( Link ) The link is to one of several stories detailing Smith's faux-pas in relation to Hitler. He said, in essence, that Hitler didn't wake up mornings thinking to himself 'What evil can I do today?' but instead woke up and by using "twisted, reverse logic" decided to do what he (Hitler) considered to be good. That included the attempt to exterminate European Jewry - along with homosexuals, the mentally and physically dysfunctional, the Roma, the political opposition, trades unionists,...
The final solution? Treat every citizen as a citizen without regard to skin color, ethnic heritage, sexual orientation or practice, gender orientation - or any other of the various designations used to seperate Americans into their respective ghettoes. Treat religion as a matter of private conscience - which means removing every trace of religious practice or dogma from the life of the Federal State. Every trace; no exceptions, no favoritism, no pandering to the Muslims, the Jews, the Ch...
It occurred to me not long after I arrived in the USA (in August of 2003) that there is very little difference between the fundamentalism of American life and the fundamentalism of the lives of Islamist extremists. Americans, like the Islamist fanatics, have their shibboleths, their idols, their sacred cows. And to threaten them in America yields the same results as does threatening them in Mecca. What's in a Name ? Among the ignorant peasants and political factions of Sudan, you can't na...
I caught a snippet on Fox News tonight. Apparently that vile insect, that despicable fraud, liar and hypocrite, Tony Blair, formerly British Prime Minister and now superannuated irrelevance posturing as a 'special envoy to the Middle East' (I don't like him - can you tell?) has announced to the world that he is a Christian. This is not news to anyone who lived in the UK during his first two terms in office (there are no term limits to the service of a Prime Minister of the UK) and endured ...
What is the State? The State is an instrument of wider society. It's defining characteristic is possession of a monopoly on all forms of violence. The State has no morality, it has no purpose other than the perpetuation and extension of its own existence, and it has no conscience. Neither has it any rival. The State is not the government. In American terms the government is best described as 'The Administration'. The State is composed of Offices and Institutions. 'The Administration' is co...
I'm English by ancestry, and that means I am a propenent of the authority of the State by nature, breeding, and inclination. England is not the country most Americans imagine it to be. It is by nature Authoritarian, secretive, and indifferent to the privileges granted, over the ages, by the Crown to the subjects of the Crown's dispensation. Let one small example stand for all the differences between the life of an American citizen and the life of a subject of English Authority. In England,...
It's two days after our latest trip to Norfolk and the Immigration and Naturalization Office there. It's a day after finally being able to renew my driver's license - despite a couple of (to me) heart-stopping moments in which the DMV clerk wandered vacantly away, carrying my passport and its latest endorsement - the one that says I'm legal for another year. Here is an example of the contorted and contracted bureaucratic thinking that, if I dwell on it for any length of time is liable to m...
Today Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, announced that his country has the ability, now, to process uranium on an 'industrial scale'. ( Link ) Ari Larijani, Iranian chief diplomat, claims that there are now 3000 centifuges installed at the Natanz nuclear facility. 3000 centifuges means that in nine months Iran could possess enough highly enriched uranium to create a warhead . Naturally, as the linked article reports, everyone from the US state department to the IAEA is denying ...
Link You'd think, considering the state of American-Iranian relations since the Ayatollahs came to power, that America would be right up there at the top of the Mullah's 'countries we love to hate list'. Nope. America is the Great Satan, but whenever some crisis threatens Iran it's always Britain, the 'Little Satan' or the 'Old Coloniser', that's seen as the Moving Hand of all things sinister and malign. Britain has been involved in the affairs of Afghanistan (where British troops are...
How many of you, I wonder, know about the event in British history referred to by the English as the Glorious (glorious because bloodless) Revolution? How many of you know that the English fought their own Civil War, over issues of religious toleration, orthodoxy and the role of Parliament in relation to the Crown? The fighting concluded in 1660. But the Civil War didn't end until 1668, when William of Orange became King of England as the conclusion to the Revolution. He accepted the claims o...
The most straightforward argument I can think of for 'unthinking', 'unquestioning' support on the part of Britain for America is simply this: without American support there would be no Britain. Without the support of America during WW2 there would, now, be no 'English-speaking' people outside of America. Hitler's Germany would have swallowed us whole - as it very nearly did. Britain owes to America its national life - and this is not a debt that can ever be repaid. That being so, the decis...
Shabby and disgusting. "Mr Bush's new Iraq strategy will have no British involvement, because the White House has recognised both Downing Street's political difficulties over Iraq and the overstretch of the British armed forces, senior officials have made clear to the Guardian. They say that there is neither the political will, nor the manpower, to freeze, let alone increase, the number of British forces in Iraq or to expand their area of operations. "It is a question of blunt realities...
Link Perhaps our newborn Super-Liberal-Man (aka Lucas) would care to exert his Super-liberal-Man powers against Adolf's Children, rather than indulging in wishful thinking about what should have, might have, could have happened in the past. What would they make of him? Short work. But here's his chance to show us his Super-Liberal-Man Megabrain at work. He can tell us how we can go about reforming them before they become a problem. The 15% involved in the article are thos...
Political fiction covers everything from imagined Utopias and Dystopias, to satire like Swift's suggestion that the famine-struck Irish should eat their children, to Apocalyptic visions like the manifesto of the Communist Party. They all conjure worlds which aren't yet but which are based in what is, and which might come to be. What follows was not written by me. It's a dystopic view of the remainder of this century and its value is not in the writing itself, or in its attempt to portray...
Is it simple coincidence that Hollywood in recent years has seen the making of a series of movies that deal with the historical and mythic origins of ancient Europe? First we had 'Troy'. Then 'Alexander'. Then 'Kingdom of Heaven'. And now '300', dealing with the battle of the Spartans under Leonidas against the Persian Empire under Xerxes (if I remember my ancient history correctly). Granted, 'Kingdom of Heaven' deals with the Crusades - but the Crusades, taken as a whole, represent a seminal...