I hate Liberty

In discussion recently my attention was drawn to Thomas Jefferson’s Adam and Eve Letter, in which he extols the virtues of republicanism and liberty, specifically in relation to the events of the day in France, the unfolding Revolution. A particular passage was quoted, which proceeds as follows;

The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.

The contest being referred to here is the constitutional struggles which saw the Jacobins emerge as the dominant political force. As I said in the original discussion, I am about to commit a cardinal sin, namely I am about to penetrate the semi-religious veneer which surrounds the American Founding Fathers, all the more outrageous because I am an Englishwoman, a Loyalist and a Royalist. So, if you find this shocking, please read no further!

To begin with I have to make it clear that Jefferson’s letter was written in January 1793, before the onset of the Reign of Terror, before the Jacobins had revealed themselves in all their horror as some of the worst political thugs in history, by far the most murderous exponents of ‘liberty’ that France or any other nation has ever experienced. Still, January 1793 was the month that Louis XVI was done to death, a sign of things to come. Putting that to one side, there are other issues, broader issues specifically concerned with Jefferson and ‘liberty’ that deserve closer examination.

Jefferson was obviously a craftsman, a craftsman in words, in grand and noble words, sentiments robbed of practical meaning. Rather than see ‘liberty’ fail he would have seen half the earth desolated. Did he have the first clue, I have to ask, over the precise meaning of this word? What a pity it s he did not stay in Europe to see half of France and then half of Europe desolated in the cause of ‘liberty.’

Take one example. When the people of the Vendée in the west of France, a peasant community wedded to their traditional Catholic faith, rose against the excesses of ‘liberty’ in early 1794 they were treated with such inhuman savagery that there have been moves to have the repression – which embraced the wholesale massacre of men, women and children – declared an act of genocide. This is hardly surprising when one reads the report that General Francois Joseph Westermann sent to the Committee of Public Safety in Paris;

There is no more Vendée... According to the orders that you gave me, I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands. I do not have a prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated all.

Clearly Jefferson can’t be blamed for this. I have not the least doubt that he would have been horrified by this ‘desolation’, by this particular definition of ‘liberty.’ So, yes, it’s possible to excuse him. What is not possible to excuse is his personal hypocrisy, hypocrisy that allowed him to laud grand abstractions like ‘liberty’ while keeping black people in servitude.

Oh, I’m fully aware of his sentiments on the evils of slavery but that only seems to compound his offence. I know all of the additional platitudes he mouthed; but it did nothing to stop him relying on servitude, freeing only two of the hundreds of human beings who were his personal property. Dr Samuel Johnson in Taxation no Tyranny, his 1775 answer to the addresses and resolutions of the American Congress, posed one central and uncomfortable question: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" There is really no answer to that.

I can only take so much hypocrisy, so many empty platitudes advancing 'liberty' where there is no liberty. But I shall withdraw, a Tory, a Royalist and a Loyalist, a hater of 'Liberty' and leave the last word to an American;

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Wormtongue and the Arab Spring

Peter Mandelson, Lord Mandelson of Foy, Business Secretary in the last Labour government, is possibly the most repellent and reptilian figure ever to have occupied high office in this country. For me this seedy and disreputable man seems to have all of the character attributes I associate with Shakespeare’s Iago or, better still, Grima Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings.

This particular Wormtongue enjoyed the company of the great and not very good. In his toadying style he enjoyed the company of Saif Gaddafi, with whom he had a jolly good time not so long ago at a private villa on the Greek island of Corfu, all chums together. But that was then, a time when he was falling over himself to do deals with Gaddafi senior. Things change; the Colonel is now the Beast of Tripoli and Lord Wormtongue welcomes the Arab Spring.

Indeed, he goes out of his way to welcome it in the latest issue of Prospect, a monthly political journal, saying that nerves over the great upheaval are misplaced, that the people want democracy, not extremism. He should know; he goes to the Middle East, he knows exactly what the people want, Colonels at one moment, freedom at the next. “I have recently made a return visit to Kuwait and, for a longer period, to Qatar”, he writes in his inflated and pompous style. Yes, democracy is what the people want; Mandelson says so.

I myself have recently not made a return visit to Tunisia, the country which saw the beginning of the end of the Arab Winter. I do keep an eye on things, though; keep an eye on press reports a lot more trustworthy than Mandelson’s musings. I read that Nouri Bouzid, the Tunisian director and prominent secularist, recently honoured at the Cannes Film Festival, was equally honoured in his own country when he was stabbed in the head by an unknown assailant. He survived, only to find that a speaker at a rally organised by Ennahda, Tunisia’s largest Islamist party, called for him to be “shot with a Kalashnikov.”

I really don’t want to rain on the Arab Spring but Tunisia is now showing every sign, as I wrote on a previous occasion, of the season turning to autumn with no summer in between. All over the country, with Ennahda on the rise, women, who previously enjoyed rights almost unparalleled elsewhere in the Arab world, are being forced to wear the veil. Forced praying and condemnation for apostasy are also on the rise. Moderate imams are being ejected from their mosques, too afraid to complain to the authorities because of the perceived weakness of the provisional government.

Hmm, a weak provisional government with a radical opposition busy organising among the grassroots, does this not remind you of something, another time and another point in history? Oh, there are all sorts of professions to ‘moderation’ and to ‘pluralism’…for the time being. As a Tunisian liberal leader said recently, there is a huge gap between what the Islamists say and what they do. February is past; the revolution heads towards October, guided there by the Bearded Bolsheviks.

You can safely disregard all that, disregard my Cassandra-like pessimism. People in the Arab world want secularism and democracy as a check on theocracy and extremism. Of course they do; Lord Wormtongue says so.

Neither a girl nor a boy be

Do you believe that there is a limit to stupidity? I do, at least I used to, coming across some absurdity or other, saying things can’t get any more ridiculous than that, surely they can’t? But they can. There are no absolute limits to human stupidity; it expands ever outwards like the universe!

My attention was drawn recently to a story that appeared in the Toronto Star. It concerns a Canadian couple – people I decline to name – parents of a baby who decided that it should grow up genderless. Oh, they know the baby’s sex alright, as do the child’s older siblings, but the rest of the world is to be kept in the dark, and the rest of the world includes the child’s own grandparents.

So, I ask myself, do the grandparents refer to it as it? It's too young at present to have a view but how will it feel in years to come? Will it feel that it would have been better to have been born to parents who were not such stupid morons, parents who have taken political faddishness to the ultimate level: blaming God - and grammar - for creating hes and shes!

When it was born the couple sent an email to friends and family, saying that they had decided not to share its sex for now. “…a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand for what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime.”

Yes, Storm is its name, rather appropriate considering what it is likely to face at the hands of people who believe that parents making choices for children is “obnoxious”. Really? I rather thought that guidance and making choices was what responsible parenting was all about. Ah, but think of the freedom it will have, to live if it wants on a diet of chocolate bars and cookies!

My parents never imposed any kind of gender identity on me, whatever that is meant to imply. I was simply Anastasia, their daughter, valued as a girl and a daughter, never limited in any way, never taught to believe that there were restrictions on what I could or could not do simply because I was female. To that extent I suppose I, too, must have been a ‘genderless’ baby, inasmuch as I was always free from preconceptions, no limitation at all being created by the proper use of language and the rules of language. Oh, perhaps we should abolish pronouns also, along with gender!

It might give you some idea who these people are, what their mode of thought is, if I tell you that, when not working or ‘unschooling’ their older children (apparently it’s a offshoot from home schooling), they wander from place to place, spending time with the Zapatistas in Mexico at one moment, spending time with families in Cuba, learning about the ‘revolution’, at the next. Oh, brave new world that has such left liberals in it, people who turn the world upside down, formless freedom for some, abject tyranny for others!

That’s just the thing, isn’t it; this child of the revolution is not an individual; it's not a girl or a boy or genderless or a unique human being; no, it’s an experiment, an experiment in the most deluded forms of political correctness and liberal faddishness. It will not grow into freedom; it is likely to grow into neurosis, especially when it becomes aware that there is a wider world beyond the cocoon spun by its loopy parents; especially as the wider world has been made aware of it.

What these people are doing is encouraging the worst forms of voyeuristic speculation and curiosity, which effectively turns their baby into a sex object, not an individual who happens to be a girl or a boy. It is not a person; it’s an either or set of genitalia; for that’s what these publicity hounds have created. Setting out to do one thing they have achieved not just the contrary but the contrary at its most refined.

Oh, well, some folks are wise and some are otherwise, as Roderick Random says.

Mao denounces Mao

A petition carrying some ten thousand signatures was handed in to a police station in Beijing recently. It calls for the arrest of Mao. No, no, it’s not that Mao; he’s beyond arrest, just resting in hell. The Mao these people want arrested is Mao Yushi, the eighty-two year old economist who heads the Unirule Institute of Economics. He is accused of slandering the other Mao and attempting to overthrow the Communist party itself.

It does not stop with the petition. The Maoist websites are all incandescent, with comments like “The whole nation is waiting for the dawn, the dawn of the day when Mao Yu-shit (sic) and other anti-Mao reactionaries who vilify Mao are annihilated.” He’s also received abusive telephone calls from people threatening to beat him up.

So, what’s brought on this flood of hate? Simply that Mr Mao published an article in late April on a blog hosted by Caixin, a Beijing-based media group. The article is called Restore Mao Zedong as a Man. The report I read in the Economist says that it was subsequently removed from the Caixin site, as well as from several others that reposted it. But it must have been restored, because I was able to find it earlier today simply by Googling the title. Don’t wait too long. A second purge may be in the offing!

There it is, the original Chinese followed by an English translation. It’s a computer generated translation, so the sense, structure and syntax is abysmal, but it’s still possible to garner the basic meaning. Actually, the author, who is calling for the end of the deification of Mao, urging that he be judged in the light of his actions, goes that one step further. He does not just restore Mao as a man; he shows him as he really was – a beast, one of the worst criminals in human history, who brought nothing but misery to China and the Chinese people.

For those who have any knowledge of Chinese history there is really nothing new here, but for a Chinese audience, brought up in a tradition of political amnesia, it’s really quite devastating. The takeover by the Communists in 1949 did not bring happiness to China: “On the contrary it plunged the Chinese into the abyss of misery for thirty years.” Mao is responsible for the death of millions: “…for which he felt not the slightest remorse.” It is a matter of regret that the portrait of this “backstage boss who wrecked the country and ruined the people” still hangs in Tiananmen Square.

The catalogue of crimes goes on, personal as well as political. This was a man who, in the style of one of the more degenerate Roman emperors, forced people to commit suicide, one who raped numerous women. The man’s “cold-blooded nature is unsurpassed”, his “dark psychology” his lack of “basic humanity.”

There is the abuse and destruction of people. But the article also touches on the abuse and destruction of China’s ancient civilization. Chinese people are want to recall the abuse they suffered from foreigners in the nineteenth century, a period which saw the Old Summer Palace of the Emperors, the Yuan Ming Yuan, a great cultural treasure, destroyed in an act of gratuitous vandalism by British and French troops in 1860 during the Second Opium War. But that was nothing compared with the vandalism of Mao, worse than any hairy foreign devil. It all went during the so-called Cultural Revolution; ancient monuments, artefacts, antiques, sculptures, paintings, “several thousand years of accumulated culture…were all negative.”

Mr Mao is certainly to be commended on his honesty and his courage. So far he has suffered no repercussions, at least from the authorities, who presumably want no airing of the past in any public trial. The late Chairman is their legacy and their liability. Bringing too close a light on him is likely to undermine the whole ethos of Communist rule. Better if he remains in heaven, a god to whom lip service is paid, one whose scripture is ignored by all those who are not politically or clinically insane.

Still, nothing is certain. The Party is in a nervous mood as it approaches the ninetieth anniversary of its foundation. If you want to really put the wind up a Chinese apparatchik just shout ‘Jasmine!’ Yes, they are terrified that the Arab spring may sweep its way east. Apparently the word ‘jasmine’ has effectively been banned, as has the inoffensive little plant, disappearing from all the markets, something of a problem in a country that consumes so much jasmine tea!

The simple truth is that everyone in China, from the highest official to the humblest peasant, everyone beyond the Maoist fringe, is aware that the people suffered more dreadfully as a result of the appalling Chairman’s ‘mistakes’ than the Arabs ever did at the hands of their own dictators, most of whom are relatively benign in contrast. Perhaps the time really has come to let a hundred – jasmine – flowers bloom.

Apologies

Thanks to all those who posted additional comments on my England’s Democrats article. I’m sorry I can’t respond at the moment because Blogger is having problems again – it keeps signing me out! I just want to let you know that your remarks are appreciated and I will reply to them individually as soon as I am able. In the meantime I can still add new posts – I think.

England’s Democrats

I was recently asked if I would look over the manifesto of the English Democrats Party (EDP). Well, now I have, a version that I downloaded from their webpage. I assume there is nothing later, though the document is clearly more than a year out of date, insofar as it makes reference to a Labour government dominated by Scots. Still I imagine little has changed in the way of the party’s fundamental aims.

I have to say that while I was certainly aware of this party’s existence I knew very little about it, other than it was a sort of English version of the Scottish National Party. The manifesto certainly confirms that, a central aim being the creation of a Parliament for England in the fashion of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly.

It seems to me that the EDP exists thanks to two things: the as yet unanswered West Lothian Question, namely why are Scottish MPs allowed to interfere in English affairs when English MPs have no equivalent right, and Tony Blair’s botched constitutional settlement, which left England in a kind of political limbo. To use the jargon, the party was born of a perceived democratic and constitutional deficit. It’s the English Parliament party; it will always be the English Parliament party. The problem is that this would seem to be a basis too narrow to allow it ever to make a serious political breakthrough.

The manifesto is about so much more, of course. There is a broad range of policies, much of which I can agree with without reservation, particularly on withdrawal from the European Union and the ending of mass immigration. There is also a highly commendable critique of political correctness and multi-culturalism, both of which I despise with a passion. I particularly liked the passage dealing with the background of the ghastly European Union, or the Franco-German Union, some simple facts that people need to be more aware of;

European integration, as conceived by the Frenchman Jean Monnet, had the aim of tying Germany into a network of political and economic links with France and other European states so that it would be impossible for Germany to go to war with them. That was by no means the only motivation for seeking ever-closer political and economic union. The interests of Germany and France came together in the peculiar circumstances following World War II. Advantage could be gained for both by combining a post-war German economic revival with French political and agricultural dominance. Germany gained a secure market for its manufacturing industry and France gained a protected market and financial support for its agriculture. In addition, France obtained privileged access to the European market for its colonial produce, and took the lead in building European institutions on the French model – centralised and bureaucratic. The aim from the beginning was to enmesh the states of Europe in an economic, political and military union from which they could not break free. That goal was, and still is, considered more important than the democratic nicety of explaining the goal to the electorate and seeking its approval.


For me this is the key; this bureaucratic tyranny is a far greater danger to our liberty, our sovereignty and our identity as a nation than the absence of a dedicated English parliament. But of course the EDP can’t make too much of this particular platform, for the United Kingdom Independence Party more or less has the ground fully occupied.

There are aspects of the manifesto that I am not convinced by. I do not want ‘reform’ of the House of Lords; I do not want an elected second chamber, the Liberal Democrat agenda. There are the usual bland nostrums about the National Health Service, the sacred cow of our national life, long overdue for an appointment in the abattoir! There is a rather vague nod towards policies on green energy, something else I’m deeply sceptical about, as I made clear in Whistle down the Wind. The EDP wants referenda as a feature of our national life on the Swiss model, something else I reject, something that would inevitably lead to voter fatigue and the domination of tireless and self-interested minorities.

Overall it was an interesting and unobjectionable read but it’s a policy for fragmentation which might very well suit the aims of the Euro-rats in Brussels (I wrote Eurocrats. I gave way to my spell checker for this more apt description!). I confess I feel far more English than British; I feel that if the Scots and the Welsh want to go their separate ways then so be it; but I do have a residual attachment to the Union, so much greater than the sum of its parts.

The Scots, I am convinced, will never vote for complete independence. The English, I am equally convinced, will never vote for yet another layer of government. Westminster is our Parliament; it has been for centuries. I agree, however, that it’s not working as well as it might, that something has to be done to ensure that English laws are made by English legislators and only English legislators.

King Chameleon

In so many ways Charles II was the most complex monarch England ever had, and the least principled. It’s hardly surprising when one considers that simplicity and principle, those virtuous vices, were qualities that Charles I, his father, had in abundance, qualities that all but destroyed the monarchy. There must have been points in the mid-1650s, with Cromwell’s Protectorate firmly in place, when Charles, wandering the Continent with his threadbare and impecunious court, despaired of endless exile.

But he came back in 1660, restored to the throne by his former enemies and not by his friends in the old royalist party. He came determined to rule but ever mindful that there were clear limits to his power, dangers in failing to play a complicated game, a game in which principle had no part.

The traumas of the Civil War, the death of his father, the absence of a stable guiding influence in his life, the beggary and humiliation of exile, bit deeply into his character. He was determined to survive and survival meant weighing and calculation. Oscar Wilde’s dictum about cynics may very well have been invented for Charles; for he truly was a man who knew the price of everything – and everyone – and the value of nothing.

For me John Wilmot earl of Rochester’s poetic comment, though slightly unfair, carries by far the greatest resonance;

We have a pretty witty king,
Whose word no man relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

Long after his death Charles continued to perplex historians, who simply could not be sure of his motives. He was in the habit of telling people what they wanted to hear. Even his death-bed conversion to Catholicism gives the impression of being part of a game, undertaken for no better reason than to please his brother James!

To be fair it has to be said that, as an individual, he was a reasonably tolerant man in an intolerant age. Much given to latitude in himself, he was prone to indulge others. His tolerance went so far as to desire a measure of relief for Catholics and dissenters, still under the burden of the penal laws, evidenced by the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence. But by this time the goodwill towards the throne at the Restoration had given way to suspicion about the king’s motives and the perceived Catholic influences behind the throne. From this point forward the so-called Cavalier Parliament was to become as potentially dangerous as its old Roundhead predecessor.

Charles needed money; Parliament demanded concessions. There was one way around this deadlock: the king could go elsewhere. He did; he went to his cousin Louis XIV. Here we have the makings of the infamous Treaty of Dover in which Charles agreed to embrace Catholicism in return for a large French subsidy, enough to free him from the tutelage of Parliament.

There has been more confusion over this bargain than any other single act in English diplomatic history. Charles, it should be stressed, was obliged by its terms to make a personal declaration of faith, that’s all, but for centuries after the Whig view prevailed that he had agreed to hand over the whole realm to Catholicism. Parliament was deceived, the nation was deceived, even some of the king’s closest counsellors were deceived, so the view went. But the real truth about the Treaty of Dover was even simpler: the biggest dupe of all was Louis!

The whole process was deeply cynical in true Carolinian style. Yes, Charles was sympathetic to Catholics – he had good reason to be – but sympathy would never be allowed to conflict with self-interest. Far from returning the realm to Catholicism in the style of Mary Tudor he was never even to make the promised declaration of faith; it was merely a way of extracting maximum profit at minimum expense. It cost him little, it cost him his word, and for cynics that’s a coin of particularly low value. There are few tricks that Machiavelli could have taught this royal chameleon.