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This is from my Russian correspondent: the Chechen Embassy in the USA has delivered a note to the White House, requesting that Chechnya not be confused with the Czech Republic whenever the origin of the Boston terrorists is discussed.

One can understand that Chechnya doesn’t wish others to claim the distinction of having raised such upstanding youngsters. But considering that the Tsarnaev brothers never actually lived in Chechnya, perhaps we ought to give credit where it’s really due.

Some acclaim must go to Russia that launched two criminal wars in the North Caucasus, devastating Chechnya and turning many of its denizens, such as the Tsarnaevs, into refugees. Let’s also not forget the international proselytisers of Islam who succeeded in turning what for 200 years had been a struggle for Chechen liberation into an Islamic jihad. And finally, let’s praise America herself, particularly her intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

It’s not as if they are deaf to the threat of terrorism. In fact since 2010 the FBI and other security agencies have been running a powerful programme snappily called Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative. The programme constantly monitors Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin and blogs, scanning them for 380 key words, such as ‘jihad’, ‘suicide attack’, ‘conspiracy’ and so forth.

Yet none of those services became curious about some items the elder brother Tamerlan had posted on YouTube. For example, he created a page of songs by the famous Chechen bard Timur Mutsurayev, including his big hit To Jihad We Vow Our Lives. Even Russian courts have banned some of those songs for their extremism, but of course multicultural PC isn’t as big in Russia as in the US.

Tamerlan also uploaded Appeal to Recruits by the Daghestani militant Amir Abu Dudjan. This chap’s terrorist operations are regularly reported on extremist websites, such as Kavkaztsentr. In addition Tamerlan’s site included subscription forms for various militant and extremist information services. Some of those were removed by Google, but the FBI couldn’t be bothered to take an interest.

Lest they be accused of negligence, police did pay a visit to the younger sibling Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after he had attended a mosque service, which must have been deemed more dangerous than openly advertising jihad. This raises a few uncomfortable questions.

Some of them involve the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which proscribes any infringement to the free exercise of religion. Presumably this means any religion, not just those we like. So how come an angelic young man, if his father’s description is to be believed, was interrogated by police simply for attending a religious service?

The only possible explanation is that US security services regard any centres of Islam as ipso facto clear and present danger. This view isn’t wholly indefensible, considering that many, perhaps most, mosques in the West like to preach jihad and even recruit potential terrorists. If that is indeed the case, then surely any country not bent on suicide would be within its right to put in place powerful pre-emptive measures. Such as, for example, shutting down all mosques that have been found to preach things other than that there’s no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.

Drastically curtailing Islamic immigration would be another perfectly logical measure, along with deportation of any Muslims who don’t hold the country’s citizenship. Such steps appear draconian, but only out of historical context.

After all, if the US administration felt justified in interning all Nisei Americans for the duration of the Second World War, and the British government to do the same to all German immigrants (including Jews), then holding large groups as factors of danger solely on the basis of their ethnicity isn’t unprecedented. We are at war, aren’t we? If only against terrorism? If we are, then wartime laws should be in effect.

If, on the other hand, Islam isn’t regarded as inherently hostile to the West in general and America in particular, then harassing a young man for mosque attendance can only radicalise him – and in this instance make him susceptible to his elder brother’s influence.

These vile acts may have been perpetrated by the Tsarnaevs acting alone on the day. But surely anyone can see that they were backed up by some support infrastructure? I for one wouldn’t know how to convert a pressure cooker into a bomb, would you? But the Tsanaevs did, which can only mean that they had been trained. Indeed, Tamerlan had travelled for six months to an unknown destination some time before the attack. It’s a reasonable bet that he was trained then.

But the younger ‘angel’ also acted like a trained commando, and yet he hadn’t travelled anywhere. Where did he learn to use grenades and fire handguns with laudable accuracy? I used to practise at a pistol range regularly for a few years, and I was still rubbish. Where did Dzhokhar practise? How did the brothers get their handguns in Massachusetts, which has some of the toughest gun laws in the world? Connecticut next door is more liberal that way, but one needs to be a resident to purchase a pistol legally.

There’s clearly an organisation operating illegally in the United States and presumably elsewhere. But any such setup has to rely on the moral and physical support of a silent majority within a certain group, in this instance Muslim communities everywhere. You know, those chaps who danced in the streets when the Twin Towers were destroyed or when Londoners were murdered on buses and the tube?

Any reasonable country would instantly deport any such dancers and shut down all possible places where they might have acquired their choreographic skills. But Western countries are no longer reasonable. So terrorists can derive their sustenance from millions who are in broad sympathy with murderers, even if they aren’t murderers themselves.

Such beautiful-sounding words as democracy, human rights and multiculturalism are all fine and well. But they have a rich potential for turning into a suicide pact, and not the kind that entails merely a trip to a well-appointed Swiss clinic.

 

Carrying musical ‘culture’ to the masses sounds like a good idea. But it isn’t.

Those in favour claim that classical performances will lift a cultural innocent up to their level. In real life, rare exceptions aside, he drags them down to his.

Real music can’t be financed by the workings of the mass market. If it is, it stops being real music. There are, and always have been, very few people in His creation who can grasp the subtleties of, say, a Bach prelude – and fewer still who can appreciate the quality of its performance. It was for those small groups that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven played their music, and it was those highly cultivated groups who paid for it.

Apart from liturgical music, only the light, operatic end ever reached broader audiences, and the lighter it was, the broader its reach. Serious music was performed only for the typically refined ears of aristocratic patrons, not for anyone willing to play the price of admission.

When the situation changed, so did the performers – and performances. Just as unchecked democracy in politics eventually brings to the fore photogenic spivs rather than statesmen, so does the parallel development in music produce herds of stars who have as little to do with musicianship as Dave Cameron has with statesmanship. The public always gets what it pays (or votes) for.

Of course this observation, though true, can only be perceived as heretical these days. Democracy is based on the supposition that common people are capable of uncommon refinement, and egalitarian democratic orthodoxy has long since spread way beyond politics.

It was Aristotle who warned that democracy fosters a mindset wherein those who are equal in one respect are deemed to be equal in every respect. Now we can see how amply he has been vindicated.

The Promenade Concerts have been a feature of the London musical scene for over a century now, and their history has unfolded in parallel with what Ortega y Gasset called the ‘revolt of the masses’. That process has an accelerator built in, a bit like a snowball rolling downhill, getting bigger and bigger until it goes over the edge and disintegrates.

The idea behind the Proms had facile appeal: using low ticket prices to attract to the concert hall those who were normally happier in a music hall. Not to make the transition too abrupt, the public was encouraged to act in an uninhibited manner: go walkabout during the performance, talk to their friends, stamp their feet on the floor while applauding.

This precluded right from the start anyone acquiring higher sensibilities: real music requires almost as much concentration from the listener as from the performer. Thus even in theory the Proms have always had a rich potential for turning perhaps the most sublime achievement of our civilisation into mindless entertainment.

Those attending the Proms this year will see how successfully, how devastatingly this potential has been realised. For real music, even though these days it’s hardly ever performed by real musicians (Nigel Kennedy, this year’s highlight, is a case in point), will find itself side by side with such cultural delights as punk and rap, not to mention jazz.

Real music was born in churches, whence it moved into palaces. Jazz was born in brothels, whence it moved into nightclubs. Punk and rap were born within the confines of the drug industry, so it’s hardly surprising that they aren’t so much decadent as degenerate, not to mention devoid of any musical content.

That sort of barbaric stuff and real music simply don’t belong in the same world, never mind the same hall. It’s like trying to fit rap lyrics into a Shakespeare sonnet: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day and then carve thee up, thou bitch.’ Doesn’t quite work, I don’t think.

One can understand the commercial appeal of such omnivorous gluttony. What better way to promote the Proms than to give the paying public what it really craves? I don’t know, perhaps public hangings of the organisers might have even a stronger pulling power.

Next time I’m in Holborn I’m going to drop into St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, the Musicians’ Church. Sir Henry Wood, the founder of the Proms, is buried there and I’d like to know if he’s spinning in his grave.

If he is, I’ll do my best to put his soul to rest. Even though in a way he has brought this onto himself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These days most people don’t know the difference between sentiment and sentimentality, and even those who do still seem to favour the latter.

Hence the reaction to the tragic death of Martin Richards, the eight-year-old boy killed, along with two others, in the explosion at the finishing line of the Boston marathon.

The papers are full of moving but utterly irrelevant information about little Martin’s disposition (sunny), school record (enviable) and views on world peace (commendable). The implication seems to be that if the boy had been a morose, bellicose underachiever his death would somehow have been less of a tragedy.

Wouldn’t it be nice if acts of random violence only ever affected rapists, child molesters, tax evaders and people who despise sentimentality? Our, and especially the American, press would then – well, not exactly condone such outrages but perhaps be less emetically indignant about them. The feeling would be that justice was done, lamentable as the method of exacting it could have been.

The Boston bombs seem to have been made of pressure cookers packed with nails and ball bearings, designed to kill as many as possible and maim more. Indeed, quite a few limbs, in addition to the three lives, were lost in the explosions.

Displaying his usual perspicacity, President Obama belatedly described the incident as ‘an act of terror’ and vowed to bring the perpetrators of ‘the vile and cowardly act’ to justice. That much was par for the course. In fact, to save valuable presidential time such stock speeches ought to be pre-recorded directly after inauguration: ‘Our thoughts and prayers go to the families…’

What surprised me is that the president also displayed a most regrettable lack of logic. After all, after every mass shooting, most recently the one in Newton, Conn., Obama would immediately call for gun control laws. One such measure, the Toomey-Manchin bill, was defeated in the Senate earlier today, which result Obama described as ‘a pretty shameful day for Washington.’

Fair enough. Barak Hussein is entitled to his opinion, in this instance that the tools used in the perpetration of ‘a vile and cowardly act’ are to blame for it. So far he has been unable to twist enough voting arms to turn this opinion into law, but that mustn’t be allowed to interfere with his principles.

Therefore, to follow exactly the same logic, he ought to propose a ban on pressure cookers, ball bearings, nails – and also possibly on saucepans with tightly fitted lids, coffee makers, blenders and any other kitchen appliances that could conceivably be turned into explosive devices.

He then must find legislators with enough persuasive powers to bring both Houses around. The anti campaign should rally behind a catchy slogan, such as ‘Pressure cookers cost an arm and a leg.’ One can just see photographs of the Boston marathon aftermath with this slogan superimposed. Voting hands would go up as if by themselves.

The tragedy at Boston represents yet another failure of US intelligence and law enforcement. These agencies have, to put it mildly, a spotty record in preventing acts of terrorism at all times. However, lately they’ve also been lulled into indolence by neoconservative war propaganda, with its smug boast that since the invasion or Iraq no acts of terrorism have been committed on US territory.

The response of the US administration and, come to think of it, the press should be much lighter on cheap sentimentality and much heavier on beefing up security and reassessing the country’s strategy in dealing with terrorism.

I don’t know if there are any foreign countries or organisations involved in this new version of the Boston Massacre. But if there are, as seems likely, the response should be swift, merciless and massive punishment – not idiotic and doomed attempts to ‘build’ tribal nations by making them democratic.

That, in my view, is the proper sentiment to be displayed under such circumstances. But when sentimentality gets into the act, sentiment has no chance.

 

  

 

 

 

 

…for submitting your most impressive novel Robinson Crusoe for our consideration in view of publishing. We at Shoddy Heightened found it highly inspiring and, at base, bordering on genius. What impressed us most is the courage with which you tackled the issues of multiculturalism, racism and, implicitly, sexual diversity.

We at Shoddy Heightened also admired your well justified criticism of capitalism, with its accent on, at base, capital. It was so right, we at Shoddy Heightened thought, the way you emphasised the moral and economic value of honest, if not yet unionised, manufacturing compared with inherently corrupt financial services. At base, money has no intrinsic value and, in today’s world, not much of any other. So your parable of Robinson finding money worthless struck a chord with all of us at Shoddy Heightened, as it did with our financial consultant and especially his wife.

At base, as we at Shoddy Heightened understand the story line, it revolves around Robinson’s parallel relationships with Friday and the goat. At base, we found the parallel motifs persuasive if somewhat lacking in focus.

However, I don’t think our readers will take lightly to your implication that, at base, Robinson is culturally superior to Friday, a person of different racial and gastronomic persuasion. Yes, it’s true that persons of different gastrosocioeconomicoracial backgrounds can learn much from one another.

But we at Shoddy Heightened don’t believe this should be a one-way street. For example, we wish you had made more of Friday refusing to add salt to his diet. At base, considering the effect of salt on blood pressure, Friday was right to emphasise the benefits of healthy eating. Rob (we do prefer the shorter version of his name), on the other hand, with his insistence on salt consumption was clearly in contravention of the NHS Health and Safety Policy Statement (see attached).

Ideally, Rob should have been as open-minded about adopting Friday’s culture (yes, including the consumption of human flesh, provided it’s low-fat) as Friday was about the culture of his white coloniser. In the absence of such even-handed fairness, we at Shoddy Heightened feel that some readers might take out an endorsement of colonialism, which both you and I know wasn’t your intention.

Also, we at Shoddy Heightened wish you could have been more upfront about the homoerotic aspects of the relationship between Friday and Rob. It’s natural, indeed commendable, that these two young and vigorous male persons would have had to adjust their lifestyle to the situation and be drawn together (yes, perhaps to the point of declaring themselves husband-wife and wife-husband). At base, our readers expect honesty and openness (yes, perhaps to the point of a graphic scene depicting the wedding night of Friday and Rob).

We at Shoddy Heightened don’t feel that the time has come quite yet to depict interspecies love with the same candour and integrity. However, provided you don’t refer to the goat as ‘kid’ (at base, this may imply paedophilia), some hint at the romantic possibilities wouldn’t go amiss. After all, in many ancient religions a goat appears as an embodiment of healthy, if somewhat unrestrained, sexuality, and we at Shoddy Heightened believe that our readers are ready to relate to human-haedine relationships as mature adults.

While we’re on the subject of religion, we at Shoddy Heightened are concerned about the stress you place on Rob’s Christianity. For example, Rob repents the sins of his youth. Frankly, Dan, I’m shocked that you approach lifestyle alternatives in such a doctrinaire, narrow-minded fashion. At base, this implies value judgment, which is bound to appal our readers.

Rob also seems to believe in Providence, and I don’t mean the city in Rhode Island. We at Shoddy Heightened believe that karma would be more appropriate and multiculturally sensitive.

We also wish you didn’t overstress Rob’s insistence on reading the Bible. Understandably his choice of reading matter had to be limited, but surely the tide didn’t necessarily have to wash the Bible ashore? We feel a copy of The NHS Health and Safety Policy Statement (see attached) would have been more consonant with our time. Had Rob devoted more time to perusing this document rather than the Bible, he would not have indulged in moral absolutism, such as describing the consumption of low-fat, low-cholesterol human flesh as a ‘national crime’.

I’m sure you’ll appreciate that, at base, publishing is a commercial business. We at Shoddy Heightened have to regard every new submission from the bottom line up. Up the bottom line, as we say. Therefore, much as it pains me to say so, we don’t feel that, at base, your borderline work of genius in its present form is quite right for our list. Keep up the good work, Dan.

 

Yours sincerely,

 Wee Shoddy

Commissioning Editor 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francophones will recognise that I’m playing on language differences here. Un crime in French describes only a felony punishable by at least 10 years in prison. Everything else is called une infraction.

So my comment in the title is just a joke, like rendering French speech in English by ending every sentence with ‘but no?’, or English in French by beginning every sentence with ‘Je dis!’. No serious divergences implied. Or are they? 

Courtesy of the Channel Tunnel, the drive home from chez nous only takes about seven hours. Add to that three hours for lunch along the way, and Penelope and I have plenty of time to discuss the differences between us and our French friends.

Inevitably gossiping about individual idiosyncrasies turns into generalised comments about the dissimilarity between the two nations, which we usually agree runs deeper than Europhiles think.

Such an exercise in comparative ethnography can be triggered by something as trivial as the French serving cheese before pudding, and the British the other way around. Or, as it was yesterday, it can be prompted by the differences in our laws. (Experience suggests that such topics are best covered before the stop for lunch: it’s not so much drinking as drinking and philosophising that makes driving dangerous.)

The legal topic came up because the other night we had dinner with a couple of dear French friends both of whom are high-flying lawyers. As friends, we have much in common; as British and French we also have differences, which the husband pointed out after his fourth glass of wine and my fifth.

French courts, he explained, are interested in establishing the truth, while the Brits are only out to observe casuistic legalities. Thus a French judge instructs jurors to look deep into their hearts to decide on the verdict. A British judge merely instructs them to determine whether the evidence presented by the prosecution proves the case beyond a reasonable doubt, and never mind their hearts.

You mean yours is a court of justice and ours is a court of law, I suggested, and my friend agreed readily. If only it were as simple as that, and looking into the details of the two systems will only scratch the surface.

The French system isn’t adversarial like ours, but inquisitorial. Collecting evidence in a French Court of Assizes (the one trying les crimes – no other court uses the jury system) is done not by prosecution and defence but by investigating magistrates, children of the Napoleonic Code. After the evidence has been presented in court by the troika of the presiding judge and two associates, the former then tells the jury to look deep into their hearts and act on their conscience.

The jury of nine includes three professional judges, there to explain to their randomly selected  colleagues how to translate conscience into justice. (‘Yes I know, Jean-Pierre, he’s vraiment nasty, but this doesn’t legally make him a murderer, n’est ce pas?)

Contrary to the widespread misconception, a French defendant isn’t considered guilty until proven innocent, and even the notion of proof beyond reasonable doubt isn’t alien to their system.

Presumption of guilt did exist in the bad old days, mainly for the benefit of Victor Hugo who otherwise would have been unable to come up with a plot for Les Misérables. But these days the classical justice of Roman jurisprudence has crowded out some of the revolutionary afflatus communicated in the 1789 Declaration of Rights. How well presumption of innocence is served by the French inquisitorial system is a different matter, and not one I’m really qualified to judge.

My interests lie elsewhere: the ethos behind our respective legal systems. Clearly neither one is, nor can be, perfect: we aren’t blessed with ideal collective systems in this world, so we should still try to be good individually.

The French system perhaps places more stress on punishing the guilty and ours on protecting the innocent, and this is more than a matter of accents. Preference of protecting society rather than the individual points at the innate collectivism of the French, implanted into their DNA by the Enlightenment. Hence also their tendency towards statism, both national and supranational, as embodied by the EU. In law too the revolutionary pathos of the Declaration hasn’t been entirely superseded by Roman impartiality.

Interestingly, though all our French friends dislike the Revolution, few of them see anything fundamentally wrong with the Enlightenment of which 1789 was the culmination. The essence of the Enlightenment was humanism, elevating man to a God-like status, which was later constitutionally enshrined by France’s perverse laïcité.

England is these days as secular as France is, but our revolutionaries have so far been unable to destroy every Judaeo-Christian premise of British institutions, though not for any lack of trying. The chief premise is that man is fallible because he is fallen.

Hence our Common Law relies not so much on the jurors’ hearts as on legal minutiae emerging through centuries of precedent. Human reason alone is deemed unreliable unless bolstered by institutionalised prudence: only God is perfect, contrary to what the Déclaration des droits de l’homme implies. The Age of Reason is indeed the age of treason – to every formative tenet of our civilisation. The philosophy based on this understanding is conservatism, which doesn’t really exist in France, even though the word was coined by a Frenchman.

I agree with my friend: the French system is cleverer than ours. He, on the other hand, probably won’t agree with me that ours is wiser. Vive la différence, I say.

Dave would love to be just like Margaret Thatcher, but only in one respect: her ability to win three straight elections outright.

But he’ll never match Lady Thatcher in this respect because he’s unlike her in every other. One demonstrable difference is that he isn’t a real statesman – in fact, he isn’t a real anything other than a power seeker. Margaret Thatcher wanted power too, but not for its own sake. Power was for her but the vehicle; the good of the country, the destination.

Unlike Dave, she had convictions and the courage of them. Mind you, I for one am not entirely sure Lady Thatcher’s convictions, honest and commendable as they were, were entirely Conservative or indeed conservative. Her policies, and above all her instincts, were more Whig than Tory, and instincts always provide a more accurate clue. It was the former Tory leader Lord Hailsham, among many others, who postulated that conservatism wasn’t so much a philosophy, much less an ideology, as an attitude to life, some sort of intuitive predisposition.

That’s why it’s spurious to separate, as many like to do, political conservatism from social or cultural kinds. If we accept, as I do, Hailsham’s definition, they’re all branches of the same tree, and apple blossoms aren’t going to grow on an oak.

For example, it’s hard to imagine a true political conservative preaching, as John Major once did when he was still prime minister, the social delights of classless society. Nor should a man get a free ride when claiming to be a social liberal but a fiscal conservative, which presumably means he loves the welfare state but would rather not pay for it.

On the other hand it’s usually possible to guess a man’s political views without ever bringing up politics during, say, a dinner-table chat. For example, it’s highly unlikely that a staunch political conservative would express enthusiasm for pop music, conceptual sculpture, garden cities, vegetarianism, same-sex marriage, facial metal or body art, and it’s impossible to imagine that in writing he’d ever choose BCE and CE over BC and AD.

Neither is it probable that someone on the left of the political spectrum would dismiss out of hand any music amplified by electric or electronic appliances. Nor can one easily imagine any kind of conservative sporting a tattoo (other than a naval one), say ‘ACAB’ on his knuckles. Such telltale signs may of course mislead, but not often.

Lady Thatcher was the only successful and honourable politician who deviated from Hailsham’s definition without in any way compromising her integrity. Her political and especially economic instincts were Whiggish, or perhaps, to use a more up-to-date term, libertarian, but she had learned to fit them seamlessly into the framework of the Tory Party. That meant conforming to a large extent with its ethos and style, and she managed to do so perfectly organically, defying Lord Hailsham.

That’s why Lady Thatcher was confused, as Robin Harris recalls so amusingly, when introduced at a party to a young man sporting an open-neck shirt and jeans. When told that he was about to become the next leader of the Tory Party, Lady Thatcher couldn’t believe her ears. She smiled at Dave and asked: ‘So you want to become a Conservative MP?’

You see, Lady Thatcher had found a way of reconciling her Whiggish instincts with the Conservative style. But it never occurred to her that conservatism could also coexist with cheap, unprincipled populism expressed not only politically and rhetorically, but also sartorially. Most of her cabinet colleagues might have been intellectual and moral nonentities, but at least they dressed like Tories.

It’s not as if Dave, who likes to be photographed with his shirt hanging out of his denim trousers, feels uncomfortable wearing proper prime-ministerial clothes: the chap was practically born in a Savile Row suit. But precisely because of that he wants to come across as someone born pre-tattooed.

That makes perfect sense to Dave, and in a way one can sympathise with him. He wasn’t going to become prime minister the way Maggie Thatcher had, was he? By showing the mind and character of someone who could lead his party to victory and his country out of the doldrums? Of course not. And since his hunger for power was ravenous he had to rely on tasteless tricks. No wonder Lady Thatcher was confused.

If you want to know why the Tories – and Britain – were so much  more successful under Maggie than under Dave, just compare their human qualities. Or for that matter their attire. Lady Thatcher was hardly ever photographed wearing casual clothes, never mind those associated with pimply adolescents raised by a single mother on a council estate. She wanted to be popular because she made peoples’ lives better, not because she pandered to their lowly tastes.

Dave, on the other hand, wants to become popular with the underprivileged by pretending to be just like them. Alas, they see through the pretence. They also realise that in parallel he only pretends to be a statesman.

We’ve all said in the past things we’d rather others didn’t remember at present. Some of those things were silly, some ignorant, some reflected our understanding as it was then but no longer is now.

The ability to look back at one’s past pronouncements and either wince or smile self-deprecatingly is a good human trait. It reflects a capacity for unbiased self-analysis and therefore a potential for self-improvement.

Some people have more of this ability, some less, and some are Germans. I hope you won’t think me a bigot if I were to suggest that, among the many indisputably great talents the Germans possess, one for dispassionate self-assessment doesn’t figure very prominently. That’s why they’re eminently capable of saying mutually exclusive things a few years apart without even realising that’s what they are.

Helmut Kohl, Germany’s longest-serving post-war Chancellor, is a case in point. Commenting on the death of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s longest-serving post-war prime minister, he mournfully admitted they hadn’t been the best of friends.

Displaying both the grace and the self-awareness for which the Germans are so justly famous, Herr Kohl blamed that unfortunate situation on the deceased: ‘Margaret Thatcher was difficult, just as our relationship was difficult.’

Of course, not only was Lady Thatcher difficult as a person but, especially, she failed to see the blinding federalist light shining out of Herr Kohl’s various orifices: ‘[She] wanted Europe, but a different Europe from that wanted by most of her European colleagues and me. From our point of view, this antagonism characterises British policy on Europe to this day.’

It’s all Maggie’s fault then. I wonder if, before looking for a mote in Margaret Thatcher’s eye, Herr Kohl had ever pondered whether perhaps there was a log in his own. Probably not, considering both his personal and national traits.

However, another interview given by Kohl in 2002 but kept under wraps until this week could possibly throw some light on Maggie’s recalcitrance and also Britain’s antagonism to the European ‘project’.

‘I knew that I could never win a referendum in Germany,’ he said. ‘We would have lost a referendum on the introduction of the euro. That’s quite clear. I would have lost and by seven to three.’ That is why ‘In one case – the euro – I was like a dictator…,’ Kohl admitted, adding by way of self-vindication, ‘The euro is a synonym for Europe. Europe, for the first time, has no more war.’ Yugoslavia doesn’t count as part of Europe then.

That old chestnut about the EU being the reason, indeed even a reason, for peace in Europe is so stupid and mendacious that it’s hardly worth a comment. This isn’t so much an argument as an attempt to dupe the gullible, those who are unaware of the decisive role NATO, mainly the United States, played in the post-war balance of power.

What is worth a comment, however, is that Kohl felt justified in assuming dictatorial powers to abandon the hugely effective Deutschmark and push through the euro. We all know what a resounding success the single currency has been since, strangulating as it is Europe’s economies, especially those encompassing people who speak languages derived from Latin and Old Greek.

In passing it’s worth mentioning something that Herr Kohl modestly left unsaid: the euro project involved not only bossiness, his own and Germany’s, but also lies. Today’s federasts routinely admit to having cooked the books in order to make countries like Italy and especially Greece look as if they satisfied admission criteria. They – and the rest of Europe – are paying a steep price for that sleight of hand, and we haven’t seen anything yet.

Could it be that Kohl’s 2002 interview explains the laments he saw fit to voice this week? Could it be that ‘the different Europe’ Margaret Thatcher wanted was that of independent, sovereign states living in peace and trading with one another as equals? Could it be she was appalled by the prospect of yet another German dictator lording it over the continent?

No, surely not. She was just ‘difficult’.    

 

 

A woman was a sphinx without secrets to Oscar Wilde. God’s second mistake to Friedrich Nietzsche. Someone who’d rather be right than reasonable to Ogdon Nash. Then physiologists took over and described a woman as someone with XX chromosomes.

These days the first three definitions would be widely regarded as frivolous, condescending, possibly fascistic. And the fourth one isn’t just insufficient but quite possibly wrong.

For example, feminists never accepted that, say, Golda Meir, Jeanne Kirkpatrick or Margaret Thatcher were women, even though they manifestly satisfied the chromosomal requirement. Granted, if pressed, feminists would agree that the three politicians were indeed female, but only technically speaking. However, they fell short of the only definition that matters, the political one.

All three only got to be regarded as women posthumously, when they could promote the feminist cause by being female after all and could no longer hurt it by not being feminists. When still alive, they simply didn’t qualify for the cherished minority status (in case you didn’t know this, women are a minority even though there are more of them – go figure, as Americans say.)

None of the three was a victim; two of them were perceived to be rightwing, possibly fascistic; all three were bellicose towards what we’re mandated to believe are oppressed minorities; two actually led their countries to war. Against this background, the seven children the three non-women had between them would be regarded as annoying factual irrelevancies that always seem to interfere with really crucial considerations.

It is from this sex, pardon me, gender angle that the legacy of Lady Thatcher is being evaluated by so many. She may have been the most popular prime minister of the 20^th century, but that’s unimportant. What really matters is that she is the sole female prime minister, even if she only became a card-carrying woman at death, having before been a reactionary, possibly fascistic affront to all progressive personkind.

Yesterday I was served, to accompany my morning coffee, a demonstration of this tendency by Sky News. Commissioned to comment on the deceased were two young women, each holding the mystery title of Women’s Editor, one at the Telegraph, the other at the Guardian.

Now I can understand, indeed welcome, a woman Editor, but a Women’s Editor? Especially at the Telegraph? Whatever next? By inference the two papers pursue a separate editorial policy aimed at women, which is nothing short of chauvinistic if you ask me. Possibly even fascistic.

Before the two young women opened their mouths I made a satisfied mental note that ours was better-looking (not being blessed with a public office, I shan’t do an Obama and apologise for this disgraceful, possibly fascistic remark). Then again, she wore horn-rimmed spectacles and, contrary to Dorothy Parker’s assertion, I do, or rather used to, make passes at girls in glasses.

Alas, the fanciable editor immediately let the side down by being conspicuously less well-spoken than her leftie counterpart. When a conservative journalist uses the glottal stop and a socialist one doesn’t, you know it’s the end of the world.

However, the two ladies immediately went on to prove that such notions are hopelessly obsolete, lamentably ill-informed and possibly fascistic. For, in spite of any divergence of appearance and diction, their grasp of political realities in general and Lady Thatcher’s legacy in particular was remarkably similar.

Both female persons remarked approvingly on Lady Thatcher being a successful woman, indeed politically the most successful one in British history. Then the Guardian person suggested that, though successful in having become prime minister at all, Margaret Thatcher failed miserably in the main mission of her life, that is of bringing more women into politics.

I must admit that I never realised this was Lady Thatcher’s aim in life, and neither I’m sure did Lady Thatcher. But the Guardian female person backed up her assertion with hard evidence: a risible 22 percent of our MPs are currently women.

If I expected a counterargument from her Telegraph counterpart, I didn’t get one. She agreed mournfully that this lamentable statistic did prove that Lady Thatcher had failed. And why was the statistic so lamentable and the failure so conspicuous? Because, explained the well-informed editor of our conservative broadsheet, our House of Representatives should represent, meaning faithfully reflect, the demographic makeup of the electorate.

That she clearly doesn’t understand the meaning of parliamentary representation didn’t make me gasp with horror – she is a modern person after all, so what matters to her is undoubtedly not what she understands but what she feels. But even in our educationally disadvantaged times, one would expect someone holding a high post at a major national newspaper, especially a conservative one, to know that the lower chamber of our Parliament is called the House of Commons, not of Representatives.

Perhaps my ear had deceived me, and the lovely bespectacled pundit was actually American? For the next minute or so I concentrated on how she spoke, rather than what she said. No, it was all there, the glottal stop, the odd dropped ‘h’ – the female person was not only British but identifiably London, or at least Estuary.

Perhaps then Lady Thatcher, may she rest in peace, did fail in her life’s work, in some way. But not in the way the two silly girls meant.

 

P.S. I had already posted this comment, when Glenda Jackson, formerly a hideous actress and now an even more hideous Labour MP, declared in the House of Commons (Representatives?) that Lady Thatcher was ‘a woman, but not on my terms.’ Miss Jackson’s terms are of course defined both politically (see above) and aesthetically, by ill-advisedly posing nude for the film camera. Lady Thatcher falls short on both criteria. Thanks, Glenda, for helping me make my point.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

Far be it from me to hold myself up as a model of anything. It’s just that, when looking for an illustration to a point made or about to be made, it takes less time to look up one’s own piece than someone else’s.

So on 16 December, 2011, a couple of days after Christopher Hitchens died, I wrote, without naming him, about his views on religion, which, along with his views on just about anything else, I find morally repulsive and intellectually feeble. However, I withheld such adjectives. This is what I wrote towards the end:

 ‘And yet, I’ve been unable to mention Hitchens by name throughout this article. I can’t claim that I’ve suddenly acquired respect for him or his thoughts. I haven’t. But I do respect death, and the scathing remarks that would have rolled off my pen two days ago are refusing to come out. Instead, I’d like to offer my sympathy to the family of the deceased.’

Most civilised people, which group, properly defined, includes few who’d agree with Hitchens on anything, would have written something along those lines. For death has its own dignity, which it confers on the deceased, regardless of how one feels about the life just ended.

That’s why I don’t recall any jubilation within conservative ranks upon the death of, say, Harold Wilson, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan or Anthony Crosland, men for whom not many conservatives felt any excessive warmth.

Compare this to the response to Margaret Thatcher’s death publicly expressed by both leftwing celebrities and also the rank-and-file.

‘Tramp the dirt down,’ tweeted MP George Galloway, who a few days ago refused to share a debating platform with a Jew. And a couple of hours later, ‘May she burn in the hellfires.’

The first sentiment was actually a quotation from a most gentlemanly song by Elvis Costello, which included lyrics like ‘When England was the whore of the world, Margaret was her madam.’ And, even better, ‘Cos when they finally put you in the ground, they’ll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down.

‘She did make war on a lot of people in Britain, and I don’t think it helped our society,’ commented Tony Benn, former Labour minister, who was unable to contain himself.

‘After the disservice she did to the country, I won’t be shedding any tears,’ added Chris Kitchen, secretary for the National Union of Mineworkers.

Her tenure, according to former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, ‘was an unmitigated disaster’.

Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone opined that Lady Thatcher was responsible for ‘every real problem’ we face today.

Rather than attempting to emulate such penetrating analysis, Derek Hatton, a Liverpool Labour councillor, spoke from the heart: ‘The issue isn’t about whether she is now dead. I regret for the sake of millions of people that she was ever born.’

Lindsey German, of the Stop The War Coalition, approached Maggie’s career from the geopolitical angle: ‘Margaret Thatcher laid the basis for policies which wrecked the lives of millions in Britain. But she should also be remembered as a warmonger. She led alongside Ronald Reagan the escalation of the Cold War.’

A Marxist posted a tweet, saying ‘Margaret Thatcher is (finally) dead. Good f—ing riddance too… That horrible old witch was 87. May she rot in hell.’

The mob is braying all over the Internet: ‘This lady’s not returning,’ ‘How are you celebrating?’

Well, most enthusiastically, is the answer to that one. ‘Thatcher death parties’ were held late into the night all across the country. The festivities featured all the usual accoutrements: smashed shop windows, paint bombs, attacks on police.

In Liverpool, flares and fireworks were set off; in Bristol, seven police officers were injured – one seriously – after being pelted with bottles and rubbish bins by a street party.

A massive rally in Glasgow had hundreds of champagne drinkers out in the street, shouting, ‘Rejoice, Thatcher is dead!’ A rabble-rouser was screaming through a megaphone, ‘Maggie! Maggie! Maggie’, and the ghoulish crowd rejoiced, as ordered: ‘Dead! Dead! Dead!’

As I always say, the Left aren’t just misguided – they are barbaric and evil. And they aren’t even clever enough to conceal that. Whether or not you are weeping for Margaret Thatcher, you should cry for our country. And our civilisation.

 

 

 

 

 

The news of Margaret Thatcher’s death brought a tear to my eye, and the demise of no other politician has ever had such an emotional effect on me.

Tributes from politicians and journalists are streaming in, and I’ve been listening to them on Sky News. Any of those people are much better qualified to write a proper obituary than I am, and many of them will do so. Such a task should indeed be entrusted to those who knew this remarkable woman, not to someone like me who only bumped into her at a couple of functions.

I could perhaps attempt an exegesis of Lady Thatcher’s political life, but this would require a less emotional frame of mind than mine is at the moment.

All I’m capable of now is a few sketchy notes on how Margaret Thatcher affected my life. For she was one reason I emigrated from America to Britain 25 years ago.

In those days I was a much more political creature than I am now, or perhaps I was more likely to see politics in strictly binary, us or them, terms. Thatcher was definitely us. A lifelong Anglophile, I would have gone to Britain much earlier had I not been put off by its suicidally socialist policies. It was Margaret Thatcher’s first nine years at Downing Street that convinced me that there was hope for this country yet.

I admired her then and I still do, even though in the intervening years I grew disillusioned with many of her policies and much of her legacy. I could talk in detail about her signing the Single European Act, her ill-advised downgrading of British manufacturing, her contributing to the future mortgage crisis, her general over-reliance on the economy as a sufficient remedy for the country’s ills, her misunderstanding of the process known as ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’ – but I won’t, not today.

Such gripes may have value on any other day, but today they would be petty. For it is in my view irrelevant that Margaret Thatcher was the only woman prime minister in British history – let those obsessed with newfangled pieties bring that to the fore. What is much more important is that she was unquestionably the greatest post-war prime minister and, right or wrong, possibly the last true statesman ever to occupy that office.

Yes, she was a very womanly woman, with much feminine warmth belying her Iron Lady image. And it was not in spite of her femininity but because of it that she became such an effective statesman. For Maggie brought to the task her talent for good housekeeping that so many women possess, translating it into successful managerial careers.

Margaret Thatcher brought to the service of her country that very talent, which in her was big enough to make her a great manager of her country, not just her family. Come to think of it, the two were inseparable in her mind: her country was her family, and she served it with selfless devotion and self-sacrificial abandon.

She had so much more to give Britain when her political career was cut short by faceless, self-serving nonentities staging a vicious, cowardly coup. That brought an end not only to Maggie’s tenure, but to statesmanship in our government: from then on we’ve been governed by spivocratic pygmies, whose moral and intellectual inadequacy is so much more visible in the bright light she shone and will continue to shine.

I didn’t like some of her policies, though I respected most of them. I don’t think that her legacy is invariably positive, though most of it is. But I loved her as a person, and the country’s loss is also mine, keenly felt and deeply mourned. Our lives were changed by Maggie, and without her they’ll never be the same. God bless her.

Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, RIP.