Martin Kelly's Second Article Archive

The Last Conservative Value

2006-03-24T21:55:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
May 17, 2005

“What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of the women!” - Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘Conan the Barbarian’

Thirteen months before he committed suicide at the age of just 30 in his hometown of Cross Plains, Texas, in 1936, Conan’s creator Robert E. Howard wrote a letter begging for payment of the eight hundred dollars he was owed by his most frequent publishers, ‘Weird Tales’.

In a Townhall column of October 10, 2003, entitled ‘Schwarzenegger can use popularity to effect change’, ‘National Review’ editor-at-large and youthful neoconservative ideologue Jonah Goldberg remarked,

“Schwarzenegger wasn't my candidate, and I was skeptical of the recall from the outset. But you've got to give him credit for one thing: Considering the array of forces against him, particularly in liberal feminist circles, he actually managed to make his greatest movie line a reality. In "Conan the Barbarian," he was asked, "What is best in life?" and he responded, "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!"

Perhaps Goldberg was being facetious. However, as an outsider looking in at a philosophy I can only examine from a distance, the original quote seems to perfectly encapsulate what can only be described as perhaps the last conservative value; one that straddles both neoconservatism and paleoconservatism, a true lowest common denominator amongst the qualities required to be an intellectual leader in the conservative movement.

That quality is pitilessness.

Neoconservatism is a philosophy based on global projection of national power. Their critics call them imperialists, but more accurately the neoconservative paradigm of ‘global benevolent hegemony’ means nothing less than world domination, as bizarre and paranoid as that one sounds when one sees it.

But there is no other logical conclusion to draw from the massive overseas military commitments the USA has undertaken since 9/11, and the willingness of George W. Bush to treat with anyone who declares they are on his side, up to and including the disgusting Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, who's a key ally in the ‘War on Terror’, when he’s not mowing down his own people in the street or boiling them alive.

The K Street Napoleons of the neocon magazines and think tanks are only concerned for the ‘national interest’, as if the USA as a legal entity has some kind of higher moral standing than that of its citizens, quite forgetting that its citizens are the United States of America. Without them, there is nothing.

Their utter pitilessness can often be seen lining the pages of their publications, with no word of sympathy for the lamentations of the women of Iraq.

The reason for this pitilessness towards the widows of a country they have helped destroy is that the neocons may feel that the Iraqis should be grateful to them. After all, they are free now.

The notional freedom that Iraq enjoys was bought with a lie, that its ruler possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction that posed a threat to the security of the United States and other nations. That was not the case. It was only at the stage in the game when it became clear the White House and the Vice-President’s office would have to either hold or fold on the nukes that the liberty of the Iraqis assumed its paramount importance.

Of course the Iraqis are not free, not in any meaningful sense. Nobody can live freely in a country full of foreign armies and swarming with foreign terrorists. That Iraq is developing its own security apparatus is to be welcomed. However, the fact that it will take years for those forces to gain the training and experience they will need in order to combat the insurgency makes the likelihood of America’s stay in Iraq look bleaker than ever.

But it was at Abu Ghraib that the pitiless of neoconservatism found its poster children. The dumb grins of Charles Graner and Lynndie England as they abused their prisoners made them the embodiment of what was wrong with the war, wrong with the peace and wrong with the whole idea.

However, just as the crimes of the Abu Ghraib MP’s pale in comparison with Saddam’s, so too do Saddam’s pale in comparison with Hitler’s. Saddam invaded Kuwait; he used chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war; he tortured, murdered and mutilated thousands, making millions into refugees and outcasts. He drained the natural habitat of the Marsh Arabs. He even deployed gas at Halabja.

But at no point did Ba’athist Iraq steep itself in blood so deep as the Third Reich. It is in relation to the Third Reich, and its ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘problem’ of Jewry, that paleoconservative pitilessness comes to prominence.

If neoconservatives make a fetish of dreams of projecting power abroad, paleoconservatives make a fetish of their isolationism. They seem blind to the fact that when one lives in a nation, a legal entity, there are times when one cannot be help be sucked into the affairs of other nations. And it is perhaps this blindness that has produced one of the most morally troubling commentaries of recent times.

On May 12, Patrick J. Buchanan, a man I otherwise greatly admire, published a column entitled ‘Was World War II Worth It?’ on ‘Chronicles Extra’. It took the position that the ceding of Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta was as great an act of betrayal as Munich. From the classic paleoconservative perspective, Neville Chamberlain’s greatest mistake in his involvement at Munich was to have got himself involved at all.

There is no doubt that in some cases Buchanan’s perspective is correct. As he put it, ‘Leninism was the Black Death of the 20th Century’. Of course more people were killed under Stalin than under Hitler. These are facts beyond dispute.

But when one deals in facts one must deal with all the facts. It is easy to criticize Roosevelt with the benefit of 60 years of hindsight; however, nowhere in the column does Buchanan mention that it was Germany that declared war on the United States, entirely without provocation, days after the carnage of Pearl Harbor.

More shocking still is his failure to distinguish between the crimes of Hitler and Stalin. Undoubtedly, Stalin killed more; but it was Hitler who made the genocide of ethnic and religious minorities, because of what and not who they were, one of the principal industries of his state. Even as the war was being lost on both fronts, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and the febrile were being rounded up and deported to those bleak barbed-wire hells.

In summarizing the geopolitical reasons for fighting the war, Buchanan posed the question –

“Was that worth fighting a world war – with 50 million dead?”

Faced with a man who made it his aim to wipe out entire populations, the answer is yes; yes; and yes again. For such a distinguished thinker as Buchanan to gainsay a president who had to lead the USA into a war which it had most certainly not sought and which it could not avoid, and then fail to mention anything of the unique nature of the greater crime which that war brought to a halt, reeks of pitilessness.

It seems that the pity of conservatism’s intellectual leaders is a rationed commodity. Both neo- and paleo-conservatives are such hardened ideologues that they will never reach any kind of accommodation with each other. However, as a respectful foreigner, one might be tempted to venture the suggestion that the American conservative movement deserves better leadership than it’s getting.

Not just the conservatives – but all Americans.

The Internet's Absence of Filters

2006-03-24T21:53:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 11, 2005

The Internet is not a corporate medium.

In order to pipe his Fox News guff into American homes, the Australian-born ‘news magnate’ Keith Rupert Murdoch must incur certain large and ongoing capital costs in order to employ the personnel and erect the infrastructure necessary in order to broadcast one second of Bill O’Reilly. Although the thought of having to write, film, edit, produce and introduce every item on his channel might be Keith’s personal vision of Hell, soon even he will not be able to compete with the unfiltered, unedited news and opinion revolution that’s been gathering pace ever since the Nixon-era political saboteur Lucianne Goldberg was feeding gossip about Monica Lewinsky to Matt Drudge; a revolution in which the only things you need to participate are a modem and a browser.

Murdoch has been an advocate of free markets for decades; well, now he’s got one in his backyard, and as time passes and the current non-existent level of Internet regulation continues, it’s a free market that is really going to hurt the corporate interests of anyone who ever borrowed money in order to put on a TV news show.

Although the Internet will have a saturation point, it’s probably nowhere near it yet, a thought which should make the Establishment quake at the prospect of the awesome power of the unleashed cyber-citizen.

This advent of this inter-connected reality has the power not just to change the way news and opinion is delivered; not just to provide other forums for activists; but also to change the very face of the political landscape.

A hyperlink serves no function other than to provide a reader with a choice; click on it or not. Obviously, this enables readers to experiment with information that would not otherwise form part of their regular intellectual diet. The attractions of writers who may have seemed thrilling only a short while ago may soon pall, to be replaced by new gurus.

The harsh reality of the Internet era is that it is not only the mainstream media but also those in government who are petrified of it; the central regulation and flow of information, the very means by which all states keep control, has been truly abolished at precisely the same time that Western governments have reached depths of authoritarianism never before reached in peacetime.

As the Iraqis might say, the genie’s out the bottle.

If one starts to selects one’s news from different sources, one may also soon collect opinions from different sources, and if enough people collect enough of a range of opinions from different sources, then the end of bipartisan politics will be well and truly spelled.

The Internet happened so fast that the political elites have only been able to react to it; the danger for Internet users will come when they want to control it, for the day may come when a politician, tired of the bad press they have received in unfiltered cyber-media, proposes that Internet use be licensed, and if not licensed then registered.

There would be a storm of protest, of course, but ultimately it is in the interests of both the Republicans and the Democrats for the flow of information to be regulated, preferably by them, and if not by them then by others favourable to them and their interests. They are political movements; they exist for no reason other than to seek and hold power. Once in power, the only means that exist of challenging that power lie in the regulated, infrequent and predictable turns of the electoral cycle.

A blogger with a piece of hot news can be read around the world in minutes. This is the biggest challenge the mainstream politicians have ever faced, an unconscionable threat to their interests.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts; and beware of politicians who say they want to protect the public in the aftermath of the very first big story that a blogger gets wrong and which has tragic consequences.

The day of the licensed blogger may not be far behind.

John Paul II, Opponent of Predatory Capitalism

2006-03-24T21:52:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 6, 2005

As was to be expected, the passing of the Polish Pope has unleashed a veritable tsunami of encomia from the neoconservatives. Most comment has, of course, focussed on the role John Paul II played in the collapse of Communism, oblivious to the fact that the Catholic Church possesses a massive advantage over its earthly, secular persecutors – it’s eternal, and will survive human ideology for no reason other than longevity.

However, there is one aspect of the Pope’s record the comprehension of which seems to be beyond them, which, being spoiled children of the now, is, from this perspective, entirely reasonable; they can’t figure why John Paul II didn’t dig big capitalism.

He opposed Communism because he respected the rights of the individual. He was pro-life because he respected the rights of the individual. Ergo, employing a quantum leap of logic of which the even the lowliest intern at the American Enterprise Institute should be capable, he opposed predatory capitalism – because he respected the rights of the individual.

In a ‘Townhall’ piece of April 6 entitled, ‘The Splendor of Truth’, Jonah Goldberg remarked that, ‘The Catholic Church was the first real advocate of globalisation’. Huh? The Catholic Church an advocate of ‘globalisation’? I know Our Lord said, ‘the poor will be with you always’, but he didn’t follow that up with some dazzling coda like ‘And you will go out of your way to advocate that people will be made poor’, which is precisely the effect that the predatory global capitalism that John Paul II opposed has had and is having in what used to be Christian societies.

Don’t just take my word for it. I know that Europeans are whiners, Euro-weenies, blah, blah, Belgian prosecutors, Islamic immigration into France (always good for 1,000 words from Mark Steyn), blah, blah, but us Euros do have one little secret – entirely unreasonably, we are still just ever so slightly scared of the Germans; and not enough attention is being paid to economic stability in that country.

German re-unification was a disaster, and should have acted as a template for what not to do if you’re planning to graft an entirely new political and economic model onto a country where the local culture isn’t accustomed to it. After Germany,
nobody would really be stupid enough to try that again.
The Germans have probably lost count of the amount of money they have invested into trying to get the old East up to Western standards, and it is killing their economy. Unemployment in Germany is at its highest since the early 1930’s. Nostalgia for the old East is on the rise. Neocons, take note.

Like the UK, Germany is a member of the European Union, membership of which demands the elimination of border and labour controls. Now, ironically, since Poland joined the European Union last year, there has been a flood of Poles to the West. The cost of living in Poland is very low, and Poles are accustomed to working for lower wages than in the West. When Poles come West, they therefore drive down wages. Although many residents of Arizona will tell you otherwise, the free market economists say that this is a good thing, quite forgetting that the state subsidies their corporate masters receive are collected from personal taxation, which has the effect of raising the cost of living.

However, according to the ‘Daily Telegraph’ of April 4, one young German entrepreneur, Fabian Loew, has devised a solution to the problem of getting Germany back to work – he’s created a website, jobdumping.de, where job applicants compete against each other to work for the lowest wages, literally a race to the bottom, a race from which Fabian Loew collects a fee.

The opportunity to pay staff the lowest possible wages is the motherlode of predatory capitalism – any concept of a ‘global economy’ has no other rationale. It supersedes politics, it supersedes ideology, for some people it even supersedes religion. Much is made of the evils of the mill-owners of Victorian England; but those Methodists and Quakers built model villages for their workers, built schools, libraries, art galleries and swimming baths, gave something back to the local communities whose labours guaranteed their profits. To whom does a global business give something back?

If one believes all that one reads about the USA, it wouldn’t be surprising if some Stanford MBA Fabian Loew type crawls out the woodwork and decides to cash in on his fellow Americans’ human misery by starting some kind of ‘jobdumping’ service.

In the meantime, as the redoubtable Paul Craig Roberts tirelessly records, because of globalisation and its little brother outsourcing, the only jobs being created in the USA are domestic services and other services that cannot be performed at lower cost somewhere else in the world. In a flash, the economy of America will become like that of eastern Germany; and, just like the concept of the United Kingdom has disappeared due to the mismanagement of its elites, so too will that of America.

The conservative right’s Euro-haters will turn round and say that’s impossible because of the differences between Germany’s heavily tax-dependent welfare state and the vitality of the American economy. All that one need say to counter that argument are five little phrases; budget deficit; trade deficit; Social Security; dying dollar; and Iraq.

Turning people into economic units, a form of pornography, was what John Paul II railed against; Catholic apologists for big business like Michael Novak couldn’t really seem to care less.

At least being Pope does give you one big advantage in the workplace – as Dr. Roberts would put it, your services are non-tradable, and thus incapable of being outsourced.

The Unspeakable Losers of the British Conservative Party

2006-03-24T21:50:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
April 5, 2005

A politician’s announcement that he will hold a debate on reducing the legal time limit for abortions should he gain office would, in almost all cases, be cause for celebration.

However when the pledge comes from the mouth of Michael Howard, the leader of the undisciplined and unprincipled losers of the British Parliamentary Conservative Party, then pro-life voters should be very wary indeed.

Social conservatism does not come easily to Conservative Members of Parliament – although they are all very comfortable with the concept of managing the behaviour of others, they show no inclination to accept any kind of limits on themselves. Many have viewed being an MP as an excuse to get freebies and expand their contacts books so they can retire on swollen public pensions and then walk into any number of directorships.

Indeed, whatever has caused Howard to break out in this blue fit of real conservatism is of very recent origin; as recently as February 2004, Howard announced his support for ‘civil unions’ for gays. A pro-life, pro-gay marriage British conservative?

Is he Andrew Sullivan in disguise?

The announcement that he is proposing a debate on the reduction of the legal time limit from 24 to 20 weeks was made in the March 20 ‘Sunday Telegraph’. Hard leftists and libertarians have dictated the social culture of the UK for so long that any attempt to loosen the Vulcan deathgrip they have on policy should be viewed as being a victory of sorts; but in this case, it’s not any kind of victory at all.

All Parliamentary debate on social issues is conducted on the basis of a ‘free vote’; therefore, the laws by which 60 million must live are dictated by the consciences of fewer than 700. The majority of those few privileged even to have a voice in the debate will be from either the Labour or Conservative camps, career politicians whose livelihoods depend on courting popularity, not on taking difficult or unpopular decisions.

In most instances, they will see no further than the date of the next election; like states, they have no friends, only interests. Also, a free vote is one of the very few occasions on which a drone MP can exercise real power, and decide for themselves in which direction they wish the country to go – the vast majority of Parliamentary votes are conducted on a partisan whipped basis.

These factors themselves mean that if Howard becomes Prime Minister, and if he actually does hold the vote, he will restrain himself from directing his minions on how they should vote.

Which means that, even after any debate, the laws will remain unchanged.

Which shows Howard’s announcement up for what it is – a shallow, opportunistic attempt to sway pro-life sentiment in favour of a party which calls itself Conservative but which has shown no interest in any genuine conservative values for decades; the shallow, opportunistic gesture of a shallow, opportunistic man.

He, and the Parliamentary Party he leads, are largely unspeakable.

But the collective desire to restore the culture of life that this country’s leaders abandoned one night in 1967 is gathering steam. The pro-life movement has a photogenic and very vocal advocate, the Rev. Joanna Jepson, who has harried two doctors who performed a 28-week abortion on a child with a cleft palate – she herself suffered the condition in childhood, and was cured by reconstructive surgery.

In the ‘Sunday Times’ of March 20, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, perhaps mindful of the social conservatism of those African evangelicals who are threatening schism in the Anglican Communion over the ordination of homosexuals, came out publicly as a pro-lifer.

There is a change in attitude taking place, slowly, painfully, little by little, towards a restriction in the abortion laws. What’s needed is a party leader of great conscience to say publicly that they oppose abortion under all circumstances and will do everything in their power to restore its rightful illegal status. Will we ever get that?

Not on Michael Howard’s watch.

The Fever of Revolution

2006-03-24T21:49:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 24, 2005

The fever of revolution makes men do and say some very strange things.

Right now, the neoconservatives and their mouthpieces are full of talk of ‘democratic revolution’, a state of affairs they believe comes to exist through nothing more than the holding of elections, as if the existence of a middle class and traditions of dissent, free speech and free enquiry have no role to play in the making of genuinely free and democratic societies.

The worst affected of all the democratic revolutionaries is the President of the United States. As commentators like Walter Williams and Patrick J. Buchanan have recently pointed out, George W. Bush leads a country of which many of whose founders saw the danger of democracy degenerating into mob rule, and thus decided that their great project should instead be a republic.

As recently as 2000, the principles that guided the formation of the Great Republic were reinforced when the Presidency was decided in the Electoral College. That a President who owes his first term to the principles of the Republic should so publicly make the spread of democracy his foremost policy aim is at best unsettling, at worst bizarre.

Does the guy understand his own job?

But the armchair revolutionaries of the First Corps of Washington Think Tanks don’t really have the stomach to go out into the field and do the really dirty work of starting the revolution for themselves. They should perhaps follow the example of a real revolutionary, one of the great unsung heroes of World War Two, Leopold Trepper.

Born in 1904 in Novy-Targ, Poland, Trepper became a Communist in his youth and never wavered from his Communism to the end of his days. After working underground as a militant in Poland, Palestine, where he was imprisoned, and France, he went to Moscow in the early ’30’s and saw first hand the butchery of Stalin’s purges. In 1938, he was selected for a special mission by Jan Berzin, the head of Soviet Intelligence, and was sent to the West.

With no more training than his experience of underground work, Trepper organised the anti-Nazi spy ring that the Germans called the ‘Rote Kapelle’ or ‘Red Orchestra’, so-called because of the sound of their wireless broadcasts, that over two years sent 1,500 broadcasts to Moscow and delivered intelligence that had a major impact on the conduct of the war, giving information on everything from troop movements to the new design of Messerschmitts.

Those members of the Red Orchestra who were captured suffered dreadfully at the hands of the Gestapo Sonderkommando in the dungeons of Breendonk and Plotzensee; many were beheaded.

When Trepper himself was captured, he played the Germans into thinking that he could negotiate a separate peace between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, even managing to write and arrange for the smuggling of a report on his activities back to Moscow while in captivity, before he escaped.

This old militant’s reward after the war was 10 years in Stalin’s jails; as an associate of Berzin’s, he had been ‘ideologically suspect’ since 1938. After his release, he returned to Poland and became an active defender of its remaining Jewish community, before the rise of anti-Semitism in that country in the ‘60’s led to his persecution all over again, eventually leading to de facto house arrest. After winning a libel case against a former head of the French Intelligence Service who had accused him of being a double agent, he was permitted to leave Poland in 1973, and died in Israel in 1982.

But Trepper was such a fervent believer in his revolution he was prepared to cling to it even after everything he had suffered and had seen done in its name. His struggle against Nazism was titanic; but he was almost mad with revolution.

Compare Leopold Trepper with Michael Ledeen. Ledeen is as fervent a revolutionary as Trepper, although his exposure to real physical risk has been far less. Reported to have the ear of Karl Rove, he is the most vocal member of the orchestra that shouts for democracy, not realising that while it is good, it must have roots in which to flourish. Just as Trepper’s Communist revolution could never succeed because of the ideology’s blind refusal to recognise that not all men can be moulded into militants, so too will Ledeen’s neoconservative revolution on the basis that not all the societies he seeks to overthrow may wish to be democracies.

But that does not mean that neoconservatives like Ledeen are no less militants than Communists like Leopold Trepper. What will Ledeen and the other neoconservative militants do for their revolution?

It’s clear what they’ve already done; they’ve turned the head of the President of the United States.

By so systematically calling for democratic revolution, and putting the words of revolution into a president’s mouth, they show their true nature, and it’s one that the old militant Trepper would recognise very well indeed.

They are subversives.

Some Thoughts on St. Patrick's Day

2006-03-24T21:47:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 18, 2005

There was a time in the not so distant past when if a British citizen of Irish extraction declared themselves to be a republican, they would have been likely to find themselves the subject of unwanted official scrutiny.

Being neither a monarchist nor a libertarian, I’m a republican by default. My British republicanism, however, has nothing to do with the fetid gangster ‘Irish republicanism’ of the terror lord Gerry Adams and his gang of butchers in the Provisional IRA.

Big Gerry is now doing the rounds of the Irish-American suckers who have financed the IRA’s 30-year murder spree out of either blind hatred of their country’s closest ally or some kind of romantic pining for an Ireland that never existed. The United Kingdom should never have to ban Americans from entering this island; however Martin Galvin, sometime official of the terrorist fundraiser NORAID, has had that distinction, putting him in the same kind of company as Louis Farrakhan.

This week, some parts of the Irish-American community need to face some particularly brutal home truths. Firstly, they are simply part of the Irish diaspora, not its entirety – they possess no exclusive right to Irish ethnicity.

Secondly, it was their money that for many years helped to buy the guns and the explosives that killed and maimed law-abiding British people just peacefully trying to go about their business.

Thirdly, will any of those who entertain Adams this week have the guts to ask him precisely what role he played in the murder of Jean McConville in 1972? Was he really the commander of the death squad that murdered this mother of 10, as is alleged, or can he account for his movements at the time of her death?

Can he confirm or deny that he was the commander of the IRA’s Belfast Ballymurphy brigade as early as the 1960’s?

Gerry Adams has been a terrorist all his adult life. The IRA has no reason to exist without the gun or the bomb. There has been talk this week of Adams becoming a marginalized Yasser Arafat figure. That analogy is incorrect, firstly because Adams is an elected politician on my dime who, unlike Arafat, works within the framework of an established democracy; and secondly, Adams just doesn’t have the brains to be a Yasser Arafat.

But because the IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein now has a firm grasp of the language of ‘human rights’ and photogenic mouthpieces like Mary Lou McDonald, Adams has thought he and his accomplice, the unashamed terrorist Martin McGuinness, could coast along for years playing men of peace in public while both are still members of the IRA’s governing ‘Army Council’. They have been abetted in this double game by the appeasement of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and George W. Bush; even after the carnage of 9/11, Bush was willing to go to Belfast in 2003 and meet with men whom he could not have failed to have known were dyed-in-the-wool killers with the blood of the innocent dripping on their hands.

It was only after two spectacular own goals, the biggest bank robbery in British history last December and the senseless murder of Robert McCartney in January, that Bush has pulled the plug on USA-Irish terrorist relations; and there seems to be no indication that this official frostiness from the White House is going to be permanent.

But the signs are good when even Pete King, the Congressional Fenian Caucus himself, is showing Big Gerry the cold shoulder – unless, of course, it’s all just a show and Adams knows he’ll be persona grata again next year, and he’ll be back to wear one of those wee hats, drink green beer and pass round the plate – just for welfare, like.

The remaining supporters of the IRA in Irish-America need to overcome their perpetual emotional immaturity and start recognising their higher duty to the principles of the land that accepted their forefathers. Any bigotry they encountered in America was no different from that faced by the Irish wherever they went – in 1923, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland published a document called ‘The Menace of the Irish Race’, which they’re still living down to this day. When ‘experts’ like the English-born controversialist and eugenics buff John Derbyshire call the Arabs, ‘the Irish of the world’, or hark back to the ‘Limerick Pogrom’, constantly focussing on the negative behaviour of the Irish throughout history, they are given ammunition by some Americans’ continued acceptance of men like Gerry Adams at this time of year.

Adams is in America to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Without Patrick, there would have been no Christianity in Ireland; without Christianity in Ireland there would not have been much Christianity in many other parts of the world.

That’s the real meaning of March 17, and the real achievement of that ancient Scot who was kidnapped into slavery and taken over the water to a wild, forbidding land; not to hold parties for killers like Gerry Adams, or have his feast turned into some kind of Emerald Kwaanza.

On North Korea, Via Social Security

2006-03-24T21:46:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 7, 2005

For all the rhetoric that flows from the lips of the neoconservatives, the country of North Korea poses no real risk to the physical security of the USA. Without doubt its leadership is odious, keeping a near-starving people wrapped in the type of personality cult once abhorred by the man to whom they pay homage, Joseph Stalin.

It would be a very bad thing indeed if they have developed the bomb; however, as with Iraq, it is highly improbable that they possess any practical means of delivering a weapon onto San Francisco or Seattle.

The only nations that a nuclear North Korea would threaten would be its immediate neighbours; and thus, unfortunately, the USA would be drawn into any and all such regional conflicts in the Far East.

That is entirely the fault of the Clinton and Bush Administrations’ continued, wilful and reckless pursuit of unbridled international free trade and international free markets, and the big-spending proclivities of George W. Bush.

The American economy vomits debt at the rate of nearly $2 billion every single day, the consequence of having both a fiscally reckless Congress and a President who cannot see the virtue in sometimes killing a bill. In their new found love of the entity that calls itself ‘The State’, some American citizens seem wilfully blind to the concept that having a small, low-spending government would make them personally better off, with much more stable wealth, than any scheme that forces them to invest in an uncertain stock market and that’s disguised as ‘Social Security Reform’ ever could.

Indeed, the impertinence behind the idea that a government can dictate what citizens will do with money that shouldn’t have been taken from them in the first place is quite staggering. The current proposals for reforming Social Security can be construed four ways; firstly along classically conservative lines, that citizens are able to invest their funds more efficiently and profitably for themselves than if done on their behalf by ‘The State’; secondly, that this is an attempt to shore up a stock market that’s over-exposed to a declining dollar; thirdly, it’s an attempt to help some Wall Street CEO’s get richer without the parachute of a Federal bail-out being provided for the patsies if there’s another Enron; and lastly, and this is the most extreme, George W. Bush is trying to create a large investor class of loyal Republicans – in other words, to establish political control over the stock market.

So much for free markets.

But the biggest buyers of American debt are China and Japan. Anything that compromises the ability of China and Japan to buy dollars for George Bush and Robert Byrd to spend is a graver threat than anything Osama bin Laden could dream of. That is the real threat posed by North Korea. The Far East now seems to be engaged in a cold war as cold as any ever fought in Europe, and it ill-behoves the neocons to stir up trouble on the peninsula when the economic order they have helped create in the States will be among the first casualties in any shooting war.

Part of that cold war’s realpolitik is that should China decide to implement its policy of regime change on Taiwan, all rhetoric in support of that country’s right to exist will be forgotten, just to ensure the Chinese keep buying dollars. It will be the Sudetenland all over again, but of course the neocons don’t do appeasement – do they?

Also to be factored in is the USA’s horrendous trade deficit, now standing at 6% of GDP. The Pearl River Delta has become the shop floor of the world, and China runs a net trade surplus with the USA in virtually anything with moving parts, while in 2002 the USA ran a net trade surplus with China in meat, hides and skins, scrap metal and cigarettes. In the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush told the American people to go shopping – the de-industrialisation of America has been so thorough that he had nothing else to work with.

But, as Larry Kudlow never fails to point out, corporate profits are an important factor in economic growth and a weak dollar makes America a great place for foreigners to invest, i.e. buy American businesses. Yeah, dude. Whatever.

At some point in the future, America’s children may be called to go to war in order to ensure that cheap imports will still undercut domestically produced goods in the shops and to pay for whatever politicians can scrape from the bottom of the pork barrel.

Opponents of the Iraq war said it was a war about oil. That was not true. However, there would be only one way of describing what any American war with North Korea would be.

It would be going to war for Wal-Mart. And one day George W. Bush will take his place in economic history as the President who made the soybean America’s most valuable export.

Where Did Bronco Billy Go?

2006-03-24T21:45:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
March 2, 2005

On February 27 Clint Eastwood, 74, joined the select band of movie-makers who have won two Academy Awards in the category of Best Director of a Motion Picture. He is the first actor to achieve the distinction, awarded for his direction of ‘Million Dollar Baby’.

He is a giant of the culture, a lone wolf who wandered for years in the critical wilderness, massively popular with his public but ignored by the movie establishment before being warmly welcomed into the fold in his 60’s.

For the duration of his career, Eastwood has shown an ability as actor and director to thrill, delight and surprise in equal measure, from producing classic westerns like ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ and ‘Unforgiven’ to political thrillers like ‘In the Line of Fire’, to intimate, personal projects like ‘Breezy’ and ‘Bird’. Although his acting became stylised, if not lazy, in the ‘60’s, re-runs of ‘Rawhide’ from the ‘50’s show a keen, capable and expressive performer who finally re-surfaced from beneath the weight of his public image in the ‘90’s.

It’s a pity that, at this stage in his career, one has to ask – where did Bronco Billy go?

Released in 1980, ‘Bronco Billy’ is easily his most joyous and uplifting movie. Its whimsical story, about the owner of an old-style Wild West show, could not have been better timed at its release, daring to re-affirm the wholesomeness of American values and patriotism at the end of the dark Carter years. It was pure cinematic Reaganism, and although it’s outstanding as a whole it deserves to be shown forever for just two scenes – Eastwood’s final soliloquy; and for its very last shot, which is probably one of the reasons he was frozen out of the Hollywood establishment for so long.

Bronco Billy McCoy would be all at sea trying to figure out the director of ‘Million Dollar Baby’.

The members of the Academy seem to have decided that 2005 should be the year in which the full force of their guiding values should be unleashed and they aren’t the values of ‘Bronco Billy’.

It shouldn’t really be surprising that the Academy should have seen fit to honour two projects dealing with the practice of euthanasia in a way that is at best morally neutral while the plight of Terry Schiavo is still in the public eye, but it galls one nonetheless. As well as awarding Best Picture to ‘Million Dollar Baby’, its members awarded the Best Foreign Language award to Spain’s ‘The Sea Inside’, a biography of a quadriplegic campaigner for the right to die ‘with dignity’.

In any debate about the ‘right to die’, it is only honest to remind its advocates that if any such right exists, it is of very recent origin – until a few short decades ago, to attempt suicide was still a crime in many jurisdictions. It is one of the last taboos – anybody who knows anyone whose friend or loved one has taken their own life knows it is not a subject they will readily discuss. Many such suicide survivors feel crippling guilt that they were unable to share the suicide’s burden, or assuage their despondency.

In some parts of the world, suicide is a serious social problem – in the Republic of Ireland, the suicide rate among young men has grown massively throughout the years of ‘Celtic Tiger’ growth, perhaps fuelled by a sense of alienation from the increased prosperity they see around them.

To promote euthanasia is to promote a cause that says that suicide is good if it feels right, the ultimate act of moral relativism. By releasing ‘Million Dollar Baby’, Clint Eastwood has trampled on all the suffering attached to suicide - if you’re paralysed, then clearly you have nothing to offer. You are an embarrassment to a culture that celebrates physical vitality, and your very existence is an uncomfortable reminder of how fragile our own bodies and egos are. Those quadriplegics who cling to life for its own sake, the pro-life champions determined to keep on living in the knowledge that their life has been spared through their own will and the efforts of others, have no voice in the movies of Clint Eastwood.

If Bronco Billy saw ‘Million Dollar Baby’, he’d probably ask just when The Man With No Name became the man with no heart.

He might even call him a billion dollar loser – because, like, dude, just when did you become an ‘artist’?

Neoconservatism and Democracy

2006-03-24T21:44:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 25, 2005

One of the more sickening sights of recent weeks was witnessed during the President’s State of the Union address.

In alleged ‘solidarity’ with the Iraqis, a group of congressman had dyed their fingers blue, mimicking the mark of death put on Iraqi voters, and waved them in the air right on cue.

This is the moral equivalent of well-fed, affluent Western academics and teenagers proclaiming their support for the oppression of Fidel Castro while wearing the image of the murderous Ernesto Guevara; a poseur’s act, purely ideological, completely free of personal risk and ultimately as disrespectful to those Iraqis who braved savage harm by going to vote as the Che-wearers are of those Cubans who suffer under the boot of a vicious old man to whom the neoconservatives are happy to turn blind eyes, thus spitting in those of Bush’s most loyal supporters, those without whom neither he nor his brother would hold office, the Cuban-American Republicans of Miami-Dade.

Democracy, say the neoconservatives, is an end in itself; but this view is heavily qualified. A more accurate question for the neocons to answer would be, ‘When is a democracy not a democracy?’

Their answer would be brief, and telling.

When it’s in Spain.

For nearly a year, the neoconservative fascists of the American Enterprise Institute, the ‘National Review Online’ ‘Townhall’ and the ‘Washington Times’ have insulted and slimed the Spanish people for their rejection of the liar Jose Maria Aznar, and his lying lie in the immediate aftermath of the Madrid train bombings last March that the Basque terrorists ETA were responsible. If all you ever read is the hatred and bile of the right-wing thug Tony Blankley, who has maliciously called for Seymour Hersh to be prosecuted for treason, then you’ll believe that the people who conquered vast swathes of the New World are a bunch of wimps and Euro-wussies.

But of the two democracies, Spain and Iraq, which will endure? Which will ultimately survive in the cauldron of history?

My money’s on Spain.

On the weekend of February 20, the Spanish went to the polls again in a referendum to determine whether the country will ratify the policy document laughingly called the ‘EU Constitution’.

The good news for the democrats is that, although the document will be ratified and the Spanish are now at the head of the queue for more Euro-integration, turnout was low.

Spain is therefore getting back to normal, and starting to once again exhibit the diffidence to the doings of politicians that should be the hallmark of all successful and peaceful societies.

This diffidence makes it easier for peoples’ to detach themselves from the grand plans and failed schemes of those who seek to lead them. When, however, a diffident people is raised to outrage, their retribution on those who break their trust, as Aznar callously did, is swift, and all they need do to bring down giants is to put a mark in a box.

When the Spanish have had enough of being Europeans, they’ll go back to being Spanish without skipping a beat. After all, these are the people whose land was the testing ground for the Junkers and the Stuka, the people who survived Guernica and 40 years of Franco, and who as recently as 1981 faced the prospect of a military coup.

The Spanish will get by. The Iraqis won’t, a great pity and entirely the fault of the neocons, addled by their ideology and lusting for their places in history. Boy, will they get them.

As those who are sufficiently interested in such matters are always reminded, there ain’t much democracy in the Islamic Middle East. The reason for this, of course, is staring right us in the face – Islam. Islam is an ideology just as much as a faith. Like any ideology, it can’t suffer challenge so its opponents have got to go. Even in Turkey, the most avowedly secular of Islamic nations, the military have had to step into the political breach several times over the course of the country’s modern history in order to prevent Islamist groups taking power. The current Prime Minister was often fond of saying that the minarets should be their bayonets and the mosques their barracks.

Whoa there, Slim! Step AWAY from the prayer-mat!

But the Iraqi elections have consolidated power in the hands of the religious majority, the Shia Muslims. One of the more depressing consequences of having gorged oneself on an intellectual diet of David Horowitz mixed with Srjda Trifkovic is that one becomes aware of the existence of words like ‘Taqqiya’.

‘Taqqiya’, roughly translated as duplicity, is, according to Trifkovic, an Islamic duty, to push the Islamist agenda forward in the public square by gaining influence and then using it to establish Sharia law. The neoconservatives, of course, have done precisely the same thing for their agenda – I used to call myself a neoconservative, but I was just a wee toy Scottish neocon, MacNeo if you like (even the Republic of Ireland has its own wee toy neocon, an O’Neo, Mark Dooley of the ‘Sunday Independent’), while the really big beasts in their jungle probably number fewer than 100 and all of them hold or have held prominent positions in Republican White Houses, the think tanks or the media. This group holds a disproportionately massive public influence in relation to its numbers.

The Islamists will do precisely the same thing in Iraq as the neos have done in America. And we have walked blind into this nightmare, this hell on earth that we are making for other people.

The purpose of democracy is to enable all to be included in the decisions that affect them. Soon, the Iraqis will have no voice, their women will be forced to wear the veil, their hands will be amputated for petty infractions, and crowds will gather to watch them be beheaded and hanged. Iraq may join Iran’s new alliance with Syria, the security of Israel could be fatally compromised and the deaths of all those Iraqis, Americans, Brits and others who’ve been killed in this war for the last two years will be utterly meaningless.

In the meantime, the Spanish will just keep going about their business, being democrats, doing their thing.

And some prominent poseurs will have great snaps for their albums. But blood stains deeper than ink.

The Siamese Twins, Illegal Immigration and Abortion

2006-03-24T21:42:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 23, 2005

For as long as illegal immigration exists, so, too, will the practice of abortion. Kill illegal immigration, and abortion would wither on the vine.

The relationship between illegal immigration and abortion is almost symbiotic. The fate of one depends on the fate of the other. They are Siamese twins who share a vital organ – the need of ‘The State’ to replenish its numbers; after all, ‘The State’ must have rulers, and rulers must have people to rule.

The election of legislators and executives are acts of delegation. The principal drawback of libertarianism is its belief that each man can be his own government. While government should be small and unobtrusive, the nature of nations possessing clearly defined borders and populations bound by shared history is that there are some functions, the defence of the realm and its foreign affairs, which require to be administered collectively. These functions are delegated to legislators and executives, and the equipment necessary for the performance of these collective functions is provided from levies on all citizens.

That’s great in theory. The problem, as Ronald Reagan often said, is that once government is handed a function to perform, it has a tendency to grow. The nature of the relationship between the citizens and their delegates’ changes. The citizens start referring to their servants as ‘The Government’. ‘The Government’ becomes an entity to which the citizen must justify himself, even down to his smallest, most inconsequential transactions. ‘The Government’ permits itself the privilege of spying on the citizens, often using the mantra ‘Security’ to justify its impertinence.

In time, the sheer size to which ‘The Government’ has grown means it has attained a critical mass at which it transforms itself into an anti-democratic leviathan – ‘The State’.

According to some writers, like Lew Rockwell, this has already happened in the USA.

Rockwell has estimated that the tipping point for this change occurred in 1994, and the Republicans’ gaining control of Congress. Before that, conservatives had been happy to accept the conventional wisdom that ‘The Government’ should be small. However, the behaviour of congressional Republicans since 1994 has illustrated that they have the same appetites as the Democrats for pork, waste and, above all else, control.

But they’re Republicans! That makes it all OK!

Not really. The worst manifestation of love of ‘The State’ that Rockwell, Paul Craig Roberts, Shane Cory and others have recorded is the level of venom directed by Republican supporters of George W. Bush towards anyone who dares to question his competence and the efficacy of his policies. Such viciousness does not become supporters of the party of Dutch Reagan.

But to survive, ‘The State’, needs one thing – it must replenish its numbers.

Child rearing is probably the most uneconomic method that could be devised for the maintenance of ‘The State’. ‘The State’ needs fully-formed adults, ready to work and pay taxes to pay for delegates and to provide services; infant children take just way too long to get into the system.

Also, the very fact of children’s existence distracts their parents from their primary function, which is the service of ‘The State’. ‘The State’ just can’t handle the competition generated by a scraped knee, a loose tooth or a request for a bedtime story.

Children, therefore, are the enemies of ‘The State’. ‘The State’ has no problem abetting their elimination. But if the purposes of ‘The State’ are inimical to the interests of children, how will it replenish its numbers? Where will it get the people?

The answer is, from anywhere. One of the most important functions delegated to ‘The State’ is the regulation of its borders – if the greater interests of ‘The State’ dictate that it should subvert or ignore its own laws on border control in order to satisfy its greater purpose of replenishing its numbers, so be it.

The more people to rule, the better. The more people available to feed ‘The State’ its tribute, called taxation, the better. The more people available to fight in the specious wars ‘The State’ declares in order to keep the people in a state of fear and to cement its control over them with the security apparatuses they fund, the better.

If illegal immigration were halted, ‘The State’ would need to find another way of keeping its numbers up. Very suddenly, almost immediately, all funding would be withdrawn from pro-choice groups and there would be an explosion of propaganda in favour of marriage and family values.

‘The State’ would get its numbers up – it would just need to wait awhile.

Do not expect any substantive action on either illegal immigration or abortion for the foreseeable future.

America's Northern Ireland Redux

2006-03-24T21:41:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 22, 2005

There is now no doubt that George W. Bush is the worst President in the history of the United States.

The final nail in his credibility’s coffin was the result of the Iraqi elections, announced on February 13. The materialisation of the Shia parties’ expected majority means that the future of Iraq could very possibly be the illiberal, murderous Sharia law practiced in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and northern Nigeria – unless other, even more dreadful conditions await round the corner.

The neoconservatives have complained that for decades the Americans have been the janissaries of the Saudis Wahhabis– Bush has made them the janissaries of the Iraqi Shia. Ayatollah al-Sistani could never have hoped for a better and more faithful servant, because Bush has become the first president to make Islamotheocratic oppression the official consequence of American foreign policy.

But at the same time, the Ulsterfication of Iraq is now almost complete.

Congratulations, Mr. President.

The idea that Iraq is now to the USA what Northern Ireland has been to the United Kingdom was originally put into the public domain by John Farmer in 2003, and the development of the synergy between the political and security situations in Iraq more than bears out the analysis.

What the elections have done is manifest in Iraq the root problem of Northern Ireland politics, a dominant political majority with common religious beliefs that brook no compromise with those of the minority.

This situation has two inevitable outcomes; civil war and the suspension of government.

When whatever Iraqi government that can be formed comes into being, it is likely that one of the first things to happen is that a Sunni minority party will walk out because of an issue on which they say there can be no compromise. This will happen because of the failure of the Coalition to manage the peoples’ expectations of how democracy works.

Consensual government will then collapse.

The USA and UK will require to intervene in the resulting civil war, and will find that the loss of blood and treasure incurred to get the country to the stage of elections will be nothing as to the losses to come when the Shia and Sunni start shooting each other in a sectarian conflict, and not ‘just’ within four provinces.

After thousands more deaths, the civil war will eventually be ended by a peace conference, probably in Vienna or Paris, at which all factions will be photographed signing resplendently-bound documents with great flourishes and kissing each others’ cheeks.

The resulting government will last approximately one year. After that time, one party will be caught spying on another, or in other counter-democratic activities. The government will be suspended and the USA will have to assume direct control, which will continue indefinitely.

And all the while the ghastly neck-smiters will be terrorising the people in order to chase the infidel from Arab lands.

The very fact that the elections have produced the outcome they have gives a very telling insight into how the Iraqi people are beginning to perceive themselves and each other. They now see themselves as Shia or Sunni first and Iraqi second, and countries where elections are prayers have no meaningful future, because if an election’s outcome is the will of God, who is Man to question it? Or to seek re-affirmation of His will at a later date?

The die was cast for Iraq when Sharia law was permitted as a source for the constitution. The failure of the Coalition to demand a complete separation of church and state was utterly shameful, and probably a cack-handed multicultural compromise designed to ensure that the Coalition was being ‘inclusive’.

But the sectarianism that informs the democratic process in Northern Ireland is as nothing to the sectarianism of Sunni and Shia. After all, the Reformation is only 500 years old; Islamic sectarian enmity dates back 1,300 years. Historic hatreds will bubble to the surface very quickly, making the country ungovernable.

Instead of making Iraq a beacon for democracy for the Middle East, it may be on its way to becoming one of the fabled ‘failed states’.

If anybody thinks this is impossible, look at Northern Ireland now, a country with a strong democratic but sectarian tradition. Its civil war was fought in the shadows, masquerading as terrorism, but it was civil war nonetheless. The Northern Ireland Assembly was dissolved in 2002 on the direct orders of Tony Blair, because of the bad faith of Sinn Fein/IRA. Elections have since been held for a new assembly, with both groups gravitating towards the extreme electoral choices.

Even after elections, there is no prospect of devolved rule returning to Northern Ireland in the foreseeable future. And if that can happen in a country with a democratic tradition, why shouldn’t we expect it to happen in Iraq?

The Light of Other Days

2006-03-24T21:40:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 18, 2005

The 20th Century produced only one real prophet. His name is Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

A country boy from Somerset whose first memories include going to school in a horse and cart, and who seems to have lived his adult life in abject terror of nuclear war, Sir Arthur, now 87, has predicted the advent of the communications satellite, the Internet and the mobile phone. In 1960, he wrote a story about the dangers of multi-channel satellite, and by extension cable, television being used for the purposes of propaganda, a salutary warning to all viewers of Fox. In 1998, he and Stephen Baxter wrote a story that predicted the current Iraqi insurgency.

If only the neocon dittoheads of the American Enterprise Institute had read Sir Arthur C. Clarke instead of Leo Strauss.

However, February 10 saw another of Sir Arthur’s predictions take a step towards becoming reality – the rejection by the British people of their monarchy. It’s contained at the very beginning of a novel he co-authored with Baxter in 2000, called ‘The Light Of Other Days’.

By the end of the decade, they said, the Royals will have packed up shop and moved to Australia, leaving England free to become the 51st State of the Union.

If the behaviour of Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor, the heir to the throne, is any guide, it can’t come quick enough.

On February 10 Prince Charles announced his intention to marry his mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles in a civil ceremony at Windsor Castle on April 8. She will not be known as ‘Princess of Wales’, but will instead hold the secondary title, ‘Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall’. Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, will later officiate at a prayer service to mark the marriage.

When he succeeds to the throne, she will not take the title ‘queen’, but will instead be known as Princess Consort.

Having wasted seven years of my life as a divorce lawyer, there is nothing in the world I find more boring than other peoples’ domestic arrangements. However, this case has profound implications for the very essence of what it means to be British.

This wedding is a direct insult to the history and, by extension, the patriotism of the British people, a cooked-up sham and perversion of the law of the land to enable one man to get what he wants and that has the sticky paw-prints of Tony Blair written all over it.

By his own admission, Prince Charles, who will one day inherit the leadership of the established church, committed serial adultery with Parker-Bowles throughout the course of his marriage to the late neurotic Diana, while P-B was still married to her first husband, who is still alive. His excuse for this behaviour is that it only happened after his own marriage had irretrievably broken down, or some other pap like that. That’s not just good enough when one day other people who lead good, honest and moral lives will pray for you as the Leader of their Church.

Consider this – the Church of England teaches that adultery is sinful. Its future leader commits adultery. He is able to escape the consequences of his actions by going through a civil wedding to a woman whose ex-husband is still alive. The principal cleric of his Church then legitimates this deft zigzag through that Church’s laws by performing a service for the happy couple afterwards!

Up and down the land, Anglicans will gather in their pews on Sunday and sing the great old hymns like, ‘Jerusalem’, and ‘I Vow To Thee, My Country’, and wonder just what on Earth their Church, the entity they look to for spiritual guidance, has come to when its next leader is riding a coach and horses through everything they have been taught to believe is the Church’s teaching, with the tacit consent of its highest cleric.

But this farrago of a marriage, effectively the heir to the throne spitting in the eye of his people, is no more than illustrative of the maxim that Royalty, like politicians, reflect the sort of society they lead. We get the royals, like the politicians, we deserve. Charles’ younger son, Prince Harry, is a lout who binges on vodka and beats up photographers; his behaviour just reflects what happens every Friday and Saturday night in every town in the country. Charles is a ruthlessly self-centred radical egotist – so is the Prime Minister. They both have a self-interest to serve here; Charles wants to save face by regularising domestic arrangements that might be bothering him, to save himself from the smell of what the late Robert Bolt called the ‘fresh stinking flowers’ of his conscience; Blair will think he can get political mileage out of it in the coming election by saying he’s helped the heir to the throne find ‘happiness’, while the local taxation rate is going up at an average rate of one-third above the rate of inflation.

At this angle we can see these events bathed in the light of other days, the days of Henry VIII, upon whom the Pope bestowed the title ‘Defender of the Faith’- before he decided he wanted to contract a second marriage. The upheaval that decision caused could be managed in those days when the word of Kings was absolute – today, they may find the British public less willing to be so accommodating of the regal libido.

As James V of Scotland remarked on his deathbed, after the birth of his daughter, Mary Queen of Scots,

“It came wi’ a lass, and will gang (go) wi’ a lass”.

Tony Blair, Destroyer of Worlds

2006-03-24T21:39:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 10, 2005

Throughout its history, the country of Iraq has been of no consequence to the interests of the United Kingdom, other than as a purchaser of arms and a vendor of oil.

By the hand of the worst Prime Minister the UK has ever had, the Iraqi people are now dying in their dozens in pursuit of a mirage called ‘democracy’, apparently a good thing, except that its practice in the United Kingdom has been so deeply wounded by the machinations of Blair and his disciples that it is changing into a country that many of its citizens do not recognise.

More importantly, and seriously, it is becoming one we wish to have nothing to do with.

Consider the events of Wednesday February 9. That day, Blair gave two more examples of triangulation and hypocrisy. The triangulation illustrates just how badly Blair and his band have tainted the quality of discourse in the public square. The hypocrisy illustrates just how little his words can be trusted on the subject of terrorism.

In all likelihood, the UK will be holding a General Election within three months. Some of the first shots of the campaign have already been fired, through the Labour Party’s abuse of the Freedom of Information Act.

On February 9, the Treasury issued documents relating to the worst single example of Conservative free-market incompetence, the events of Wednesday September 16 1992, ‘Black Wednesday’, when sterling crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and George Soros made one billion pounds betting against it. These documents had been requested by the Labour Party.

The more sensitive sections had been blacked out - however, it was later revealed that the blacked-out sections had been e-mailed to the BBC.

The spin machine spun into action immediately, and the Treasury released a statement saying the e-mail was the work of a junior official. And if you believe that, you’ll believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

The sections that should not have been revealed are, of course, highly damaging to the electoral interests of the Conservatives – however, the Freedom of Information Act does not provide for sensitive information about Blair’s government to be made public.

It is rare for any British government to be so lacking in public trust that we do not believe a word it says, but that is the stage that has been reached with Blair’s. There have been so many lies, so much spin, that its pronouncements are now all viewed with downright suspicion, a natural consequence of over-triangulation.

The second example ostensibly relates to the rectification of a long-standing miscarriage of justice, but which instead is a hideous example of hypocrisy, pandering to the terrorists on his doorstep while young men are being killed fighting terrorists in Iraq.

In 1974, 11 entirely innocent people, mostly from two families, were convicted of carrying out IRA bombings in Guildford and Woolwich. Their real crime was being Irish in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were convicted on tainted evidence, largely obtained by torture, and many spent up to 15 years in custody. A fictionalised account of Gerry Conlon’s case was made into a movie, ‘In The Name Of The Father’.

Gerry’s father Giuseppe died in prison in 1980, entirely innocent of the offences for which he had been incarcerated.

However, the convictions of the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven were overturned in 1989, part of a landmark series of appeals that showed how deeply corrupted English justice had become in pursuit of Irish terrorists. Although compensation for wrongful imprisonment would have been paid, one would have thought that an apology would have been forthcoming before now.

One should never expect any Leader of the Conservative Party to apologise for state-sponsored injustice perpetrated on Irish Catholics – just not their bag, old boy. But why has Blair waited until seven years after taking office to issue an apology that was 16 years overdue?

Because, just last week, the Provisional IRA issued two strongly worded statements protesting the perfectly constitutional demands being made upon them to surrender their weapons and against the announcement made by Hugh Orde, the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland, that he believed they were behind a £26 million pound bank robbery in Belfast before Christmas.

So, as a sop to keep the IRA from shooting again, which would illustrate the failure of his Ulster policy of real appeasement of real terrorists, Blair issues an overdue apology to a group of people who had injustice done upon them by the British state, whose continued imprisonment had great propaganda value for the IRA and who were, with I think one exception, ultimately proved to have had nothing to do with it in the first place!

However, the Guildford and Woolwich cases do illustrate that, as with so many instances since 9/11 both here and in the USA, the fear of terrorism per se makes liberal democratic governments do some very strange things, and every citizen had better be concerned for their liberty when the word ‘terrorism’ passes a politician’s lips. Right now, Blair is advocating house arrest and detention without trial for terror suspects.

So much for Magna Carta. But one can’t help but wonder, with so many foreigners being sent home from Guantanamo, just how many of them were just Muslims in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Blair is the man who’s shoulder to shoulder with George W. Bush in taking the so-called ‘War on Terror’ to Syria and Iran; the man who’s abetted the destruction of the country of Iraq and the unleashing of its inner Islamist djinn in order to satisfy his lust for a place in history; the man who has destroyed politics in the United Kingdom as know it.

He is like some figure from Hindu mythology, a destroyer of worlds. Or at best the tin-pot leader of a third-rate banana republic.

End Taxpayer-Funded HIV Research Now

2006-03-24T21:37:00.000Z

(Note - You should have seen the hate mail I got for this.)

Commentary by Martin Kelly

February 7, 2005

On January 30, Chris Smith, a former Culture Secretary in Tony Blair’s Cabinet, announced in the London ‘Sunday Times’ that he has been HIV positive for 17 years.

He had not disclosed his condition to Blair. This means that he had also not disclosed it to his local constituency party or, most importantly, to his electorate in Islington.

Smith came out as gay in 1984, the year after his election to Parliament. This announcement comes a matter of weeks before a General Election at which he is standing down.

He said that he did not know when or from whom he contracted the virus. He also said that his continued good health was because of the ‘expert, professional care’ he had received from the National Health Service.

The behaviour of Chris Smith towards his electorate, his party, his leader and the wider British public is amongst the most contemptuous on record from a public servant. And although hard cases make bad law, he is proof of why further taxpayer-funded HIV research has to cease, not just in the UK but everywhere else.

When people live in monogamous, permanent heterosexual relationships where neither party is an injecting narcotics abuser nor received a contaminated blood transfusion, they are at little risk of contracting HIV.

That was not the message with which my generation, the UK teenagers of the mid to late ‘80’s, were bombarded. We were told that HIV was going to explode. It was going to be a pandemic to rival Spanish flu. Hundreds of millions would die.

It didn’t happen, leastwise in societies where the public heeded the message.

The truth is, in societies like the UK and USA, it never was going to happen. The vast majority of our populations’ lifestyles were, and are, HIV-incompatible.

It did explode in Africa. AIDS in Africa is not a stain on the world – it is a stain on those African cultures and superstitions that dictate, for example, that an adult male can protect himself from HIV by sleeping with a virgin. It is a stain on the sexual hygiene of some Africans. The failure of the multicultural West to secure the physical and moral well-being of Africa’s young by not adopting a policy of extremely tough love towards sex education years ago is a stain on those few members of the International Development establishment who have abetted the creation of this giant slow-motion car crash by failing to do their very well-paid jobs. It is not the fault of anyone else.

According to Chris Smith, a cocktail of medicines preserves his health. If he is a patient on the National Health Service, these are provided at the expense of all British taxpayers. Some apologists for Chris Smith will say that he is also a taxpayer, and this is true, although, as an MP, his salary and expenses are paid from taxed money. Some of his apologists would say that his continued treatment at public expense is akin to care given, for example, to smokers who develop lung cancer, or heavy drinkers who then require liver transplants.

But there are critical differences. Firstly, a smoker or drinker may have a physical, perhaps even genetically driven, need for tobacco or alcohol. Promiscuous homosexuals have no such physical need – they have an emotional need, the kind of need that a mature adult should have the self-control to be able to master.

Secondly, a smoker or drinker might not act with conscious disregard for his or her own health. There was a time in Chris Smith’s life when he clearly couldn’t have cared less for what he caught or didn’t catch from whom or how many he slept with, at a time when the dangers of the lifestyle he was living were at the centre of the public eye.

Of course, there are those unfortunate souls who contract HIV by accident, or who have been deliberately infected through their partner’s malicious misrepresentation, or who have been stabbed with dirty needles in the course of being robbed or while trying to effect an arrest, or are so desperate for a high they’ll stick anything in their arm.

But the level of support available for people who find themselves in those grim conditions is staggering, at least in the UK. No more resources should be made available.

The bottom line for amoralists like Chris Smith is that nobody has the right to criticise another person’s lifestyle. God knows, we’ve all done things we’d rather not talk about, and prefer to keep to ourselves. But this argument shutters the door on debate as to which Western groups predominate in the statistics relating to HIV contagion (homosexuals and drug users) and how they catch it (by deliberately refusing to take very simple and well-publicised precautions).

This is not an issue which should divide liberal from conservative, not one about privacy or sexual freedom, and it’s an issue which will come to the fore with a vengeance when the true cost of Medicare starts to kick in.

This is an issue that goes to the heart of the nature of the relationship between citizens. For the most part, HIV is a disease contracted through irresponsibility. If a citizen will not take regard for their own health, why should other citizens invest in its preservation and improvement?

Certainly, let HIV research continue, but not with public money.

All Quiet by the Dead Sea

2006-03-24T21:36:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
February 4, 2005

If a Muslim commentator were to refer to the State of Israel as ‘Zionia’ in the mainstream press, the outrage would be absolutely justified and deafening.

They would probably, and rightly, be fired by their publisher and forced to repay whatever bungs they’d received from the Bush White House.

On 9/13/2003, a ‘Townhall’ columnist called Jay Bryant referred to the Muslim world as ‘Islamia’, on his website, ‘The Optimate’. He repeated the phrase in a ‘Townhall’ column called ‘First olive’, dated 1/31/2005. In the original column, he referred to ‘Islamia’ as ‘a word I have made up and define as the Islamic counterpart of the old term ‘Christendom’.

However, before he engaged in a philological expedition worthy of Lewis Carroll, Bryant of Arabia should have been aware that there is already a perfectly serviceable Arabic word to describe the ‘Islamic counterpart of the old term ‘Christendom’. That word is ‘umma’, roughly defined as the brotherhood of all Muslims, and the nature of the umma is such that it cannot be secularised.

It was the spirit of the umma that Osama tried to inflame. The vast majority of the umma, to their credit, want and wanted nothing to do with him.

Those who did have been handed a golden opportunity to fight the infidel due to the carelessness, arrogance and stupidity of the neoconservatives in their invasion and occupation of Iraq.

And, for the first time in quite some time, it seems to be All Quiet by the Dead Sea.

I cannot recall hearing any reports of terrorist attacks in Israel for some time. The incidence of attacks seems to have lessened considerably.

This is a state of affairs that can have only four causes.

Firstly, Israel’s anti-terror operations are winning.

Secondly, the Islamofascists are in trouble. The death of a prominent leader, such as Arafat, almost always leads to a subsequent power struggle. Although they may have hated him, he was at least a recognisable figurehead, a celebrity tyrant if you prefer. They needed him as much as he needed them. The relatively easy accession of Abu Mazen may be no more than superficial – although he has a popular mandate, the warlords are fighting among themselves.

Thirdly, the number of volunteers for murder operations is dropping. Although the young men may be willing to echo the vicious anti-Semitism of Hamas, fewer are willing to kill themselves for its sake.

They, too, may care for the preservation and survival of their homes and families.

Fourthly, the terrorists and suicide bombers still exist, but they are elsewhere.

At base, terrorism is a form of radicalism. Radicalism is a mental state, but the terrorist is a radical committed to taking personal action, to making the mental state become real. That commitment cannot be satisfied by inactivity.

Terrorists need to terrorise, and terrorists cannot reform, - those who do are not true terrorists.

A good example of this comes from Northern Ireland. Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, there have been no major attacks by the Provisional IRA, although the paleo-Fenians of the Real IRA perpetrated the Omagh massacre after the agreement, to which it was not a part, was concluded. However, the Provisionals have consistently obfuscated about handing over their weapons. They must have the guns in order to keep the diehard terrorists in their own ranks in line.

The lack of terror opportunities has led to the gradual transformation of the province’s terror gangs into crime gangs, and a worst-case pessimist can envisage a future for Ulster not unlike that of Chechnya, Kosovo or Somalia, de facto gangster societies and failed states.

But if the terrorists and suicide bombers of the West Bank are elsewhere, where can they be? There is only one place they can be, Iraq, the place that seems to afford more opportunities for terrorism right now than anywhere else in the world.

Even in heavily policed areas like the West Bank, it surely can’t be impossible for some committed wannabe neck-smiter to slip across the Jordanian border and make their way across that country to Iraq. And if one can do it, so can others.

After all, Iraq has two important advantages over Israel for your average terrorist. Firstly, it is very much larger, so there is very much greater freedom of movement. Secondly, it is less secure. The Project For the New American Century has created a terrorists’ paradise.

At the end of his ‘First olive’ article, Jay Bryant wrote that

“For historical and ethnological reason, Iraq had to be the first Arabic olive out of the (democratic) jar. That is why oil policy, weapons of mass destruction and other minutia (sic) never really mattered”.

Every man should find his ethics harsh, difficult masters. Jay Bryant can clearly reconcile his with the lies and deceptions forced on the American people in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
He should be grateful he lives in such a tolerant society, where liars can send the sons of others to fight the mortal enemies of another state.

A Hollywood Ending

2006-03-24T21:34:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly

February 1, 2005

Now that Ronald Reagan has died, perhaps the time has come for the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to honour him.

It would be nice to think they would do that, but they probably won’t. Hopefully the serried ranks of glitterati will at least clap politely when his name and image appear on the roll call of those who have passed away in the preceding year. Even if the Academy did award him a posthumous honorary Oscar, Nancy Reagan would possibly use the ceremony as a platform to plead for more funding for stem-cell research instead of simply enjoying the belated recognition being given to the most important actor who ever lived.

Such a plea would be completely in line with some of the Oscar nominations that were announced on January 25. If you read on, expect spoilers.

This year’s nominations show what the Academy is really concerned about, and it’s one of the most morally ambivalent ever. The movie being tipped to sweep the boards is ‘The Aviator’, dealing with, of course, the life of Howard Hughes, who, during his public years, seems to have been sexually incontinent. Laura Linney has been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress for ‘Kinsey’, a biography of sexologist Alfred Kinsey, a man of whom it could fairly be said he did more harm than good.

America’s years of exposure to Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan and John Derbyshire should have taught it to be very wary of Brits being serious, and the plucky, worthy and serious little Brit-flick ‘Vera Drake’, whose eponymous heroine is a sympathetic abortionist, has won three nominations.

Having moved seamlessly through the whole spectrum of the left-wing agenda for the social manipulation of the body, the nominations glide to the other end of the human timeline. One Best Picture contender, ‘Million Dollar Baby’, and a Best Foreign Language contender, ‘The Sea Inside’, both deal positively with the ‘right to die’, i.e. euthanasia.

It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘a Hollywood ending’.

There are those in the movie industry who will justify this list by using Jerry Springer’s formulation, that his show simply holds a mirror up to society. In some cases, that might be true. They will say it reflects the concerns of the real world.

But those who have the talent and then the privilege of being able to put their work forward for release to the public have a particular duty of care in relation to its content. ‘Million Dollar Baby’ is a particularly powerful case in point.

The career of Clint Eastwood as actor and director shows him to be a story-teller, not a message deliverer, although Warner Brothers, the studio behind ‘Million Dollar Baby’ and Eastwood’s constant partners, have a history of producing socially-conscientious drama dating back over 70 years, back to the days of ‘20,000 Years in Sing-Sing’.

‘Million Dollar Baby’ is Eastwood’s first real message movie, apart from some throwaway lines in ‘Magnum Force’. There is no innocence, no artistic challenge, in Eastwood’s selection of this project. A veteran of his experience and power within the movie industry knows precisely what they’re doing when they make a movie portraying a conflicted Catholic, presumably from a generation particularly risk-averse to mortal sin, committing what their Church teaches is murder.

His character’s compassion for the crippled boxer will be held up as the reason why Clint pulls the plug. But the very fact that a movie personality of his experience and status has made such a movie only provides succour for those who would seek to make euthanasia legal under all circumstances.

If ‘Million Dollar Baby’ wins, then of course the public will be treated to inches and inches of newspaper interviews by Eastwood and others saying how important the subject matter was. But this is the world in 2005. In the times in which we live, no opportunity for propaganda is ever lost, even if it’s down at the multiplex, and it has to be recognised as such.

George W. Bush’s re-election seems to have been effected on a false prospectus, that his electorate perceived him to be a social conservative. He certainly hasn’t broken much sweat attending to their concerns since November. The inaugural address was so light on social conservatism that a number of his voters who maybe heartily disagreed with him on Iraq but who wanted to keep the Democrats out because of their collective association with the culture of death must be feeling short-changed.

But these nominations are Hollywood’s slap in the face to the American people for having the temerity to re-elect their President, and the American people are thus doubly suckered – once by the President and again by their icons.

A win for ‘Million Dollar Baby’ would be a real Hollywood ending - for Jack Kevorkian.

War in the Graveyard of Empires

2006-03-24T21:33:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 26, 2005

George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, in reality The Triumph of Bush Augustus, has had a mixed press from his most loyal supporters, the usually dutiful chorus of the ‘National Review Online’.

Some, like William F. Buckley, Jnr., came to bury him, others, like Jonah Goldberg, to praise him as an ‘American revolutionary’.

And of course neoconservatives aren’t Trotskyists.

In one respect, the address was a towering achievement – his speechwriters managed the feat of giving Bush many fine words containing little tangible insight.

However, in one sentence, they let him down completely - Bush Augustus, the de facto Emperor of Iraq, showed the magnificence of his new clothes by saying that the survival of liberty in his land depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

This statement, a gross insult to the memory of Patrick Henry, was grossly insulting to the intelligence, patriotism and history of the American people, for one simple reason.

He did not tell you why.

Why should the survival of American liberty be threatened by a lack of liberty elsewhere? If America is an exceptional society, as the neoconservatives say it is, what does American liberty have to fear if other nations are not like America?

Nothing at all. And all the while, the storm clouds of war continue to gather over the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It would be better for Iran and the Iranians if their government were not an Islamotheocracy, and perverse to think otherwise. Of course the Iranian people should have liberty and not have to suffer under the dead hand of Sharia law.

But since when was it the duty of Americans to give them liberty? Is there something different about the Iranian people that they are incapable of fighting for their own liberty?

What threat do the clerics really pose? The volume of spin on how dangerous they are makes you dizzy.

A reasonable man, exercising a reasonable degree of care in his reasoning, would reason that, if an influential clique has been proved wrong about an issue, say, the threat posed by a Middle Eastern country’s pursuit of Weapons of Mass Destruction, then they would be loathe to repeat the mistake again, perhaps for no reason other than that a second mistake would critically undermine their influence.

But we’re talking here about the neoconservatives, for whom reason always goes out the window in favour of paranoia.

Much opposition to the Iraq war was based on the practical premise that Saddam had no workable delivery systems for attacking the States. And all of a sudden there is a deal of unsubtle agitprop appearing to the effect that Iran will soon have a delivery capability.

The neoconservatives don’t intend dealing with the same problem in the same way twice.

Seymour Hersh’s recent ‘New Yorker’ piece on the subject of Bush Augustus’s plan to march against the Persians, called ‘Next Stop Iran?’ was reprinted in the January 23 ‘Sunday Times’. It gives some chilling insight into what these guys are really about.

Hersh is a conscientious reporter – he reported that “many western intelligence agencies believe (Iran) to be at least three to five years away from a capability to produce nuclear warheads because of serious technical problems, although its work on a missile delivery system is far more advanced”.

So it begins. The case for Iranian intervention begins with its advanced delivery systems – not unlike Saddam.

The spin was taken up by Edward Luttwak of Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies in the January 23, ‘Sunday Telegraph’. In an almost Orwellian diatribe, Luttwak commented, “The thought of ayatollahs with nuclear weapons should terrify everyone – especially in Europe, because the Iranians could soon put those bombs on the top of rockets that could reach European capitals’.

Just like Saddam’s could. And, like Saddam’s, I’m sure they’ll be capable of being deployed within 45 minutes.

The drums of more bloody, inhumane and unaffordable war get louder and louder. The sheer size of Iran makes a conventional attack nigh impossible, given the limited resources available. It would fail, unless the war was conducted with extreme, possibly nuclear, violence. More thousands of Americans and millions of Iranians would die to further the cause of ‘benevolent global hegemony’ the bromide the neos use to conceal their fascism.

The neoconservatives have not learned that Persia is the graveyard of empires. In time, the Persians will overthrow their current masters when they can suffer them no longer, in the spirit of Patrick Henry. Only then will they be free. No conqueror or despot, from Alexander to Crassus to its own Shah, has ultimately endured in that country. There is no reason to believe Bush Augustus would be any different.

The Triumph of Bush Augustus was littered with religious imagery. Last time I looked, ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ did not begin with, ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of an air strike on Tehran’.

The Smoke and Mirrors of Rich Lowry

2006-03-24T21:32:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 21, 2005

You just can’t keep a good neocon down.

Amidst the wreckage of what they’ve done, you’ll always find one who’ll say that nothing in Iraq is as bad as it seems, and that we all just need to stay the course and everything will work out just fine. This assertion will always be accompanied by an allusion to a document from which a few judicious quotes or general examples can be cobbled into an apparently reasonable argument supporting their case.

It’s all smoke and mirrors, of course, and a classic example appeared on the January 18 ‘National Review Online’, courtesy of the parent rag’s wunderkind editor, Rich Lowry.

Before he started rooting for arguments in the undergrowth of British colonial history, one of Lowry’s principal claims to fame is that on March 7 2002, he expressed ‘lots of sentiment for nuking Mecca’, a statement followed shortly thereafter by “By that call I did not mean an actual strike on Mecca. The article was only a literary fantasy and should not be considered more than that”.

In his defence, Lowry was writing in NRO’s ‘Corner’, a blog so pretentious and inward-looking it brings to mind the scene in ‘Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers’ where, after being startled by the sound of Fangorn Forest, Legolas exclaims ‘The trees are speaking to each other!’

But the boy demagogue certainly doesn’t get a free pass for his other infractions. Although it was the hatchet man David Frum who penned the NR’s disgusting ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ piece of March 2003, it was Lowry who passed it fit for publication. They are both equally culpable.

Amidst his other duties, which seem to include the incessant advertising of his TV appearances, Lowry pens a column for King Features Syndicate, and the January 18 effort was reprinted on NRO. It carried the innocuous title, ‘Been There, Done That’.

The focus of his piece was, unsurprisingly, that although the insurgency in Iraq looks bleak, there are historical analogies that mean the situation may not be as dire as it appears and that insurgency campaigns can be defeated. Referring to a book called ‘Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam’ Lowry set out to prove that the techniques adopted by the Brits in quelling the post-World War Two insurgency in Malaya could be successfully adopted in Iraq.

He failed. Utterly.

In fairness, he was failing even before he mentioned the title of the book. He referred to ‘the recent qualified victory of the British over the Irish Republican Army’. Victory? What victory? Former death squad commanders like Gerry Adams, the leader of the Provisional IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein, being permitted to sit in the Northern Ireland Assembly after they’ve ‘lost’ is a victory? A victory where the ‘losers’ refuse to hand over their guns? Yes, that’s victory! Now we know what the neocons mean when they talk about victory! Head for the hills!

He then says, ‘(given) their colonial history, the British had plenty of experience with such low-intensity conflicts, but had forgotten it after the conventional warfare in Europe of World War II.’ This insight may surprise the surviving veterans of Special Operations Executive, the Special Air Service and the Chindits, units that spent much of WWII engaged in low-intensity, guerrilla-type campaigns against the Axis in Europe, North Africa and Burma.

Lowry then narrated some of the techniques by which the Malayan insurgency, which started in 1948 and which was winning by 1950, was brought under control – smaller ops; securing the minorities; building a Malayan Army; organising elections; and promising independence. He fails to mention neither the Malayan Special Branch’s relaxed attitude to the muscular interrogation of suspects nor its indifference to assassination as an operational tool, perhaps other features the campaigns have in common.

But then, blithely and utterly without irony, Lowry finished his analogy with this sentence, the sheer import of which seems to have escaped him:

“Slowly, the air went out of the insurgency, which was officially declared over in 1960, 12 years after it began”.

It looks like the neoconservatives have the patience for a very long haul in Iraq, a very long haul indeed. Lowry should ask himself if his beliefs merit inflicting 12 years of body bags on America for the purposes of ending an insurgency in somebody else’s country, made possible by those who share those beliefs.

Because these are the reasons why Lowry’s analogy is totally wrong. Malaya was sovereign British territory; the insurgency was a threat to an already established colonial government to which the majority of Malayans were willing to show loyalty. Iraq was not American territory; the insurgency is only there because the neos insisted American troops had to go there. In Malaya, the insurgents were not fighting a force widely believed to be occupiers; in Iraq, the insurgents are. The Malayan insurgency did not appeal to the patriotism of most Malayans, based as it was on ethnic lines; the Iraqi insurgency might just appeal to the patriotism of some Iraqis, citizens of a nation independent for decades. And that’s even without mentioning the absence of any religious ideology on the part of the Malayan insurgents, unlike the current batch of Iraqi neck-smiters, souped up on petrodollar Wahhabism.

The whole analogy is dud. It’s a pity that the worldview Rich Lowry enjoys from his ivory tower doesn’t let him see it.

And by the way, Rich, over the course of the last 40 years there have been at least four IRA’s - the Official; the Provisional; the Continuity; and the Real. Make sure you know which one you’re talking about next time. For other readers, he was referring to the Provisional.

The Lost Continent

2006-03-24T21:31:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 20, 2005

The sins of the neoconservatives are hard to count. To use the words of the old Church, they are hardened in sin, so steeped in the values of aggression, denunciation, intolerance, imperialism, pecculence, propaganda and torture that the immediate future of America under its current ruling class seems very bleak indeed.

However, of all the enemies the neos have made, there is perhaps just one that deserves their scorn – the European Union. Their opposition, of course, does not stem from wholesome reasons; like the UN, it sees it as a rival for international influence.

The European Union is a de facto empire, its governors, the members of the European Commission, de facto satraps who wield almost unlimited and accountable power over the private lives and commercial affairs of nearly 500 million people. Its values are just as bankrupt as those concocted in the mental hellbroth of the American Enterprise Institute but the very fact of its existence holds great appeal for a great many continental Europeans, on an almost atavistic level.

Although the people of continental Europe are extremely committed nationalists, most of them share one principal common memory; that of being conquered people. Whether the conqueror was Rome, Charlemagne, Spain, the Ottomans, Napoleon, the Hapsburgs or the Third Reich, at some point or other in their histories your average continental people will have been occupied at least once, some, like the Dutch, the Serbs and the Poles, several times. The history of the Third Reich shows that just as occupation was righteously opposed by some it was warmly welcomed by others, and it is perhaps this feeling of being able to abdicate responsibility for your own affairs that occupation can bring that makes the secular pan-European dream so dangerously attractive.

However, the limit of the European experiment has been reached – Brussels has just lifted its arms embargo on weapons sales to the Chinese.

Sino-EU relations are advanced – one of the greatest threats to US security comes not from the dastardly goatherders of Fallujah, but from the ‘Galileo’ project. ‘Galileo’ is a Sino-EU joint venture to develop a satellite-based positioning system to rival GPS, using frequencies very similar to those of America’s spies in the sky. The Chinese have almost unlimited ambitions in space, and such projects as these only underline their desire not just to compete with, but to rival, the USA.

One has to wonder what the Chinese have to gain by buying weapons. They are already a nuclear power, the most populous and one of the most advanced countries in their region. They have no predators – there is no invader they could not repel. The only reason they could have for wanting to buy more guns is to improve the ones they already have, to better equip the agents of an already murderous state become even more efficient killers. If they want to improve their guns, one can only wonder against whom they would want to use them.

The greatest irony, of course, is that while the State Department may protest as much as it likes, the White House will continue with the ruinous economics of international free trade, which really means that the American people are financing Chinese armaments by continuing to accept the decline of America’s own manufacturing sector for the sake of what Pat Buchanan has called ‘all that junk at the mall’.

There is much hidden suffering on the continent of Europe, not least of all amongst its young women. One by-product of the end of the Cold War and the descent of Russian public life into turf wars between corporate and corporatised crime gangs has been an increase in what used to rather quaintly be called ‘white slavery’, or the trafficking and sale of females for the purposes of prostitution. Every year, thousands of young women make their way from East to West in the hope of a better life, only to find themselves trapped in the clutches of compatriot pimps.

This is not a civilised place – leastwise, not any more.

NeoConservatism and Appeasement

2006-03-24T21:29:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 14, 2005

The Iraq Survey Group’s announcement that there were no weapons of mass destruction in that country should sound the death-knell for neoconservatism.

It won’t. However, the announcement does have one significant consequence for the ongoing foreign military presence there.

It makes it illegal.

The invasion of Iraq could be justified at the time on the thin basis that it was necessary in order to enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1441. However, 1441 was passed on the assumption that Saddam had or was developing WMD. If there were no WMD, there was no justification for enforcement. If there was no justification for enforcement, there was no legal basis for war. If there was no legal basis for war, there is none for occupation.

Accordingly, the belated recognition that the invasion of Iraq was legally motiveless could make Blair, Bush, their cabinets, their staffers and their aides all liable for prosecution for crimes against peace. The Sons Of The Desert Go Up The River? Not likely, although careless GI’s and squaddies remain indictable for war crimes allegedly committed in the heat of battle.

Last October, I wrote an article for ‘The Washington Dispatch’ called
'How the Neocons Will Kill the GOP'. The scandal surrounding Armstrong Williams provides proof for this hypothesis, if any more were necessary. However, Williamsgate is also proof of the depth to which neoconservatism has embedded its ideology within the Republicans. It is like any other ideology, a series of abstracts that need power in order to become reality. Without power, the ideologue is a cipher - he is personally unfulfilled, and in turn this inner emptiness leads to the development of the ideologue’s defining behavioural characteristics; rage, violence and bad judgment.

All ideologies are doomed to fail. They proceed on the assumption that everything, human behaviour, economics, their own flaws and failings, can be explained away in terms of their ideology. This inevitably leads to the infliction of human suffering. German National Socialism preached that the Germans were a master race and that the Jews were inferior - so the Jews had to go. Soviet Communism preached that the Soviet state was perfect; any who dissented from that view must be mad; therefore dissidents should be institutionalised. Neoconservatism speaks of ‘benevolent American hegemony’, which should be funded by the world’s most powerful economy, now being bankrupted in the process.

No ideology has ever benefited anyone other than its promoters. Williams was an ideologue for ‘No Child Left Behind’. One of the odder aspects of the scandal is not that he took the money, but that all the criticism from conservative commentators is being directed at him - not a word against the Bush Administration, a Republican administration, for offering it to him! Williams is the keeper of his own conscience, but that it should be offered in the first place sheds much welcome light on the ideological ethics of a White House led by George W. Bush. Somebody and their superior thought that the ideological agenda was so important that it justified an act of deceit on the American public.

Given the ISG’s announcement and Williamsgate, one wonders if this is going to be a very difficult second term for Bush, and whether more of these deceptions will come to light. And all for a series of abstracts which, once made real, are inevitably doomed to failure.

But ideologues can’t see that. They can only see the advancement of the agenda. They will do or say anything to justify its advancement, and when all else fails, will seek to undermine and slur those who aren’t with the program. One of their favourite slurs is to describe those who refuse the Kristol meth as ‘appeasers’. This tactic raised its head in the wake of the 2004 Spanish general election, to the shame of David Limbaugh, Bill Murchison, George Will, Tony Blankley, Debra Saunders and Chuck Colson.

However, neoconservatism’s last weapon of choice for the destruction of credibility is to call its opponents anti-Semitic. One very much doubts that my editor would permit such sentiment on his pages, but should some readers have any doubts about me or my beliefs, 18 months ago I wrote a column for ‘The Washington Dispatch’ called 'A Policy of Contradictions', which made the point that the White House was wrong to criticise the Israelis for launching rocket attacks against Hamas when it did precisely the same thing against Saddam on the first night of the war.

The cry of ‘appeasement’ could be heard again on January 12, in an article by Israeli journalist P. David Hornik in ‘The American Spectator on the Web’ called ‘The Wages of Appeasement’. According to Mr. Hornik, in March 1938, Germany was the ‘beneficiary…of British appeasement’.

Neville Chamberlain sure gets a bad press from the neos. The name of the other Prime Minister who followed the same policy, the Conservative Stanley Baldwin, seems absent from the curriculum of Neoconservatism 101. All those neos who slur the name of Chamberlain forget several critical facts.

Firstly, with the exception of Gibraltar, the United Kingdom has had no direct territorial interest in any part of continental Europe since the 17th Century; more bluntly, we had no direct domestic interest in German affairs.

Secondly, at the time of Munich, the memory of the carnage of World War One was still very fresh in the minds of the British and French people, and that memory had bred a deep horror of war. This was completely understandable in towns like Accrington, Lancashire, which lost 800 men in one day on the Western Front.

Thirdly, the conditions in Germany that gave rise to Hitler included the financial chaos of the ‘20’s and early ‘30’s, for which Woodrow Wilson’s Versailles Treaty, with its demands for impossible reparations, had been partly responsible.

Fourthly, Chamberlain did not flinch from leading the UK into war to honour its alliance with Poland and all her people.

But the neos don’t see any of that. They do not see and are not interested in any of the other factors working on Chamberlain at Munich, and do not judge him accordingly; instead, like the propagandists they are, all they see was a perceived victory for Hitler.

They are unforgiving historians.

After recounting his parents’ flight fromVienna to New York City after the Anschluss and the genocide of other relations in the Shoah, Mr. Hornik proceeds on to the Oslo Accords. His statement that Yasser Arafat was ‘a thuggish individual with a history of murderous brutality’ gets full agreement from this quarter. However, he says

‘The reason I’m still alive is that this time the Jewish community under attack is armed and has some ability to defend itself’.

Equating the Jewish community with an Israeli state that has internationally recognised borders and jurisdiction over its own affairs is hyperbole; likening one of the world’s largest, best-equipped, most sophisticated and most experienced militaries with a raggedy band of partisans does them a great disservice; but even with the human resources that our common enemy, Islamism, is able to summon it’s hard to divine which countries or organisations possess the strength that would be required to undermine the Israeli state.

The weakness of Israel’s opponents is not enough for Mr. Hornik. He asks the question,

‘Why are some democratic leaders prone to appeasement? Some – like Chamberlain, Carter or Peres – are appeasers at heart’

The very fact that Shimon Peres has, in the past, been democratically elected by other Israelis to represent their best interests in both peace and war, and is now part of the government again, means nothing to Mr. Hornik.

He then makes the observation,

‘If democracy is incorrigibly prone to appeasement, a dysfunctional act that results again and again in war and mass bloodshed, then democracy’s ultimate value as a way of life has to be questioned’.

Many hundreds of thousands of his fellow Israelis would recoil in horror from that sentence, since their democracy is so precious to them and so successful that it has never been subverted in their country’s history, even under the most difficult circumstances. He does a great disservice to all his fellow citizens who have died to preserve Israeli sovereignty and democracy and who have held opinions diametrically opposed to his own.

It would also be interesting to know whether Mr. Hornik considers such Israelis ‘unpatriotic’, another favourite neoconservative slur.

Like the inability of Saddam to build a delivery system that would have enabled an attack on the USA, no country or organisation in the Middle East has the ability to launch a substantial attack on Israel or seriously undermine its security.

Israel, therefore, has no opponents worth appeasing.

The Internet age has broken down the ability of governments and persons to control the supply of information forever. The one piece of information about the neoconservatives which every citizen everywhere should know is the existence of a 1996 policy document called ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’.

‘A Clean Break’ was written in 1996 by three American arch-neoconservatives, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, for the Likud Party of Israel, then led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, no dove himself, rejected it. It suggested that the security of Israel could only be guaranteed by the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam. When Bush came to power, Perle was appointed Chairman of the Pentagon Defence Policy Board, Feith to the Pentagon and Wurmser to the staff of the Vice-President. The tragedy of 9/11 gave these men and their ideological fellow travellers the opportunity to prove that they were more Likudnik than Likud.

There would be no appeasing them. Ask the Iraqis about appeasement. As far as they are concerned, who was it that could not be appeased? Who have unleashed horrors just as bad as those of Saddam? The Iraqis had no WMD; they posed no serious threat.

It is possible that historians of the future will look back on the summer and autumn of 2002 and equate the actions of the neoconservatives with those of Hitler in the run-up to Munich and after.

They will say that it was the neoconservatives, who have now been proven to be the unjustified aggressors in this bloody and unjustified Iraq war, who could not be appeased. Their unappeasable determination to go to war was the proof of neoconservatism’s true nature.

That it is fascism.

A Night at the Opera

2006-03-24T21:24:00.000Z

(Note - after this piece was published, I received an e-mail purporting to be from David Soul. In subsequent debate, my e-mailer proved to be the most tenacious opponent I have ever had. If it did come from Mr. Soul, then he's a man worthy of respect, because he never gave up on what he believed in; and showbusiness's gain was politics' loss.)

Commentary by Martin Kelly

January 13, 2005

The flawed hero is a staple of high, and sometimes low, drama. There are few sites more tragic than seeing a very capable, talented and intelligent man, a man with much to offer, make choices so bad that he becomes a caricature of what he could have become, thus diminishing all that he has previously achieved.

Sounds like the stuff of opera.

On January 8, BBC Television broadcast ‘Jerry Springer the Opera’, a decision that has generated a controversy worthy of an opera itself.

The piece started life as a 2001 workshop on opera writing at London’s Battersea Arts Centre. It was performed to great acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival, where it received the imprimatur of its subject, before transferring to the National Theatre and thence to the Cambridge Theatre in London’s West End, where it has been a smash.

It is very rare for a work still being performed in London to be broadcast during its run. The BBC’s motives for doing so are opaque, to say the least.

Springer’s TV show is so bad that it’s easy to forget his other real achievements, becoming Mayor of Cincinnati in his early ‘30’s and winning seven Emmy Awards for his serious journalism. There is no doubt that he is a man of great ability, which, like the Emperor Tiberius, has relatively late in life been directed towards the exultation of the base. It is sad that Springer will some day only be remembered for that garbage talk show when it is by far the least of his achievements.

The same can be said of the man portraying him on stage, David Soul. It’s easy to forget that Soul was once not only one of the world’s biggest TV stars, but at the same time he was also one of its most successful recording artistes. The man whose talent burst on to the screen as a chillingly vicious vigilante in ‘Magnum Force’ has made his home in the UK for the last several years, after overcoming well-documented personal problems, but he’d better be careful because if this is the best gig he can get he’ll end his career opening supermarkets in Clacton-on-Sea.

The language used in this piece is foul. This is perhaps not surprising – after all, it’s based on the Jerry Springer show- but it was too much even for my hardened Glaswegian ears. It would be too much even for HBO or Fox. The first act is a straight pastiche of an episode of the show, and ends with, I kid you not, a troupe of tap dancers dressed up as the KKK. ‘Springtime for Hitler’ has nothing on this.

However, it is the second act that has been the focus of controversy. The character of Springer descends into Hell and is called upon by Satan to hold a show for him. I didn’t hang around for that, but it is reported to contain imagery of God the Father, Our Lord and Our Lady that, in the language of the BBC, ‘some viewers may find offensive’.

Why would the BBC be broadcasting a show that’s in the middle of its run? In my recollection there has never been another instance of a West End show being broadcast while theatre staff are still taking bookings for it at the box-office. There must be something about this show setting it apart from all others currently running that has made the BBC feel it is worthy of broadcast. The only things that make it different from other West End shows are, firstly, it’s a pastiche on the career of a major TV celebrity of minor cultural worth, and secondly, it contains offensive anti- Christian religious imagery.

You decide.

For several days beforehand, the UK’s evangelicals were picketing the BBC and burning their TV licenses. It was not reported whether any of them had ever picketed the Cambridge Theatre. However, the newspapers the following day reported that some BBC executives had received threats which had resulted in them calling in security guards or leaving their homes altogether. There is no reason to believe that these claims are false.

In December, a play written by a Sikh, which portrayed a rape in a Sikh temple, was closed when a Sikh mob stormed the theatre in Birmingham where it was being performed. There has been much wringing of hands over this incident, but if one criticises those whose religious beliefs lead them to close down a theatre as part of a mob, then one must also criticise those who call themselves ‘Christian’ who threaten TV executives because they plan a broadcast that might be offensive. The fact that the executives are in the wrong in no way justifies thuggery.

There wasn’t much else better on the other channels. BBC Scotland was showing one of the occasional travelogues that Billy Connolly films when he’s on tour, this time from New Zealand. They all follow the same pattern – Billy goes whale watching (‘This is magic! This is brilliant! I love this!’); Billy goes to a Maori gathering (‘This is magic! This is brilliant! I love this!’), et cetera, all interspersed with footage of his stage show.

Billy Connolly can be a very funny man. However, he is foul-mouthed, his humour is largely scatological, the format of his shows lets him hold forth on his own anti-religious beliefs and all these qualities they have all been on display for the benefit of viewers of BBC Scotland, at their own expense.

Not much difference from one side to the other, none of it funny and all of it farce.

Outsourcing Treatment for Veterans of Iraq

2006-03-24T21:23:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 11, 2005

The corporate culture of outsourcing that very possibly led to Abu Ghraib is still alive and well in the Pentagon.

It’s their addiction.

On January 9, Liam McDougall of the ‘Sunday Herald’ reported that GI’s who have fallen into substance abuse as a result of trauma endured while serving in Iraq are being treated at Castle Craig, an up-market Scottish drying-out clinic. The unit has apparently won a large contract to treat military addicts. The cost of each serviceman’s treatment, approximately $2800 per week, is being borne by Tricare. McDougall reported the chairman of Castle Craig, Peter McCann, as saying,

‘We can have up to about four at any one time, but there’s a continuous stream of them coming in. There has been a step up in the numbers since Iraq. We see about 40 a year’.

It was surely bad enough to have one of the state’s most sensitive functions, the interrogation of prisoners, be conducted by civilian ‘contractors’, as is alleged to have happened at Abu Ghraib. However, the soldiers being treated at Castle Craig deserve rather more from the Pentagon who sent them into harms’ way, thereby exposing them to the conditions that have triggered their deterioration.

Also, Peter McCann’s comment raises as many questions as it answers. For how long has the Pentagon been outsourcing the care of its most vulnerable personnel? How many other centres like Castle Craig are used across the world? How many other types of medical treatment are being carried out on US service personnel by the private sector? What is the Pentagon’s total bill for private military treatment? How many personnel have been and are being treated under this regime? And, specifically, since the instigation of hostilities in Iraq? And what has been the concomitant increase in spending on such programs over the last two years?

It is easy to despise those who fall into substance abuse, or who suffer mental collapse because of trauma. In World War One, many British soldiers suffering from shell shock were shot at dawn as cowards, a stain that successive governments have refused to wipe away. A cursory glance at any statistics on suicide will show that the group most likely to kill themselves are young adult males, obviously also the group most likely to fight in any war. Young male soldiers are therefore doubly at risk of trauma not only because they are soldiers; but also perhaps just because they are male.

For decades, the US military has used the principles of overwhelming firepower and force protection to minimise casualties, so GI’s did not have to go ‘over the top’, like doughboys on the Western Front. But despite the advances in military engineering and military science that have made the USA unbeatable in open combat, so, too, there have been two other massive changes in conditions that now seem to have rendered these philosophies ineffective.

Firstly, the culture from which soldiers are recruited has changed; the GI of today comes from the world of easy consumption and MTV, a different world from that which existed when the doctrines were first expounded. Although they are just as tough as their predecessors who fought in Korea and Vietnam, their attitude to warfare will have been shaped by the images with which they have been surrounded all their lives – no previous generation of soldiers has been exposed to so many violent images almost from the cradle. As in so many things, the problem arises when perception meets reality.

Secondly, as William S. Lind has tirelessly argued in these pages, the nature of the warfare US troops are expected to conduct in Iraq is different from that for which they are trained and equipped to fight. These young men and women are doubly stressed by having to engage their opponents in situations where the neck-smiters, heavenly virgin-chasers and Ba’athist dead-enders seem consistently to have the tactical upper hand.

Given these circumstances, it’s perhaps not surprising that PTSD and its bedfellow, substance abuse, should be on the rise among those who have had to fight the battle.

This issue goes directly to the heart of the relationship between the state and its citizen volunteers. Although the USA does more for its service personnel than any other nation, it is still wrong that a citizen in service who suffers any kind of battlefield injury or trauma should be treated by an agency other than that responsible for its infliction – ultimately, the agency that sent the injury’s recipient into danger.

One cannot believe that with all its resources, the Pentagon is not able to perform these duties in-house. Obviously, the DoD is subject to budgetary controls; its budget is massive, but it still has to be managed. It is impossible to believe that there are no additional resources that could be made available for these men and women from the current budget.

One is sure that the treatment they receive at Castle Craig is excellent – if it were otherwise, one would hope the US military would have nothing to do with it, and one is sure that high standards are enforced in every private sector hospital or treatment unit entrusted with the health of American soldiers, wherever it is in the world. But that is not the issue: what is despicable about this is that it is a different expression of the same Bush mentality that bans pictures of returning caskets. The war he started has had casualties, even casualties with conditions the discussion of which may be taboo, at least around him. The fact that he may not want to discuss substance abuse means nothing when his war has helped make it a reality for many others.

Shunting off young men and women to a drying-out house in Scotland is not how a commander should lead his troops.

The Empire of Croesus

2006-03-24T21:21:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly

January 10, 2005

Herodotus, the first historian, recorded that an oracle told Croesus, King of Lydia, that he would destroy an empire.

By the time he received the prophecy, Croesus was the greatest emperor in the world. He had conquered all in his path, and his name is still a byword for unimaginable wealth.

He was overjoyed at the news.

Croesus has many descendants.

Like Croesus, the neoconservatives are aggressive and militaristic. They revel in the suffering of those they deem their enemies, such as the Iraqi civilians abused and degraded by the sadists of Abu Ghraib. It will be hard to see how any WHAM team will assuage the injuries suffered by those men, or of the residents of Fallujah who now suffer the indignity of fingerprinting and retinal scanning in order to enjoy the privilege of living in what remains of their own homes.

What the neos did in Fallujah is not just a scandal, it’s a sin. In order to find an enemy to fight, almost all the people of Fallujah suffered because of the desire of some Clean Break Gang policy wonk like Douglas Feith to make a show of strength that was bound to fail, given their opponents’ apparent sophistication. You mean, dude, like, the jihadists actually read books and study history?

Like Croesus, they are addicted to wealth. Many of them use fine slogans like ‘loss of blood and treasure’ to justify the damage they do, when their hearts are full of lies and dreams of plunder. There is no moral, practical or economic difference between single-bid reconstruction contracts awarded by Washington to be paid by the Iraqis and demands for tribute made by conquerors upon the conquered. Like the ghouls they are, the neos have stolen the heart of American conservatism and distorted what the noble word ‘conservative’ means. This ranks among their worst acts – those of us who live in countries without conservative movements look on in horror at what they are doing to one of man’s greatest projects of the last 60 years.

No true conservative forces aggressive war on another nation. The principal aim of Ronald Reagan, the greatest conservative, was the maintenance and spread of peace, even if the only way of securing peace was through deterrence. The bellicosity of the neos gives the lie to all their boasts about being the heirs of Ronald Reagan.

But soon the Iraqis will be rejoicing – their neoconservative masters will permit them the luxury of a vote. It will not, of course, be a universal vote, but at best a 78% vote, which will in all likelihood lead to the establishment of an Islamic theocracy and the ultimate break-up of that state. A country that was previously quite happy to be one and whole will be torn asunder and friends will turn on each other for no reason other than a person thousands of miles away has willed that it shall be so.

Many rightly baulk at the idea of ‘American Empire’. However, there can be no escape from the conclusion that what has been forced on the Iraqis for two years is most certainly a neoconservative empire, which like all empires is doomed to fall.

The words of the oracle gave Croesus hope. He marched off to war against the Persians, and his armies were annihilated.

The empire that the oracle told Croesus he would destroy would be his own.

On Bears and Vipers

2006-03-24T21:20:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
January 4, 2005

Bear baiting is one of the most disgusting and inhumane sports still practiced by man.

Given their own cruelty’s bottomless depths, it’s perhaps no surprise it’s one of the neoconservatives’ favourites.

Their version has two expressions. Although it’s hard to believe, the first has the potential to lead to a foreign policy catastrophe far more dangerous than the shambles they have visited on the Middle East.

The neos are all nice and happy now that democracy has won over tyranny in Ukraine. The truth is that, in that country, democracy has only won unless one believes that democracy and neoconservatism are identical – that it’s a democracy if your guy wins, by any means necessary.

As Justin Raimondo, Srjda Trifkovic and others have assiduously reported, the backing given by neoconservatives and other western interests to the campaign of the improbably poisoned Victor Yushchenko is at least as great as that given by Vladimir Putin to Victor Yanukovych. If he does it, it’s bad – so why is it good when we do it?

Generations of Russians grew up under the threat of MAD just as surely as generations of westerners – did we think that their memories of it would just vanish while ours would remain? What do they think when they see NATO bases in Turkey, Afghanistan and Central Asia? When there are unnecessary NATO airbases in the Baltic Republics?

What are they to think when the read editorials with titles like ‘Look back at Weimar – and start to worry about Russia’, such as that which appeared in the January 1 ‘Daily Telegraph’? The piece, written by Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard, describes Russia as being on the path to dictatorship. Ferguson, a Scottish Thatcherite to his core, misses the one respect in which Weimar Germany and modern Russia are almost identical, that both countries’ people had and have cause to resent foreign interference in their economic life; in Germany’s case, the burden of reparations placed upon them by the Versailles Treaty, in Russia’s, the demands from outside that they continue with the absurd caricature of liberal capitalism that led to its people being beggared by the thief caste of oligarchs.

Vladimir Putin is the democratically elected President of Russia. In all likelihood, he’s not a nice guy – but he’s their guy; they elected him. The consistent application of pressure on Putin to do what we want is entirely counter-productive and the greatest real danger to world peace that could ever be concocted by the madmen of the American Enterprise Institute and Freedom House.

Lest we forget, he has nukes.

The second bear they love forcing to dance is the American economy. As long as the boardrooms are doing all right, the neos couldn’t care less, but the year 2005 should be a time of great prosperity; instead, it opens with massive economic uncertainty, which is all the fault of one man, their hero, George W. Bush. If there is a crash in 2005, it will be the worst ever, simply because, unlike other crashes or depressions, right now the whole deck, the federal budget deficit, the massive trade deficit, the weak dollar and the cost of war, is stacked against America.

George W. Bush has not shown himself adept at much in the last two years. His record this year could determine if the historians of the future describe him as the worst president ever.

In the midst of all this, the neoconservative vipers clamour for more action, more bloodshed, more enemies to fight, most likely Iran, a country against which no action could be taken without a draft. Possibly one of the most significant portents of impending trouble for this Presidency appeared in the January 2 ‘Sunday Telegraph’.

It described the Canadian-born rabid neoconservative David Frum as ‘a close political ally’ of the President.

In a quote that described him as ‘a prominent Republican’ (memo to the late Dutch Reagan – Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?) Frum took the UN to task about its ‘poor management record’ and in one sentence caught the very essence of neoconservatism: ‘We are not arguing about money, we are arguing about control’. Vladimir Putin couldn’t have put it better.

Along with Hollinger International’s faithless fiduciary Richard Perle, the Yale and Harvard educated Frum co-authored the neoconservative tract ‘An End To Evil’, describing how American forces would sweep through the Middle East to conquer the evil of terrorism – as the late English comedian Tommy Cooper used to say, just like that. The Reader’s Digest Resident Fellow at AEI and a former Senior Fellow at Myron Magnet’s Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research, Frum has been at various times an editor at the ‘Wall Street Journal’, a columnist for Canada’s ‘National Post’, a contributing editor to the ‘Weekly Standard’ and former Bush speechwriter who may or may not have coined the phrase ‘Axis of Evil’ and who now stands guard over the ideological purity of Rich Lowry’s ‘National Review Online’.

By his own admission, his conservatism is unorthodox, for example, he holds pro-choice beliefs (Frum, ‘Births and Deaths’, NRO, 11/6/2003). However, while Fallujah burned, and US troops were engaged in house to house combat fulfilling a Middle Eastern policy of which he had been one of the principal advocates, Frum showed his respect for those troops in a slightly unusual manner.

He took his son to a football game, specifically the Grey Cup, apparently one the highlights of the Canadian Football League season (Frum, ‘Dateline Ottawa’, NRO, 11/22/2004).

Alternatively described as ‘the country’s most obnoxious, self-aggrandizing conservative pundit’ (Smith, ‘America’s Most Obnoxious Conservative’, New Partisan, 12/15/2004) and a ‘cheap Canadian careerist’ (Taki, ‘The Bum Frum’, The American Conservative, 4/21/2003), the alleged sins of David Frum include being a hatchet man (Frum, ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ NRO, 3/19/2003); of being a liar (Fleming et al, ‘The Lies of David Frum’, Chronicles Extra, 3/21/2003); of being a braggart (Engel, ‘Proud wife turns axis of evil speech into a resignation letter’ Guardian Unlimited, 2/27/2002; Noah, ‘David Frum: On Second Thought, I Didn’t Coin “Axis Of Evil”, Slate, 2/26/2002): of being an anti-homosexual bigot and yellow journalist (Frum, ‘Manslaughter’, NRO, 6/10/2004: Frum, ‘A Terrorist At Twilight’, Front Page Magazine, 4/11/2004): and of being a well-heeled thug (Novak, ‘Axis of Ego’, The American Conservative, 3/24/2003).

We live in days of bears and vipers. Happy New Year.

A Christmas Carol for NeoCons

2006-03-24T21:18:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
December 29, 2004

It was very late on Christmas Eve, almost midnight, when the bell tolled for George Ebenezer Bush. But as he lay awake, well past his bedtime, the knocking at his door grew louder and louder.

‘Who is there? What fell spirit has come to disturb me?’ he cried out. Then, as the door opened, he saw the ghost.

It was tall and thin, with small round glasses and a goatee beard. Tied to its body were some domestic dustbins, on each of which was scorched the word ‘History’. Around its neck was an anvil on which was written ‘I am the Father of the Red Army’. On its head was perched a sombrero, through which protruded the handle of an ice pick.

Its hands were dripping with blood.

Ebenezer gasped. ‘You are the ghost of Leon Trotsky! What do you want with me?’

‘Tonight’, said Trotsky, ‘you will be visited by three ghosts. They will show you what was, what is and what is to come, so you may know the error of what I taught you’. In a flash, the ghost was gone.

At first Ebenezer was stunned. ‘Ah’, he thought, ‘it is just a lumpy piece of gruel that has disturbed my digestion. Better outsource the cook.’ He slept fitfully, until he heard another knock at the door.

‘Who is there?’ he said. And when it spoke, he knew whose ghost it was, for during his life the ghost had called them the most frightening words in the world.

‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’.

And Ebenezer knew it was the Ghost of Christmas Past.

He was shown his previous Christmases; that one in Tijuana had been even better than he had remembered! But then he saw the path his life had taken; innocence lost; the gradual hardening of his heart; until he had reached the stage where he had been happy not just to promote, but become finally responsible for, the execution of the politics of neoconservatism. It had all seemed so bold and purposeful once; now, he could see it was all just lies and broken promises….

The Ghost turned to him and said, ‘Ebenezer, you once called yourself a ‘compassionate conservative’. Where is the compassion in your heart now?’

He woke up with a start. ‘What a terrible dream’, he thought. Then came another knock. He was petrified.

‘Who is there?’ he asked.

‘I come so that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth’.

The Ghost of Christmas Present showed him the whole of the great Republic as it prepared for Christmas. He saw it all, from the mountains to the prairies, stockings being hung up in homesteads, childish notes being left under Christmas trees, even in poor homes – there seemed so many of them! As he grew tired, the Ghost took him to a party.

It was high on Fifth Avenue, a gathering of new and old money, the new looking garish and sounding boastful, the old staying quiet, looking ashamed. He could hear one new money boasting, ‘I shaved 5 per cent off operating costs by closing the factory in Cleveland and re-opening in China. Man, I bought a new yacht with that money!’ Another said, ‘Just between us, we wouldn’t be doing half as well as we are if it weren’t for the illegals. They work for next to nothing, they never call in sick and if they cause trouble, like, the INS is just a phone call away.’

Ebenezer felt sick listening to them. But what a third one said chilled his heart.

‘Good old Ebenezer! The lower the dollar goes, the more I’ll make hedging against it! Only in America!’

‘Please’, begged Ebenezer,’ let us leave this place, these people – they disgust me!’

‘Ebenezer’ said the Ghost, very quietly, ‘these are the people you called ‘your base’. And in a second they were gone.

They were standing in a diner in Cleveland, Ohio. The waitress behind the counter looked beat. A young family were in the corner, a mother, father and two small daughters, trying to be happy. It was clearly their Christmas dinner.

‘This man’, said the Ghost, ‘lost his job when that factory owner sent it to China. He voted for you, you know, but he hasn’t been able to find another job since – something about being underskilled.’

The Ghost turned round on him and glared at him in fury. ‘Was it for this, Ebenezer, that your countrymen spilled each others’ blood at Shiloh and Gettysburg? Did I gamble the very future of our Republic - for this?’

Ebenezer woke again, shaking with fear. He waited and waited for the knock.

‘Wh-who is there?’ stumbled Ebenezer.

‘I cannot tell a lie. I am the Ghost of Christmas Future’.

In a second, Ebenezer was whirling through time and space. It lasted but a moment, and Ebenezer found himself far away from home. He was in another country.

It was a dry, hot land, and everything was still. There was no sign of life, until a small, bundled shape emerged from a doorway and moved towards him.

‘What is that?’ said Ebenezer, terrified.

‘Don’t you know, Ebenezer? That is a woman.’

‘But why is she dressed in such heavy clothing? Does she not suffer from the heat?’

‘When you were President, Ebenezer, you invaded Iraq. It was the Iraqis who bore the brunt of the suffering at the time. But you did something to perpetuate their suffering after we Americans finally went home’.

‘What did I do?' said Ebenezer, aghast. ‘This night has taught me that I have sinned, and will do anything to repent, but what did I do?’

The voice of the Ghost was grave. He was tall and stern, his face marked by the cares of having been the first leader of his great nation.

‘You endorsed a constitution for Iraq that included Islamic Sharia law as a source. Because of your actions, the people of Iraq now have no freedom. Their journey has ended in the opposite direction to the one my brothers and I started in 1776 – tell me, Ebenezer, were we more enlightened than you? You live in a great land of plenty, where none need ever want – but did we know more of liberty than you?’

And then Ebenezer saw Sharia justice.

He screamed.

He awoke. It was dawn outside. Ebenezer immediately reformed, becoming the kindest man in the neighbourhood, and they said no man ever enjoyed Christmas more.

God bless us, every one. May you all have a happy and peaceful holiday season.

The Moral Bankruptcy of Tony Blair

2006-03-24T21:16:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
December 20, 2004

Tony Blair is morally bankrupt.

In order to take the United Kingdom into the Iraq war, he would have required to give Her Majesty the Queen false intelligence at their weekly briefing.

As someone who once revelled in the title ‘neoconservative’, I now think that both Blair and Bush knew that it was false before they started this adventure.

It takes real nerve to lie to a monarch, even a toothless one like Elizabeth II. But you have to be morally bankrupt to lie to a 77-year old woman about wars being proposed in her name.

His government has been shown to be a foul nest of chancers, time and time again. The culture of any organisation is dictated by its leadership; when it is so thoroughly morally bankrupt as Blair’s, there is only one reasonable conclusion to draw; that it is a moral bankruptcy that has duplicated from the head down.

The office he holds is barred to Roman Catholics – the Act of Settlement is still in force. Blair is married to a Catholic, he worships in a Catholic church, and every once in a while there are rumours that he is planning to convert away from Anglicanism. The last such rumour was in October.

Having married a Catholic, one assumes he has received sacramental marriage. One of the conditions of sacramental marriage being given to a mixed couple is that all children of the marriage must be raised as Catholics. When the last rumours were doing the rounds in October, the website of Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News carried a report saying that three of his four children have been baptised into the Church.

My guess is that it is his youngest child, Leo, aged four, that’s the odd one out.

Looks like a Prime Minister can sire papists before he enters Downing Street – but it’s a different story once they step behind the black door.

On December 14, David Lammy, the Minister for Constitutional Affairs, gave one of the worst parliamentary performances on record, when steering the Mental Capacity Bill through the House of Commons. The critical issue in the Bill was the status to be afforded to ‘living wills’; many were concerned that enforceable living wills could lead to euthanasia. The UK now has a permanently embedded class of affluent trash, who would have no hesitation in switching off their parents’ life support machines if it speeded up the distribution of their inheritances. Lammy repeatedly referred to ‘assurances’ given in ‘letters’ that had not been put before the House that it was not the government’s intention to use the Bill as means of introducing euthanasia by the back door. It later transpired that they were between Lammy’s boss Lord Falconer and the Catholic Archbishop of Cardiff. It was a performance of staggering ineptitude driven by the arrogance of moral bankruptcy.

Blair’s politics are best described as neoconservatism by proxy. His government scandals are neoconservative by proxy in nature - Bernard Kerik stood down over the immigration status of his nanny; Blair has lost one of his most dutiful retainers in a row over somebody else’s.

On December 15, David Blunkett, the authoritarian thug whom Blair had made Home Secretary, resigned. For the past three weeks the public life of a mature democracy has been stalled, in a time of war, because its Home Secretary has been engaged in a very public feud with his exotic former mistress.

As Leader of Sheffield City Council, Blunkett flew the red flag from the town hall. Bogus asylum-seekers are to be discouraged – it takes only the most hard-hearted to say that asylum-seekers’ children should be separated from their families and taken into care. Blunkett did. For three years Blunkett presided over the night and fog dungeon of London’s Belmarsh Prison, where terror suspects are held without trial for years, a detention policy declared illegal by our highest court the day after his resignation. His most recent initiative has been the introduction of compulsory identity cards, now endorsed by those ever undisciplined, unprincipled, unethical and unimpressive losers, the leadership of the Parliamentary Conservative Party

Several years ago, he commenced an affair with Kimberly Fortier Quinn, the Californian publisher of the scandal-mired ‘Spectator’. The affair started four months after Quinn’s wedding to another man. A child was born in 2002 – there is a presumption of paternity in her husband’s favour. She ended the affair several months ago, during a second pregnancy now nearing its end.

Since then, Blunkett has admitted giving Quinn a railway travel warrant intended for his own use, paid for by the taxpayer and worth about $360. He has resigned because it became clear that his private office had passed a residency application by Quinn’s nanny, Leoncia Casalme, to the immigration authorities, an action of which he had said he had no knowledge.

I practiced as a lawyer in Scotland for seven years, and the vast bulk of my practice was family law. I have never come across a litigant who has done what Blunkett has done, launching a paternity suit in respect of a child borne to a woman who, at the time of the child’s birth, was married to another man.

That is the morally bankrupt pathology of a stalker.

In his reply to Blunkett’s resignation letter, Blair described him as ‘a force for good in British politics’.

The most extreme form of parliamentary procedure is the Parliament Act, to be used for only the gravest business. In 2000, Blair used it to ensure that the homosexual age of consent was lowered from 18 to 16 – the act of a morally bankrupt man. He sits in a Catholic Church, surrounded by the message of life and does nothing to halt or slow down abortion.

On December 16, the foolish and stubborn Geoff Hoon, Secretary of State for Defence, made the Rumsfeldian announcement of regimental amalgamations and troop cuts, in a time of war. Hoon denied that these were cuts; instead, the role of the forces is being ‘redefined’.

In a land where the distribution of public resources is more important than private property, individual liberty and the rule of law, one can be sure that the imminent demise of Black Watch, the Royal Scots, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers’ and all the other regiments affected will ensure that some more resources are made available for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the first battalion of Her Majesty’s Abortionists.

Tony Blair is not fit to be Prime Minister. A man cannot be trusted with his country when he cannot be trusted with his infant child’s soul.

Big Blue Sells Out To The Reds

2006-03-24T21:15:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
December 16, 2004

In the year 2000, the UK’s automotive industry was worth $15.

This was the price paid for MG Rover, our last mass auto producer, by a consortium called Phoenix, consisting of four West Midlands businessmen.

One of MG Rover’s most famous models was the Mini Cooper, used by Michael Caine for his getaway in the original ‘Italian Job’. The Gang of Four have proved themselves to be a very capable Self Preservation Society, and announced a few weeks ago that they are negotiating the sale of part of their stake to Shanghai Automotive Industries; the last flight of the phoenix.

Last week, IBM sold its PC manufacturing arm to Lenovo, a partly state-owned Chinese business. Lenovo has paid IBM $1.75 billion, and IBM will retain a 19% stake in the merged corporation.

Big Blue has thus sold out to the Reds, it says in order to concentrate on its software and services businesses. However, for a company that would not exist had it not been founded in the only society where it could ever succeed, the USA, IBM’s decision to sell out to an agency of a government that detains without trial and forces abortions on its females is utterly beneath contempt.

One of the UK’s most insightful business commentators is Dominic Rushe of the ‘Sunday Times’. On December 12, Rushe, in an article co-written with David Smith called ‘Devoured by the Dragon’, reported that later this month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release a report outlining the relative differences between the average hourly wage costs of factory workers in the USA, UK and China.

The average hourly wage for a factory worker in the USA is $21.97. In the UK, the figure is $20.37.

In China, it’s 64 cents.

All hail the foundations of China’s economic miracle.

Rushe also reported on other acquisitions by Chinese corporations. The French electronics group Thomson has sold its manufacturing business to a Chinese TV manufacturer called TCL. China Netcom has paid $1 billion for one of Global Crossing’s businesses.

But getting a little piece of Big Blue is the real deal for these guys. The Chinese Communists have proven themselves to be the ultimate Thatcherite free-marketeers; the only thing that matters is making money. They do not care about the standard of living of their people; they do not care about frivolities such as civil liberties and human rights; instead, it’s all just ‘show me the money, baby’, and boardroom barracudas from Boston to Berkeley are more than happy to buy the labour of some wee Chinese lassie who’ll assemble their stuff, breathing in toxic gases and getting mercury on her skin, for an average wage of 64 cents an hour.

Of course, it’s not all going their way, something which, being Communists, they find very hard to handle. BBC News recently reported that there is a shortage of labour in the Pearl River Delta, Chinese manufacturing’s heartland of heartlands. A labour shortage in the world’s most populous nation may seem bizarre, but they’re 2 million workers short – they’ve opened too many factories, and the despised but indispensable migrant labour is now very much more choosy about where they wish to work. Don’t you just love the market in action!

They pay the same inflated petroleum prices as the rest of us – this boom is fuelled by imported energy. The oil price affects them as much as everyone else. The only thing giving them a competitive advantage is that 64 cents an hour.

Also, as previously reported, they’ve ripped up so much of their productive farmland to build factories that in several years time they will also be a net wheat importer. China may be the only country in the world ever to develop starving millionaires.

Some areas of public life in China are opening up, - in the same edition of the ‘Sunday Times’ that carried Dominic Rushe’s report, it was reported that a woman called Ma Weihua, a drugs mule, had undergone a forced abortion on the orders of Li Junyi, the commander of the drugs squad in the city of Lanzhou. According to the ‘Sunday Times’ it would seem this practice is not out of the ordinary. Ma’s case has become widely known through the determination of a newspaper called the ‘South China Weekend News’, maybe the first flowering of a free press.

It’s also been reported that the great excluded masses are not happy at seeing such wealth, and its associated lavish living (China is one of only two countries to which Davidoff exports its Millennium cigars, the other being the USA), in the midst of such poverty, and the October 17 ‘Sunday Times’ reported that there have been some violent protests.

But they won’t make very much difference. Before he went totally neo, the greatest advocate of why the West has succeeded was Victor Davis Hanson. Hanson, now reduced to mining Tolkien for analogies, used to say the West won because its traditions of democracy, free speech, free enquiry, open capital markets, gender equality, property rights and the rule of law created the ideal atmosphere in which progress could take place and thus enable entities like International Business Machines to come in to being and thrive. The management of IBM haven’t realised the debt they owe to history; and, instead of making the changes required for them to regain their dominance in PC manufacturing, have selected the easy option of selling out to a country that wants the products of these Western traditions, but not the traditions themselves. And which, both politically and commercially, wants to own everything in sight.

It can’t happen. And, in a fair and moral world, the top guys at Big Blue really should avoid paying themselves bonuses for selling off some of America’s best family silver.

The Fool's Gold of NeoConservatism

2006-03-24T21:13:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
December 14, 2004

I want to know where the neocons are putting their money. My guess is it’s going into gold.

A rise in the price of gold is still the surest sign of impending economic trouble, and for months the smart money has been buying the yellow stuff like there’s no tomorrow. Gold is the ultimate shelter fund; unlike the paper the US Treasury spews out with abandon, it never loses its value, and is the best means of protecting wealth in troubled times. According to Pat Buchanan, writing in ‘The American Conservative’, the price of gold has risen from $260 to at least $447 per troy ounce over the period of Bush’s administration. According to the December 12 ‘Sunday Times’, it could hit $500 before Christmas. One analyst, Ross Norman, has predicted a high of $575.

If one speculates on whether the price of gold will go to $575 per troy ounce, one has to consider the other conditions that would need to apply before it happens; a dollar in your pocket that is worthless; not tens of thousands but tens of millions unemployed; savings destroyed; mortgages destroyed; outright failure of the stock market; very possibly, acute civil disturbance, if not actual panic in the streets.

If the dollar continues to fall, the USA, and therefore the world, will be staring into the abyss of the worst recession in history, which historians of the future will record was totally avoidable had the President of the United States bothered to exercise a fraction of the fiscal discipline required of those who entrusted him with their government and their money. The neocons will always spout the crock that ‘Yeah, Reagan built up a budget deficit, so Bush is just doing what Reagan did, blah, blah,’ Yes, President Reagan did build up a budget deficit, but there are three critical differences between the Reagan budget deficit and the Bush budget deficit.

Firstly, Dutch took over running the government when it was within three months of going bust. He had to spend the money. Bush didn’t.

Secondly, at that time the USA was running a huge trade surplus with the rest of the world. American exports were still generating earnings. They’re not now – the trade deficit is, what, 6% of GDP? Then, there was money coming into the bank; now, it’s all going out.

Thirdly, Dutch was doing something productive with the money – he was opposing the Soviets! He was making America safer! What is Bush doing? Illegal immigration at a rate of 4,000 per day? That’s not making America safer. Cutting taxes in a time of war? That’s not making America safer. Not killing any bill that’s been put in front of him, something Dutch had no hesitation doing? That’s not making America safer. Putting perfectly productive Americans out of work and exporting their incomes to ensure American business stays ‘competitive’, a canard repeated by Irwin Stelzer, the arch-neocon and Rupert Murdoch’s Emissary on Earth, in his December 12 ‘American Account’ column? That’s not making America safer.

And since when did America need to ‘compete’ with anyone? You’re America, for God’s sake!

Dutch Reagan was the greatest economist ever to have sat in the Oval Office. That whirring noise you can hear coming from California is the sound of him spinning in his grave.

Many commentators have noted that if the dollar continues to fall, it will lose its status as the world’s reserve currency, the only one that’s good wherever you are. This is a distinct possibility, and unlike the few other occasions when the reserve currency has changed, as, for example, from pounds sterling to the dollar in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s, there is no alternative currency waiting to spring up and take the dollar’s place.

The consequences of a dollar collapse for the USA would be dreadful; for the rest of the world, it would be a catastrophe.

The outrageously careless economics of George W. Bush have been lauded by his neoconservative cheerleaders, who are happy to tell him only what he wants to hear, a practice best reserved for despots and potentates, not Presidents of the United States. The President does not seem inclined to deep thought or piercing insight; having a group of Machiavellian yes-men giving you economic and security ‘advice’ is not as hard as, say, maybe going to bed a little later in the evening, once all the necessary details of the job have been mastered.

The current condition of the American economy is as much a failure of ethics as of knowledge. The neocons have no concern that there is a broad gap between rich and poor, a new thing that is the consequence of embracing unbridled free markets and unrestricted international free trade. Instead, their economics are only those of naked self-interest. Some of the saner ones, like Bruce Bartlett, whose worship of the free market is probably the only thing keeping him a semi-detached neoconservative, are starting to get cold feet, and are saying out loud that a collapse in the dollar is on the cards if the current policy continues.

But the neos couldn’t care less – opportunity in adversity, right? If Wall Street tanks, there will be plenty of rich pickings for the private equity specialists like the Carlyle Group, one of whose directors is George H.W. Bush, to pick up. This mindset was beautifully expressed in the December 12 ‘Sunday Telegraph’ by Luke Johnson, a millionaire pizza salesman who happens to be the son of Tony Blair’s guru Paul Johnson, a former leftist firebrand turned bloated boor of the new right. In his ‘Maverick’ column, Junior wrote of successful capitalism that ‘the result is the survival of the fittest – or perhaps just the richest’.

Which is why, as they are money and power people, my guess is that many of the neos have been hedging their bets by buying gold, and the dumb suckers who will hang on to their greenbacks for auld lang syne can take the hit like they usually do.

Maybe yes, maybe no. But right now, there is a substantial public interest in the disclosure by those who have promoted and argued the insane fools’ gold politics of neoconservatism of what steps they are taking to protect their personal assets when the economic collapse that is neoconservatism’s inevitable consequence actually happens.

The first to disclose should be Richard Perle.

The Sons of the Desert and the Happy Scottish Warriors

2006-03-24T21:12:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
December 10, 2004

Commentators stand or fall by their ability to deliver insight. Thank God mine was wrong.

The deployment of Black Watch to Camp Dogwood, outside Baghdad, is over. Enough damage having been wreaked on Fallujah for the time being, the men from Perth returned from Central to Southern Iraq in total secrecy on December 4, and are scheduled to return to Scotland next week.

Let’s hope there’s many a cup o’ kindness taken when they get back amongst their ain folk, because like all men and women of all nationalities serving in the neocon hell of Iraq, they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Thank God that, just for once, Blair and Bush, The Sons Of The Desert, didn’t renege on a promise, and Black Watch will make it home in time for Hogmanay.

The level of public trust in the government of Tony Blair is virtually zero. His is a government of libertines – the man in charge of homeland security, David Blunkett, is behaving like a stalker towards his former mistress, launching a public paternity suit in respect of a child borne while the mistress was married to another man, a man who thus enjoys a presumption in favour of his own paternity.

This is the sort of country they’re coming back to.

British soldiers enjoy nothing like the level of official support their American comrades do, both during and after service. While serving in Iraq, all Brits were still paying the full level of income tax – they receive no exemption while on front line duties.

On December 5, the ‘Mail on Sunday’ reported that, because of confusion surrounding the impact of 2001 legislation requiring military personnel to re-register their vote, the number of Scottish service personnel actually registered to vote has dropped by 90% in five years. To lose one’s life taken on active service is an acknowledged risk. To pay full tax for the privilege must be irritating. But for a government to make it difficult for citizen volunteers to exercise their franchise is reprehensible.

The UK has no GI Bill of Rights, no Veterans’ Administration. To this writer’s knowledge, there is only one hospital for ex-servicemen in Scotland, the Erskine, a charity. According to statistics published by the charity ‘Shelter’ several years ago, at least one-third of all the UK’s homeless have a services background.

When they get home, they’ll get a pat on the back. The area from which these men are recruited is an economic basket case – three Black Watch casualties, Stuart Gray, Paul Lowe and Scott McArdle all came from Fife. Fife used to have thriving coalfields and linoleum mills. They went years ago, and were replaced by high-tech assembly jobs. They’re in the process of going as well, and it’s almost as if successive governments want to see ex-servicemen become minicab drivers and call centre operators.

One great industrial site remains in place, the Royal Dockyard at Rosyth, in the constituency of Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. On December 5, the ‘Sunday Times’ reported that Rosyth has missed out on a naval refit contract to Kellogg, Brown and Root, a division of Halliburton.

Although Tony Blair’s commitment to the war has been ideological, one does wonder what he thought he might achieve by sharing this adventure. Some writers have formed the conclusion that his motives may not at first have been pecuniary; they’ve just ended up that way.

On October 15, 2004, Paul Craig Roberts published a column on ‘antiwar.com’ called ‘Blair Sells Britain, Buys A House’. The thrust of Roberts’ piece is that Blair has recently purchased a townhouse in London’s fashionable Connaught Square for $6.4 million. The source of his lending is not known. The mortgage payments alone would require all of Blair’s pre-tax income as Prime Minister.

Where’s he going to get the money to pay it? Roberts believes that ‘by hiring out Britain’s army to the Republicans, Blair struck it rich’ and is banking on making a great deal of money from directorships, US book deals and the US lecture circuit after his retirement as Prime Minister, a theme picked up by Peter Oborne in the October 23 ‘Spectator’, who also raised the possibility that Blair will benefit from the loyalty that the Bush family has historically shown its retainers.

American readers might be appalled by this possibility – it is, however, not at all without precedent in Scottish history.

One of the most ardent of Scottish historians was an Englishman, the late John Prebble, whose interest in Scottish history developed after listening to old Scottish guys talking, while growing up in Saskatchewan. A journalist who co-authored the magnificent movie ‘Zulu!’ Prebble wrote a marvellous series of books on Scottish history, one of which was on the period called ‘the Clearances’.

One wonder how many Americans know they might not have been Americans had it not been for the doings of a man called James Loch.

In the early 19th Century Loch, an ambitious young lawyer, took a position as factor, or land agent, to the first Duke of Sutherland. Being a man of his time, Loch was greatly interested in ‘progress’ and ‘improvement’; after a while, he began to believe that the Duke’s northern estates were better suited to the cultivation of the Great Cheviot Sheep than to cultivation by man.

The so-called ‘Loch Policy’ resulted in the dispossession of thousands of tenant farmers off the land, an act of forced population movement worthy of Stalin, aided by socially ambitious clan chieftains whose sights were fixed on the bright lights of Edinburgh and London.

Prebble acidly remarked that these chieftains had ‘bartered their birthrights for a house in Belgravia’. It’s a pity that the same mentality still applies, and that the blood of the Scots, English, Welsh, Irish, South Africans, Zimbabweans and Fijians, all of whom have died serving in the British Army in this war, is good currency with which to buy a house in Connaught Square.

Galloway and the Rise of the British Islamic Left

2006-03-24T21:09:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
December 9, 2004

One of the greatest English hymns is William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.

Like many in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, Blake was radically opposed to the Industrial Revolution – in ‘Jerusalem’, he refers to ‘dark Satanic Mills’, although his reaction was not as bad as that of the ultra-conservative Pope Gregory XVI, who remarked on the invention of the railroad – ‘Chemin de fer? Chemin d’infer!’

However, ‘Jerusalem’, ends with the one of the most stirringly patriotic stanzas in the Canon of the Church of England –

‘I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green and pleasant land’

The outcome of George Galloway’s December 2 libel victory against the ‘Daily Telegraph’ is that it may lead to the rise of something else in the green and pleasant land - an established voting bloc of Islamic left. At the moment, he is leading a charge in that direction, a real ‘chemin d’infer’, and it’s been facilitated by the neocons.

In April 2003, the ‘Telegraph’ had published allegations, based on documents found in the burned out Iraqi Foreign Ministry, that Galloway, the Member of Parliament for Glasgow Kelvin who was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003, had been in the pay of the Saddam regime. American readers, accustomed to the protections of the First Amendment, must be clear that under English law, Mr. Justice Eady’s decision to find in Galloway’s favour was absolutely correct.

Galloway did not contest the authenticity of the documents. Instead, the ‘Telegraph’ was on the back foot, basing their defence on the ‘Reynolds principles’, whereby publication that might be libellous is justified as being in the public interest. Mr. Justice Eady, sitting without a jury by consent of both parties, held that the ‘Telegraph’ had failed meet seven of the 10 ‘Reynolds’ tests, and specifically that they had failed to give Galloway adequate opportunity to respond prior to publication, nor should they have published an editorial calling him ‘Saddam’s little helper’ containing the word ‘treason’. As a result, Galloway has been enriched by $300,000.

The publication of the allegations occurred while the disgraced rabid neoconservative Conrad Black was the owner of the ‘Daily Telegraph’. I do not believe for a moment that the editor of the ‘Daily Telegraph’ would not make some effort to consult his proprietor prior to the publication of a story that could have resulted in the fall of a Member of Parliament. He must have known of the story before the then editor, Charles Moore, went to press. It is hard to articulate the anger one feels towards this man Black; that, having been granted the privilege of owning great institutions like the ‘Daily Telegraph’ and the ‘Spectator’, that he should turn them down market and mire them in scandal; that he should then be alleged to have stolen from them is worse; but to have so thoroughly subverted ‘The Daily Telegraph’ into nothing but a mouthpiece for neoconservative fascism is unforgivable. This story again proves that it is never the corrupt who pay – when Galloway gets his damages, as he will, the money will not be coming out of Black’s pockets, but those of his stockholders who inherited his liabilities.

Over the past year, Galloway has collected nearly $500,000 by winning libel cases. His story is an interesting paradigm of the changes in the sort of people who have become Labour politicians over the last 80 years – the greatest of all Labour politicians to date has been the late Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary in the first Labour government after World War Two, one of the founders of NATO and the man who made sure Her Majesty had the bomb. During the 1920’s Bevin had been a leader of the longshoremens’ union, and earned the nickname ‘The Dockers’ King’s Counsel’ for the eloquence with which he pled their case. One wonders what a man like Ernie Bevin would think of a sometime Labour MP being skilled at the art of winning of libel actions.

Of course, Galloway was not expelled from Labour over these allegations, but for criticising party policy. His criticism included an interview with Al-Jazeera TV on September 28 2002, when he said,

“Will they (the Arab states) send forces to defend Iraq this time in 2002 or will they allow the use of their forces, air space and land by the Crusaders and foreigners to attack Iraq and start a fire in an Arab, Muslim country that is part of their big entity…Will they allow this entity to be torn and paralysed? If they do, then they
deserve what is awaiting them in the next 100 years.”

In 1994, Galloway, by that time a Labour MP for seven years, went to Iraq and publicly saluted Saddam’s ‘indefatigability’. At that time, Saddam was the leader of a country with which the United Kingdom was still officially engaged in hostilities – the 1991 ceasefire was in place. Doing that wasn’t bad enough to get him expelled from the Labour Party. Publicly criticising Tony Blair and party policy was.

Since his expulsion, Galloway has founded a party called the ‘Respect and Unity Coalition’. The Glasgow Kelvin seat is due to disappear at the next General Election, and Galloway’s expulsion happened, oddly enough, just in time to save Labour a damaging selection battle for the nomination between Galloway and Mohammed Sarwar, the UK’s first Muslim MP. Expelling Galloway has left Sarwar with a clear run at the ball.

The absence of Galloway will be no great loss to the people of Glasgow Kelvin – he did not maintain a home in the constituency, and more often than not his surgeries were taken by staffers. With $300,000 of the ‘Telegraph’s money in his pocket, his sights are firmly fixed elsewhere.

The East End of London has seen radical politics before - during the 1930’s, incidents like the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ marked the advent of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists into our culture. Galloway has announced that he will be contesting the East End seat of Bethnal Green and Bow.

Bethnal Green and Bow is represented by Oona King, an ultra-Blairite. This would make it a tempting target in itself – it’s also much closer to his south London home, and much more convenient than having to trail 500 miles in-country every weekend to listen to us Glaswegian rubes bitch about roadworks on Gibson Street. However, for a calculating man like Galloway, it has one massive advantage that he is probably gambling will come to his assistance, and vote for him in force – one of the UK’s highest concentrations of Bangladeshi Muslims, every man jack of them opposed to the war. Not even Abu Hamza al-Masri, the Fakir of Finsbury Park, could have ever hoped to use Muslims as Muslims in such a directly political way as this.

Galloway’s ambitions are not limited to taking the seat – he has predicted that within three years, Respect will control the local council, Tower Hamlets.

It is to the eternal shame of the Labour Party that they kept Galloway in their ranks for so long. It makes it even more ironic that, had they not expelled him on the most specious of grounds after his greater sin of 1994, Respect would not exist, Oona King would not be under threat and Galloway might not be on the verge of creating an Islamic leftist voting bloc.

If this succeeds, Galloway will really have unleashed the djinn of political Islam in the United Kingdom, and the creation of the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets will only give succour to those who wish to build Al-Quds in England’s green and pleasant land. Why would somebody from the old mill town of Dundee want to do such a thing?

There is one possibility that cannot easily be dismissed.

He has spoken all of his life in support of Arab causes, flying the Palestinian flag from Dundee City Chambers when he was leader of the council. He has been a frequent traveller to the Middle East. He claims to be opposed to the tyrannies of the Middle East, speaking out against the House of Saud. He has referred to Coalition forces as ‘Crusaders’, and the Arab states as a ‘big entity’. His second wife, Dr. Amina Abu Zaid, is a Palestinian.

Has George Galloway converted to Islam?

Bhopal's Unfinished Business

2006-03-24T21:08:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
December 6, 2004

On December 1, BBC Television broadcast a documentary entitled ‘One Night in Bhopal’, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the world’s worst ever industrial accident, when a gas leak from Union Carbide’s plant in Bhopal, India engulfed the city in the middle of the night, killing between 3,000 and 10,000 people, an angel of death as merciless as that which killed the first-born of Egypt.

The disaster was the result of four catastrophic safety failures. Firstly, a workman failed to attach an anti-leakage appliance to a pipe he was cleaning, resulting in water mixing with a chemical called MIC, contained in a storage tank. The valves in the pipe were already insecure. The chain reaction caused by the mixture of water and MIC made the tank’s temperature rise to 200 degrees. At that temperature, the mixture began to give off ultra-toxic gas, which leaked through the valves.

The second failure was that the tank’s cooling system was not in use, but on standby.

The third failure occurred when the gas began to leak. Union Carbide India employees turned off the alarm designed to warn the shanty neighbourhoods surrounding the plant, for fear of starting a panic.

The fourth failure was that the flare tower, which could have burned off the leaking gas, was out of operation.

The gas attacked the eyes and the lining of the lungs, causing victims to choke on their own fluids.

The BBC reported on the aftermath of the disaster. The precise number of victims is still not known. Many were never identified. Union Carbide USA disavowed responsibility for the disaster, instead placing the blame at the door if its subsidiary, Union Carbide India. The public health advice Union Carbide issued after the disaster was that symptoms could be treated with household medications. Union Carbide’s own internal report blamed sabotage. The corporation eventually reached a non-liability settlement with the Indian government. Under the settlement, average compensation per victim amounted to approximately $550. The plant was closed in 1985.

The people of Bhopal continue to suffer very much higher than average incidences of eye, skin and lung diseases and genetic birth defects. The miscarriage rate in Bhopal is seven times the Indian national average. Women suffer very much higher incidences of severe menstrual problems. According to the BBC, at least one person in Bhopal still dies every day as a result of the gas exposure they received in December 1984.

Warren Anderson, the Chairman of Union Carbide at the time, is still wanted in India on manslaughter charges, having jumped bail in 1984 after his arrest by the stouthearted and fearless Swaraj Puri, the town’s Chief of Police. Anderson will be delighted to know that, 20 years down the road, Chief Puri is still working the Bhopal beat despite suffering from severe breathing difficulties brought on by gas exposure. Without any kind of central plan for such a civil emergency, Chief Puri led the people of Bhopal back to their homes saying that he would be the first to die if there were still any gas. Anderson apparently spends his time between Florida and the Hamptons, a gilded fugitive.

In September 1984, an internal report for Union Carbide USA made clear the dangers of mixing water and MIC. The report was not passed on to Union Carbide India.

Corporations are not social entities; they don’t hold barbecues or drive their kids to school. They exist for only one purpose, to make money. As Dennis Prager has memorably put it, the corporate mindset would put an orgy on ‘Captain Kangaroo’ if they thought they could get away with it.

But the Bhopal disaster was corporatism at its very worst. It could have easily been avoided, if all the controls that were in place had operated, and the townsfolk of Bhopal had been instructed how to protect themselves and their families in the event of a catastrophic leak. It might have been avoided if the safety report on the dangers of mixing water and MIC had been passed on to Union Carbide India. In its aftermath, its chairman shouldn’t have jumped bail – India is a country that possesses working courts and laws on evidence and procedure. The fact that they are still pursuing Warren Anderson shows that the Indian authorities believe he has a case to answer under the laws of the jurisdiction where the company he chaired elected to have a subsidiary engaged in probably the most dangerous of all manufacturing processes. Nobody in Union Carbide’s boardroom commissioned or built that plant with a gun at their head. He should not hide in the Hamptons, but, if he is still able to do so, should surrender himself for trial, and have the evidence against him tested in open court. The mark of an honourable man is his willingness to face up to the consequences of his own actions or the actions of those who act under his authority. Saying ‘It’s the subsidiary’s fault’ is a good plea when defending a tort case, but not really one should be able to sleep easily with.

America was right to have nothing to do with the operation of the International Criminal Court. That would place its strictures at a higher level of standing than the Constitution. Soldiers acting under reasonable orders should always be protected from civilian prosecution.

But Bhopal did not involve the business of states. It involved the doings of corporations. The actions of executives in the pursuit of profit should not require and should not have the same protections as the actions of soldiers in harm’s way.

One can, of course, imagine the immediate reaction of Union Carbide’s corporate superstructure. Legal would be on the phone to the insurers, explaining what steps they were taking to investigate the risk of exposure. Public Relations would be on the phone straight away to the banks and the major investors, trying to persuade them not to sell, and to the credit rating agencies, saying that there would be no need to downgrade the stock. Any lawyer who cuts a non-liability deal limiting exposure to a rough average of $550 per victim is a genius, and one can be sure Union Carbide would have hired the best their stockholders could buy.

For all the dangers that Indian outsourcing poses to western economies, maybe after Bhopal one can understand why India has concentrated on attracting white-collar jobs. An average payment of $550 makes one wonder what signal that gives out to the rest of the world concerning the value the West places on human life.

Maybe Warren Anderson can try to justify that the next time he swings round the neighbourhood. One is sure Chief Swaraj Puri would be delighted to meet him again. They have some unfinished business to discuss.

Can Austerity Measures be Avoided?

2006-03-24T21:07:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
December 1, 2004

The spectre of austerity measures, wages and prices controls, restricted working weeks and gas rationing, is floating above the American economy, an elephant in the room that the White House and Congress refuse to acknowledge. It is in possibly the deepest trouble it’s been in since the Wall Street Crash, a fully avoidable crisis into which its custodians have sleepwalked because of their refusal to face basic economic realities. The malaise of the Carter years happened in a very much smaller economic environment than the Bush one; the Bush malaise in on a truly global scale. When it all falls down, 1929 will look like a picnic.

President Bush seems to believe that he can deliver stability while massively increasing public spending; while cutting taxes; while presiding over the erosion of industrial capacity; while refusing to impose any form of meaningful import controls; while refusing to curb illegal immigration; while fighting a war.

Memo to the White House – IT’S NOT WORKING!

At the moment, the only way this policy can be sustained is by printing dollars for the central banks of the Far East to buy at the rate of nearly $2 billion every single day. These countries do not see themselves as America’s partners, but as adversaries -China has doubled its energy imports in five years. It is imported energy that is now fuelling their boom, and they compete with America for access to these resources, while at the same time keeping the dollar afloat because they need it to be at an artificially low level to keep their exports competitive - they keep their own currency pegged to the dollar. Other countries are losing faith in the buck – the Russian central bank recently decided to switch some of its holdings from dollars to euros.

People look to Alan Greenspan to protect their homes and savings, when his ability to safeguard the economy is restricted solely to the issue of interest rates. Although his track record as a central banker is superb, in a truly global economy he is less powerful than people imagine.

But even now, there is hope. There is a very simple six-point plan that the president could follow if he is interested in not just maintaining America’s global economic dominance, but more profoundly, avoiding the inevitable outcome of such reckless policy, the bread line.

Kill 95% of all government programs now.

Government is the most wasteful economic activity ever devised. Its functions should be limited – secure the borders, fund a militia, keep the highways clean and passable, make sure the mail’s delivered on time and ensure that the living standards of the citizens are not jeopardised by your activities. There is little else for a government to do.

Masking the activities of government by outsourcing to the private sector does not diminish its scale; it only moves the problem off the central balance sheet, not out of the deficit. Only by killing all unnecessary programs, probably best defined as any program or arm of government that has not been specifically constitutionally mandated, will the US budget deficit be reduced. There is no moral, economic or conservative justification for a Republican President and a Republican Congress to continue to spend other citizens’ money on their pet projects, when the only means of reducing the resulting deficit will be levying more taxes on those citizens further down the line.

They have taken to themselves the right to tax – since when did they have the right to waste?

This policy would put a lot of civil servants out of work. From experience, putting people out of work is always an ugly business, but in some cases it’s necessary. This is one of them.

Take back the dollar

If China ever decides to break the currency tie, which they will do when it suits them, the dollar will sink like a stone. One of the major causes of deficits is the ready availability of easy money – if you make more money available, the thinking goes, more people will buy it. It’s a great theory, until you print too much money, hyperinflation kicks in and the price of a pound of potatoes creeps up to $70.

China doesn’t need any more dollars – don’t give them an excuse to buy any.

Fundamental reform of the tax code

All taxation is fundamentally penal. It is pure brute force, taking money away from people who have earned it because you want it for something else, while backing your actions with the force of law and calling its payment a civic duty.

The President’s tax reforms over the period of his first administration were not designed to help the vast majority of taxpayers. His supporters always argue that the ultra-rich pay a higher share of taxes, but it does not matter if they contribute 30% or 40% of the total tax take – those out with their bracket will still pay the remaining 60% or 70%. The less wealthy and the steadily diminishing middle class are now subsidising those who benefited from the first round of tax cuts.

Any proposal for tax reform must include these provisions; abolition of all stamp duties; abolition of any capital gains taxes; abolition of inheritance taxes; abolition of tax breaks for importers; abolition of corporation taxes, with severe penalties to be imposed against corporations who do not reduce their prices to reflect the nil-tax rate; and the implementation of a flat income tax rate of 18%, diminishing over five years to a rate of 1% across the board for all taxpayers, with the resulting shortfall being made good by equivalent increases over the same period in

The Tariff

The purpose of a tariff is to discourage imports while encouraging domestic production and generating revenue for small government.

The USA is now running probably the highest trade deficit of any nation in history. Not even the Roman Empire bought so much stuff. It is a testament to America’s strength that its economy has not already buckled. The very fact that it has not gives the protectionist cause for optimism – if it wasn’t so strong, why would they want to export there?

This means there has never been a better opportunity for America to take positive advantage of the world’s desire to sell it stuff.

A tariff would relieve the burden of taxation on the people who work the longest hours, and who individually work more jobs, for the shortest vacations, of any people in the developed world.

Deviousness and low cunning are not natural conservative traits. They are natural neoconservative traits, based on the entryism of their godfathers Trotsky and Shachtman, all veiled in the obscurantism of Leo Strauss. Unfortunately, classical conservatives may now need to show the same level of low cunning in order to beat the corporate interests who would oppose any tariff down to their stockholders’ last dime.

A tariff should be more than just a dollars and cents levy on the naked price of imports. If a foreign government wants intellectual property transferred to a subsidiary in their country, as the Chinese demand, then they pay extra. If they want lobbying for their imports as part of the deal to allow the building of factories on their turf, as the Chinese demand, then they pay extra.

The principal destination of outsourced white-collar jobs is India. While the USA has a hard-won culture of civil liberties, Indian culture still maintains a caste system whereby citizens are systematically excluded from opportunity due to the circumstances of their birth. If a corporation wishes to outsource a service to India, then, as well as any tariff payable on the re-imported service, they should be fined if they do not insist that the same rules on equal opportunities apply on sites in India as in America.

Trade is not a right – it has costs on all sides. One consequence would be that those who demand to trade with America would have to pay for more than just the privilege of trade. For example, nations like South Korea have long enjoyed the right to trade almost freely with the USA, while also enjoying America’s military protection at little or no cost. A tariff would mean that they could still trade – but the tariffs they pay would be funding the military, instead of the entire burden falling in the good folks in Nebraska.

Penalise outsourcing to a point where it becomes uneconomic

I once suggested an 85% flat tax be levied on outsourced goods and services. Given the imminent decline of the dollar if current conditions continue, that bar was too low – a figure of between 95% and 99% is probably more realistic.

Outsourcing does not grow economies; it kills them. It shifts economic advantage from personal to corporate interests, increasing profit for a few without any broader return. In an economy that needs personal taxes in order to function, like the USA at the moment, it destabilises the country by diminishing the tax base.

Lay-offs used to happen only when companies weren’t doing well, and in those cases most conservatives would agree that lay-offs would be regrettable but necessary – the business owners who bore the economic risk had a right to minimise that risk. However, modern outsourcing means that people are now being laid off when businesses are doing well – it is nothing but a means of reducing payroll costs to increase profits. Such behaviour, such reckless pursuit of profit at the expense of another man and his family’s security, is not conservative.

Some people, like the neoconservatives, say this process is unstoppable, due to the genuinely global nature of economic activity, and that markets will always seek their lowest cost, be it in India or Indiana. There are some in that camp who argue that to say otherwise is battling history. On the other hand, there are neos who used to say that they stood athwart history, shouting ‘Stop!’ Maybe they are the ones who don’t understand history. Classical conservatives should know rather better.

Repatriate all illegal immigrants and jail those who hire them

Pace Frosty Wooldridge, illegal immigration’s most pernicious effect is the driving down of wages. Wages would not be driven down if employers did not hire illegals. Hiring illegals in place of Americans is not quite economic treason, but it comes very close.

Too many countries in the Americas rely on the American earnings of illegals as part of their GDP. Illegals’ earnings are 14% of El Salvador’s economy. It’s got to stop. If that means higher prices in the shops, then that’s a necessary sacrifice that has to be made until the economic imbalance is corrected.

To put it another way – is it more preferable to pay three cents more for a sack of carrots picked by a guy with a Social Security number, or four cents more for a bag of oranges, than to pay two cents more in tax on every dollar you earn because of the demands of illegal immigrants on public services?

One troubling question for conservatives is the issue of regulation. Under certain circumstances, it is perfectly conservative to regulate. The White House and Congress should be actively lobbied to promote a bill creating the federal strict liability offence of ‘corporate economic sabotage’. CES would supercede all other legislation on illegal immigration and would occur wherever any corporation, partnership or sole trader hires an illegal immigrant. It would be an offence that is very easy to prove, and should be backed up by fines of up to one year’s turnover, not profits, and federal jail time of up to seven years for any executive responsible for a second offence. If an executive is found guilty in two different corporations, then the first offence should aggravate the second.

Illegal immigration should stop just about overnight.

The purpose of this program, which would contain its fair share of pain for some folks, would be to preserve the wonderful thing that is the powerhouse economy of the United States of America, without the need for austerity measures. It can still be done, and, given current conditions, it should be preferable to the other perfectly possible alternatives that might apply in two years time – a run on the banks; hyperinflation; mass unemployment; banks handing out mortgages on street corners to generate business. This is a way to hold back the storm, because it’s not looking good.

The Decline and Fall of Victor Hanson

2006-03-24T21:05:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
November 29, 2004

“Most conflicts do and yet do not begin over disputed borders. So it was with the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, which ostensibly started from disagreement over the exact boundaries between Zululand and the European provinces of Natal and the Transvaal, but in truth was inevitable, given the colonials’ desire for more land, labor and security. Other than the pretext of a pre-emptory attack, the British had no ostensible reason for invading Zululand. Even most of the state ministries in London wanted nothing to do with a war in southern Africa at a time when the empire’s more critical interests in India, Afghanistan, and Egypt required its full resources. No observer on either side ever made the case that a Zulu army had crossed into either Natal or the Transvaal to prompt hostilities. King Cetshwayo’s repeated orders were to avoid sending his impis across the borders of Zululand”- Victor Davis Hanson, ‘Carnage and Culture’, Doubleday, 2001, page 300.

Condoleeza Rice’s appointment as Secretary of State was perhaps not unexpected; however, it was not her nomination that was puzzling, but her acceptance – why would this lady, whose personal achievements far outshine those of the President, still be prepared to work for the guy who hung her out to dry before the 9/11 Commission?

It’s the neoconservatism, stupid.

As has often been repeated, neoconservatism is a philosophy that is rooted in Trotskyism. Some neocons just can’t hide it – in a September 8 column called ‘What’s wrong with you people?’ Jonah Goldberg wrote, ‘I’m the sort of curmudgeon who believes voting should be more difficult and there should be less of it’.

Being a fundamentally fascist philosophy, neoconservatism needs to name scapegoats and make enemies, and no neocon is more vocal in performing this function than the contract lawyer Jed Babbin, forever railing against France and the French for their impudence in adhering to their sovereignty.

Others, like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts, call them ‘Jacobins’, after the sect of French revolutionaries, a conclusion that was hard to avoid on November 5, when the mercurial Andrew Sullivan reported on his ‘Daily Dish’ that Bill Kristol of the Murdochite neocon ‘Weekly Standard’ had quoted Danton in the wake of Bush’s re-election.

However, the worst of all neocons are those who provide it with intellectual legitimacy. For the succour and encouragement he has given the philosophy, Victor Davis Hanson, the smartest neo of them all, is the worst of the worst, and it is only since the re-election of the Neocon White House that he has revealed his true colours.

Hanson is an intellectual of rare talent, an author, journalist, military historian and sometime classics professor at the University of California. His Friday columns on the ‘National Review Online’ provide necessary intellectual ballast to the rantings of Michael Ledeen and John Derbyshire, and the Pavlovian yelps of delight at every utterance from the mouth of George W. Bush.

Hanson authored one of the finest pieces of prose written in the wake of 9/11, called ‘What made them do their duty?’ for ‘City Journal’. He also wrote the best deconstruction of the House of Saud that I have read so far, called ‘Our Enemies, the Saudis’, for ‘Commentary’. It’s always sad to see a very clever man make a fool of himself, but Hanson has done it twice in the last two weeks.

On November 5, he made another nasty insinuation of cowardice against the Spanish for their rejection of Jose Maria Aznar in the wake of the Madrid bombing – “The farmers of Utah, the plant workers of Ohio, and the immigrants of Florida are not the same folk as those of Spain”. No doubt, if only because those folks didn’t have to suffer lies for advantage in the aftermath of tragedy. It ill befits such a capable historian to fall into the sort of ideological trap for which he would roundly condemn Eric Hobsbawm or Howard Zinn. However, he fully revealed his neoconservatism on November 19, when the link from the NRO front page to his piece contained just one word – ‘Revolutionary’.

The article, called ‘The Real Humanists’, pretty much followed Hanson’s formula of praising Bush and bashing Carter and Old Europe. If you dared criticise the initial invasion of Afghanistan, you’re a ‘subversive ankle-biter’, or a ‘deer-in-the-headlights critic’. You’ve got to be careful if you criticise the failure of Iraqi reconstruction – ‘Our mistakes in the reconstruction of Iraq were never properly critiqued as naïve and too magnanimous, but rather they were decried by the Left as cruel and punitive – as if being too lax was proof of being harsh’. Abu Ghraib? Lax? Whatever.

It is a poor historian who draws his conclusions from the blood on David Frum’s hatchet. Now that Arafat is dead, there is no further need to speculate whether or not he had AIDS, as Frum did, nor was there any need for Hanson to comment on his family’s ‘unwillingness to disclose what really killed the “Tiger” of Ramallah’. Let the dead, even the bad dead, rest in peace, for he is now under the judgment of God for his actions, as they themselves will also be.

Now comes the red meat. “In fact, the effort not just to strike back after September 11, but to alter the very landscape in which our enemies operated was the only choice we had if we wished to end the cruise missile/bomb’-em-for-a-day cycle of the past 20 years, the ultimate logic of which has led to the crater of the World Trade Center’. While many previous policies did contribute to 9/11, it is interesting to see Hanson repeat again that invading a country that had no connection with 9/11 was ‘the only way’ in which terrorism could be defeated. How many countries have suffered through the siren song of fascists that their way is ‘the only way?’

To Hanson, the Doom of Fallujah is a cosmic struggle – “In the struggle in Fallujah hinges not just the fate of the Sunni Triangle, or even Iraq, but rather of the entire Middle East – and it will be decided on the bravery and skill of 20-something soldiers’ – not, you will note, 40-something hacks or 50-something classicists. He continues, ‘If they are successful in crushing and humiliating the fascists there and extending the victory to other spots then the radical Islamists and their fascistic sponsors will erode away. But if they fail or are called off, then we will see Days of Sorrow that make September 11 look like child’s play’.

All neoconservative scaremongers must be asked- where is your proof that more terror is inevitable if your policies are not implemented? Upon what evidence do you make such sweeping assertions? They will never praise the sterling work done by civilian agencies behind the scenes, and the role played by citizens in keeping vigilant to the possibility of threat, instead always praising and promoting the aggressive, militaristic mindset that has turned Iraq into Tartarus.

Hanson ended his piece by saying ‘Quite literally, we are living in the strangest, most perilous, and unbelievable decade in modern memory’. We sure are, thanks in no small measure to the actions of neoconservatives and their erudite apologists. The ancient Greeks wrote of Perseus slaying the Gorgon, and Theseus slaying the Minotaur. Maybe VDH has gone off on some proto-mythological monster hunt, with Ba’athists and Islamists taking the place of giants and centaurs.

However, he will well know the meaning of hubris. Bellerophon was a mighty hero who slew the Chimera, but who in later life grew arrogant, and tried to fly the winged horse Pegasus to visit the gods on the summit of Mount Olympus. To punish his arrogance, Zeus released a tiny gadfly that stung Pegasus and threw Bellerophon to his death far below.

All should beware the fate of Bellerophon.

Some Thoughts on Bigotry

2006-03-24T21:04:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
November 24, 2004

This column abhors all discrimination against black people, women and homosexuals on account of colour, gender or sexuality.

However, it also denies the existence of concepts called ‘racism’, ‘sexism’ and ‘homophobia.’

The words ‘racism’, ‘sexism’ and ‘homophobia’ are rooted in Marxist thought. As a life-long anti-Marxist, one cannot endorse or approve of anything that started as a Marxist construct designed to ensure Marxism’s ascendancy by creating divisions.

There is a very much more suitable and ancient word to describe those who despise black people, women and homosexuals on account of colour, gender or sexuality. That word is ‘bigot’, and common humanity, not Marxist political correctness, should at all times inform the conservative to disavow and shun bigots.

Bigotry got a fair old outing in the UK last week. The Labour Party, apparently the spokespeople for the poor, put more rural poor out of work last week by using the most extreme form of parliamentary procedure to ensure a ban on fox-hunting in England and Wales will take effect from February 2005. One of their drones has coughed up and admitted that the pursuit of the ban was just good old-fashioned class warfare, designed to hurt people because of what, not who, they are.

On November 21, it was reported that in Scotland, a Catholic is twice as likely to be the victim of a sectarian assault as a Protestant – Catholics comprise 17% of the population. The Catholic Church in Scotland has failed utterly to evangelise its flock, even with the advantage of taxpayer-funded separate Catholic education. Instead, it has concentrated on sacramentalisation and mysticism –the epitaph of Scottish Catholicism will be, ‘They all came for their ashes’, while the chapels stand half empty for the rest of the year. For many in my community, the real religion is soccer, their church Celtic Park, where they worship at the altar of Glasgow Celtic, while the hawkers outside sell scarves describing the head coach as the ‘Messiah’ and the former star striker as the ‘King of Kings’.

One can elect to stay out of this marsh – however, one cannot avoid Scotland’s summer curse, the parades and dreary drums of the Orange Order, wearing their garish uniforms, exercising their right to walk the Queen’s highway while denying others the right to cross it, fluting away their hymns to Protestant ascendancy and the victory of William III over James II at the Battle of the Boyne, fought on July 12 1690. It says much for a country if some of its citizens think the last thing in their history worth celebrating happened 314 years before.

Sectarianism is an ugly bigotry that, in my town, still leads to young men losing their lives if the wrong team loses a soccer match.

Coming from this background, it was a bit irritating to find out that one of my articles had been linked to ‘Stormfront’.

‘Stormfront’ is a website for the white nationalist community. Although it’s difficult to write that phrase without falling off the chair laughing, it’s still pretty disgusting to think you wrote something of which a white supremacist would approve. My own thoughts on the UK’s white nationalists, the British National Party, were recorded in an article I wrote last year for The Washington Dispatch where I called them ‘a sub-Klan collection of rednecks dedicated to race-baiting and immigration control’. There’s been no subsequent change in position.

What got the tinfoil twitching under the Wehrmacht helmets of the cyber-Klanners over at ‘Stormfront’ was an article I wrote called ‘Jihad-Ache’. The aim of the article was to point out that the jihad of Islamists is still a force to be opposed. It is not the jihad of all Muslims, or of all people with brown skins, Pakistani accents and names like Asif. It is limited to a small group who have nothing but contempt for civilised democratic order - much like white supremacists themselves.

Good Little Slaves

2006-03-24T21:03:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
November 23, 2004

Slavery is alive and well in the USA and UK. It no longer thrives under the crude concept of ‘chattel slavery’, instead preferring more modern labels – national security and commercial imperative.

The United Kingdom is one of the few countries mad enough to entrust its homeland security to a blind man, the Home Secretary David Blunkett. Blunkett is an unpleasant authoritarian, whose latest scheme for stamping on the citizen is the introduction of compulsory identity cards.

In this country, the state already possesses a vast amount of information concerning the citizen’s private business. Like the vast majority of my countrymen, I have a birth certificate, a National Insurance (Social Security) number, a bank account, a driver’s licence and have been the holder of a passport. The state knows where I live, because I have to disclose my address for inclusion on the voters’ roll, available for inspection at my local public library. The state knows I am a solid citizen, because all my income taxes have been deducted at source and I have never been convicted of a crime – it would know if I had. However, Blunkett now wishes to compel me to hold an identity card, containing biometric data such as DNA, so that I can prove who I am to the agents of the state, should they wish to question my identity.

Blunkett’s rationale for this initiative is that he believes it will stamp out illegal immigration, aid the fight against terrorism and organised crime, and facilitate access to public services. I’m native born, so my immigration status is beyond question. Being Catholic, Islamist terrorism has never really been my bag. I have never sought out the company of organised criminals, so there is nothing I can tell the agents of the state about Maxie Two Shots or Waldo the Knife. That’s three excuses rendered redundant, leaving only the fourth.

What is at work here is deeply unpleasant authoritarian socialism. Socialism is not the mere belief that private property should not exist – it believes that the people are the property of the state, the very essence of their individuality like their DNA and their retinas the property of the state to control.

It proves that to a socialist state like the UK, control of, and controlling access to, resources, the public services, is of far greater importance than the ancient liberties of the individual.

In other words, socialism would make us slaves, not of Simon Legree but of Tony Blair, a soft slavery, but slavery nonetheless.

On November 21, the ‘Sunday Herald’ reported on the increasing tendency of corporations to snoop on their staff, often interfering in their private lives. The American and British economies function on the output of services. Service industries have key common features. There will always be a high level of competition within service sectors. While this is good for consumers, it also drives down wages and makes high demands on the time and productivity of workers, who have to make sacrifices like adopting working practices like shift work to ensure they are able to stay employed. Many corporations may have felt like they owned you – now some act like they do.

The service sector’s star performer for the last 20 years has been the call centre. The economic health of an area is inversely proportional to the number of call centres operating within it. Call centres can only perform two kinds of tasks, sales or customer services. This is not work for which the majority of the population is suited, so call centres can only be successful if they are located in areas where there is a large pool of readily available labour, such as depressed former industrial areas. Because they are service based, they always pay less than the former industrial jobs, but the people taking the jobs wish to stay independent of the state, so they are prepared to work for lower wages, and if they complain they can always be threatened with outsourcing.

However, many find the sales and customer service environments beyond their natural aptitudes, so they quit. All call centres suffer massive levels of staff turnover. So they go back into the market, and the cycle starts all over again.

According to the University of Sheffield, the poorest place in the United Kingdom is the City of Glasgow. It is the UK’s call centre capital.

The great failure of conservatism has been abandoning education to the liberals while we were doing something else – to these ears, conservative complaints about the universities ring hollow. But the junior school system should always work towards scholastic excellence; to broadening the mind of the child; to encouraging learning for its own sake. The classics are integral to this process; in neo-classical civilisations like ours, they give the child the first opportunity to understand our civilisation, as well as revealing the marvels of Greek and Roman literature.

Earlier this year, the Scottish Executive took the decision to stop training classics teachers. On November 21, Scottish Television’s ‘Seven Days’ show reported from Cumbernauld, a dormitory town outside Glasgow. One of Cumbernauld’s biggest employers is a call-centre operated by, or on behalf of, Morgan Stanley. ‘Seven Days’ reported that seniors at Cumbernauld High School are being given lessons in how to be call-centre operators, and photographed them wearing headsets and sitting at terminals.

These teenagers have not been taught citizenship; they have not been taught history, except from particularly slanted angles; many have not been taught basic English grammar. They have, however, been taught how to take a call in a call-centre.

They have been taught to be good little slaves, whose only role in life is to be productive, not to be a citizen. Ideology has denied them their history; now economics will deny them their futures.

For Cumbernauld, read Ohio, Michigan, wherever, if one more manufacturing job is permitted to leave the Unites States of America.

Jihad-Ache

2006-03-24T21:02:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
November 16, 2004

In her compilation of French Crusader era texts, Chronicles of the Crusades, the late English linguist Margaret Shaw recorded Jean de Joinville’s account of seeing the Saracen army for the first time.

They were massed on the beach, their prisoners in front of them. The prisoners were on their knees, waiting to be beheaded.

It all sounds sort of familiar.

The recent murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh, shot then stabbed in broad daylight in an Amsterdam street, has brought the jihad into focus again, in all its desperate dreariness. It is dreary, because it reeks of the totalitarianism that civilised nations like the Dutch and the Brits have worked hard to avoid. Van Gogh’s crime was to challenge the treatment of women in Islamic societies. The imagery he chose for his project, having texts from the Koran painted onto the body of a young woman in a diaphanous burqa, was in the worst of all possible taste and worthy of condemnation in itself. But it did not deserve a death sentence.

There has been much wringing of hands over the effect the murder has had on Dutch multi-culturalism. Perhaps there has been a dawning realisation that the great experiment, which was in many ways intended to be a very noble and welcoming thing, has failed not because of the people who have come but because of the culture they have come from. The two most liberal and open societies on continental Europe are The Netherlands and Sweden – the last instances of political violence on the continent have been in the Netherlands and Sweden, in both instances, the killing of Van Gogh and the murder of the Swedish politician Anna Lindh, by unassimilated ethnic minorities. It makes the case against multiculturalism quite conclusive. In the November 10 Daily Telegraph, Daniel Johnson wrote that ‘the Dutch are fast becoming a nation of neo-conservatives’.

That is nonsense. Van Gogh’s alleged killer is Dutch-Moroccan. If the Dutch had gone neo, right now they’d be preparing to invade Tunisia.

The jihad may even have reached Scotland. Earlier this year, a 15 year old boy, Kriss Donald, was abducted off the street by a group of Asian youths in the heavily Asian Glasgow district of Pollokshields. His burnt body was later recovered several miles away. One of the accused has turned Queen’s Evidence, or to put it more bluntly, turned snitch. He has given evidence that the ringleader wanted to abduct a white boy and put out his eyes.

According to Bukhari’s Hadith, as quoted by the Islamic scholar Ahmed Simon on www.islamreview.com, Mohammed once ordered that a prisoner’s eyeballs be gouged out.

Those many readers of The Washington Dispatch not afflicted with MTV Memory will recall that several years ago, the country of Afghanistan was invaded in order to liberate it from the baleful influence of Taliban jihadists. This country was going to be an oasis of liberal values. They have recently had an election, or the nearest simulacrum of an election that could be managed in that country, which the Pashtun prince and Ben Kingsley look-alike Hamid Karzai has won. On November 7, the Sunday Telegraph reported that Vincent White, an American citizen and adviser to the Finance Ministry, had spent four weeks in a Kabul dungeon after it was alleged that he had paid an Afghan youth for sex. The allegations against Mr. White, which he vigorously denied, were later retracted when the youth admitted to making the allegation under torture.

Looks like the fears about trying to bolt the appurtenances of a western society on to an Islamic one were justified.

In case any think this incident an aberration, an isolated pang at the birth of a new free society, on November 11 the Daily Telegraph reported that the Afghan Supreme Court has banned – opium trading? No. Honour killing? No.

The might and majesty of the Afghan legal system was directed against what the Telegraph described as ‘the rapid liberalisation of Afghanistan’s media’. They banned cable television. Hide your kites and dim the lights, ‘cos the boys are back in town.

It’s enough to give one a jihad-ache. Jihadists are headbangers. Right now, the continent of Europe is going through a post-socialist Periwig period, almost like the license of the Georgian era, where the maintenance of welfarism, secularism and personal licence are the principle thrusts of policy. In the new Europe, it’s impossible for a person like Rocco Buttiglione to become a European Commissioner because he has expressed his belief in Catholic teaching on homosexuality.

However, the mistake that many Americans make is in thinking that all Europeans think this way. The more rabid neoconservatives and doomsayers predict that Europe will be Islamic in 50 years’ time – not so. They say that Islamic demographics will win. Not necessarily.

It may be the case that my generation, the children of the Thatcher era, are so addled by consumerism that we might not last the distance. But even if they have the standard 1.2 kids, that’s still a population of hundreds of millions for the jihad to contend with. Already, restricting immigration is a hot issue in the UK, which has historically been the most immigrant friendly nation in Europe.

We shall see. The Dutch, the Scots of Continental Europe, are a people who built an Empire that spanned the globe, based in a country that was reclaimed from the sea. They will not go down so easily.

Neither will the Brits. For all the effort of politicians and businessmen to turn us into a nation of drones, we still care deeply about our country and those who serve it, people like Private Pita Tukatukawaqa, a native of Fiji who was killed last week serving with Black Watch. We know what the jihadists don’t; that the Fijians are the Apaches of the Pacific, proud, dauntless and terrible.

I don’t fancy the jihadists’ chances one little bit.

War is a Game to the NeoCons

2006-03-24T21:00:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
November 15, 2004

Neoconservatism is fascism.

Fascists conquer countries and demand that the conquered accept their ideology.

Fascists set up puppet regimes led by favoured strong men and backed up by force.

Fascists dictate that acceptance of their way is the only way by which the conquered can live in peace.

Fascists round up those who disagree or protest and imprison them without charge.

What is neoconservatism but all that?

The pampered neocon creatures of the think tanks, all the good little boys and girls who have networked so hard to get all the best jobs, who have all the education in the world but not a scrap of sense between them, are fascists.

To them, the business of war is a game, played out by other people, the kind of people they praise but with whom they would never really wish to mix, in corners of the world they know are dangerous – because one of their pals has told them so. Or because they interned for a Senator with an interest in Foreign Affairs. Or because they have a Masters in International Relations.

In many ways, they are the most privileged people in the entire history of humanity; unelected, isolated, insular, they have a finger on the reins of power in the most powerful country the world has ever seen, at the very height of its power.

As a result of their policies, the town of Fallujah is fast becoming rubble; those goat herders had better be made an example of! What is becoming clearer is that the smarter neck-smiters and Ba’athist dead-enders may have ‘exfiltrated’ themselves prior to the commencement of the assault. Although the fighting in Fallujah is brutal, it will not be conclusive; the unrest across the country says as much. By their stupidity, an action taken to improve security will only further undermine it.

Are these guys nuts?

They are like big yuppie kids, playing ‘Dungeons and Dragons’. The depth of their commitment to their ideology was plain when they insisted that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. They fostered an atmosphere of fear, telling people to buy stuff to make their homes secure, while the calibre of the intelligence they gathered was on a par with the medieval maritime maps that said of uncharted waters, ‘Here be Dragons’. For them, Saddam Hussein was a dragon to be slain, while their push for war sowed the dragon’s teeth amongst the body politic, a wound from which the greatest country the world has ever seen has still not recovered, despite the best intentions of John Kerry and those of his supporters who regard their shared history as Americans to be more important than their ideology.

The neocons are certainly adept at producing dungeons. The patsies for the scandal of Abu Ghraib are now and will forever be the reservists caught on candid camera, while there is little public talk of ‘Operation Copper Green’, and ‘contractors’ being brought in to ‘circumvent’ the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention is one of the high watermarks of post-Enlightenment civilisation, one of those documents that show, like the Bible and the Constitution, that Man is capable of great nobility, that prove we are better than beasts – it went into the trash to give the neocons what they wanted. And Abu Ghraib is what they got as a result.

Like all fascists, they favour their friends. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, for whose plots their actions would be too fantastical, they scream like wounded eagles at the corruption of the UN Oil for Food Scandal, while they never mention that the UN Compensation Commission is disbursing 18 billion dollars to corporate interests for ‘lost profits’ and ‘business decline’ as a result of the 1991 peace settlement, all payable from a 5% levy on Iraqi oil, oil products and gas sales. According to the magazine Private Eye, Halliburton has received $18 million – as the Eye points out, this was money they and the other claimants never had in the first place. There would have been no levy if the neocons had not agreed to it. They are certainly intimate with the concept of double standards.

Once Fallujah is razed to the ground, their fascism will demand they seek a new foe; things are getting ropey in Mosul – better send a brigade. They will not stop until whatever mad master plan they have concocted for the domination of their interests has been effected. Their values are not historic American values, their language not historically American. Unless they are banished from influence, the neocons will continue to strut around in thousand dollar suits, far away from danger, playing their bloody games. Hey, dude, how do we get to the next level? Is that by imprisoning farmers?

Or by going into Iran?

The Cancer of Free Trade is Killing the West

2006-03-24T20:58:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly

November 10, 2004

When a cancer threatens the body, there are only two options; kill or cure.

The remedy is the same when a cancer threatens the body politic. Unrestricted international free trade is such a cancer. It is advocated by small corporate and political elites, whose concerns do not lie with the welfare of families and communities but instead with profits and the tax take. It is a destroyer of resources; it brings both personal and national debt; it weakens the independence of nations; and it has no respect for human life, either within the womb or without. It treats people like things, either consumers or productive assets; it is a form of pornography.

At least Larry Flynt has enough courage in his own convictions to be
an honest pornographer.

The international free trade mindset was prominently on display on the front page of the November 8 Daily Telegraph. That day Digby Jones, the leader of the Confederation of British Industry, was reported as claiming that the UK will have no jobs for unskilled workers in 10 years’ time, and that

“I have formed the view that that if ever there was a country made for globalisation, it is Britain. It is in our DNA…Protectionist voices who think they can stop this – that’s cloud cuckoo land”.

According to Jones, the middle class can go to hell. Like those pesky foetuses who muck up your business plan and for whose existence you have to fork out maternity pay for unproductive time, it is better for the interests of the elite that they do not exist. I think his time scale is too short. I would give it at most eight years before all the UK’s unskilled white-collar jobs are gone. It is often reported here that the Brits don’t like the idea of off-shoring. Like so many things, the European Union, the Iraq war, abortion, capital punishment, gun ownership, they are not going to get a voice because the vested interests of the elite have spoken, and if any don’t like it, they, too can go to hell. Like George W. Bush, Tony Blair is a guy who has enjoyed the very best of what his country has had to offer all his life. Jones was to be addressing an audience that would include two of Blair’s socialist high priests; Gordon Brown, a spoiled product of the Scottish elite, and Peter Mandelson, the grandson of a Labour politician whose personal and political failings have been rewarded with appointment to the European Commission as Trade Commissioner. The only productive work outside politics that the two of them have ever undertaken between them have been brief spells as TV journalists many, many years ago.

If the UK’s non-skilled white-collar jobs are gone in eight years, I would give the USA maybe 12 to 15. As Jones says, one is living in cloud-cuckoo land if one thinks that this process will ever change unless radical action is taken. In other words, kill or cure.

Inside the same edition of the Daily Telegraph, a columnist called Jim White described the work of telesales people as ‘odious’. It may be odious to him – it’s somebody else’s livelihood, one many would rather not have to do if international free trade had not destroyed the manufacturing base, and the politicians had not so thoroughly corrupted the value of qualifications by constant political interference in the schools.

One of the better examples of international free trade’s baleful effects was found in the November 7 Sunday Times. It’s apparently good business practice for the UK’s online retailers to charge Brits up to double the price for the same goods and services that they charge to Continentals. For example, British Airways (motto, ‘The World’s Favourite Airline’) charges Brits £2,353 for a business class seat on a flight from Paris to New York via Heathrow – the same seat costs a French resident £1,071. After 25 years of an unbridled free market, it’s now the right of the Brit to pay top-dollar for everything.

But there’s nothing else to be expected from a country where the only ideology now is the right of big business to screw people into the ground. As previously reported, the passage of the Gambling Bill is causing considerable controversy. Just how badly Blair has sold us down the river was exposed in the November 7 Mail on Sunday. According to that newspaper, a public servant called William Perrin went on a week-long beano to Vegas in November 2003, and returned ranting about the socialist virtues of unregulated blackjack. Downing Street apparently put the strong arm on the rest of Whitehall to keep mum on the whole affair. Perrin’s magnificent obsession became the notion that a mega-casino could regenerate a depressed post-industrial area. As anyone who lives in a former industrial town can tell you, the one thing that will regenerate a depressed post-industrial area is industry – New Labour has given new meaning to the expression, putting it all on red.

But the same paper reports that Gideon Hoffman, a civil servant at the Department of Culture who is helping to manage this fiasco, has sent a speculative resume to another gaming group! He is reported to have said, ‘When this is over, I will be getting a job in industry, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out which one’. Such confidence is only possible from a committed elitist.

It does not take a prophet to see that any expansion of the gaming industry is just the type of commercial activity that would appeal to the Russian mafia.

Whatever Hoffman’s aspirations, he is a public servant, with duties to the people. Civil servants angling for good private work are nothing new either here or in the States. Some even attend very strange conferences. Take, for example, the number three civilian at The Pentagon, Director of the Office of Special Plans and arch-neoconservative Douglas Feith.

It has been reported the Feith was a delegate to the 2004 meeting of the Bilderberg Group. Named after the hotel in the Netherlands where it first met in 1954, Bilderberg is a favourite of conspiracy theorists, although there are very legitimate questions as to its operations. Its delegates never reveal what is discussed. What business does a man whose wages you pay have attending the conference of a private body whose discussions he will not reveal to you? Why is Kenneth Clarke MP still an MP on the public dime while apparently the number two guy in the whole thing? Why was Ed Balls, a civil servant and economic adviser to Gordon Brown and now a prospective Labour candidate, reported to be a delegate to Bilderberg in 2001, 2002 and 2003? Was the journalist Mark Steyn really a delegate to Bilderberg 2003? Why is The Economist magazine always reported to have journalists on site, who never report what was said? Why do other journalists who try to report on it always end up having their collars felt by the local cops? The era of Bilderberg has been the era of free trade. Communism has been defeated – in 1954, political Islam was not a threat. The only issue that spans both these eras, id free trade, so it can be the only thing they are talking about. The power held by its delegates in the world’s commercial and political life means it must open its doors to public scrutiny, and its members justify what they do and talk about in the national interests of their countries of origin.

Given that the effects of international free trade are always the same wherever it’s practiced, it’s sometimes hard not to think that there is some guiding hand following a blueprint for the destruction of the nation state. Take, for example, the Republic of Ireland.

The past 15 years has been a period of historic economic growth in that country – however, as usual, it has had its costs. The Sunday Independent recently reported that the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy was built not on an increase in productivity, but in an unparalleled expansion of the workforce. Mum got a job. Mum getting a job means she spends less time at home. Families become dislocated and rudderless. The divorce rate increases. Drug and alcohol abuse increases. Families buckle under the sometimes irresistible pressure to consume. Basic goods do not drop in price – mysteriously, they become more expensive, as the commercial need shifts from having to satisfy customers to satisfying shareholders. The bulk of shareholders are institutions, massive financial webs investing money in each other. The managers of the institutions become narrower in their outlook, themselves becoming an elite, appointing each other to their executive remuneration committees, writing each others’ pay checks with other people’s money, leading to the inevitable consequence of a free trade economy, now rearing its head on the Emerald Isle as it has done on the UK and most certainly in the USA – a growing gap between the rich and poor.

Free trade has produced an economic environment where the fate of the dollar is no longer in American hands. If there is any kind of economic slowdown in the coastal zone of China, America is going to suffer. The UK is a basket case – the kind of free trade advocated by people like Digby Jones is going to kill my country stone dead. There is still hope for America. The folks whose ancestors wrote ‘We, the People’ spoke last week, letting the Democrat elites know how they feel about their crackpot social opinions. Instead, they gave their vote to a Republican elite intent on waging wars of aggression, and which values consumption as the standard of peace. Let your Congressman know – if you want to withdraw from the WTO, write them. If you want a tax on outsourced goods, write them. If you want to see the IRS abolished and replaced with a tariff, write them. If you hear the argument made that Americans will lose jobs insourced from abroad if a tariff is introduced, then write them to tell them that those insourced jobs will be replaced with American generated jobs in a matter of weeks. If you hear the argument that outsourcing leads to job creation, write your Congressman to tell them that it also diminishes the tax base, removes resources for programs like the Marines, and diminishes the country’s capital base by making it harder to save money and pay mortgages.

Like I said, this is kill or cure. The cure would be tough, sure, but the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate – do the Republicans really want to turn the United States into a continent sized replica of the City of Glasgow?

What's So Great about Great Britain?

2006-03-24T20:54:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
November 3, 2004

As a Brit who writes for a primarily American audience, it was very heartening to receive positive feedback from home for a recent article called ‘The Fate of Tony Blair’. There was a broadly common theme in the e-mails I received – what a mess we’re in.

The Presidential election cycle is over, and the incumbent will have many serious problems to deal with. Not the least of these is, what sort of country is America’s closest ally? What is it like? What do they do all day long?

The United Kingdom is an ancient, very proud society that for the last 60 years has suffered an onslaught from increasingly isolated political and media classes whose consistent aim has been its destruction and re-birth in their own images and suffering all their prejudices.

One of the least appealing features of the UK’s elites is their knee-jerk anti-Americanism. A fabulous example of this was presented by Peter Oborne of The Spectator, in an article called ‘R.I.P. Democracy 1776-2004’ for the October 31 Mail on Sunday.

Here are some stunning insights from the political editor of a magazine whose editor, Boris Johnson, is also a paid public servant on a salary over twice the national average –

“The majority of the American people might as well be tribesmen of the Amazonian rainforest for all the say they have in the result. …Worse are the people whose votes will actually affect the outcome. The majority are bigoted, ignorant and stupid beyond belief. Virtually none have been abroad, or even know how to get a passport…America possesses the most ignorant voters in the world.’

Now before Task Force Delta sets sail from Norfolk for the Thames, let’s give Mr. Oborne a little context. He had taken a map of the world on to the streets of Philadelphia, and was surprised to learn that many did not know the locations of Afghanistan or Iraq.

The population of the UK is 60 million. According to Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools of England and Wales, 7 million adults in this country leave public high school unable to spell the word ‘plumber’. We are such a well-educated bunch.

It would be very interesting to see if he achieved a better result in his impromptu geography lessons if he tried the same exercise on the streets of any British city. Personally, I would doubt it – successive Labour and Conservative governments have worked so hard at turning schools into media for the dissemination of propaganda and places of business that it’s a miracle that most schoolchildren leave the public system knowing anything at all. And by the way, before he got his nice gig at The Spectator, Peter Oborne used to work for The Daily Express, owned by a banana-chomping pornographer called Richard Desmond, who was permitted to buy the paper after donating £100,000 to the Labour Party.

What has brought the country to the pass it’s at? Where more people would prefer to leave than remain? Ideology.

The roots of the Labour Party are very different from those of the Democrats. While the relationship between the Democrats and the AFL-CIO has always been close, the Dems are not the child of the unions – the Labour Party is. It sprang from trade unionism, and as a result has always been a directly socialist party. Its heyday was the General Election of 1945.

That election, which swept Churchill from office in a repudiation of the Conservative Party similar in scale to 1997, saw the arrival of big-time socialism on to the British political landscape. The National Health Service came into being – perfectly satisfactory railways, steelworks, coal mines and airlines were stolen by the state, nationalised, in the pursuit of the mad ideology that bureaucratic ownership brings economic efficiency. Over time, the socialisation of the British people was pushed further and further – for many poor children, not just make believe poor but real poor, the best exit to a better life was the system of state-funded selective education called ‘grammar schools’. In the 1960’s the Labour Minister for Education, Tony Crosland, like so many of them the recipient of an expensive private education, said that he was going ‘to close every f…… grammar school in the country’. By design, the Labour Party withdrew a route out of poverty for the poor, perhaps for no other purpose than to keep them in their chains.

The effects have been largely been terrible. For reasons of ideology, children were not streamed according to ability – the brightest suffered from having to study at the pace of the slowest. The Blair government has a fetish for targets. Targets are a useful tool for motivating a sales force, not for setting scholastic standards. Tony has found a perfect way round his own system – when enough schoolchildren don’t reach a grade, dumb down the exam.

The NHS is a yolk on the back of the British people that no political party has the will to finally abolish. Created in 1948, it was designed to do one thing – to provide medical care that was free at the point of use. In 1948, that was a vision that was sustainable – the ratio of taxpayers to sick was such that it could be afforded. By 1951, it wasn’t. That year, it had to introduce charges for spectacles and dentures. It’s been downhill all the way from there. It is still free at the point of use – in order to keep it free at the point of use, people queue for hours to register with an NHS dentist when one opens in town. In order to keep it free at the point of fuse, one third of its doctors and half its nurses are immigrants – it is so big that we cannot train enough medical professionals ourselves just to keep the hospitals open. It’s the biggest employer in Europe. And, of course, it is free at the point of use – there is nothing in the deal about being treated on time; there is nothing in the deal about being treated in a hospital that meets even basic hygiene standards; there is nothing in the deal about being treated by a doctor whose diagnosis you can understand.

That is socialised medicine after 56 years of the NHS.

The other great boon of the Labour government of 1945 was the welfare state, which would care for the people ‘from the cradle to the grave’. The welfare state has done more harm to the United Kingdom than any of the Labour Party’s other mad schemes. We are an island race, thus independently minded, and thus conservative – nothing saps the will of an independent people faster than being told they do not need to work in order to eat. There are families in the UK who have been welfare recipients for generations. This is not right. It is a dehumanising and degrading practice that destroys the self-esteem of the recipient and provokes the anger of the donor. So slender is the knife-edge of artifice on which the current Labour government sits that the hard left Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, has had to introduce means-testing to ensure that there is enough money to pay for all of the goodies he promised for the kids and the pensioners, quite forgetting that for many the very words ‘means test’ invoke the terror and hardship of the Great Depression.

If the Labour Party has been the red blight upon us, the Conservative Party has been the blue, a party of hope and change that became a party of sloth, sleaze and pecculence. Its most ambivalent figure is Margaret, Baroness Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher did do good, no question. However, the destruction that her ideology of the market, almost a cult to its adherents, has brought in its wake has had consequences just as dire as anything wrought by the Labour Party.

Under Margaret Thatcher, our manufacturing base was destroyed as being too expensive to maintain. The nationalised industries were privatised. The philosophy of privatisation is an unusual one – the business having been stolen from its original owners through nationalisation, does the state then have the right to sell it on to others, decades afterwards? The economic rationale is sound – a business will always have more opportunities to acquire capital in private hands than in public – it’s the moral one that’s a bit shaky.

The great state industries were not to be supported – as a result, the UK’s automotive, aircraft, steel making and shipbuilding industries are but a shadow of what they used to be. Instead, we concentrated on service industries and trading things, buying and selling stuff, and the market red in tooth and claw has had some interesting social consequences.

Pre-Maggie, there was no telesales industry. There is now. She achieved the feat of turning the home into a place of business.

Pre-Maggie, the country towns of England, Scotland and Wales all had their own individual character. Now they don’t – they all look the same. The chain stores all worked the market so well that you can’t tell what part of the country you’re in unless you look at the map – Peter Oborne, take note.

Pre-Maggie, we used to be a reserved, cautious people, not prone to boasting – not now. For many, ostentation is the norm. The TV schedules are dominated by cheap tat designed to feed our apparently insatiable appetite for ogling other folks’ stuff.

Pre-Maggie, people didn’t move house much – not any more. If you’re a trader, you’ve got to trade, and what better asset to trade than bricks and mortar? The weirdest aspect of the market’s triumph has been the proliferation of neutral decorating schemes, designed to enhance a property’s value but which make them all look the same.

Even the kids look the same – when they rebel, they are rebelling according to the massive marketing pressures placed on them by the music, fast food, fashion, computer games, body piercing and mobile telephony industries. These kids have been bred from the crib to be consumers, to the extent that even their human development is dictated by the market. Maybe they’re getting in touch with their Celtic and Anglo-Saxon roots, but there is something definitely sick in a culture that enables corporate interests to dictate to young girls that piercing their stomachs and tongues is fashionable, saying it’s OK to render the flesh susceptible to infection so long as they spend money. Yuk.

But what can you expect from a Conservative Party that produced a roll of honour like Kenneth Clarke, former Chancellor, still an MP and making big bucks as a director of British American Tobacco, selling cigarettes to the Far East? John Major, a former Prime Minister, who’s made a packet as a director of the Carlyle Group along with George H.W. Bush? Michael Portillo, who’s doing nicely as a BBC pundit while still a public servant? Oliver Letwin, who had to stand down from his post as a director of Rothschild’s (Castro’s bankers) when he was appointed Shadow Chancellor? Lord Young (went into telecoms)? Lord Prior (went into guns and bombs)? Lord Kenneth Baker (went into smutty text messages)? Keep the cash rolling in boys!

Then came 1997, Year Zero of New Labour. There wasn’t anything new about it – it just a cosmetic patch-up job designed to make them look better than the Conservatives, gulling the public into thinking they were moderates by pledging not to raise the income tax. They’ve raised everything else, throwing money into the public sector without any appreciable return. Having ripped off the mobile phone operators for billions at the time of the last licensing round, they still don’t have enough money, so they’ve just come up with the Gambling Bill, aiming to expand the casino industry as another vehicle for mulcting cash from the suckers! There has been a furore over this – the socialism of Labour’s founders was as much informed by Wesley as by Marx, and this is not what they would have wanted.

At the same time, they haven’t had the bottle to tackle the market, doing nothing to tackle the obscene gap that now exists between rich and poor. It’s been reported that the UK’s wealthiest man is Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian steel billionaire for whose commercial interests Blair once wrote a letter of support. Over the past year, inflation has run at between 3% and 4%- according to Christopher Fiddes of the Daily Telegraph, executive compensation has risen by an average of 16% over the same period. Nice work, if you can get it.

But the really nasty by-product of this combination of socialism and unbridled market capitalism has been a sort of compulsory libertarianism, where the Communism of political correctness fuses with the desire of the individual to do as they please, in turn producing some very confused people.

Take Leading Hand Chris Cranmer of the Royal Navy’s HMS Cumberland. According to the October 24 Sunday Telegraph, Leading Hand Cranmer is the first adherent of his religion to be formally recognised as such by the service. He is a Satanist.

Like everywhere else in Europe, the liberals control social policy with a rod of iron. Children are presented with images of sexuality from the earliest age – politicians express shock when they start having sex young. Intercourse is presented as an entertainment without consequences – the Sunday Telegraph has recently reported that the taxpayer-funded British Pregnancy Advisory Service is sending women to Spain in order to obtain abortions that are illegal in the UK due to the stage of their pregnancy. The debris of this ruinous liberalism wanders round our towns at all hours of the day and night. The institutions of the state, provided by the citizen for their own protection, do not function unless in this liberal atmosphere. The citizen is not permitted to protect his home without having to make a lawyerly judgment in a split-second decision in combat against intruders, in the middle of the night. So paralysed is the police service by its institutional liberalism that it cannot keep the streets of Nottingham and Birmingham free from a gun culture that would shame LA’s ganglands.

This is Great Britain now. This is your ally.

The Fate of Tony Blair

2006-03-24T20:52:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
October 28, 2004

The most common misconception about the political vision of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, is that he is ‘Bush’s poodle’ or ‘lapdog’. Tony is anything but – he is an equal partner in crime, driven by the same messianic vision of world order as that which seems to drive the 43rd President of the United States.

It would be fair to say that Blair’s administration has been the most politically successful of any since the Second World War – as, from a certain perspective, it might be said that the same could be true of Bill Clinton’s. Both men shared broadly the same social democrat agenda; both had come to power when the greatest perceived threats to national security had been overcome; both were still young men, full of vitality, in Blair’s case certainly a welcome public change from the stale faces of the Conservatives who had sat in government for the previous 18 years.

His election was the ultimate triumph of style over substance. The lustre began to fall off him within weeks, when it became clear that Formula One motor racing was to be exempted from the provisions of legislation aimed at banning tobacco advertising at sports events. Formula One’s billionaire owner, a petite former garage mechanic named Bernie Ecclestone, had made a hefty donation to Labour.

Since that time his administration has been riven by scandal. He has lost the same minister, Peter Mandelson, twice; once, for an issue of concern relating to a mortgage application; twice, for concern over a letter of support he may have written for a billionaire Indian looking to obtain a British passport. In the late summer of 2000, the country ground to a halt when farmers and teamsters blockaded oil refineries in protests at increases of 300% in the level of duty on red diesel – in three years! In 2001, Scotland’s biggest industry, tourism, took a pre -9/11 hammering after the first outbreak of foot and mouth disease in decades; the national herd has not yet fully recovered.

Economically, the rails have just come off. It took a long time, but it’s happened. The first thing that Blair did as Prime Minister was to make the Bank of England independent of the Treasury, with control of interest rates. The concerted assault by taxation on pension funds meant that the only secure long-term investment vehicle for the public was their dwelling, if they owned one. Since November 2003, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has been putting up interest rates, and movement in the property market is slowing down. For the first time in seven years, Brits are starting to think they’re worse off than they were under the Tories. Not usually a good sign.

A reader once wrote to me asking what I thought of Blair’s chances for the future. Being an extremely biased observer, I have to say regretfully say, not as bad as they might be.

If historians of the future ever decide to give a name to his time as leader, it should be called ‘The Great Disconnection’, because no politician has done more to disconnect the British public from politics than he has, through spin, sleaze, media management and close party control. The most important work of his premiership was done long before he ever became premier – what has sustained him in the very difficult political times he has suffered and caused others to suffer since 1997 has been that in the three years beforehand, he and a very small clique of people – Mandelson; his press adviser Alistair Campbell, an unashamed former gigolo and tabloid journalist; and probably his wife – moulded the Labour Party into his Blair’s image. Instead of being the party of class warfare, it became a safe party for vote for, the party of ‘Mondeo man’ driving the kids to soccer practice in a people carrier. He has loyalists, and ultra-loyalists – if there are two things that Patricia Hewitt, the Anglo-Australian Secretary Of State for Trade and Industry, can always be relied on to do, they are a) introduce into any debate the topic of how many women’s’ groups she’s met with recently; and b) back Tony.

This cadre of loyalists is to keep in check the hard left figure of Gordon Brown. As well as inciting considerable English racism (he is always described as a ‘dour ’ or ‘penny-pinching’ Scot), Brown is yang to his yin, the id to his ego, the fulcrum, focus and heartthrob of the hard left. They were never tamed – if you work as a teacher or a nurse in the UK you have never been better off, thanks to the power of Labour’s public sector union power base, and the rest can go hang – and they still like to flex their muscles, as the firemen did two years ago, and the London Underground drivers do regularly.

But in the court of public opinion, Blair is still viewed by many as being the least worst option. His only real rival for the leadership is Brown – the rest are largely non-entities. If Brown is kept onside, with a promise to stand aside at the end of the next parliament, Blair may realistically be able to enjoy perhaps another seven years in office. Did I just say, seven years? Ye gods, it didn’t hit me until then.

UK elections do not run on a standard four-year cycle – the maximum term of a parliament is five years. Although elections are normally held at the end of the fourth year, in the past 12 years, two have been held at the end of the fifth, 1992 and 1997. The last was held in 2001. There is talk of an election next year – we shall see. The major obstacles to him losing office should be the opposition parties, and the critical tests of public opinion towards the opposition are always parliamentary bye-elections.

The party that always does well at these elections are the Liberal Democrats. Led by Charles Kennedy, possibly the most unscrupulous man in British politics, they are the most unscrupulous of politicians – the Lib Dems form part of the Scottish Executive coalition; Kennedy campaigned against Scottish Executive health policy – they always do well at these votes. However, in Hartlepool at the end of September they came second behind Labour. The Conservatives came fourth.

Could he be forced to resign over Iraq? Naw, the time for that has been and gone. He survived the Hutton report into the death of David Kelly (the remit of which was heavily skewed in the government’s favour) and he survived the Butler report into the question of the intelligence surrounding WMD. If neither of these brought him down, nothing in Iraq will.

What are his chances of re-election? With Michael Howard as Leader of the Conservatives, Gordon Brown at his back and the likelihood of a 60% turnout? The world’s his oyster.

Would his association with Bush affect his chances? No. The UK’s left are like the old three bar-grill fire your grandmother used to have – they generate a great deal of heat and very little light. Provided he throws them a bone now and again, such as the abolition of the ancient and noble country pursuit of fox hunting, they will be happy, and won’t make too much of a protest. Blair is at heart a neoconservative straight from the bowels of the American Enterprise Institute. It could be fair to say that, if Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had been actively looking for a model on how to overstretch the armed services, they could have looked to the volume of engagements British forces have undertaken since 1997. As a committed Atlanticist who thinks his country’s interests are best served by being America’s closest ally, it is fair to say that many Brits make the critical mistake of confusing the vast majority of Americans with the tiny minority who comprise the neocons – very few have ever heard of Pat Buchanan, for example. But, as with Bush, the public can protest and be damned, for they are both elitists. There will be no heeding any cries of ‘Troops Out’!

He will not lose office over Iraq, no matter the cost. No matter the bloody cost.

The Sad News from Ireland

2006-03-24T20:49:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
October 25, 2004

It’s not often one reads something in a three-day-old newspaper that causes one to do a double-take, but it happened on October 20. Within recent weeks, I had started buying the Irish Sunday Independent newspaper for my Irish fiancée, and its edition of October 17 contained a news report of massive significance that, according to my own basic investigations, has caused a storm in Ireland, has been carried on a couple of weblogs, was mentioned on the local BBC news in Northern Ireland and has otherwise been ignored by every newspaper in the United kingdom and the United States.

In an answer to an allegedly planted question Dermot Ahern, the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Ireland, said that his Fianna Fail party was ‘willing to form a coalition government with Sinn Fein’, the political wing of the IRA.

If this is true then Ireland will become the first independent English-speaking nation outside South Africa to have terrorists in its government.

Just where are the neocons when you need them?

A government that includes the ghoulish disciples of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness is something that the Irish people most certainly do not want. According to the Sunday Independent’s own poll, 60% of the population is against any kind of role for Sinn Fein/IRA in Ireland’s government. 91% do not want any role for it while the IRA continues in its obdurate refusal to disarm. Two Fianna Fail members of the Irish parliament, The Dail, have threatened to resign over the issue.

Immediately the Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, the smoothest of smooth operators, began soft-soaping the people by saying that ‘There has to be an end to paramilitarism’, and that ‘there can be no place for private armies’. But the blistering pens of Jody Corcoran and Emma Blain reported that the real rationale for this announcement was pressure from the majority hard line Northern Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of the Rev. Ian Paisley, as effectively a gesture of goodwill from Fianna Fail, without which the DUP would not be prepared to enter into a coalition government with Sinn Fein in the North. Sauce for the goose must also be sauce for the gander.

If all this is true, then the people of Ireland have been sold down the river, because it has all the markings of a Great Anglo-Irish Carve-Up. Firstly, somebody says something (Dermot Ahern). The purpose of saying it is not to enable debate to take place, but instead to let the people know that a decision has been taken. Other people either deny it outright (Bertie Ahern) or say nothing (Ian Paisley, Tony Blair). The matter will be a hot issue in the press for a week or two, and will then die down. In the background, all interested actors (politicians and civil servants) will be working like Trojans to ensure that the original declaration is implemented.

That is the way that government in the UK and Ireland works. The pattern has been repeated on a number of occasions from continued expansion of the EU to expansion in the social liberal agenda. For 50 years Ian Paisley has used the sectarian slogan ‘No Surrender!’ as a battle-cry. Is he now prepared to surrender because the prospect of having real power in Northern Ireland is dangling before his eyes, and he wants it before he dies? Who knows?

Sinn Fein formed part of the last coalition government in Northern Ireland, which was suspended two years ago because of their continued failure to respect the workings of a democratic society. They were alleged to have used spies against other representatives. Martin McGuinness, a genuine terrorist, was the Minister of Education, and his last act before the suspension of the Assembly and the Executive was to announce without consultation the abolition of Northern Ireland’s outstanding system of selective education, an announcement that the Blair government has backed up! If this is what they would do in the school, then God only knows what they would do when faced with the challenge of running a police service in another country, a country which is extremely proud of its young democracy.

Where is the Prime Minister? Silent and absent. Where is The President? Out chasing the Irish vote. It seems they’re only interested in fighting terrorists who don’t have cousins in Glasgow or Boston.

If what Dermot Ahern has said is true, it is not just a sad day for Ireland; it is a sad day for democrats everywhere, because it means that if you kill enough people, you get taken seriously. The gangs of thugs and hoods in the interim governments of Afghanistan and Iraq will not do anything to better the lot of the people but will merely use those countries as vehicles for their own enrichment and aggrandisement.

Adams and McGuinness would do the same. Shame on you all.

Cons and Neocons Who Hate Free Speech

2006-03-23T23:37:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
October 22, 2004

Being able to express yourself freely within the bounds of the law and without fear of consequences is like the ability to receive a regular delivery of mail – it is the hallmark of a functioning, civilised society. Like the mail, however, it’s sometimes taken for granted.

In the UK, the Post Office doesn’t work anymore. At the turn of the 20th Century, it was said that the only interaction most citizens had with the state was with the mailman, and a letter posted at noon would be delivered at five. There are now no second deliveries, the amount of mail that’s stolen is a national scandal and the unions still have the power to bring the system to a complete halt should they wish to do so. It’s against this background of dysfunctionality that those ever-reliable unprincipled and undisciplined losers, the leadership of the British Parliamentary Conservative Party, have mounted an attack on freedom of speech.

One of the great conservative values is delayed gratification, a hard task in times of low real wages, cheap imports, outsourced jobs, predatory pricing and rising living costs – and when there’s a war on. It’s harsh to have no sympathy for those who feel the call of their Mastercards in such times. However, a group that consistently exempts itself from this value are members of the British Parliamentary Conservative Party, who, when faced with the opportunity to make money on top of the double-national average wage they receive from the taxpayer, never seem to be able to delay their gratification. A good example of this phenomenon is Boris Johnson, MP for Henley-on-Thames.

Elected in 2001, Johnson is also –

Editor of The Spectator
A weekly columnist for The Daily Telegraph
A columnist for GQ magazine
An occasional guest presenter of the BBC’s current affairs comedy quiz show, Have I Got News For You.

However, on this occasion Johnson is the injured party, due to an assault on
his free speech by the Leader of the Conservative Party, the odious Michael Howard.

The death of the Iraq hostage Ken Bigley produced an outpouring of grief in his home city of Liverpool. People can grieve as they see fit – the blown up photo of Bigley, a divorcee with a Thai bride 20 years his junior, hanging in the sanctuary of his mother’s local Catholic Church did grate a little. However, in The Spectator of October 15, an editorial appeared, either written or sanctioned by Johnson, which accused the Liverpool people of ‘wallowing in sentimentality’.

This is where things get confusing. Johnson wrote it or sanctioned it in his capacity as a magazine editor – why, then, did Howard, a person with no connection to the magazine, not only order him to apologise but also to go to Liverpool to deliver the apology in person? Since when did Michael Howard have the power to sanction what magazine editors can and cannot say in their magazines? Does Howard believe that any speech that can even be perceived as being likely to challenge or cause offence should be forbidden? Or is it just any kind of free speech he doesn’t like?

Or is it just free speech that’s politically inept that should be banned?

On October 16, Paul Craig Roberts wrote rather a sad commentary for antiwar.com called The Brownshirting of America. He reported, from personal experience, the tendency of some of those who support George W. Bush to label anybody who opposes him as a traitor or worse, and on their insistence on lockstep support for The Boss. Roberts’ belief is that the root of this is a deep wellspring of economic alienation (another gift of international free trade) into which the talk radio market tapped during the Clinton years. However, what Roberts describes is a different expression of the same level of antipathy to democratic values that leads the followers of Lyndon LaRouche to label Dick Cheney and Tony Blair as ‘Beast Men’. As James Bowman has described, it is almost a feeling that the person delivering the slur or the insult can say anything, that the person receiving it is less than a person, and that they have no right of reply – the accusation is final, the accuser is judge and jury. In this respect, they may indeed be Brownshirts. Or Trotskyites. Or Neocons. Those who sent Roberts the hate-mail that caused Townhall.com to pull his column claimed to be conservatives, but are not that – something else, but not that.

Should Bush win, this may be the future of your country. The movement he leads, not classically Republican, certainly not classically conservative but something else, neoconservative, cannot be trusted to act as custodians of the wonderful history and traditions of American Constitutional democracy. Lies will be solidified as truths, ideology as certainty and war as peace faster than you can say ‘weapons of mass destruction’. John Kerry’s ‘Tony Soprano’ crack was quite funny, given that, to my eyes, Iyad Allawi bears more than a passing resemblance to James Gandolfini. But the President ought to admit that talk of ‘bringing freedom and democracy’ is just garbage if you don’t make every effort to implement the whole package, and that a 78% democracy is no kind of democracy at all. He ought to admit that the conditions for maintaining a democracy and establishing a culture of civil liberties and free speech are not favoured by an Iraqi constitution that has Sharia law as a source. He can sack the Clean Break Gang who are running The Pentagon and who kicked this fiasco off in the first place, all of them dangerous men. And he can say that the USA, the country of Jefferson, Adams, Lincoln, Reagan and so many other genuine defenders of freedom, affirms its commitment to respect the civil liberties of citizens of all nations.

Like, just how many trials of those guys in Guantanamo will be heard in public? And how many of them are really dangerous?

The Sons of the Desert Gather Flowers of the Forest

2006-03-23T23:36:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
October 19, 2004

It was a disaster from start to finish.

They had refused to learn from the mistakes of their forebears, that people who are invaded are people who will resist; they failed to understand the culture and psyche of the country they were invading; they failed to bring sufficient forces; and the forces they did bring used tactics appropriate to previous wars.

Yep, the Scottish invasion of England in 1513 was a real quagmire.

It did, however, leave one very special legacy. The Scots met the English at Flodden Field in Northumberland, and were slaughtered. In memory of the disaster of Flodden, a lament for a lone piper was written that is used by the British Army to this day to remember those who fell in wars far away from home. It is called The Flowers Of The Forest, and it is to us what ‘Coming Home’ is to you guys.

The neoconservative war planners have made such a mess of ensuring that adequate forces are in Iraq that, last week, the commander of US forces in Iraq, General George Casey, requested that his Brit counterpart, General Bill Rollo, provide Brit soldiers to assist in the Baghdad theatre of operations, specifically in the areas of Iskandariya, Latifiya (reckoned to be Zarqawi’s ‘hood) and Mahmudiya, thereby enabling Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz to concentrate all resources on their ongoing attempts to level the town of Fallujah. The Brits are to be under the command and control of American officers, ‘fighting for’ as opposed to ‘fighting with’ (a very sensitive political distinction in relation to the national sovereignty of the United Kingdom), and following American rules of engagement. 650 men of the Highland regiment The Black Watch, recruited from around Perth, the historic heart of Scotland, are being dispatched.

So as in 2003, 1991, 1950, 1944 and 1917, Jock will once again be fighting beside Dwight, and Tam and Rab beside Juan and Clayton Lee. It looks like Tony and George, The Sons Of The Desert, shall soon have more flowers for their garden.

The attitude of the neoconservative movement to the men and women serving under arms in its Iraqi war of aggression has been abysmal. It considers all soldiers to be automatons, only useful for the implementation of their grand designs of Empire, to be sent into harm’s way without regard to details such as whether they are properly equipped, whether there is adequate or even verifiable intelligence of the threats they might face and certainly without regard for their morale. They abuse the special nature of the volunteer soldier’s contract with society, relying on his obligation of obedience for the furtherance of their plans, and, if he is killed, they do not give a damn about the other, higher part of the soldier’s contract - that he is entitled to be publicly mourned, honoured and remembered. George W. Bush’s news black out on returning caskets is ample proof of their contempt.

Case in point. The Black Watch is four months into its second six-month tour in Basra. By all accounts, they had been looking forward to being home for Christmas – now, that’s not going to happen. That’s a great bonus from your country. But they are British soldiers, and they will do as they are told, as they must.

The British Army has not been having a picnic in Basra recently – like their American comrades, they have been subjected to sustained terror attacks, which has resulted in a massive increase in the volume of ammunition that’s been used. And it’s from this arena that they are going to Baghdad.

Will The Sons Of The Desert ever apologise for what they have done in that country? For the civilian lives they have taken needlessly? For the peril in which they place their own citizen volunteers? One would certainly hope that leaders and statesmen would possess the intelligence to reflect on mistakes, and not continue doing the same things in the hope of achieving a different outcome – the classic definition of insanity. But as time passes, it seems clearer that neither Bush nor Blair is temperamentally inclined to self-examination, although both have tremendous capacities for self-justification, self-belief and self-promotion. The question is, both tout themselves as moral and prayerful men – does neither of them, in the quiet of the night, ever feel ashamed of what they have done?

When they have to, the Scots fight like demons – during World War One, the kilted Cameron Highlanders were so ferocious that the Germans gave them the nickname ‘The Ladies From Hell’, and they won the lifelong admiration of at least one of their opponents, a certain Corporal Hitler. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders held their ground at Balaclava so stoutly that they earned a name now common throughout the language, ‘The Thin Red Line’. In every one of Britain’s wars, the Scots have been at the front, and whatever else one thinks of this war, right now I wouldn’t want to be in any neck-smiter’s shoes, because the boys from Perth and Pitlochry are coming.

Let’s hope they won’t be there for long, and that there will be no more need to hear the strains of The Flowers Of The Forest, whether it’s in Dundee, Arbroath, Calumet City, Illinois or Thousand Oaks, California. It’s called a lament for a reason.

NeoCons and the Terror Bounce

2006-03-23T23:34:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
October 14, 2004

One of the neoconservative movement’s most commonly used tools is scaremongering, in particular, predicting that the USA will suffer a terrorist attack in the homeland prior to the Presidential election. This tool has been used recently by the theologian and ultima neocon Michael Novak when slavishly reporting the pearls of the failed politician and proven liar Jose Maria Aznar, who told the neocons gathered round his ankles at a breakfast meeting of the American Enterprise Institute on September 24 that the USA will suffer ‘a major destructive action’ before November 2 (see ‘The Neocon and the Liar’).

Yeah, dude. Like he would know.

Why do the neocons do this? After all, what possible advantage could they get out of implying that the billions of dollars that have been spent on Homeland Security since 9/11 have been to no avail, and that their boy will be just as useless at protecting Americans as Aznar was at protecting the Spanish?

According to a piece of research published on September 30, the answer is very simple. It might help to keep George Bush’s poll numbers up.

That day Robb Willer, a Ph. D. student in Cornell’s Department of Sociology, published a paper called ‘The effects of government-issued terror warnings on presidential approval ratings’, in ‘Current Research in Social Psychology’. Willer’s conclusions are telling – for each terror warning that is issued by the government, the President’s approval ratings increase. Not merely do his personal approval ratings increase, but his ratings on economic performance also improve.

So that is why they do it. They think that every time they say there will be an attack, there will be a chance that it will provide a boost to Bush in the same way the official alerts do, and help to cement the impression that the American homeland is under constant threat. Although personally, I’m a small government guy, it’s hard to see how, in the wake of 9/11, the President could have done anything other than spend heavily on shoring up mainland America’s clearly shaky defences. Perhaps it was necessary to reinforce to citizens that globalisation, and the global movement of people, had brought the USA fully into the world, and that the world was neither as safe nor as sane as America.

But where the neocons fall down is in trying to instil a climate of fear. Climates of fear are the hallmarks of tyranny – nobody should feel afraid of getting on a bus in America, the way I’m sure many embattled Israelis feel when they get on the bus to go to work. Americans are entitled as Americans to go about their business unmolested by the blandishments of snooping cops and jobsworth civil servants, poking their noses where they don’t belong. Although the neocons, like the controversialist and absurdist John Derbyshire, will defend the right of the rich and powerful not to talk to the cops if they don’t feel like it, like Martha Stewart tried to do, they are not so vocal in their condemnation of those controversial parts of the Patriot Act intended to stop terror but which instead can be used for other law-enforcement purposes against old John Q.

The great argument for creeping police powers is, of course, you have nothing to fear if you’re blameless. But that’s not the point – as a non-American who reads a very great deal of American journalism, one thing about America that some Americans, and certainly almost all neocons, don’t understand is that America is not like other places. America even fights its wars according to a Constitution first committed to paper 220 years ago, and which has undergone remarkably few alterations since. This is not the norm – in fact, it is unique.

By trying to instil a climate of fear, the neocons are trying to advance their agenda of turning America into the sort of country that suits them, one that is not unique but instead globalised and homogenised, one where they are served and everyone else does the serving. They are Trotskyite entryists – they infiltrate the most influential agencies, assume the top jobs and then start promoting other entryists to advance their common agenda. Their weapon of choice in this case is fear – fear of the dreadful lapses that let Atta’s cadre of medieval savages, kin to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s neck-smiting SOB’s, into the flying schools of Florida and onto the tarmac at Logan. It may happen again, and it may happen before the election, in which case I will be eternally sorry – but the amount of money that taxpayers have spent since 9/11 on preventing such an event predicates that the possibilities of it happening are very remote indeed.

When they speak this way, they are trying to generate a terror bounce for George W. Bush. Bounce them back to AEI. And be very, very wary of Orange Alerts in the last week of October.

The Great NeoCon Post-Debate Panic

2006-03-23T23:33:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
October 7, 2004

The last time I was part of the audience on a political talk show, the host came to speak to us before recording. He asked us to keep our questions brief, and then said something that has tainted my perception of every news broadcast and political show I’ve watched since. The reason for brevity was, ‘this is politics, but it’s also showbusiness’.

Which is exactly the fact that the neocons have forgotten in their hysterical reaction to the first debate between the presidential candidates. It was an exercise in style and presentation, not substance. Bush failed, but neither he nor Kerry was ever going to say anything that would be in the slightest bit controversial, innovative or insightful. What it was was a sort of upmarket WWF confrontation between The Boston Brahmin (‘Hear him nuance!’) and The Outsourcer (‘Give me your jobs! Bring them down! Send them to me NOW!). The only thing that was missing was Jim Lehrer shouting, ‘Let’s Get Ready To Rumble!’

From what I saw of it Kerry was wiping the floor with Bush. Even early in the debate it was clear that Bush had gone with a set of slogans to chant. The use of slogans by neoconservatives betrays their Trotskyite roots. Power to The People! You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains! He’s A Dictator! He Gassed His Own People! It’s Hard Work! In liberal democratic as well as totalitarian politics, slogans are brainwashing tools – constant repetition leads the followers to believe the truth of the message; and the fact of their repetition betrays the uniformity of thought that any really solid cult, whether political or otherwise, needs in order to ensure its survival. Which is why this White House is the most leak-proof in living memory.

But the real proof of the input that both sides’ legions of consultants and advisers had in prepping the preppies was the almost hilarious appearance of Laura Bush and Theresa Heinz Kerry in virtually the same neutral colours. Although it’s showbusiness, there was no need for it to be farce.

However, the neocons have reacted to Bush’s flop as only ideologues whose ideology has been shown wanting can. For them, this debate has been a disaster, because it showed up The Boss’s shortcomings at prime time.

Consider the almost manic reaction of Jay Nordlinger, Managing Editor of The National Review. In a column called ‘Don’t Shoot the Messenger’ in the October 1 National Review Online, he outlined all of the mistakes Bush made and concluded with,

“I have called George W. Bush a Rushmore-level president. I believe history will bear that out; and if it doesn’t, history will be wrong. I think that Bush’s re-election is crucial not only to this country but to the world at large. I not only think that Bush is the right man for the job; I have a deep fondness – love, really – for the man, though I don’t know him.

But tonight (I am writing immediately post-debate) did not show him at his best. Not at all. He will do better – I feel certain – in subsequent debates. I also worry that they count less”

This provides an interesting insight into the neoconservative mindset, as it betrays the personality cultism to which all ideologies derived from Communism are prone. Bush is not just a candidate – he is the Great Leader, without whom The Party could not survive. So far, he is a one-term president who has had to deal with some unique problems that were not of his making and others which most certainly are. Should he lose, it will not be the end of America. Any neocon who thinks that is dissing the US of A. But a Bush loss will be the end of the neoconservatives –and they are terrified of it.

Others held their nerve rather better than Nordlinger. William F. Buckley, Jr., the original good conservative gone bad, opted to parse the content of both candidates’ presentations in an NRO column called ‘And The Winner Is’, published on the same day as Nordlinger’s rant. He took his rapier mind to what Kerry actually said, and concluded, rightly, that it didn’t amount to very much. What did for WFB was that Bush didn’t have anything innovative to say about resolution in Iraq. The founder of The National Review concluded that,

“President Bush does not have an easily saleable vision of what to do with that cursed dilemma. It transpires, gradually, that we are relying on the Iraqi people to effect their liberation, because we simply aren’t up to it.

And Kerry was there to say: Let me try it, I’m somebody else. And that got a lot of people to opine that that is a winnable program”

Hard words indeed for a neoconservative to say.

The ubiquitous and vocal neocon talking head and State Department basher Joel Mowbray reached slightly different conclusions in a piece called ‘The Bush-Kerry Face-Off’, for the October 1 edition of Front Page Magazine. Typically, Mowbray gives Kerry less credit than Buckley. He did, however, note the charmlessness of Bush’s performance and the existence of ‘flash-polls’ giving Kerry a 10-point lead. However, he screwed his courage to the sticking post and rallied the comrades back to the banner with the observation that,

“Before anyone reads too much into the ultra-early poll results, though, some history: Walter Mondale was declared the winner over Ronald Reagan in their first debate”.

Solidarity, brother! Solidarity!

If you think these are odd instances of nerves, think again. In the October 3 Sunday Telegraph, Mark Steyn, one half of The Neocon SAS, was whistling in the dark, trying to keep cheerful by making cracks about Kerry’s tan and manicure, with lots and lots of puns on the word, ‘summit’.

Writing in the Sunday Times the same day, the official spokesman for the Pro-War Pro-Choice Conservatives for Kerry Party (membership-one), Andrew Sullivan, made what were, in fairness, several very cogent points. Firstly, Bush gave the impression of being disengaged from the reality of what is happening in Iraq. This is not surprising – he is an ideologue, and ideologues usually only pick up what they want to hear. Secondly, the way Bush’s mind works is that if you criticise the war you disqualify yourself from office, which is not, as Sullivan suggests, ‘offensive’; but it is entirely in keeping with a mindset that demands purity of ideology. Like the neoconservatives.

The big beasts in the neoconservative jungle are really running scared. Interviewed by Tony Allen-Mills in the same edition of the Sunday Times, Bill Kristol said, “Bush has better arguments for his foreign policy than he made tonight”. You can almost hear the gulps of despair coming from The Weekly Standard.

Indeed, right now the neocons are so scared that one of their number, the tireless guru of neoconomics Irwin Stelzer, has written a book about the philosophy in order to scotch the myth of ‘neocon cabals’. It’s called ‘Neoconservatism’, it’s being published this month and nowhere in the 1,500 word puff piece extract that appeared in the same issue of the Sunday Times did Stelzer refer to its roots in Shachtmanite Trotskyism.

A year ago, they would have considered such a book unnecessary. They were riding high. Their confidence bred hubris – who needs more troops on the ground? This is a cakewalk. The Iraqis are free now – man, they’re all buying TV’s and air conditioners! When can we go into Iran? Faster, please!

But now, with the shattered promises; the flip-flop on recruitment of former Ba’athist officials; their failure, born of hubris, to recognise the power of the twin forces of tribal loyalty and Iraqi nationalism; their practice of slurring their opponents; their obsession with money and markets which played its own part in the nightmare of Abu Ghraib; the public know all these things about them now. Who will stand firm? Who will not waver? Whose heart is true?

Yep, you guessed it. Though cowards flinched and traitors sneered, the hatchet man David Frum, loyal to the cause to the last, posted a diary entry on NRO on October 1. Whatever debate he was watching, it wasn’t the same one as everyone else. He made no reference to Bush’s failings, took two brief points made by Kerry, said that Kerry had ‘locked himself in a strategic box’ and concluded the brief entry with,

“Only a horrible mistake by President Bush could have let him out. The president didn’t stumble. So Kerry is still boxed in – and losing the election”.

The words of a true believer. Let’s hope he stays on the barricades when the neocons really start panicking in the streets.

How the NeoCons Will Kill the GOP

2006-03-23T23:32:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
October 6, 2004

Ideologues are like racehorses or Siamese cats – they must be bred from a pure line. Just as inbreeding has turned Siamese cats into demented neurotics, so too are most ideologues – the only difference between them is that the Siamese has an excuse.

The neoconservatives’ relentless quest for ideological purity is what will kill the Republican Party that they currently infest. The very word, ‘neoconservative’ is redolent of a desire to design yourself as different from others who are like you – what was wrong with the word ‘conservative’? Why must they be ‘neoconservatives?’ If anyone thinks that the GOP is strong enough to withstand the force of their divisive ideology, they had better think again, because right now the British Conservative Party is dying as the result of its abandonment, decades ago, of conservative principles in pursuit of ideology that was new and radical but which is now just old and failed, the economic dogmas and absolutes of Thatcherism. Neoconservatism adopts many of the same principles, and the Harvest of Thatcher will be the Harvest of Bush. You have been warned.

The evening of September 30 was the night that the death rattle of the Conservative Party could be heard in Hartlepool, in the North-East of England. One of Hartlepool’s claims to fame is that, during the Napoleonic Wars, its people hanged a monkey they believed to be a Bonapartist spy.

The Conservatives had kept the seat as recently as 1959. However, Hartlepool, like everywhere else north of the River Humber, was badly affected by their adoption of Thatcherism.

Thatcherism states that everything must be left to the market. The market will create choices for people. As a consequence, the state has no business interfering in the choices that people make. It is therefore impossible to review the abortion laws as people may wish to choose to have abortions. If it is the choice of a business to relocate its operations overseas, the government has no cause to interfere. Anything that stands in the market’s path must be annihilated.

As you might imagine, Thatcherism was a very, very business-friendly philosophy. However, it inflicted casualties. Principal among these were northern industrial towns like Hartlepool, which all suffered massive unemployment as the market adjusted itself down to its lowest cost. As a result, the Conservative Party has been on the back foot in the north for 20 years.

The Parliamentary bye-election that night arose because the sitting MP, Peter Mandelson, had resigned in order to become a European Commissioner in Brussels. Labour kept the seat with a vote of 12,752 on a turnout of 45.8%. The Conservatives finished fourth, with a vote of 3,044.

The conservative columnist Peter Hitchens, brother of Christopher, wrote a scathing article about the Conservative Party called ‘The problem, not the solution’ for the October 2 issue of The Spectator. He makes it quite clear that it was the Conservatives’ abandonment of conservatism that has brought them to this pass, and they have nobody to blame but themselves. He’s dead right.

In the meantime, that day’s leading editorial in The Daily Telegraph was called ‘Howard must be ruthless in pursuit of power’. When the house journal of the Conservative Party feels it must exhort an already ruthless man to greater heights of ruthlessness, then the movement it’s supposed to represent is dying.

It is the divisive, unconservative ideology of the neoconservatives that will kill the GOP. They might not do it immediately – it might take years. However, the death warrant of the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan was signed the minute that the neoconservatives gained the balance of power in its leadership. These people were not seeking power in order to act like true conservatives; protecting the status of the family; creating opportunity; ensuring America’s borders are secure; protecting the right to life; protecting American tradition and history. Many, like George W. Bush, American Thatcher, seemed to be running to their own agendas, not the bill of goods they sold the public. Many who call themselves neoconservative still say conservative things about halting illegal immigration, either actively or passively ignorant that illegal immigration is vital to the best interests of the corporate interests they fawn over.

This inconsistency doesn’t bother them, because they have inherited the truth. They have inherited the pure vision. The pure vision tells them to wreak havoc, that’s what they do. The pure vision tells them to sell the dollar to the Chinese, that’s what they do.

In time, the people will drift away from them as they tire of a message of constant aggression, constant war and constant economic insecurity. And what will happen after that is what I’m really scared of.

Europe's Top NeoCon Reloads

2006-03-23T23:25:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
October 1, 2004

On Tuesday September 28, Europe’s top neoconservative rammed home the message to anyone willing to listen that the neocons are unrepentant for the carnage they have visited on the country of Iraq, nor do they feel any real regret for the loss of at least 11,000 Iraqi lives. It was nothing to do with oil. It was nothing to do with international terrorism. It was just personal all along, driven by hidden agendas and/or their lust for glory, and they’re in it to the end.

In his speech to the Labour Party Conference in Brighton, Tony Blair said:

“The evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong. I acknowledge that and accept that…the problem is …I can’t, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam. The world is a better place with Saddam in prison and not in power”.

He added, “I have come to realise that caring in politics isn’t really about ‘caring’. It’s about doing what you think is right”.

So much for laws and policies. If making war is what you think is right, then do it. Yes.

The sole rationale for this war was to disarm Iraq of its Weapons of Mass Destruction. Anything else reeks of hidden agenda.

For whom is the world a better place, Prime Minister? Although the secret police may not be knocking on their doors any more, one can hardly say that the lot of the residents of Fallujah, Samarra and Najaf has improved any. Because of a group of outsiders who chose to take cover in their midst, they are now at very much greater risk of aerial assault than they were before. By all accounts, Baghdad is pretty much Tombstone on the Tigris, which it certainly wasn’t before. But that’s just a tragic consequence of war, Tony. I understand. We all feel your pain.

It’s not much better for the nearly 1,300 dead Coalition personnel, of whom over 60 have been Brits. But they were doing their duty, even although the first Brit to die, Sergeant Steve Roberts, was ordered to give away his body armour to a colleague who had none, while the government continues to treat the public sector on the home front like a giant make-work scheme for preferred demographics, pouring money into unproductive politically correct projects which receive massive funding and from which few derive real benefit. But I suppose that just shows your commitment to social inclusion, doesn’t it Tony? I understand.

It’s not much better for the British Army in Basra. Recently, attacks on them have grown exponentially, up to 800 in the last month.

Blair’s soft-focus message was that he’s acted like a man of principle in taking us into this mess. He’s done what he thought was right. It was right to invade Iraq to disarm them of weapons they never had. Presumably, it is now also equally right for any sovereign nation to invade any other sovereign nation in order to change a regime its leaders don’t like.

This is a serious point of law. Just what will they do when Red China decides to enforce its policy of regime change on Taiwan?

To paraphrase Michael Kelly, killed in Iraq, I believed you, Prime Minister, when you stood in the House of Commons and said that WMD could be launched in 45 minutes. I believed you when you said this man was a threat to world peace. I believed you when you said that he was connected to international terrorist groups not of the past but of the present. I believed you when you said all those things.

But the interests of the neoconservative movement, as stated in documents from ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’ to ‘Project for the New American Century’ to ‘An End to Evil’ (what a dumb, arrogant title for a book!); from
the interests of government departments with sinister names like Douglas Feith’s ‘Office of Special Plans’; to the interests of a man burning to avenge his family’s honour, like George W. Bush; to the interests of the most truly narcissistic Prime Minister of recent times, all of whose actions are triangulated with one eye on his place in history, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair; all of these interests dictated that the government of Saddam had to go, regardless of whether he had the weapons or not.

All policies of deterrence were discarded. No cause in the world was greater or more urgent than this man’s removal.

In retrospect, it was all a crock of yellowcake.

But having been against one tyrant, they’d be against them all – right?

Blair’s subordinate Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was in New York City recently for the UN General Assembly. The conservative community on the web did not seem to notice that another visitor to the General Assembly was the Hitler of Zimbabwe, Robert Gabriel Mugabe.

Mugabe continues his rape of that beloved country, turning white farmers, the country’s biggest employers, off their land in a redistribution scheme from which prominent members of his ZANU-PF party are the greatest beneficiaries. Many of Zimbabwe’s white farmers are able to claim British citizenship, and have found my government most obstructive of their attempts to resettle here. His genocide of the Matabele in the 1980’s continues to go unpunished. His most prominent opponent, the Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo Pius Ncube, continues to be harassed by Mugabe’s goons to the point of breakdown. Mugabe continues to call gay men pigs.

Under those circumstances, a very potent case could be made that the interests of the United Kingdom, and those entitled to citizenship of the United Kingdom, would be best served by confronting this fascist madman than by being in Iraq. Instead, Jack Straw shook Mugabe’s hand. That’s real progress, of the kind that Tony Blair called for in his conference speech.

Only a real neoconservative could pave the road of history with the skulls of Iraqis and call it the road to progress.

A Nation, Not a Market

2006-03-23T23:23:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
September 29, 2004

America’s economic prospects remain the same regardless of who wins the election. American manufacturing will continue to decline. American jobs will still be outsourced overseas. Neither party will make any serious effort to curb illegal immigration.

There is no great mystery as to why this should be so. It is because it is what the market wants.

Who is the market? Is it you, the small investor looking for a better return than bonds? Is it you, the housewife looking for the best bargains for her family? Or is it you, the corporate guy, the boring, bland, dull, grey corporate guy, reciting your jargon like incantations?

As run today, the world, literally the world, belongs to corporate guy. And the neocons love it, even the smart ones who should know better, like Victor Davis Hanson.

Run properly, markets are healthy things – after all, what’s the alternative? Free enterprise funded by private capital was the only way in which the marvellous technological advances of the 20th century were able to come about. The desire to acquire private capital has generated more wealth for more people, and to date has probably inflicted less lasting hurt on people, than the economic idiocies of Communism. During the 1980’s the Romanian Communist Party screened Dallas, ostensibly for the propaganda purpose of decrying the decadence of a capitalist society. As propaganda, it didn’t work – the Romanians loved it.

But now the market dominates everything. It dominates what you do, where you live, what you eat and the very air you breathe. In the world of the free market, there are no such things as countries. There are no such things as citizens. There is no history, loyalty, civics or ethics. There are only consumers. The consumer has two functions. Firstly, at all costs, he must be productive. Such is the importance of his productivity that it must be measured in margins of seconds. Secondly, he must consume.

Unless controls are introduced on the free market very soon, a movement will begin to remove the Pledge of Allegiance from America’s schools, funded by global corporate interests, not the usual atheists. The reason is simple – right now, loyalty to Old Glory and the Constitution is one of the few remaining barriers in the market’s path to achieving its goal of removing America’s borders and integrating it into a global market that they control for the benefit of generating wealth for themselves. The former boast of the Society of Jesus was that if you gave them the child they would give you the man. The market says, if removing the child’s first connection with American history and culture, indeed with the very essence of what it means to be an American, is what it takes to help us get what we want, then let’s go for it.

The free-marketeers, who are all very aggressive and vocal in their beliefs, say that if you think such things you’re wrong; you’re a Flat-Earther or worse, an anti-capitalist. Nothing is further from the truth. It is in order to preserve the wonderful traditions and principles of Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American liberal capitalism that this rush has to be stopped now, otherwise they have no future. Let me give you an example.

The real turning point in the history of the free market was the election of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the British Conservative Party in 1975. Her predecessor Edward Heath had brought the UK into what was called the Common Market, the forerunner of the European Union. The fact that the envisioned free market transformed itself into a political behemoth with the consent of alleged ‘conservatives’ is another story altogether. However, Heath was what was once called a ‘One Nation Tory’ from the great tradition of Disraeli and Churchill. Heath’s failure to curb the economic insurgency of pro-Moscow trade unionists laid the grounds for Thatcher’s election. She abhorred ‘One Nation’ conservatism, preferring instead to let the market dictate all aspects of all policies. After the Labour government tested to destruction the big statism favoured by both Bush and Kerry, she won in a landslide in 1979.

It was in 1979 that the Conservative Party ceased to be a conservative party. Instead, it became the party of the market.

To her credit, she did take on the pro-Moscow unions. However, trade unionism is not per se a bad or unconservative thing – markets only consider the people they employ to be corporate liabilities, to be eliminated from the balance sheet at the earliest opportunity. If membership of a trade union enables a conservative to preserve his family’s prospects then he should be in, not out. However, the fact that the British unions were acting so blatantly against the national interest created a tide of opinion against them, which Thatcher rode to destroy them.

In the 25 years since her election, British manufacturing has been decimated. The great ships no longer roll down the slipways of the Clyde or the Mersey. The ocean of coal we float on lies largely unmined. Although the market has created new jobs (with the aid of substantial grants from the taxpayer), they are almost all service jobs, which pay less, are far less likely to be unionised and which have far fewer opportunities attached to them. If you live in a town that used to have a car plant, you’ll recognise this. Because service sector jobs pay less, these towns suffer more from social problems like divorce, alcoholism and drug abuse as it very difficult for a large group of people who used to earn relatively high wages to have to subsist on consistently less. The advocates of an untrammelled free market will always say, ‘it creates jobs’. Yes, it does – it just that those jobs don’t pay very much and enable their holders merely to get by from paycheck to paycheck as opposed to being able to make a living. And those jobs are always subject to the movement of the market, so they are far less secure.

In the meantime, the real problem of a service economy is that all your competitors are providing the same service as you. Your service has to be different. As a result, your staff have to work even longer hours or adopt working practices like shifts. Shift working used to be the preserve of a few, with benefits like generous overtime for the attendant inconvenience. Not any more. It’s expected. The market demands it, which is why it’s now just as hard to get a parking space at the mall on Thursday afternoons as it used to be on Saturday mornings.

In the meantime, executive compensation vastly outstrips the rate of inflation and the difference in earnings between the CEO and the guy on the shop floor has widened not a few but dozens of times. The market even killed the game show.

In the 1970’s, one of the UK’s most popular game shows was called Sale Of The Century. Broadcast by Anglia TV, it had two big draws – firstly, a really catchy theme tune; and secondly, a really charismatic host, Nicholas Parsons. It always began with a disembodied voice saying ‘And live from Norwich, it’s the quiz of the week!’ The contestants would then play to win consumer goods like washing machines, rare and valuable items in those days thanks to the machinations of the Shah of Iran.

Of course, over time the market developed to such an extent that consumer goods became cheap and affordable, by seeking its lowest cost. Playing for washing machines wasn’t fun any more, so now contestants on game shows have to do stupid, demeaning, embarrassing things on shows like Big Brother and Survivor.

The quiz of the week in Norwich last week was ‘How am I going to earn a living?’ One of the town’s biggest employers, the insurer Norwich Union, is cutting 950 jobs between its operations in Norwich and York as part of its plan to create 7,000 jobs in India over the next few years. Perfectly productive Brits are being downsized because the directors of Norwich Union think the British people are so addled by the market that they will continue to accept notional savings on insurance as justification for putting other Brits out of work – savings which never really seem to appear. They’ll have to wait and see how long we’ll take it.

Of course, the real sale of the century has been the outsourcing of American industrial capacity to China. What is the morality of this? Advocates of the free market say that if production of steel moves from Gary, Indiana to Shanghai, that is merely the market at work. The steelman in Gary wears comprehensive protective gear – the Chinese wears a T-shirt and flip-flops. There is a comprehensive system of workmens’ compensation covering the boys in Gary – are the Chinese even unionised? Are there wee lassies in China starting to hack with what P. J. O’Rourke has laughingly called ‘gym-shoe-lung?’ The Gary workers may participate in a bonus scheme based on their productivity – does the Chinese earn even a dollar a day, while his boss, probably the son or daughter of a high Communist, is driving about in a Hummer? The BBC 10 O’Clock News of September 27 had a piece on how the Chinese boom means that they now import twice the volume of oil they did three years ago, which may have the effect of keeping the oil price at its current level. Are the American people, not famously fond of expensive gas, going to have to suffer continued high prices at the pumps to enable the elite of a Communist country to consume more, while they churn up productive farmland to build more factories and then consume more gas? While it so excludes its own people that they grab every opportunity they can to find work anywhere, like the 19 Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay, England, on February 5th? Those guys, mostly Christian professional men, were people whose ethics demanded that they work to provide their families. Chinese capitalism/communism did not enable them to do so. So now they are dead. RIP.

Ah, but the Chinese were illegals! Well, yes, but they were under the thumb of organised people smugglers like the Snakeheads. Unlike many illegals they did not come from a nominal democracy. They did not cross the Channel under their own steam, but instead in a flatbed truck in which the air supply could have been cut off at any time. And the earnings of Chinese illegal immigrants in the UK do not comprise 14% of China’s GDP the way that money sent home from the States comprises 14% of the GDP of El Salvador.

Being critical of illegal immigration is not the racial nationalism that those who advocate it allege. In all matters relating to illegal immigration into the USA, I defer to Frosty Wooldridge of The Washington Dispatch. Frosty’s figure of 4,000 illegal immigrants every single day is frightening! But the market, with its insatiable appetite for growth and consumers, needs that level of illegal immigration in order to sustain itself, which it is why it will never stop. That is why Kerry will do as little as Bush has done to stop it. George W. Bush’s offer of amnesty was like rolling out the red carpet for anyone who seeks to circumvent the history and traditions of immigration into America for the chance to make a buck. It is only surprising that he was so blatant.

Markets know no borders, and those who advocate them will do anything they can to tear them down. If you don’t believe me, ask the grubs of Australia.

When grilled, grubs are considered a delicacy by travellers in the Outback. Aussie investors had better start scrambling about for them, because the world’s most powerful free-marketeer, and king of the corporate neoconservatives, is in the process of wiping up to seven per cent off the value of their stock market by taking his corporate HQ on walkabout from Sydney to New York, a move which his spokesman is unashamed to say will enable him to exercise more control over the company’s affairs. Because of globalisation and the free market, the future of the grub is not looking good!

The generic name for the cuisine of the Australian Outback is ‘bush tucker’.

Like pidgin English, Keith Rupert Murdoch is a sort of pidgin conservative – the words are the same, they’re just in the wrong order. For someone who controls an outlet like Fox News, apparently dedicated to being fair and balanced, he did his bit as one of Thatcher’s Little Helpers to smash trade unionism in the UK’s newspaper printing industry. For someone whose publications claim to be conservative, he had no hesitation in being the first proprietor to publish photographs of topless females in family newspapers.

The number of people who take his money is staggering. The blogger Andrew Sullivan describes his website as ‘independent’ –he’s written a column for Murdoch’s Sunday Times for years.

The political influence he holds, especially in the UK, is incredible – both Tony Blair and the odious Michael Howard have paid him court in Queensland, Australia and Cancun.

Never mind the trade-in he took on his wife he took after getting a gong from The Pope. Never mind his becoming an American citizen after being honoured by the government of Australia. Never mind the constant cross-selling that led Irwin Stelzer of his neoconservative bible The Weekly Standard to describe TWS as ‘the most influential opinion journal in America’ in his weekly ‘American Account’ column for the September 25th Sunday Times.

Ask instead, why did he become an American citizen? His gaining the status of American citizen enabled News Corporation to gain control of a corporate asset, Twentieth-Century Fox. It enabled him to expand his market. From his apartment overlooking Central Park, he might look down on the huddled masses below whose ancestors started their journeys to America in the hellholes of Europe, Africa and the Far East and say to himself, ‘I know what it means to be an American’.

On the other hand, having done it once, who’s to say he wouldn’t do it again?

Pat Buchanan has written recently about neoconservative antipathy towards the regime of Vladimir Putin. The neocons have been blasting Vlad the Impaler for being oppressive and illiberal, in marked contrast to their own message, which is, of, course, all sweetness and light.

On September 25th, The Sunday Telegraph reported that the king of the corporate neoconservatives, the man who gives them more airtime than anyone else, is expanding his broadcasting operations in Russia. He’s already into radio, and is hoping to give them pay-per-view. This link will enable him to leave a broadcasting footprint from the west coast of Ireland to the South China Sea. Is Vlad bad for business? Who knows?

That’s what the market represents – homogeneity of output under the control of very few people who will do anything they can, even promoting the insidious doctrine of neoconservatism, to get what they want. America’s borders? Tear them down! The Constitution and history of the United States? Throw them away!

Sorry, folks, my history’s not for sale anymore. Yours shouldn’t be either. Check where it comes from, and if it doesn’t say ‘Made in America’ don’t have anything to do with it. If the voice at the other end of the customer service line doesn’t have an American accent put the phone down. Demand the return of customer service centres to Main Street, America, so that you can get your problem fixed by another human being willing to look you in the eye and not ask you, from thousands of miles away, if cookies are enabled. Call for an 85% flat tax on outsourced goods and services as being in the interests of the American economy.

Just don’t forget come November that unless either mainstream candidate is pushed into taking action to preserve the unique status of the American economy, they will do nothing. And that’s not what you’re paying them for.

The Neocon and the Liar

2006-03-23T23:21:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
September 28, 2004

On Saturday September 25th, Michael Novak, the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, posted the following item on ‘The Corner’ of National Review Online:

“Former Prime Minister of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar, spoke at breakfast Friday morning at AEI and predicted three spectacular terrorist events in the near future. First, a major destructive action in the United States before election day on November 2, possibly during the last 72 hours, for massive effect in causing confusion and commotion. Second, a dramatic escalation of action in Iraq leading up to November 2, and again in late December and early January to head off the Iraqi election at the end of January. Third, a spectacular attack in the United Kingdom next May to disrupt the re-election campaign of PM Tony Blair”.

‘The Corner’ is not like The Talkback Forum on The Washington Dispatch. It is where the beautiful people of neoconservatism gather to dazzle us with their insight, erudition and elitism, and there are none more dazzling than Michael Novak, the acceptable face of neoconservatism, a Catholic theologian who received the 1994 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, the author of 25 books who has been translated into every major language and a former Ambassador of the US Delegation to the UN Human Rights Conference in Geneva.

Novak has not gone entirely without criticism – in a scathing essay published in the Houston Catholic Worker in 1999, Mark and Louise Zwick berated him for using ‘Catholicism as window dressing to promote an economic system based solely on self-interest, a system that has nothing to do with the Gospel or Catholic social teaching, (replacing) the heart of Catholicism with Adam Smith and Max Weber (virtue comes to society only through self-interest: the Gospel is a private affair)’

The American Enterprise Institute is both the heart and brain of neoconservatism. Other AEI Fellows include the Blue Bolshevik luminaries Michael ‘Faster, Please’ Ledeen and the Canadian-born hatchet man David Frum, co-author with Richard Perle of An End to Evil, the neoconservative Das Kapital. However, in this instance it is not the identities of the neoconservatives themselves that is interesting - it is their choice of speaker that is telling.

For me, the final break with neoconservatism came with Abu Ghraib. Before, I had believed that philosophy had been about spreading and protecting democracy and making the world a safer place, not wee Lynndie and her dog leash. However, there had been a growing feeling of discontent with it, and one of the principal causes had been the reaction of neoconservatives to Jose Maria Aznar’s loss of the Spanish general election in the immediate aftermath of the Madrid bombings.

Jose Maria Aznar is a liar. A stalwart neoconservative, his first reaction to the deaths of 191 people was to pronounce that the bombing had been carried out by the Basque separatists ETA, before their bodies were cold. Aznar made his announcement before the duffel bags containing the usual Islamofascist gibberish were discovered. If ETA had carried out the bombing, it would have completely removed any sympathy for them from the people in whose names they would have been acting. For all that they are ruthless terrorists, they are ruthless rational terrorists – it would not have served their purposes to carry out such an attack. ETA would not have perceived it to be in their twisted interest to do something like that. It was ludicrous of Aznar even to suggest it. However, coming as it did so shortly before the election, Aznar, acting with the cold calculation that only a Jacobin or Bolshevik is capable, seized the opportunity to try to spin the disaster to his advantage and away from any criticism from the leftist press in Spain that it may have been the result of Spain’s commitment in Iraq.

The Spanish were absolutely disgusted with Aznar for trying to spin the deaths of 191 people to his advantage, and as a result Zapatero was elected and Spain withdrew from Iraq.

What is doubly shocking about this behaviour is that Aznar was a popular Prime Minister. In all likelihood, he would have won the election. However, like the good Jacobin that he is he just couldn’t resist the chance to try to spin and twist tragedy to his own advantage.

However, immediately after the Spanish election results were announced the neoconservative movement began to use the Bolshevik language with which they’re most comfortable and started to label the Spanish as cowards and appeasers. Notable culprits were David Limbaugh, George Will, Tony Blankley, Bill Murchison, Chuck Colson and Debra Saunders. I was so disgusted by this behaviour in reaction to the exercise of a free franchise by a free people that I wrote a column about it for The Washington Dispatch called Negative Reactions to Spanish Democracy.

It says little for such a distinguished theologian as Novak to spend any time in the company of a man like Aznar. However, from the neocon point of view, it makes perfect sense.

Having been kicked out of office by people they think have been cowardly, Aznar is a perfect guest for AEI. He speaks their sort of language, the language of scaremongering and fear. What basis does a failed politician like Aznar have for predicting an attack in America before the election? He wasn’t so hot at keeping the Spanish safe. What basis does he have for predicting an escalation in Iraq? More to the point, why does he think there will be one before the election in the UK next year? Doesn’t he know that the UK doesn’t operate on a fixed four-year election cycle? Doesn’t he know that, although he might do so earlier, Tony Blair doesn’t have to call an election until 2006? Michael Novak clearly doesn’t.

But the real message of this address was that Aznar, the Great Euro Sacrificial Lamb on the altar of neoconservatism, was spreading the gospel the neocons love to hear. Marx said that religion was the opium of the people. The opium of the neoconservatives is fear. They love fear so much they’ll gather round a liar to get a fix.

And they love to make you afraid. Boy, do they love it.

The Blue Bolsheviks

2006-03-23T23:19:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
September 24, 2004

There are few studies more likely to induce deep sleep than trying to follow the doings of Communists. The core of their beliefs is the rejection of God and the exaltation of man, but being human they cannot erase their spirituality completely, so they must find new gods, and the gods of Communism, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Mao, have been the most unattractive, fractious and bloodthirsty divinities until the advent of Osama.

In such difficult times as these, for nobody should doubt that these are truly historic times, it’s maybe pertinent to ask ourselves, what became of anti-Communism? Why has a movement that so energised society for decades withered on the vine? Did we really think that Communism died with the Soviet Union? It surely hasn’t. Our difficult times are being directed and influenced by people who at some time in their lives have either been Communists or who have no compunction about using Communist language. Red Bolshevism is dead as a political force in sane societies. What has taken its place is equally dangerous – the Blue Bolshevism of neo-conservatism.

A useful essay outlining the Trotskyite roots of neo-conservatism is Stephen Schwartz’s 'Trotskycons', published in the June 11 2003 edition of National Review Online. Schwartz is a popular Internet pundit who has worn many hats during the course of his life, which have been duly recorded by his long-standing antagonist Srjda Trifkovic. As well as being a convert to Islam, something he doesn’t usually tell his readers, he has admitted to involvement with the KLA in Kosovo. Therefore, when reading him, one must be careful to determine whether it is Stephen Schwartz, Suleyman Ahmed or Comrade Sandalio that’s speaking. He’s probably cultivating crossover appeal.

These aren’t guys who queue at the job-window, waiting for some Johnny Friendly to shout ‘Everybody works today!’ Instead, they began life as Trotskyites in the ‘30’s in the school advocated by the philosopher Max Shachtman – according to Schwartz, ‘they belonged to or sympathized with a trend in radical leftism that followed the principle of opposition to the Soviet betrayal of the revolution to its logical end’. In layman’s terms, this began as a house fight with the Stalinists.

According to Schwartz, the first individuals to formally break from Trotskyism were James Burnham, a founder of National Review, and Irving Kristol of Encounter. Described by the hatchet man David Frum as the only person willing to take the title of ‘neo-conservative’, Irving Kristol is the father of Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, along with National Review the main ideas-engine of neo-conservatism. The Weekly Standard is published by News Corporation, the ultimate owners of Fox News. No doubt in the interests of the ideological purity all Bolsheviks crave, Schwartz absolves Bill Kristol, Richard (‘The Five Million Dollar Man’) Perle and Paul Wolfowitz from any taint of Shachtmanism.

Having left Trotskyism, the neo-conservatives gravitated firstly to the Democrats. However, they still could not tame the fractious beasts within, and started to leave the Democrats in 1972, in opposition to the nomination of George McGovern. Using the classic Trotskyite tactic of ‘entryism’, they began to fill more and more positions of influence within the Republican Party, until now they have come to dominate it. Not bad for people who only started voting Republican in 1980.

For Schwartz, Trotsky is not an ambivalent figure. He lauds Burnham and the Elder Kristol for the fact that ‘they did not apologize, did not grovel, did not crawl and beg forgiveness for having, at one time, been stirred by the figure of Trotsky.’ That’s nice. He’s even more forthcoming on his own opinion of Trotsky as it stands at the moment, describing him a figure of ‘moral consistency’ who, ‘if nothing else, took responsibility for the crimes of the early Bolshevik regime.’

One of those crimes was, of course, the massacre of White Russian military that he orchestrated at the Kronstadt naval base outside St. Petersburg. This is Schwartz’s spin on Kronstadt –

“It is certainly true that Trotsky’s role at Kronstadt was abominable. It is also true that very few people today know or care about Kronstadt, which may or not be bad.’

That as chilling a sentence as I can remember reading. However, he really gets into his stride when he gets going on the subject of the Blue Bolsheviks not of the past, but of the present, and the role they played in supporting interventionist Iraqi War. Step forward that onetime most ardent of Bolsheviks, Christopher Hitchens.

For the life of me, I can’t work out what voodoo Hitchens has worked on you guys over there. He once wrote a column on the subject of Churchill for The Atlantic Monthly called ‘The medals of his defeats’. He made reference to his father’s service as a naval officer on H.M.S. Jamaica and the role he played in helping sink the German destroyer Scharnhorst during the Battle of the Atlantic. He described it ‘a far better day’s work than any I have ever done’. I wouldn’t disagree with that for a second.

However, because of a brilliant skill with words developed at an English public school and the University of Oxford, Hitchens has achieved a level of recognition that his beliefs or former beliefs do not merit. Like Stephen Schwartz, like David Horowitz, like all Bolsheviks Red or Blue, the natural flow of his temper is toward the extreme. It doesn’t matter what extreme. In Horowitz’s case the extreme can be reached after years of soul-searching and repenting what he believed before, his massive learning and energy then channelled into fighting his four noblest of fights, for academic freedom, for the defence of Israel, against the spread of radical Islam and the dirtiest one of all, against the people he once admired and associated with, but it’s still extreme.

It’s hardly surprising then that Hitchens should attach himself to the war against radical Islam with the gusto that he has – it’s a competing ideology. To the mind of Hitchens, Osama is a threat to the hearts and minds of Muslims who would otherwise be attracted to the doctrine he has devoted his life to. Their insistence on the promotion of the rational at all costs means that when a crazy like Osama crosses their path, they can’t get it into their heads that this guy can’t be reasoned with. Many of them say they do get it, but they don’t really. It’s hardly surprising, then, that an extremist like Hitchens has been a lecturer at a White House that’s full of them. It’s hardly surprising that Horowitz has given him the airtime he’s had on Front Page Magazine, which has also carried the thoughts of Comrade Sandalio on a regular basis.

Anyone who is still proud to call themselves a Dutch Reagan or Margaret Thatcher anti-Communist needs to oppose these people. These guys have nothing new or exciting to offer, only war, ideology and then some more of the same. The man whose coat tails many of them rode, Dutch Reagan, was a liberal New Deal Democrat who became the most committed anti-Communist of all time, ending it up largely smashing it. But Dutch never followed Trotsky. He didn’t ever try to justify Kronstadt or sing ‘The Internationale’. The ‘Internationale’, when sung in English to the tune of ‘O Tannenbaum’, ends with the phrase,

‘When cowards flinch, and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the Red Flag flying here’.

Neoconservatives called the Spanish people cowards after the Madrid bombing. David Frum calls conservatives who oppose his beliefs ‘unpatriotic’. Is all of this familiar?

With apologies for my bad Russian, it’s time they followed their mentor’s advice and consigned themselves to the dustbin of history. Dosvedanye, Tovarischi.

The Horror of Neoconservatism

2006-03-23T23:18:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
September 22, 2004

“F--- Saddam. We’re taking him out”

The Daily Telegraph reported on September 18 that the above statement, allegedly a direct quotation, was President Bush’s response to suggestions made in early 2002 that any Iraq War would be sowing the wind.

Writers like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts are right to label the adherents of the neoconservative movement as ‘Jacobins’, fanatics for power, spiritual descendants of the upper classes who directed the reign of terror following the French Revolution, willing to damn with a spot of ink, willing to trash the bona fides of those who speak against them. As a recanted and repenting neoconservative, I suppose that makes me a Jacobin too.

After these fanatical Jacobins gained power in 2000, to what use did they put it? They inherited a country at its peak, its people keen to return to normality after the previous two months. Listening to George W. Bush’s inauguration, I was struck by his appeal for a civil society, but its reality has been war, bloodshed and the promotion of vested interests and hidden agendas. The boyhood stories I read about the ancient Greeks called the times before The Age of Heroes the Three Ages of Man – The Golden Age, when all was peace; The Silver Age, when all was brutish; and The Bronze Age, when men were intelligent and civilised, but used their skill and learning for nothing but the waging of war, and in the end they killed each other off. The neoconservatives are the true Bronze Men, much more so than any Soviet general. At least you could deter and contain a Soviet general. There is no way to deter a neoconservative, let alone contain them.

They’re not particularly keen on democracy. After Madrid and Jose Maria Aznar’s loss of the election for his lie that the bombing was ETA’s work, they had no hesitation in labelling a people reeling from the shock of a massive terrorist attack as ‘cowards’ and ‘appeasers’. The Spanish appeased nobody. Instead, they refused en masse to be lied to about the identity of those responsible for an attack that killed hundreds of their countrymen.

They don’t bother themselves with whether or not you can support your family by having a job. Like all Jacobins, they are money and power people, many of them, like George W. Bush, the fruit from the top of the social tree. President Bush refers to gatherings of corporate CEO’s as ‘his base’, when there has been no truer word spoken in jest. All the neoconservatives are avid outsourcers, zealots who see the free market as the only way to build prosperity, forgetting that the only thing a free market can do is find its lowest cost. Once an industry has gone to a place where it can be performed at a lower cost than in America it is gone for good and it is never coming back. To these people, your status as an American citizen means nothing. You have certain rules to play by – produce, pay tax, spend money and sell your future to the market. They’ll leave you alone provided you play along with the rules, being good boys and girls, buying duct tape and maxing out your cards to help keep China afloat because one of your Presidents decided he would help the gang of criminals and tyrants who run that country get rich. Hardly Jefferson’s dream.

The Jacobins of the French Revolution ultimately lost because their fanaticism caused them to turn on each other. History isn’t looking good for the neocons, for the same fate awaits them. It is a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance that they should have shed so much blood in the pursuit of their ambitions. Thank God, their fate is still in your hands come November – if it takes the mass sacking of all known neoconservatives from the Pentagon for the President to proclaim this bloody philosophy dead, and to reclaim the soul and credibility of the Grand Old Party that should be a keeper of all historic, honest and wholesome American values, then he’d better start handing out the dismissal notices.

Faster, Neocons! Kill! Kill!

2006-03-23T23:16:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
September 16, 2004

Beginning in 1922, the British boys’ comics Wizard and Hotspur carried a story called ‘The Wolf of Kabul’. The Wolf, British intelligence agent Bill Sampson, was a typical end of Empire type, happiest when kicking ten bells out to the locals. He had an Afghan sidekick, Chung, whose weapon of choice was a cricket bat, which he called ‘Clicky-ba’. Chung’s catchphrase after using lethal force was to say to The Wolf, ‘Lord, I am full of humble sorrow – I did not mean to knock down these men – Clicky-ba merely turned in my hand’.

Clicky-ba was turning in the hands of neocon commentator Jed Babbin in a September 13th article called ‘Did We Lose The War?’ in The American Spectator on the Web. I like TAS, think it’s a great site, second only to The Washington Dispatch. In the current difficult climate, it has the courage to publish the widest range of opinion of any conservative site affiliated to print media, with steady authors ranging from the sublime James Bowman to the ridiculous Babbin. They’ve published a lot of my letters, so I write this with some regret, as they’ll probably never do so again.

Babbin, a contributing editor of TAS and a contributor to the National Review
Online, is a former functionary in the Bush I Pentagon and is or was a talking head for MSNBC. In this capacity, he patronised Bob and Wlady’s readers by referring to his broadcasting duties as being ‘a talking warhead’ while describing himself on NRO as a ‘military analyst’. However, his climb up Rich Lowry’s greasy pole has not yet gone so far that he has merited pop-up ads for either of the books he’s written while I’ve been reading him.

The second sentence of the article was

‘We’re doing pretty well in the war against terrorists and the nations that support them’.

Therefore, a neocon betrays their belief that a state of war exists between America and any nation they believe supports terrorism. Do not expect peace any time soon. I’ve written regularly about the immorality of the neoconservatives’ rapprochement with Gaddafi. Has he?

From paragraph four –

“It’s awfully likely that we will see some large attack in the U.S. homeland before the election, because the terrorists want to affect the result”.

Classic neoconservative scaremongering. His idol, George W. Bush, has invested billions of dollars in Homeland Security, which seems to have paid off. There have been no attacks. There were no attacks during the primaries, none during the conventions. Why should Babbin think that the entire force of the Federal government will be unsuccessful in preventing an attack he is utterly confident will happen within the next few weeks? And to prevent that happening, why isn’t he calling for the return of troops from Iraq to bolster security at home? And why does he think such a strong and powerful people as the Americans are so weak that they would let terrorists affect the outcome of their election? Does he think they are children?

In paragraph five is a phrase that could be interpreted as meaning Babbin believes we aren’t killing Afghans quickly enough –

“a still-too-slow decision process is delaying our hunter-killer teams”

Faster, Neocons! Kill! Kill! Feel the turn of Clicky-ba!

On the efficacy of the Iraqi provisional government, from paragraph seven –

“We should be doing much more to destroy the insurgency in Iraq, but we can’t unless Allawi lets us. We are paying a high price for turning sovereignty back to the Iraqis too soon”

One could pick over that statement on several levels; all I will say is that it is the statement of a classical imperialist.

On the stone in their shoes that is the country of Iran, from paragraph nine –

“(His overly diplomatic comment meant that) Iran was running the al-Sadr insurgency and had become one of the principal obstacles to freedom in Iraq”.

Two principal observations – firstly, does the fact that the British government has been accused of using Basra as cover for building links with the mullahs qualify us as one of those ‘nations that support’ terrorists; and secondly, the real obstacle to freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the willingness of neoconservatives to agree to Sharia law as a source for both those countries’ new constitutions. As a result of their failure to demand totally secular states, both of those countries will fail again. It is only a matter of time.

From paragraph 11, while discussing North Korea –

“John Kerry said he wants America to be respected, not feared. Sorry, Johnnie. I prefer ‘feared’”.

How they love the power of fear, a power developed by their spiritual grandfather Trotsky when he wielded the might of the Red Army.

The last sentence of the article is, well, just read this –

“Our October surprise should be a big nasty one for Iran”.

One does not know whether to mock or pity such a sentiment. However, it is entirely reflective of the mindset of his fellow ideologue Michael Ledeen, AEI fellow, NRO columnist and an ardent advocate for war on Iran, always phrased with the words ‘Faster, please’. He must see himself as a new Cato, but these guys are closet leftists. Talk of ‘Faster, please’, an America that’s ‘feared’, nasty surprises for Iran, using scaremongering on terror attacks the way the Soviets used fear of sabotage – these are attacks of the left, not of the right. Babbin and Ledeen have lurched so far to the left that they’re one step away from marching down the Mall in green jackets and Mao hats.

It all used to mean something, boys, but Iraq has proved its futility. It’s time for all American conservatives to see these guys for what they are, hardened ideologues of empire who have no compunction about how much blood, or whose blood, they spill in the process of getting what they want, when they want, where they want it. Jed Babbin is prepared to say he doesn’t think any of it’s worked, as he fears a homeland attack in a matter of weeks. It’s time to go back to the thinktanks, boys. Faster, please.

China Crisis

2006-03-23T23:15:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
September 14, 2004

The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party will soon be facing the greatest crisis in its history, one entirely of its own making with the potential to affect us all profoundly. Because of their policy of massive economic expansion which has been actively encouraged by two White Houses to the detriment of the American economy, and the benefits of which are reserved for the little red emperors and paper warlords, China will soon be unable to feed itself.

This monumentally significant piece of news was buried in the farming column in the September 3 issue of the satirical magazine Private Eye. Private Eye is Britain’s best publication, a wonderful wee magazine that has survived every attempt to close it down in its 40-year history, and it still breaks big, big stories.

It arose from a development in the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). CAP is the very worst aspect of the EU, a policy that for years subsidised farmers to over produce leading to regular butter mountains and wine lakes. However, CAP has been reformed, and instead the farmers now get a subsidy for the acreage of land they farm.

This is all well and good and efficient – it’s just that it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. In the good old days, CAP helped keep world grain supplies at a level that ensured a stockpile equivalent to 123 days of global consumption. However, the end of a policy that also encouraged massive corruption and waste has also coincided with the bad news from Beijing.

According to Private Eye, only 12% of China’s area is capable of cultivation, and 70% of that 12% needs irrigation. They have expanded so quickly that in the last five years, the area available for cultivation has dropped from 92 million hectares to 76 million. Within five years, China will be the world’s largest importer of grain, while the global stockpile has already dropped to 60 days.

This is an impending catastrophe that the free market in Chinese goods renders us powerless to avoid. For as long as the spoiled consumers of the West seek to have consumer goods at unreasonably low prices, the Chinese will continue to build factories on land that we now know would be better used putting bread into the mouths of the Chinese. One of the great fads of recent years has been talk of ‘corporate social responsibility’, like ensuring that businesses recycle or don’t sell landmines. It would be particularly socially responsible to avoid building factories in China for the foreseeable future, but such fads do not factor in that corporations are not social entities, they exist for one purpose, to make money, and they have no other agenda.

The issue of outsourcing seems to have dropped off the agenda for this election. It needs to be resurrected, because making and keeping real work in America is the only way the Chinese can be deflected from their collision course with disaster. On President Bush’s watch, American manufacturing has lost at least one-sixth of capacity. A Kerry White House would be no different. Kerry’s statements on economics betray a shallowness of understanding of the subject, and an over-reliance on the repetition of the Clintonian social agenda. The appearance of the self-proclaimed last conservative Democrat at the RNC should have reminded Kerry that the last real conservative Democrat President imposed tax cuts and built up the military and his name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It’s unlikely that Kerry would get the message.

But in the Great Game of trade before country, there never was a player like William Jefferson Clinton. One wishes him well on the road to recovery, but Bill Clinton perpetrated the single most economically destructive act of any President of recent years by permitting the dumping of cheap Chinese steel on the American market to keep them afloat when they were going bust. As a result, it will be a very pleasant surprise in 10 years time to hear of any American steel mills that are still rolling.

If Kerry wins, will he impose a tariff that would scale down Chinese growth and make them tear down the factories in order to reclaim the land they need for their survival? Hardly. The Murdoch press, in the form of Irwin Stelzer of The Weekly Standard, would be on him like an attack dog for threatening to close down markets. A meaningful tariff from a Bush White House is as likely as him refusing to sign John McCain’s next hare-brained legislative adventure, whatever that may be.

So China will starve and America will suffer, out of a mutually pressing need to supply and consume sports shoes. I wish you both well, but it’s really not my problem. I live in Scotland, and it’s not my currency that the Chinese are propping up.

The Pastor's Off to Jail

2006-03-23T23:14:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
September 13, 2004

Conservatives be warned - quiet Sunday mornings can be bad for your health.

On September 5th, I was flicking through the Sunday papers to the sound of the BBC news when I heard something that means I will never look at Volvo cars the same way ever again. An evangelical pastor in Sweden is being imprisoned for a hate crime committed while preaching a sermon.

I didn’t catch his name. However, his crime was to say from the pulpit that he regards homosexuality as an illness like cancer.

One doesn’t agree with that belief. If homosexual acts are carried out in private by consenting adults over the age of 21 and not for the sake of prostitution, then the state has no business in the matter. Marriage rights for homosexuals bear the scent of hothouse flowers in ivory towers. It’s an intellectual enigma that the most strident activists for New Marriage are those who have been the most implacable enemies of Old Marriage, their endless war on the family having been waged on the killing fields of the statehouses and divorce courts, their ammunition the liberalisation of the divorce laws.

However, the essence of ‘hate crimes’ is bigotry. Provided that the bigot does not seek to inflict any kind of harm on the object of his bigotry, whether by violence or discrimination, then, although the bigot himself is odious, his beliefs shouldn’t be illegal. What is in his heart is between his maker and himself. It is precisely what is in that pastor’s heart that the Swedish state has seen fit to punish.

The real import of the decision to jail him is that the Swedish state has taken upon itself the right to regulate what ministers of religion can say to their flocks during their services. Their government has told Sweden’s evangelicals that they can repent and believe the Good News as much as they like, provided that the Good News conforms to the standards of Swedish liberal social policy.

Of course, the Swedish gay rights brigades are supporting this liberal smorgasbord 100%. They might care to consider the latitude given to an equally controversial minister by the British state.

Yes, folks, Allah be praised, it’s Omar Bakri Mohammed, The Human Beachball! He’s out of his girdle and chasing the headlines!

For the uninitiated, Bakri is the London-based spiritual director of a group called Al-Muhajiroun, or ‘The Emigrants’. A Syrian who’s been kicked out of both Syria and Saudi Arabia for his activities in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, this dainty 300-pounder has sired seven kids, lives in rent-free public housing and collects $500 a week disability benefit from the British taxpayer while at the same time saying that his group’s aim is to turn Britain into an Islamic state. If the one-eyed, hook handed Abu Hamza al-Masri is the pantomime villain of British Islamofascism, Omar Bakri Mohammed is its pantomime dame.

He’s a totally unsavoury, ruthless SOB, of course. He had to do a lot of nifty footwork a few months ago when it became public knowledge that he had counselled the Anglo-Pakistani suicide bombers Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, the Mike’s Place murderers.

However, Bakri recently geared up for his usual celebration of the events of 9/11. On September 3, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) carried a translation of an interview he gave to the Arabic language London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, concerning his plans for this year’s event. He said that any criticism they catch would be,

“a simple sacrifice in comparison with what we must actually do – that is, support the jihad led by Bin Laden”

In the Sunday Telegraph of September 5th, he gave an interview in English stating his position on the Beslan school massacre. He said,

“If an Iraqi Muslim carried out an attack like that in Britain, it would be justified because Britain has carried out acts of terrorism in Iraq. As long as the Iraqi did not deliberately kill women and children, and they were killed in the crossfire, that would be OK”.

What do both these ministers have in common? They both interface with the culture of ‘rights’. It is the right of Sweden’s gays not to hear any criticism of their lifestyle, so a Christian minister goes to jail for expressing his religious beliefs. Omar Bakri Mohammed enjoys the right of free speech, using it to exhort violence against his hosts twice in a week, entirely without any kind of consequence.

Let us all hope that, in the immediate future, Omar Bakri Mohammed says something really bad about Swedish gays.

Richard Perle's Nemesis

2006-03-23T23:13:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
September 10, 2004

Downward and downward spiral the fortunes of Conrad Black, the deposed CEO of Hollinger International, the only tycoon in history brought low by his wife’s taste in shoes. Last week, the sometime Sun King of the Sun-Times received a mortal blow in the form of an internal report into his alleged malfeasance called ‘The Hollinger Chronicles’ authored by a personage no less prominent than Richard Breeden, former chairman of the SEC.

It is damning stuff. According to Dominic Rushe in the September 5 Sunday Times, Breeden has found that throughout the period of 1997-2003, the amount of money taken by Black and his cohort David Radler in a policy of ‘aggressive looting’ amounted to $400m, a staggering 95.2% of Hollinger’s net income for that period. Although there might not be much to substantiate the investigations by the SEC and the Illinois authorities, if he is found to have breached any SEC rules Black is automatically guilty of violating a consent decree requiring him to comply with securities laws, which was passed with his consent in 1982 and which remains in force, following litigation against sometime target Hanna Mining. Such violation is a criminal offence, and he goes straight to the hole.

However, it’s not only King Conrad who should be quaking in his boots with this report’s release. As a result of his failure to perform the duties incumbent upon him as a member of Hollinger’s executive committee, uber-neoconservative Richard Perle, ‘The Prince of Darkness’, sometime Chairman of the Pentagon Defence Policy Board, may soon find himself out of pocket to the tune of – wait for it, I’m savouring this – 5 MILLION DOLLARS!

Perle is not just a neoconservative – he is the personification of that philosophy. Along with David Frum, he is the co-author of An End to Evil, neoconservatism’s vision for the Middle East. Frum, like Black a Canadian by birth, was a columnist for Blacks’s National Post before being hired as a Bush speechwriter. Fired after his wife’s Internet boast that he coined the phrase ‘Axis of Evil’, Frum then penned the Bush hagiography The Right Man, before finding his true level as resident ideologue of the National Review Online. Frum is a hatchet man with a strong tendency towards self-promoting buy-the-book conservatism. In March 2003, he published a scandalous article in the National Review called ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ accusing Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, Samuel Francis and others of, amongst other things, disloyalty, anti-Semitism and racism as payback for their refusal to support the Iraq War. Buchanan returned the compliment to Perle in a classic article, ‘Whose War?’ published in the March 24 2003 American Conservative.

Perle started his career in public life as an aide to Scoop Jackson. In 1983, the New York Times reported that he had been paid by Israeli weapons manufacturers. In 1996, he co-authored a report for Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’ along with arch-neoconservative Douglas Feith. Buchanan quoted directly from the paper:

“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in co-operation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions”

Four years after writing that, Perle was back at The Pentagon. It was in the office of Feith, now the number three civilian at The Pentagon, that the suspected Israeli agent Lawrence Franklin worked.

However, Breeden blasts Perle for the lack of care he exhibited towards the interests of the wider shareholder democracy forming Hollinger International. Perle was not just a main board director; he was a member of the corporation’s executive committee. He should have been scrutinising the web of interlocking companies, the non-compete fees, the management fees and the asset sales and purchases that seem to have enabled Black and Radler get their hands on so much for so long. Either Perle wasn’t doing his job properly or he was looking the other way. Breeden proposes that the ultimate penalty be imposed on Perle for his consistent failure to perform. Black’s biographer Richard Siklos, writing in Hollinger’s former title The Sunday Telegraph of September 5, quotes Breeden thus –

“As a faithless fiduciary, Perle should be required to disgorge all compensation he received from the company”.

Over the course of his involvement with the company, Perle was paid a total of 5 million dollars. If Perle is called upon to repay this sum, it will be very interesting to see who is backing him up.
‘A faithless fiduciary’. Man, that must really hurt. However, Conrad Black liked his company. Under Conrad Black, both the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs faithfully parroted the neoconservative line. According to Dominic Rushe, Hollinger International’s board meetings were civilised affairs, where, after a brief chat about the operations and tribulations of a global media empire, Black, Perle and Henry Kissinger would chew the fat about politics. It’s a pity that more time wasn’t spent on discussing corporate affairs; otherwise the Louisiana Teachers’ Pension Fund might not now be suing Hollinger. It just goes to show that, in business as in politics, don’t ever ask a neocon to mind the store.

The Sons of the Desert Stick Together

2006-03-23T23:12:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
September 2, 2004

It’s interesting that the RNC should meet in New York City, the ‘city that never sleeps’, as the city’s greatest tragedy happened because both the Republicans and the Democrats were asleep at the wheel.

While George W. Bush holds court in the backyard of the Fifth Avenue Commissars, his fellow ‘conservatives’ in the United Kingdom are breathing defiance of their mainstream trans-Atlantic bedfellows. It has been reported that Michael Howard, leader of the squalid, unelectable band that goes under the name of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, will not ever be invited to meet the President.

The reason that’s been given for this Cold War between the English speaking world’s two main ‘conservative’ parties is Howard’s earlier flip-flop in relation to the Iraqi tragicomedy of errors. Howard is an odious politician, willing to sell out one of the bedrocks of conservative thought, preservation of the status of the traditional family unit, for the cheapest of cheap electoral advantages (see The Unprincipled Losers of The British Conservative Party – http://www.washingtondispatch.com/article_8051.shtml). As Home Secretary responsible for law and order one of his Ministers, Ann Widdecombe, wrote that he had ‘something of the night’ about him. With such a man at its head, it’s only to be expected that a party that was wholeheartedly in favour of war a year ago should take every opportunity it can to kick the Prime Minister when he’s down.

However, the real reason for the banning of Howard from the President’s presence is likely to be the unwritten but very active policy of the Bush White House, actually the real Bush Doctrine – the administrations of foreign countries engaged in or sympathetic to the Iraqi effort must be preserved. And just about the only person left in the Labour Party supporting the war is Tony Blair. Bush must protect Blair, by any means necessary. The Sons Of The Desert must stick together.

On the morning of March 5th, it was reported here that the IMF wanted to hire Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as its new head. Brown is Blair’s biggest rival and likely successor. A crude attempt by the State Dept. to manage risk by forestalling a palace coup within the Parliamentary Labour Party that would remove Blair and install Brown, who’s a socialist to his core? You never know.

Just as the self-styled ‘conservative for Nader’ Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com is settling into his armchair to enjoy the prospect of Israeli spies in The Pentagon being unmasked and led away in irons to Shark Island or Abu Ghraib, so too he should consider the impact that overt interference in British politics might have on what remains of the effort. Although UK losses have been minimal in relation to America’s, the Communist Anti-War Left have bounced back like rubber after they found out that the war wasn’t about oil, certainly not at over $40 a barrel. One can almost detect a silent glee from the BBC as it reports the death of every GI, not realising that the more Americans are killed, the more firmly the pseudo-Trotskyite neoconservative entryists at the top of the Bush Administration will feel the need to crush their opposition. Because crushing is all they know. It’s the only word in their vocabulary, and it’s what kicked this whole mess off in the first place.

But in the presence of alternatives such as deterrence, containment and massive and sustained counter-terrorism against the Islamist green menace, which both parties helped create by endorsing free markets, mass immigration and multiculturalism, means that the people will only take being party to the crushing of innocent civilians for so long. Once started, a job has to be finished, which makes Kerry’s deadly ambivalence over what he would do in Iraq the strongest reason of all not to vote for him, regardless of what he did or didn’t do or what injuries he did or didn’t sustain in an absolutely lethal war zone before a number of his most aggressive critics were born. But it is not in the nature of Americans, or Brits, to crush. Blair and Bush seem to have no problem with it – that may be a part of their Type A characters. Type A’s don’t realise that in politics, unlike business, the people who hire you aren’t like you. Most of them loathe you, and see the existence of your position as a necessary evil they’d rather not think about.

But when you’re a man on a mission, like George W. Bush, or if everything you do is triangulated to securing your place in history, like Blair, then you will crush and continue to crush until you have done so much crushing that you’ve got what you wanted, whatever it was. As time goes on, the willingness of the coalition’s leaders to continue this venture in a country that now has some form of legal independence is unsettling, and Bush’s hostile actions towards those who would ordinarily be perfect bedfellows show that they’re in it together, to the bitter end. Are these boys on, like, some kind of, um… Crusade?

A Good Job for Blair's Best Boy

2006-03-23T23:10:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
July 28, 2004

The stench of corruption wafted up once again from the British Labour Party on 23rd July, when Downing Street announced that the vacant seat on the European Commission would be offered to Peter Mandelson. Mandelson, a lifelong socialist and noted friend of Dorothy’s with lifelong commitments to power and the good life, has no other qualification for this post other than once being one of the closest political associates of Tony Blair. The irony of this is that, as the only politician who has ever been compelled to resign from the Cabinet twice, he will wield greater power in his new role than in any office he held in the UK. Nice work if you can get it.

If Peter Mandelson had been born 150 years before on another continent, he would have made a very successful living as a post-Civil War carpetbagger and snake oil salesman. The grandson of wartime Labour minister Herbert Morrison, he joined the movement at a very early age and after a brief media career, became an adviser to former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, for many years also a European Commissioner. After Blair’s accession to office in 1994, Mandelson is credited with the invention of the ‘New Labour’ brand, a branding so effective that they gulled the public into thinking that Labour was no longer a socialist party.

Mandelson, MP for Hartlepool, was appointed Minister for Trade in 1997. He was gone within 18 months after a scandal involving a not wholly accurate mortgage application that might have landed lesser mortals behind bars. After a period spent sitting in the naughty corner, Blair felt he so needed the talents of his Richelieu that he was brought back to become Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. After installing his Brazilian boyfriend in Hillsborough Castle, which went down a bomb with the ultra-Presbyterians, he was forced to resign again in January 2001 after an allegation, which in fairness later proved unfounded, that he had helped a couple of Labour-friendly Indian billionaires, the Hinduja brothers, obtain Brit passports on a fast track.

How and ever, now it’s onwards and upwards for Tony’s Boy. Acres and acres of newsprint are now devoted to concern over the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’, personified by focus groups of failed politicians from as far apart as Finland and Greece making policy that member states have to implement. Nobody gets a vote at all on whether or not most of it is necessary. Coming from the best traditions of European social democracy (‘We play while the Yanks pay’) it doesn’t seem to bother them that such cosiness breeds alienation. Alienation is the breeding ground for the extremism of both the left and right.

But it’s into this club, with the best brandies, the best cigars and the best cuisine that Blair is sending his pal, who, because of the structure of Eurocentric power will have far more influence than he ever had when he was setting speed limits in County Down. But in the Through The Looking Glass world of socialism, nothing succeeds like failure.

Anyone ever tasted good old-fashioned British mushy peas? Peter Mandelson is the socialist MP who once confused mushy peas with guacamole. Power, as they say, to the people.

No Tears for Martha Stewart

2006-03-23T23:09:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
July 22, 2004

You do the crime, you do the time. You obstruct the DoJ when it’s investigating your role in a scheme that would have increased your fortune by the tiniest of fractions, you go to jail for five months.

Extreme libertarians who see the DoJ as just another intrusive arm of a tyrannical state may have a point when they leap to Stewart’s defence. One should sincerely hope they didn’t lose money on ImClone. However, while a law may be a bad law, indeed an unconstitutional law that breaches the Fifth Amendment, while it stands it has to be obeyed, and a jury of her peers decided that Stewart didn’t obey it.

Hopefully, she will now have several months to reconcile herself to her guilt. Guilt, like shame, cannot survive in a therapeutic culture whose focus is not on confrontation of wrongdoing followed by atonement and absolution, but instead on justifying the validity of all actions on a morally neutral basis.

But public declaration of guilt is still the cornerstone of criminal jurisprudence in any particularly fair and objective jurisdiction, like, hey, the State of New York! Saying ‘the law’s bad’ may be true – if enough of her defenders, like the controversialist John Derbyshire, turn her to thinking it’s a bad law, then she has remedies in the form of further appeals. It may be the case that the way in which government has changed over the period of the Bush Administration might eventually have the pernicious effect of tainting the jurisprudence of the Fifth Amendment, although one would seriously hope otherwise. But as it stands, Stewart has received a fair trial according to the law, and all her fame and money and love of money has brought her down to the same level as a single mother whose only hope of profit from her crime was a crack high.

Don’t you just love the G-Men! The spiritual heirs of Eliot Ness were lying in wait for her, hopefully in a smoky basement, with a tape recorder that squeaked with every revolution. A powerful overhead light would have been good as well, just for effect. Rocky Sullivan would have proud of the lengths that Martha went to not to squeal to the coppers!

Criminals used to be described as ‘common’. As the nature of human activity expands, so too does the level of sophistication required to perpetrate the kind of scheme that she was involved in. The consequences of such criminality percolate down to every level of life – example, two years ago we set about buying a house. So stringent are the Law Society of Scotland’s rules on money laundering that I needed to show an ID to a lawyer I had worked with for three years! When that level of regulation is deemed necessary, it’s always easy to blame an abstract entity like ‘the government’. But it’s not all the government’s fault. It’s also the fault of people like Martha Stewart and her gang, people who try to circumvent laws for no reason other than there might be a little bit of money in it for them and because they can. If you feel the slightest sympathy for Martha, at least bear that thought in mind the next time you are subjected to some petty indignity when applying for a loan for the farm.

What will life on the inside be like for her? I don’t think she’ll be learning how to play ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ or ‘Birmingham Jail’ on a rusty mouth organ. However, she may come out with a new perfume for the sophisticated Continental prisoner, called Bastille. Or else, she might go for a new range of greeting cards, like ‘Fulsome of Folsom’ or ‘Loving of Leavenworth’. On second thoughts, that doesn’t sound such a great idea…

Osama Buys the Yankees!

2006-03-23T23:08:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
July 21, 2004

You could see the headlines spinning towards you, like a montage from a newsroom movie of the ‘40’s. Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Osama buys the Yankees! Take me out at the ball game! Extra! Extra!

Now before CK Rairden and Glenn Rabney suffer a collective stroke over at the Sports Bar, it’s nonsense, of course. But its equivalent may be about to happen in England, where on July 17th, it was reported by the Channel 4 News that Muammar Gaddafi may be poised to take control of London Premiership soccer club Crystal Palace, providing another ugly twist for the beautiful game.

It’s been a pretty ugly year for soccer. Europe’s premier competition, the European Championships, was won for the first time by Greece. Although they were worthy winners (yawn) they play soccer like a Sunday league pub side from Dundee, very physically and very defensively. As a result, the winners turned out to be the game’s worst possible advert in the year’s most watched tournament.

In recent years, doping scandals have been far more prevalent. Indeed, one of England’s potential stars, defender Rio Ferdinand, didn’t make it much past the middle of the season before being slapped with an eight-month global ban for failing to take a dope test. Ferdinand’s absence was one of the main reasons cited by English commentators for their early bath, rather on focussing on the unpleasant home truth that England’s national coaches seem to be obdurately opposed to training for penalty shoot-outs.

But the Gaddafi purchase would take soccer’s corruption to a whole new level. And the father of the feast, the man who started the whole ball rolling, was one Keith Rupert Murdoch.

In 1993, the old English First Division re-formed into the Premiership. Murdoch came along, offered the Premiership a massive wedge of cash for rights to broadcast matches on his Sky Television satellite station and the ‘well-known local businessmen’ who ran England’s top clubs at the time grabbed it with both hands. As a result, even 11 years later, even with falling TV revenues, the amount of money sloshing about English top-flight soccer is staggering, and that sadistic little djinn from Tripoli, sorry, our new partner in peace and prosperity, wants a piece of it.

He’ll probably get it, of course. Tony’s shaken his hand. That will make it all right. It might not make it right for all the Northern Ireland folk who were killed and maimed by the weapons and explosives that Gaddafi provided to the IRA in the ‘80’s, the vast bulk of which haven’t yet been decommissioned by those human rights loving volunteers. It might not be all right for the family of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, murdered by a bullet shot from the windows of the Libyan Embassy in 1984. It might not be all right for the townsfolk of Lockerbie, killed in their beds by the pious and humble Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, sometime Libyan Chief Spook on Malta. But we’ll get used to it, because that’s business and business is more important than lives so you’ll just get used to it and shut up about it.

The Italians have had to get used to it. Gaddafi now owns 7.5% of the mighty Juventus of Turin. Juventus were once wholly owned by Fiat Auto, making them the world’s most exclusive factory team. However, its owners, the plutocratic Agnellis, decided that there might be some advantage to them in letting little Muammar join the game. This is not by any manner of means Gaddafi's first foray into Italian soccer – his son, Saad al-Gaddafi, is a pretty useful player, and has been a registered professional at both Perugia and Lazio. At the very least, if he takes over the national team there should be no need for him to have to use Uday Hussein’s training methods.

It’s all lunatic. After Yvonne Fletcher’s murder, letting Gaddafi buy Crystal Palace would be like Osama purchasing the Yankees. It shouldn’t happen, but it will, because the people we vote for seem to love people with money more than they love principle or honour. And that says more about the people who lead us, and by extension us ourselves, than it could ever say about Gaddafi. Which is, like, frightening.

The Free Market's Massacre of Britain

2006-03-23T23:00:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
July 2, 2004

On June 29, the University of Sheffield published a report on the demographic and economic changes that occurred in the UK during the ‘90’s, using census data from 1991 and 2001. Its conclusions is that we are not one country but two, and the lessons to be learned from this are as pertinent for the USA as for ourselves.

The report states that the country is now effectively divided in a line running between two rivers, the Severn in the West and the Humber in the North. So great is the power of London’s financial services sector that everything below that line is classed as ‘Greater London’, everything above it ‘The Rest’. During the ‘90’s, 1.5million financial service sector jobs were created in London, together with a loss of 500,000 skilled trades jobs in The Rest. During the last decade, the populations of cities in The Rest have declined sharply – Birmingham (heavy industry) down 3%, Liverpool (shipbuilding/automotive) and Glasgow (ships/coal/steel) both down 8% and Manchester down 10%. London now has 20% more college graduates within its city limits than it had ten years ago.

The poorest place in the UK is officially, the City of Glasgow. Out of a workforce of 400,000, 100,000 are either unemployed or receive long-term sickness benefit, and 13% of high school students leave full-time education with no qualifications whatsoever, in a country where no one need pay for any service if they are without sufficient means.

The decline of the manufacturing sector bears the brunt of the blame for this demographic catastrophe. However, the manufacturing sector would not have declined if it had not been for the aggressive pursuit of free market economics by the governments of Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair – it’s been on Blair’s watch that the corporatists who have been the beneficiaries of this state-sponsored economic Darwinism have started exporting call centre and financial services jobs to India.

In the meantime, the cheap political mantras of ‘creating jobs’, ‘urban development’ and ‘regeneration’ led to the area called The Rest being filled to overflowing with cheap, disposable jobs like call-centres and telesales. A service sector job will always pay less than a skilled or a manufacturing job, so the region’s economic health suffers accordingly. So deeply has free-market Thatcherism sunk into the psyche of the British body politic that no one seems to question the harm it has obviously caused the country’s mental and physical fabric. The right of London’s self-selecting corporate elites to make money is now the rationale of our economy. Now, even light manufacturing is being sent to the new tigers of Eastern Europe, where wage rates are lower and profit opportunities greater, taking jobs away from the UK without regard to the fact that wages were comparatively higher here because of the prices they charged.

Could this happen in America? It already has. According to a fascinating article for in the Chronicles Extra of June 21 called The Jobs That Aren’t, the always-reliable Paul Craig Roberts paints the bleakest of pictures. To quote

‘In the past 40 months (three previous graduating classes) the US economy lost 376,000 jobs in professional and business services, and 200,000 jobs in professional and technical services.

Since January 2001, the United States has 64,000 fewer accounting and book-keeping jobs, 16,000 fewer architectural and engineering jobs, 223,000 fewer computer systems design and related jobs, 123,000 fewer management jobs, 532,000 fewer information jobs (including telecommunications, ISP’s, search portals and data processing), 117,000 fewer jobs in air transportation, 80,000 fewer jobs in chemicals, 122,000 fewer jobs in plastics and rubber products, 178,000 fewer jobs in apparel, 128,000 fewer jobs in textile mills, 523,000 fewer jobs making computer and electronic products, 297,000 fewer jobs making machinery, 134,000 fewer jobs making electrical equipment and appliances, and 209,000 fewer jobs making transportation equipment.

If job disappearance of this magnitude continues, textile engineers, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, electrical engineers and computer engineers will disappear as American occupations’

Grisly stuff, but not as bad as the other, perfectly possible scenario. The decline in prosperity in California is already causing emigration from that state, which will in time lead to a Hispanic majority. There is already a vocal minority who call for the secession of the South Western states to form Aztlan. Although this sort of garbage is the product of 1960’s Baby Boomer pseudo-Marxism, the aggressive push for the free market may just create the economic conditions that would make it possible.

I can envisage a future for my wee country in which its economic disparities become so severe that its current economic split will solidify into a political one. My leaders are so in thrall to the free market, like dogs with a bone, that they will paint this as a greater good, when it will do nothing but deepen despair even further. The question for you guys is, would a President ever let that happen to you?

The Apotheosis of Saint Monica

2006-03-23T22:59:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
June 30, 2004

The universally bad reviews that My Life has garnered all make mention of Clinton’s penitence for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. However, his sociopathic self-justification (‘I did it because I could’) has had me troubled.

Can someone tell me when the clock turned back to 1883?

The conservative commentary surrounding the book’s release paints the Clintoin/Lewinsky relationship as something from a penny dreadful novella of the 19th Century. I’m quite sure that the 42nd President is capable of a lecherous leer when the mood is on him, though it would be better if those moods had not taken him when he was discussing troops movements with Sonny Callahan. All that’s necessary to complete the picture are spats and a handlebar moustache, with maybe a subtitle like ‘His Wicked Way’ and Slick Willie could be the villain from a Charlie Chaplin silent. Maybe the scenario ends with Monica swooning at the thought of being sent into white slavery, or at least of getting a cable show.

Baloney. Indeed, in a pathetic and utterly self-serving interview that has been broadcast on the UK’s Independent Television network, Monica has once again come out of the woodwork, to say how Bubba was a rat, and how she comfort eats to get over the stress of what has happened to her.

Get over it, baby. Life is usually never the same once you’ve been involved in a cause celebre.

The creation of the cult of Saint Monica Lewinsky, wronged woman, will only gain strength from this book launch. 40 years of feminism can be rolled back in a minute, and it’s OK for Monica to be portrayed as a dizzy wee flibbertigibbet, swept off her feet by Hot Springs’ own Rhett Butler. Female commentators, in focussing on how badly she feels she’s been done by, completely forget that in this matter, at no point did Monica Lewinsky cease to be a moral actor in her own right.

Like any number of extremely ambitious young women, she was willing to enter into a physical relationship with a more senior colleague whom she knew was married. In her case, she most certainly couldn’t have failed to know that, as altar-bait, Bubba was out of bounds. But that did not stop her continuing the adulterous conduct for over a year, with varying degrees of intensity.

It’s said that power is a great aphrodisiac. Maybe yes, maybe no. But closeness to power never absolves one from one’s own moral obligations. The fact that Bill Clinton’s sexual morals came from the barnyard, and that at the time he was also being sued for sexual misconduct prior to election, should at least have given her pause, but she went ahead and did it anyway.

One is not suggesting for a moment that she suffer the same fate as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for the rest of her days, heaven forefend no, one can’t possibly be seen to be making moral judgments these days. But in the times of which Hawthorne was writing, the stocks were also in use. Now, because I’m not an American I can get away with this, but wouldn’t it have saved a ton of taxpayers’ money if he had just volunteered to go into the stocks for a few days, you could have thrown rotten tomatoes at him and the whole thing would have been over and done with? Instead of going through a whole series of litigations in which the government of the USA was weakened, and its enemies emboldened, by a stasis over the meaning of the word ‘is’?

Ultimately, his sins are the worse ones. He was subject to the discipline of civil marriage, she was not. He was in a particular position where he must be trustworthy, she was not. The particular defects of his own character led him to lie, she did not. However, the events that have brought about their ruin were consensually entered into, and Monica Lewinsky is not particularly worthy of sympathy, if only because she is not the first and will by no means be the last young woman to be dumped by an older married man. She is no saint.

Now, I’m off to find my sewing needle and my big scarlet A. Yoo-hoo! Monica!

Security Means Alaskan Oil

2006-03-23T22:58:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
June 3, 2004

On May 29, the body of Michael Hamilton, a 61-year-old Scot, was dragged through the streets of Khobar, Saudi Arabia, before a siege in a hotel that resulted in Al Qa’edist militants fleeing the scene after slitting the throats of a Swede and an Italian.

I don’t buy the official version of what happened at the weekend. Given the amount the Saudis spend on arms and other items which are potent in other hands but which in theirs are as useful as children’s’ toys, it is not beyond the bounds of belief to imagine that the forces assaulting the hotel had access to state of the art surveillance equipment. If that were the case, the Saudis would have had good cause to know precisely who inside the building were the terrorists and who the hostages. So many of them got away that I think someone let them go.

At the same time as the foreign workers who are essential to the existence of a place on the map called Saudi Arabia are being killed or evacuated, its government has cut the production of the only commodity the country has to sell in order to increase its own revenues and as a protest at the actions of the countries who provide the workers who keep Saudi Arabia functioning. Whichever way, they are not our friends. We must disengage from them completely and at once.

Removing troops is one thing, but removing their economic prop is the only way in which events in Arabia can be brought to a head, for good or ill. The spectre is that a Saudi Arabia without the Sauds will be a mujahideen paradise, selling oil to the most unsavoury places on Earth. That may indeed be the case, although the lack of indigenous expertise in extracting, refining and shipping oil makes one think otherwise. The only reason why the Saudis have been able to perform to their consistent double standards is because they already have captives, in the form of the world oil market. To all intents and purposes, we are their hostages, and have been ever since oil started being pumped.

There is only one solution for this, which is for the President to go back to the first principles he proclaimed in 2000 and start pushing another bill for oil drilling in Alaska. The environmentalists are funded by rich do-gooders whose own business ethics do not bear close examination. As in the abortion struggle, the rights of people are paramount – they must trump those of plants and beasts. It is not until the Western world and the USA in particular is free of the vice of Saudi oil that the Saudi people will be free to take the course that their culture, history and temperament will dictate for them.

In the meantime, the vexed issue of the propagation of Saudi Wahhabi Islam must be tackled. The province of Ontario has become the first English speaking jurisdiction to establish a Sharia court. This means that Canadian Muslims have now established a legal apartheid for themselves, subjects of the Queen asking for justice in her courts but not subject to her law. This is a development that can never be allowed in the USA or anywhere else. It is increasingly hard to see the connection between our leaders’ words and actions on the vital issue of Islamism. If a fat twister like Abu Hamza al-Masri has in fact gone over the line from preaching jihad to practicing it, he deserves whatever justice is brought on his head. However, jihad is an article of faith for him, sanctioned by his holy book. Jihad demands war. Preaching war should be prosecuted, no exemptions, no excuses.

On the Arabian Peninsula, tribalism is the norm. It was only the presence in abundance of a commodity that advanced industrial societies elsewhere need that brought the limited explosion in prosperity for a few that has forced that country’s deeply medieval culture into conflict with the coveted appurtenances of the 21st Century. Their culture has been unable to cope with the shock, and Osama bin Laden has been the result. No more.

Off to the North.

The Day After Armageddon's Deep Impact

2006-03-23T22:56:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
June 2, 2004

Movies released now are not as good as they were 10 years ago. Then, I used to go weekly to the two independent theatres that still survived in Glasgow’s West End. Both are now closed, one a restaurant, the other is waiting redevelopment. Even in 1996, we caught Independence Day in the last theatre on the city’s South Side, which is now also closed, being redeveloped as apartments. In the last 10 years the whole movie-going experience has been turned into one great big corporate consumption opportunity, the releases loudly, crudely and violently homogeneous. It’s just revolting to see grown men carrying boxes of popcorn so big you know they’ll never be finished but just wasted. It’s annoying that, no matter how warnings are given, some clown will still leave their cell phone on and it will go off at a critical point in the action. Maybe the manners of going to the cinema are dying - as we increasingly expect personal service in everything, we become less able to participate in communal entertainment.

By the time the lights went down, I was ready for The Day After Tomorrow, to see it all swept away.

Forget the relatively intelligent criticism of the movie’s junk science – the factual failings in this movie are so profound that absolutely nothing in it can be taken seriously.

Example 1 – at one point a character is shown watching Manchester United playing Glasgow Celtic. Celtic are portrayed wearing blue tops. Blue is the one colour that Glasgow Celtic would never, ever wear, being the colour of their archrivals Rangers.

Example 2 – three RAF helicopters crash in the Highlands on their way to rescue the Royal Family from Balmoral Castle. As well as giving an indication that the story is set in August (the only time the Royals ever go to Balmoral), the fact that there is always a helicopter at Balmoral to evacuate them the short distance to Aberdeen Airport is not deemed worthy of mention. And, consequently, if it were taking place in August, wouldn’t the high school the Jake Gyllenhaal character attends be on vacation, rather than sending him on scholastic decathlons?

Example 3 – at the very start of the movie, which owes a great deal to the beginning of Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers, Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is portrayed coming out of a hut, leaping across an icy chasm to recover critically important samples and leaping back again. He and his two companions are then portrayed from an aerial shot, standing beside the chasm in awe and disbelief. I could have sworn the hut wasn’t in the aerial shot.

The Day After Tomorrow isn’t, of course, a disaster movie. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as disaster movies but survival movies. What should motivate the viewers’ interest is the drama involved in the characters’ struggle for survival. In this movie, you just don’t care.

I have seldom seen a movie that so stubbornly fails to generate interest in its characters. Dennis Quaid, the poor man’s Harrison Ford, acts in this movie with two expressions, mouth open and mouth closed. I’m wrong, he uses a third. When facing down authority, he glares. Boy does he glare at the wicked Veep! Man, he glares at the government guy who only gives him 48 hours on the mainframe! In fairness to Quaid, he is not helped by a script containing some of the worst dialogue heard on screen since Star Wars. But all the conservative smart boys and think-tankers have been asleep on the job when they’ve only noticed that the character of the Vice-President is based on the Vice-President. The good and compassionate President who orders the evacuation of the South is played by Perry King, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Al Gore in terms of height, build, age and haircut.

All the clichés of the survival movie are there – the smart kid whose romantic failings are corrected by the end – wait, that’s not right! Roland Emmerich left that as a bloody great loose ending- and the sick youngster. At one point I expected the hero’s doctor wife to produce a guitar and sing Kum Ba Ya, which would probably finish off the poorly poppet.

This movie is a bust. Its star is a computer generated tidal wave shown swamping the Statue of Liberty. In an article for the Washington Dispatch last September called In Love with Disaster, I wrote that,

‘One director, Roland Emmerich, has managed to do what neither Hitler nor Al Qa’eda achieved and destroy New York twice’.

Now he’s done it again! What is the root of this mania? Roland Emmerich used to be a very clever and original film-maker, in the early days of Universal Soldier and Stargate, but the rot set in with Independence Day, which is War of the Worlds as scripted by the DNC and the first occasion when Der Moviemeister busted the Big Apple. Everything else since has been drivel, including the downright malicious and odious The Patriot, the proper title of which should be Braveheart in the American Revolution, which depicted Redcoats burning Americans in a church, an atrocity that really was perpetrated by the SS in 1944 in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. The wolves chasing the kids are true to his German roots, straight from the fairy tales of the Black Forest and the Brothers Grimm. However, it is irresponsible if not downright narcissistic of Emmerich to continue to depict sudden calamity at a time when sudden calamity is a constant threat, and the object of your depiction has been on the brutal receiving end of a sudden calamity.

Whether your disaster movie of choice is Armageddon (oil drillers save the planet), Volcano (the product of a psyche that really hates Los Angeles), Deep Impact (New York buys it again at the hands of a giant wave), do yourself a favour and watch something else. The quality of output is universally bad, I know, and I for one will never watch anything advertised as a woman’s movie or starring Winona Ryder. But The Day After Tomorrow is so bad don’t even consider it. It’s a movie about the dangers of consumption that took millions of dollars to make (think of the amount of hydrocarbons needed to make the prints) released by one the world’s most rapacious corporations. It deserves to sink beneath the weight of its own ice-cap sized pretensions.

Can Saddam be Tried

2006-03-23T22:51:00.000Z

Commentary by Martin Kelly
May 24, 2004

The legitimacy of a government is an entirely separate legal issue from the criminal actions of its members.

Witness the Sunday Telegraph’s May 16 report that Saddam Hussein is prone to telling his captors that he is still the President of Iraq. This is not such a bizarre delusion as it might first seem.

Claims to legitimacy vary. At his trial in Westminster Hall, Charles I claimed the divine right of kings as an absolute defence to all charges. If, as King, he was ordained by God to rule, what other power could put him on trial?

Of course, no one believes in the divine right of kings any more. We have the next best thing, international law, instead.

The Neoconservative War was launched to enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1441. Unlike many of the vexatious resolutions that have been passed against Israel, 1441 was mandatory, demanding that Iraq disarm. The stupid failure of the Iraqis to prove that they had disarmed, and their now forgotten obstruction and harassment of Blix and his pantomime troupe, were the justifications used by the USA and UK for launching the war that was apparently necessary to enforce 1441. 1441 had been passed unanimously, was mandatory and was enforceable. So far, so good, so legal.

But there was no mandate for regime change. Therefore by what legal authority was the regime changed? Has the legitimate government actually changed at all?

Although Saddam’s regime was a disgusting one, it was recognised as both the de facto and de jure government of Iraq through the prior acceptance of its ambassadors. There was no effective Iraqi Government in Exile of the kind that claimed to be the governments of France and Poland during World War Two, for the UK and USA to recognise. Although diplomatic relations did not exist between Iraq and the USA and the UK at the time the Neocon War started, the closing of diplomatic channels was simply a matter of British and American policy. It did not affect the legitimacy of the Saddam government.

Of course, there had been a previous war that had not ended in outright Iraqi defeat but in ceasefire. The reason for this ceasefire was that George H.W. Bush had staked everything on observing what he was advised was the correct position in international law, that the terms of the resolution authorising the ejection of Iraq from Kuwait prevented Norman Schwarzkopf rolling on to Baghdad. As a result, in the run up to the Neocon War George W. Bush was unable to ask for a revocation of the 1991 ceasefire as at no stage after Desert Storm had Iraq posed a serious threat to the security of Kuwait.

Therefore, the only authority that the coalition had for being in Iraq was to enforce 1441. Although regime change in Iraq had been American policy since 1998, it was not a specific feature of 1441. Accordingly, the legality of the continuing occupation hangs by a thread, whether 1441 impliedly authorises regime change as a necessary step of Iraqi disarmament.

If the overthrow of the Saddam regime was legal because it was necessary to satisfy the terms of a mandatory UN Security Council Resolution, the neocon UN-sceptics have done more to empower the UN for good or ill than Kofi Annan could achieve in his wildest dreams. By doing so, they have vested in the UN the power to make resolutions that can then be used by member states to overthrow the governments of other states thus throwing the Constitution of the United States of America into the trash. Their actions have given the UN the power not to just to proclaim upon the affairs of member states, but to allow its members to take actions against other members which may now be perfectly legal, thus turning the UN into the world government its advocates would love it to be. To hell with sovereignty, it’s now meaningless, thanks to Project for the New American Century. Consider this – if such a principle existed, if UNSC had passed a resolution demanding action against the Nixon Administration over Watergate in 1974, it would have been perfectly legitimate for Canada to invade to enforce it.

Governments can of course be overthrown from within and their successors recognised as legitimate governments. There is no more disgusting, barbaric, racist and corrupt government in the world right now than that of Robert Mugabe Black Hitler, which will turn Zimbabwe into a mass grave before he is dead. However, by international standards his government is legitimate. Saddam was overthrown in an invasion not governed by the normal laws of war. The invasion had one cause that was perfectly legal, but its effect can properly, according to this interpretation, be seen to be outside the law. If the law matters at all to a neoconservative.

In order for a trial of Saddam to take place, it will be necessary for prosecutors to establish that his entire government had to be overthrown in order to properly implement 1441. This is not a case that calls for a Nuremberg Law, when the interests of justice were clearly served by the agreement of the Allies that such crimes as ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘crimes against peace’ did exist, and that their prosecution was valid because of the enormity of the Axis crimes. It is a narrow but simple point on which, in theory, the entire case may fall.

It won’t fall, of course. As Robert Bolt put it, the canvass and the rigging of the law will be stretched to ensure Saddam meets his end courtesy of the hangman, but it should give some food for thought to the bright sparks at the JAG Corps who gave the A-OK to Abu Ghraib. After all, if you’ve bet the farm on a case that says the whole government had to go, how come you’ve re-hired some of its worst servants? Doesn’t that render the cause functus?

In case anyone thinks that neoconservatives always get away with overturning the governments of their enemies, think back to Charles I. Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax and the rest of them were neoconservatives as surely as Michael Ledeen and Paul Wolfowitz. Just over 10 years after Charles mounted the scaffold in Whitehall on January 30 1649 and the end of the monarchy was proclaimed, the monarchy was back with a vengeance.