The Strange Death of Socialist Europe

(With thanks to Nobby)


I have in front of me a copy of the Economist for 23 April, opened at page thirty one, a story headed In the red corner, about Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party. Anticipating the outcome of the May 5 elections, a future now past, the author writes:

…it is likely to be a good day for the leader of the opposition. In local elections…his Labour Party is likely to make gains at the expense of both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats…It may also return to power in Scotland and win enough seats to govern alone in Wales.


Oh, for the power of foresight! Rather than joy the May elections brought disaster for Mister Millipede, the biggest disaster of all in Scotland, ending decades of political thraldom to the Labour Party. Even in the local elections the gains were not that impressive, coming mostly at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, with the Conservative vote holding up well.

More important, we now know what a spineless traitor this man is, involved with a gang around Ed Balls in something laughably called Operation Volvo, a plot to stab Tony Blair, then Prime Minister, in the back and replace him with that gruesome old ogre Gordon Brown, whose time eventually came though most people wish it hadn’t! This is the Labour Party exactly – treacherous, backward, stupid and back-stabbing, totally unfit for government, totally unfit to govern itself let alone the country. It deserves to be led by an insect like Millipede.

It’s heartening to know that the debacle of 5 May is a symptom of the malaise of the left all over Europe, something highlighted by Toby Young in the Telegraph soon after Super Thursday. The traditional blue collar vote is drifting away. In Sweden the Social Democrats lost its second election in a row, with only 22% of people in work voting for them.

It goes on. In the European election of 2009 the German Social Democrats only managed 20% of the vote, their worst showing since the Second World War. In France the Socialists managed a derisory 16.5%. It will be interesting to see how they poll in future now that Dominique Strauss-Khan, their great hope for the next presidential election, stands accused on a charge of sexual assault.

The truly interesting thing is that the 2007-08 financial crisis and its aftermath has sent voters to the right, not the left, as Young points out. Old boundaries are melting. In France more and more working class voters are being drawn away from their traditional political attachments to the socialists and the communists, voting instead for the right wing National Front, something I highlighted in the Irresistible Rise of Marine Le Pen, an article I wrote for BrooWaha (www.broowaha.com/articles/.../the-irresistible-rise-of-marine-le-pen)

The common factor here is that the liberal elites who dominate the left no longer share the outlook of their one-time voters, who are more concerned than ever by the impact of mass immigration. It really does not matter how one cuts this up, economic migrants or bogus ‘asylum’ seekers, it means numbers and more numbers, particularly from places in the world alien to the European cultural tradition. In Sweden, for example, a million immigrants have entered the country since 1990, fully three quarters of whom subsist on state benefits, the welfare free-riders that the right-wing Sweden Democrats identified in the general election of 2010.

Come to think of it we have no need of a foreign aid budget, as across a good bit of Europe, Britain included, foreign aid is being paid in the form of public doles. There is no need to wait for it never to be paid in, say, Kenya, where it ends up in the pockets of kleptocrats; no, come to Britain as a welf…sorry, asylum seeker instead.

Immigration, bad as it is, is only one part of the equation, as Young says. There is the question of the European Union and European integration, much beloved by déclassé liberal-socialists, much hated by ordinary voters. Earlier this year the True Finns – the Finish equivalent of the United Kingdom Independence Party – polled 19% of the vote in a general election, a five-fold increase since 2007. In contrast the Finish Social Democrats saw their vote fall to just over 19%. This is in a country where immigration is not an issue but Europe is, particularly in the light of the Euro-crisis and the bail-out for countries like Greece and Portugal.

People are angry, angry at the anodyne formulas and the lies; angry at the dissimulation, at the betrayal of democracy and the betrayal of nations, angry that decisions are being taken for them by a cabal of corrupt politicians and self-serving bureaucrats; that aliens, terrorists among them, have been allowed to flood across porous borders, that communities have been destroyed.

The people most betrayed are the working class, people who have been shamefully taken for granted by tofu-eating lefties all over Europe. Ethnic identity, other older and more atavistic loyalties are beginning to re-emerge. The political right needs to have the imagination to capitalise on this, to confine cosmopolitanism, liberalism and socialism to the oblivion where they truly belong.

Archbishop Polonius

I begin by writing that I was reluctant to begin. Once again Rowan Williams, our benighted Archbishop of Canterbury, is in my sights, but as a target he is too easy, a slow, bovine and unimaginative beast. In hunting him there is no sport, no challenge at all; he is far too easy.

In the nineteenth century it was said that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer. I can make no general observation about the Church in the twenty-first century, other than to say that it is diminishing in painful stages, slowly poisoned by large draughts of liberal relativism, so much so that in another hundred years it is likely to be extinct. At the present it is being guided to that terminus by a prelate whose politics are more than obvious: he is the Labour Party at prayer, assuming he prays at all, other than to Tony Blair, who appointed him in the first place.

Comrade Williams at the moment is the guest editor of the New Statesman, a socialist weekly, which also happens to have Medhi Hassan as a political editor, a man who has likened non-Muslims to animals. He may have a point, because it’s clear that the red prelate is a bit of a donkey. He was braying loudly in the latest issue of this appalling journal, which itself is dying by degrees, braying against the government of David Cameron.

A climate of fear grips the nation, he wrote, anxiety about policies for which people didn’t vote, fear over changes in education and welfare policies. The free schools policy being advanced by Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, is one of this “radical, long-term policies for which no one voted.”

Really; can he be sure of that? Perhaps he should pause for a moment and browse through previous editions of the New Statesman. I seem to remember a poll it published two weeks ago, in which it reported that 79% of respondents thought that free schools were a jolly good idea. The policy was actually included in the Tory manifesto, something else this muddle-brain clearly failed to check in questioning the democratic legitimacy of the government.

Welfare reform, that’s another thing that’s causing so much “plain fear”, this “quiet resurgence of the seductive language of the deserving and undeserving poor.” Why he should consider such language ‘seductive’, or just where it comes from, is a bit of a mystery. It has never been used by Iain Duncan Smith, the minister responsible for welfare reform, or anyone else in the government, either in plain or ‘seductive’ form.

The aim is simple enough: to break the dreadful cycle of welfare dependency which has condemned so many to a life on dire council estates, an endless round of fags, pot noodles and daytime TV, a more soulless life I find impossible to conceive. Once again, contrary to the red prelate’s musings, policies to lift people out of state sanctioned poverty were openly discussed prior to the general election. But he would rather see the continuation of welfare ghettos, as he sits in splendid isolation in Lambeth Palace, an unelected denizen of the Lords, with no legitimacy or mandate whatsoever, other than the Blessing of Blair.

It really is a waste of time writing about this pompous ass, this man whose intellect is clouded in a perpetual fog. We have seen him in every stage of his wretched metamorphoses. We have seen him as an advocate of Sharia Law, as a man who thinks that our ancient system of justice, of equality before the law, is a “bit of a problem.” This is a man who expressed his ‘discomfort’ over the death of one of the worst mass murders in history; a man whose grasp of history and theology is so weak that he thinks Shakespeare was probably a Catholic and that it is possible to pray for souls in hell.

I could go on but there is really not much point. He has simply added another link to his chain of absurdity, a process that I expect will continue long into the future, doing untold damage to the Anglican Church, as he embraces one fashionable left-wing or politically correct cause after another.

Since he saw fit in one of his previous outings to pass judgement on Shakespeare I think I shall conclude by allowing Shakespeare to pass judgement on him. One does not have to look too hard to find Williams in the plays. There he is, in Hamlet. Who is he? Why Polonius, of course, the royal counsellor whom the Prince taunts as a “tedious old fool.” I’m sure that Shakespeare would have been delighted by this wonderful example of life imitating art - Archbishop Polonius, pompous, garrulous, pettifogging and fatuous, a man who has no method in anything, not even his madness.

Finding Ophelia

The first story that caught my eye yesterday morning when I glanced through the days reports was one concerning Shakespeare, still making the news hundreds of years after his death! Actually the story concerns one Jane Shaxspere (sic), who was found drowned when she was just two years old, her body floating in a pond in Upton Warren in Worcestershire, just twenty miles from where her near namesake lived in Stratford.

The details of Jane’s death were discovered by historians from Oxford looking at sixteenth century coroners’ reports. She died in 1569, when Shakespeare was approximately five years old, accidentally falling into the pond while picking marigolds. The suggestion is that she was the bard’s cousin. It’s certainly possible, given the near similarity of their names and the proximity of their locations, at a time when people did not travel much, and extended families could be found across a fairly limited area.

It’s further suggested that Shakespeare, many of whose characters and plots were based directly on his own experiences, may have used this tragedy as the basis for the death of Ophelia in Hamlet, one of the most haunting scenes in his whole canon. There the Prince’s former lover, driven mad by the death of her father, falls into a brook, floating for a time before being dragged down by the weight of her saturated clothes;

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.


Hitherto academics believed that the inspiration behind this scene came from the death of Katherine Hamlet, a friend of the Shakespeare family, who fell into the River Avon and drowned when she was sixteen years old. It was believed by some at the time that she had committed suicide because of the breakdown of a relationship. Ophelia in Hamlet is certainly mad, though it’s uncertain if she committed suicide or not, at least by Queen Gertrude’s account to Laertes, her brother, softened possibly to spare him the full horror. In the play the church is under no doubt that she took her own life, denying her a full Christian burial.

The whole thing is certainly quite intriguing, though a precise link is almost certain to prove elusive. Though the researchers have enthusiastically embraced little Jane, there is no need for the tragedies to be mutually exclusive. The drowning of Katherine may very well have resurrected memories of the earlier event, linking possible death for love with death for love of flowers.

The researchers are looking for further clues that might possibly identify Jane as the original Ophelia. Dr Emma Smith of the faculty of Language and Literature at Oxford has said that “It’s interesting to think of Ophelia combining classical and Renaissance antecedents with the local tragedy of a drowned girl.” Yes, it is, though I would hazard that it’s never likely to be much more than that. But it’s comforting to believe that Jane, and Katherine, have been transfigured and immortalised in great art.

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.