unchecked democracy and free enterprise became so inextricably linked that the failure of one would presumably lead to the failure of the other.

Since unlimited democracy was founded on the fallacious philosophy of egalitarianism, its practitioners now had to falsify the process of free enterprise as well to make sure its products could be more evenly distributed between the consumers and producers.

Failure to do so would jeopardise the status of those currently in power and undermine the future of the whole political class. Putting it crudely, votes – and the power they confer – had to be not only requested but also bought.

This had to be done with some delicacy: the success of wealth redistribution depended on the existence of wealth to be redistributed.

Therein lay the problem, for the only way to achieve such a symbiosis was to subvert the organic distribution of wealth in a successful economy, in which some people earned increasingly higher wages and some others made increasingly higher profits.

This arrangement had to be replaced by its simulacrum: an increase in the size of groups making a living without earning it, and the consequent plunder of wealth actually earned.

The entitlement group was bound to continue to increase, for human nature is such that the availability of unearned income and the number of those desiring it exist in a symbiotic relationship.

The process of redistribution, rather than being organic, had to become coercive: wealth producers were to be forced to part with greater and greater chunks of their wealth to support the expectations of greater and greater numbers of those who felt entitled to consume without earning.

Hence the emergence of the welfare state, and it’s naughty of John Humphries to have found anything wrong with it. Next thing we know he’ll find something wrong with modern democracy – and then we’ll know for sure he’ll burn in secular hell.  

 

 

It’s appearing on archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/‎

Hope to see you there.

I’m beginning to have doubts about Nigel Farage – not that I can ever be an unequivocal admirer of any politician.

By itself, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that he gave an interview to our leftmost broadsheet The Guardian. Farage is duty-bound to seek an audience wherever he can find it, making his views heard as widely as possible.

The trouble begins when he adapts his views to his audience, especially that particular audience. The only way to endear oneself to that crowd is to start spouting the same things they say between cocktails at Notting Hill and Islington.

This is what Farage tried to do by referring to Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech as “a disaster”. “Everybody ran scared of discussing this [immigration] for decades,” he added.

“Now, I think what UKIP has done is to help make immigration a sensible, moderate, realistic, mainstream debate.”

UKIP has done nothing of the sort. This debate can never become “moderate” because it’s never conducted on merit, at least not by both sides. The left side of the debate only ever uses it either to restate its PC credentials or, more macabre, to rip even wider the traditional fabric of our society.

Powell, possibly the last great parliamentarian, knew that uncontrolled immigration of cultural aliens, or especially hostiles, would achieve this very purpose. And he communicated this knowledge with prophetic powers seldom seen this side of the Scripture.

“We must be mad”, he said, “literally mad, as a nation, to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents… It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”

As we’re bracing ourselves for the likely arrival of 500,000 Romanians and Bulgarians next year, most of them Gypsies, we should recall Powell’s rhetoric and tremble.

“The urban part of whole towns and cities in Yorkshire, the Midlands and the Home Counties would be preponderantly of exclusively Afro-Asian population. …The people of England, who fondly imagine that this is their country and these are their hometowns, would have been dislodged…”

At that time the non-white population of England was a mere 1,000,000, but Powell saw the signs with the clarity of a prophet. At this writing the populations of Inner London, Bradford, Leeds, Wolverhampton, Birmingham and so forth are a quarter to a third Afro-Asian – and the demographic takeover is accelerating by the day.

This is no longer mere immigration – when it reaches such proportions, immigration becomes colonisation. And it’s not as if the greater Muslim part of the colonisers are adapting to our civilisation. On the contrary, they expect us to adapt to them.

Already whole communities live by Sharia law; our ministers and prelates are already saying that “elements of Sharia should be incorporated into our law”; already the BBC is broadcasting a muezzin’s call to prayer every day at Ramadan.

That’s what Farage’s new friends either don’t want to hear or choose to ignore. All they remember from Enoch Powell’s speech is one turn of phrase, which they first distort and then repeat ad nauseum.

The classically educated statesman quoted from Virgil’s Aeneid: “As I look ahead,” he said, “I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

That was exactly the figure of speech the lefties needed. They grabbed it with both hands and have been waving it like a PC flag ever since.

Whoever wishes for England to remain England is a sadistic fanatic who can’t wait to see – or better still to spill – rivers of blood. Never mind that ‘rivers of blood’ appear nowhere in the speech – if facts don’t support ideology, so much the worse for facts.

That’s all it was, a figure of speech, pure and simple. Some may like it, some may find it unfortunate. But the point remains, and I’ll spell it out in capitals: POWELL WAS RIGHT.

The leader of the party whose main plank is protecting Britain’s sovereignty ought to be throwing this capitalised phrase contemptuously in the faces of The Guardian lot. Instead of calling it a disaster he should be calling it prophecy.

It’s not because of Powell that “everyone ran scared… for decades”. It was because of our predominantly leftwing press that has been repeating the ‘rivers of blood’ mantra with maniacal persistence.

It was because our PC mouthpieces correctly see uncontrolled immigration as the battering ram of modernity, punching breaches in what used to be the impregnable walls of our civilisation.

By trying to speak to them in their language, one runs the risk of eventually thinking in their way, or at least of muting one’s own thought to a point where it’s hardly heard. If that’s the price one has to pay for electoral success, the success isn’t worth having.

Words matter, Nigel, and what’s behind them matters even more.

 

A certain amount of technological ineptitude is a sine qua non of a conservative, especially one no longer in the first flush of youth. As if to prove my conservative credentials, I confused the Archbishop Cranmer addesses for its blog, for which I’ll be writing from time to time, and e-mail.

Sorry about the confusion this might have caused. Anyway, my today’s blog appears on archbishop–cranmer.blogspot.com.