Obama’s Creeping Tyranny

I dedicate this article to Bob Mack and all other American patriots

I love America.  It’s like a second home to me.  We have close family friends in south-west Georgia, people I’ve been visiting on and off since I was a child.  They live in the old Georgia, semi-rural Georgia, a town surrounded by cotton fields, further from the chaos of Atlanta than mere distance would suggest.  It was in cotton fields in winter that I first learned to shoot.  Georgia and the Old South is all part of my romantic vision of the United States.

It's going with the wind.  Romance is shattered by reality, the reality of what is happening to America today, what is happening to American democracy and the American people.  On this side of the Pond we know all about creeping tyranny, as democracy is steadily eroded by the European Union, a bureaucratic monster that eats ever further into our individual lives.  We should have seen this coming.  Sadly we were betrayed by the lies and dissimulation of our politicians over many decades.  The betrayal of America has taken place over a far shorter period.  The betrayal of America is Obama.

Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote a classic study of American democracy in the nineteenth century, would no longer recognise the country.  I do not mean simply because so much has changed in two hundred years.  No, it’s at a more fundamental level.  His American Republic was based on overlapping communities, a plurality of interests, something which gave it meaning and strength, something that kept state and government at suitable distance.  Now the state, Obama state, is effectively crowding out the older forms of civil society, the older forms of liberty.  It’s the big battalions now, no longer Edmund Burke’s small platoons.

The whole process saddens me.  It saddens me that more Americans are not aware just how civil society and civil liberties have been eroded over the past four years by the most centralising government in the country’s history, a form of government that would once have been described as, well, un-American.  Even religious communities are threatened by the overweening power of the state.

My thoughts here were focused by a brilliant article by George Weigel in the latest issue of the political journal Prospect (Liberty, faith and Obama’s Leviathan).  Take the massive health care bill which Congress passed in 2010.  Did the senators and representatives actually read this document in its entirety?  Has anyone read its 2000 odd pages and lived?  No, probably not, but it’s a monster that has acquired a life of its own.  Its acquired a life in the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where, as Weigel says, one finds Obama’s statist tendencies at the most refined.  Here the sacred flame of creeping state socialism is guarded with care. 

This self-serving bureaucracy is set to acquire power over so many aspects of American life, of the life of ordinary Americans, set to be strangled in red tape.  It’s staffed by people who represent the hard left of American politics.  These are the refugees from The West Wing, now enjoying unprecedented and vicarious power, like the bureaucrats in Europe.  They have a bigger agenda.  Weigel puts it thus;

For the regulators at HHS are not simply dedicated to the nationalisation of healthcare in the United States; they are committed to the use of federal regulatory power to promote and enforce their understanding of “preventative healthcare”, a euphemism that masks their commitment to the sexual revolution in its most extreme forms and their devotion to a virtually unrestricted abortion licence…Thus it seemed self-evidently clear o those drawing up plans for implementation of Obamacare that all employers be required to buy insurance plans that covered, not only contraceptives, but sterilisation and abortifacient drugs – all of which, to the permanent bureaucracy at HHS, are components of “preventative healthcare.”

Contraception here is not the issue.  Contraception is widely available in the States.  No, we are dealing with something more crucial; we are dealing with matters of conscience, conviction and religious principle.  Obama, in his lack of wisdom, has taken on the Catholic Church and other religious communities in a manner I would never have believed possible in the United States. 

It’s not about birth control; the Church is not trying to impose itself on anyone.  It’s about the use of coercive state power. It’s the insistence that the Church carry out procedures which conflict directly with its own teachings.  In essence it’s about religious freedom and freedom of conscience, an issue over which Obama and his HHS minions have little or no comprehension.  In Stalin’s Russia, when the church was not being persecuted, it was turned into a department of state.  In Obama’s America the Church is similarly set to be turned into a department of state. 

An administration blind to religious freedom is also blind to other forms of freedom. The state is filling so many areas of discourse.  The bureaucratic nightmare of Obamacare is creating, as Weigel indicates, a new Leviathan, the anti-pluralist form of rule identified in the seventeenth century by Thomas Hobbes.  Power is being centralised, dissent marginalised.  This is not a disease in isolation.  America has been infected by a European virus.  Here the left is intolerant of dissent and debate.  In American the left is equally intolerant of dissent and debate.  Public space, in other words, is being filled with state power.  American democracy is being consumed.  Leviathan has a huge appetite.  

It seems to me, that in this electoral year, that America stands on a crossroads almost as critical as that in 1860.  I can’t predict the future but the auspices are not good.  I could only wish for a more effective and persuasive opponent to Obama than Mitt Romney.  So much depends on opening the eyes and minds of the people to the dangers they face.  If you want a possible view of the American future look to the European present - big government, big bureaucracy and massive waste all against the diminishing of personal freedom.  It’s not a happy prospect.  I feel sure that De Tocqueville would be horrified by the land of Obama, the land of creeping tyranny. 

Bye, Bye, King Newt

I was so glad on Saturday, so glad that, against all the odds, against a tidal wave of electoral hostility flowing over the Conservatives, Boris Johnson prevailed in the London race.  I was even gladder, though, to hear Ken Livingstone’s final farewell, not so much swan as crow song.  At last London is rid of this maudlin, self-pitying old narcissist, the worst thing ever to have been inflicted on the city.  Bye, bye King Newt; please take Polly Toynbee and all your other nauseating acolytes with you.  Never turn again; thou shall never more be mayor!

I wrote recently celebrating Boris, the best thing to happen to London in years.  Now comes the time to write Livingstone’s epitaph, a farewell to arms for conceivably the most unprincipled flash harry ever to disgrace London politics.  I became aware of him and his antics when he served as Mayor from 2000 to 2008.  By his friends I came to know him, and his friends included dictatorial thugs like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.  It was London tax payers who funded his trips to the latter’s communist paradise.  London as Havana; that was his view of the future, and if you know Havana you will understand just how bleak the future! 

Livingstone, insofar as he has any principles at all, is a hard rock of the old hard left, a chip off the Berlin Wall.  His ideas are all in the past, washed up on a shore of ideological failure.  With the fall of the old Soviet bloc he was one of those socialists who had lost an empire but not yet found a role.  It was fashionable leftist causes at one turn - rainbow alliances and what have you - and radical Islamists at the next.  He could preach homosexual rights and then embrace reactionary Muslim clerics calling for the death of homosexuals, with no apparent sense of the contradiction.  You see, it was all for the greater good of Ken. 

In the course of a disastrous mayoral campaign he cynically tried to appeal to Muslim voters in the manner that George Galloway did in the Bradford West by-election.  A good many people I came across in the course of the contest, not all natural Conservative supporters, were sickened by his antics and his opportunism.  Boris had the capacity to charm everyone; Livingstone, I hazard, charmed no-one, not even those who voted for him.  Who could not feel sick watching him weep at a party election broadcast which he claimed represented the view of ordinary Londoners when it turned out to be paid ‘supporters’ reading from a script.  There is really no end to the newt’s cynicism. 

His is the Socialism of Fools, and I feel sure that some people will understand the reference.  He could sneer at the rich, especially rich Jews (in his mind all Jews are rich).  He could rage against tax avoidance, only to be embarrassed by a revelation that he, too, was a tax avoider, paying a lower rate than any of his rivals in the mayoral contest, paying a lower rate than a good many of the Londoners he expected to support him.  This hypocrite-in-chief went so far as to reach for the rich person’s gambit – he set up a company to reduce his tax liabilities. 

All in all his election campaign, conceivably the worst ever by a major politician, was disaster hard upon gaff hard upon disaster.  The more time went by the more hollow, tired-looking and self-pitying he became, promising everything to everyone if only he could get back into office.  Who was to pay for all his lavish promises on public transport fares on what have you?  Not Ken, I can guarantee that munch at least. 

I read in the Sunday press that he was bullied at school.  All I can say is he wasn’t bullied enough!  Farewell to corrupt Tammany Hall-style politics; farewell to cronyism and junkets, farewell to all of the old tired shibboleths, farewell Hugo Chavez and Yusif Al-Qaradawi.  London has seen the last of Ken Livingstone and his causes, the last of the sad old whinger.  Hurrah! 

A Question of Equivocation

I don’t watch a lot of television.  In fact I hardly watch it at all; I don’t even have a television set in my rooms at college.  When I’m in London or elsewhere there is just far too much to do, places to go, people to see, books to read, premiers to attend, parties and more parties!  Besides most of what’s broadcast is complete rubbish, a form of death by entertainment, the kind of mind-numbing real live life shows anticipated with stunning prescience in The Year of the Sex Olympics, a play I wrote about here a couple of years ago (The Live Life Show, 9 June, 2010.)

I do, however, use catch up services like BBC iPlayer, just to make sure I’ve not missed anything worthwhile.  My viewing tends to be a bit sporadic, though, depending very much on what else is happening in my life.  I had some time to spare at the weekend and decided to see what was on offer.  I’m so glad I did because each broadcast has a limited shelf-life. 

There was an excellent documentary by Professor Mary Beard on life in ancient Rome.  It’s not that I want to talk about, though.  Rather it’s The King and the Playwright: a Jacobean History, presented by Professor James Shapiro.  Hitherto I’d never heard of Schapiro, an American specialist in Shakespeare based at Columbia University. 

It was quite brilliant, an exploration of the way in which the transition from Tudor to Stuart rule impacted on Shakespeare’s drama.  In plays like Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens and King Lear Shapiro shows how the dramatist, now part of the King’s Men playing company, both flattered and subtly criticised James I, the new monarch. 

But it was in the second episode, touching on ‘equivocation’ that really opened my eyes.  In placing Macbeth, the Scottish play, in the context of English history, Professor Shapiro delivered a real wow-me effect.  He brought out contemporary nuances that I was completely unaware of, matters relating to the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot.  For an American professor of literature to alert me to a novel dimension of English history really is something! 

The key here is the word ‘equivocation’, which entered general usage during the early Jacobean period.  It acquired a particular resonance in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, when a nation was beset by uncertainty, by fear of terrorism and the even greater fear of potential terrorism. 

Even as the principle plotters were executed in January, 1606 the authorities continued to look for the mastermind behind a scheme that, if successful, would have killed not only the king but virtually the whole of the English establishment.  The man they alighted on was Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest, who had been charged with keeping the faith alive in England.  Now the Plot acquired a whole new dimension, implicating the Catholic community at large.

In the course of investigating Garnet’s alleged complicity a document was discovered, quite explosive, appropriately enough, on the question of equivocation – namely, the justifiable lie.  A Treatise of Equivocation was really just a guide for Catholics living in a hostile Protestant environment.  As Shapiro explains, it was a ‘how to guide’ for English Catholics, torn in their loyalties between the King and the Pope, on evading direct questions by subtle forms of dissimulation; lying, in other words, without lying.  The government had its mastermind. 

The trial of Garnet was a sensation.  He was accused of being involved in not just the Gunpowder Plot but other treasonable schemes going back some fifteen years.  Equivocation was used as a fundamental part of the prosecution’s case.  In parrying the accusations Garnet said that even Jesus himself had equivocated, which doubtless deepened the offence.  The jury took a mere fifteen minutes to reach a verdict.  As a contemporary said, Garnet would equivocate even so far as the gallows, but he will hang, without equivocation.

Shakespeare, in his brilliance, caught both the word and the national mood in his new play – Macbeth.  Those who know the play will immediately call to mind the supposedly comic devil porter scene.  It’s night.  To the gates of Macbeth’s castle comes an unknown visitor, who proceeds to knock loudly at the door. The porter arises and enters into a mood of devilish reverie, as if at the gates of hell;

Here's a knocking indeed! If a
man were porter of hell-gate, he should have
old turning the key.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there, i' the name of
Beelzebub? Here's a farmer, that hanged 

himself on the expectation of plenty: come in
time; have napkins enow about you; here
you'll sweat for't. 

Knocking within
Knock,
knock! Who's there, in the other devil's
name? Faith, here's an equivocator, that could 

swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come
in, equivocator.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there? Faith, here's an
English tailor come hither, for stealing out of
a French hose: come in, tailor; here you may
roast your goose. 

Knocking within
Knock,
knock; never at quiet! What are you? But
this place is too cold for hell. I'll devil-porter
it no further: I had thought to have let in
some of all professions that go the primrose
way to the everlasting bonfire. 

The whole play, which centres on a regicide, had a tremendous topical relevance.  The porter is alert to treason and equivocation.  James himself would have recognised who the principle equivocator was, the traitor who could not equivocate his way to heaven. 

Macbeth is full of equivocation, of evasions in the face of the truth.  Macbeth equivocates, Lady Macbeth equivocates, dissimulation in multiple forms, high and low.  In the end Macbeth realises that he himself has been the victim of the witches’ equivocation;

I pull in resolution and begin

To doubt th' equivocation of the fiend

That lies like truth.

How carefully Shakespeare walked here.  To deal with such sensitive issues with such directness carried potential dangers.  A play centring on regicide might have been fatal in less skilful hands.  But Shakespeare balances equivocation with flattery, holding up a mirror to the king when the play touches on the issue of the succession.  Now the witches stop equivocating.  Macbeth sees into the future; he sees James himself; his treachery has been fruitless; the rightful line will prevail.  There is no more equivocation. 

1812 and all that

What great event in history happened in 1812?  I put this question at the weekend to people I know, all history alumni, mostly English though there were also a couple of Germans in the group.  It was by way of experiment, you see.  Almost everyone gave the answer I expected – it was the year that Napoleon invaded Russia (one mentioned the Battle of Salamanca in the Peninsular War!)  If I had asked a wider audience, people with a reasonable grasp of history, I’m reasonably certain that I would get the same answer.

Now, if I change the audience, if I put the same question to Americans and Canadians I think it reasonable to assume that the majority would answer differently; the Americans almost certainly would.  For 1812 was the year that America went to war with Great Britain.  It’s a conflict that is remembered in The Star Spangled Banner, the American national anthem.  That the young nation survived a war with a great imperial power was a source of pride.  It’s also the source of one or two national myths.

In England it really is the forgotten war, one which made little impact then or later.  It’s different for the Canadians, who, in resisting American invasion, found their own particular pride which was later to blossom into nationhood.  I’m not sure if they are planning to mark the bicentenary of the outbreak of the war, which falls next month, but Americans probably shall, if only to remember the Burning of Washington and the ‘rocket’s red glare’, as Old Glory fluttered above Baltimore’s Fort McHenry. 

It was America that declared war on Great Britain on 18 June, beginning a struggle that was to last for over two years.  American grievances were genuine enough, principally caused by British interference with commercial shipping, an essential part of the total economic blockade of France.  Stung by this and other issues, including the impressment of seamen who claimed to be American citizens, Congress declared war on the urging of President James Madison. 

It’s was really all a bit of a gamble.  Madison calculated that Britain would be fully preoccupied with the war in Europe.  After all, most of the army was fully engaged in the Peninsular War; most of the navy was blockading the coast of Europe.  Now with Napoleon about to enter Russia there could be no better time to attack, with land campaigns against the Canadian provinces and naval attacks on British shipping in the West Indies and North Atlantic.  But he had gone to war with an army scarcely fit to fight, evidenced by the fiasco that followed the invasion of Canada.  The tiny American navy performed creditably in single ship actions, but beyond boosting morale these had no lasting effect. 

So far as Britain was concerned the war was no more than a little local inconvenience.  As Andrew Lambert writes in a recent article in the BBC History Magazine (When Washington Burned), the government had one central war aim: to make the Americans leave Canada alone.  Canadian garrisons were reinforced but no troops at all were withdrawn from Wellington’s army in Spain.  Above all, there was absolutely no intention of challenging American sovereignty, and to describe the struggle as ‘second American War of Independence', as some were wont to do, is a huge exaggeration.   It might, with greater accuracy, be described as the War of Canadian National Integrity. 

None of this was new to me.  I was surprised, though, to learn of a mood of hysteria and hyperbole that gripped at least one prominent figure in American public life – former president Thomas Jefferson.  A letter of his was quoted – with admiration - recently on Blog Catalogue.  Dated 28 June 1812, when nothing significant had as yet happened, he wrote;

Our present enemy... may burn New York, indeed, by her ships and congreve rockets, in which case we must burn the city of London by hired incendiaries, of which her starving manufacturers will furnish abundance. A people in such desperation as to demand of their government aut parcem, aut furcam, either bread or the gallows, will not reject the same alternative when offered by a foreign hand. Hunger will make them brave every risk for bread.

New York was untouched, though British forces did attack and burn parts of Washington, including the White House, in August, 1813, in retaliation for a previous burning of the town of York, now Toronto.  Contrary to Jefferson’s expectations London survived intact, untroubled by fictitious gangs of starving insurgents. 

I said earlier that Madison’s actions were a gamble.  But there is more to this than the military imbalance involved.  There was also a political gamble, one which exposed the latent tensions in the American system of government, tensions left over from the formation of the Union that were not fully resolved until the Civil War. 

You see, his Democratic Republican Party did not have the confidence of the nation as a whole.  He represented the sectional interest of the states of the South and the West, committed to expansionism.  Opposition to the war was strongest in New England, where the states enjoyed good commercial relations with Britain.  There was even talk of secession as the war progressed.  Trade with the enemy, moreover, continued, as the British blockade was relaxed on this section of the Atlantic coast.  Wellington’s army continued to be fed with American grain. 

For generations after American historians celebrated the War of 1812 as a ‘victory’, though such a view is only tenable if one adheres to the second War of Independence thesis.  The truth is the whole thing was a glorious stalemate, one which crippled the American economy and stored up unresolved political problems.  By the time Napoleon abdicated in April 1814 the British blockade was acting like an anaconda, strangling trade, government revenue and domestic consumption.  By October of the same year America was bankrupt. 

The war was finally concluded officially by the Treaty of Ghent, signed in December 1814, though the embers continued to burn for some weeks after.  There were no victors and there were no losers (setting the Western tribes to one side).  It was a case of status quo antebellum – just the way we were.  So, yes, while Americans sing that their flag is still there it’s as well to remember that it was never England’s intention to take it away.

Scheitert Europa?

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of anti-Europe!  It’s just so fascinating to watch political developments on the Continent, watch increasing dissent over the whole tawdry European ‘ideal.’  It extends even so far as France and the Netherlands, two of the original six nations who grouped after the Second World War to form the European Economic Community, now the European Union.

In 2005 the electorate of both of these countries rejected the constitutional treaty devised at Lisbon.  No matter; they were ignored by the political class, who proceeded as intended with an act of legerdemain, a treaty that was not the treaty, a constitution that was not the constitution.  But the dog has stopped growling; it’s now biting.  The recent fall of Prime Minister Mark Rutte shows just how unhappy the Dutch are with the EU.  In France, with all in a flux as the second round of the presidential election approaches, even that slimy opportunist Sarkozy has suddenly acquired anti-European credentials. 

Here Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, once made a speech in which he promised to create “British jobs for British workers.”  It was a more than usually stupid sound-bite which immediately bit him on the backside.  The reality, under the new Europe, as he himself must have known, is that no political leader can guarantee the insularity of the domestic labour market.  In the months after his speech the number of foreign workers rose by 175,000 as the number of British fell by 46,000.  There are, in other words, far too many Polish plumbers.

As austerity bites even deeper even the endlessly tolerant Dutch have opened to this fact.  There Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, even has a website where people can complain about Polish migrants.  In France, too, there is mounting anxiety, something Sarko has latched on to, particularly among the low skilled and poorly educated, those most at risk from increased foreign competition for jobs. The Poles can come to France and the Netherlands but the French and the Dutch can’t go to Poland, or, rather, they can, if they want to end up jobless and homeless on the streets of Cracow or Warsaw. 

The future does not look good for the single-marketers, for those who want to base this single-market on a central fiscal discipline.  The tighter euro budgets become the angrier national electorates.  The coming Greek election, scheduled for 6 May, is guaranteed to show just how deep this resentment is. 

The evidence is also there in France and the Netherlands, with more and more voters veering towards parties of the right or the left that are opposed to further European integration.  Add to this the impact of globalisation, which has compounded the problem of sapping wages and diminishing opportunities.  European leaders, the Economist reported recently, are worried by the rise of extremist and populist parties.  It’s their actions, their pursuit of policies that ordinary people neither voted for nor wanted, that has created the best opportunity for such extremism in decades. 

You see, electorates can be ignored; they have been ignored, time and time again.  But there are consequences here.  The European Union was formed in part out of fear of German revanchism.  The only alternative to the EU, as Chancellor Merkel more or less suggested not so long ago, is a German invasion of Poland.  With the EU we have just the reverse: a Polish invasion of the West! 

 Scheitert Europa? - Is Europe failing? - the German daily Handelsblatt asked in a front page headline recently.  I certainly hope so; for the alternative is too frightful to behold.     

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

The Times reported last week that Mein Kampf is shortly to be reprinted in Germany, the first time since 1945.  The article itself was accompanied by a wholly gratuitous commentary from one Ben Macintyre, headed Illogical and evil nonsense – read, gasp at it and bin it.   That just about sums up the content of the piece.  Macintyre is not opposed to publication; he just blows a rather hysterical fanfare – ‘badly written’, ‘turgid’, ‘illogical’, ‘boring’, ‘evil nonsense’ and on and on.  Why bother reading it at all?  Macintyre has read it for you!    

Time, I think, for me to revive an earlier comment I made welcoming the prospect of the first new German edition since the fall of the Third Reich.  I knew the copyright, held by the state of Bavaria, which for long refused requests for republication, was scheduled to run out next year, a fact that I found quite pleasing.

Why was I pleased? To begin with I should say that, so far as I am concerned, the banning of books, books with a political message, no matter how repellent, is always wrong. But more to the point, Mein Kampf is an honest political statement, perhaps the most honest ever written by a politician. One only wishes that it had been taken more seriously at the time. It certainly was during the early days of the Cold War, when Western writers scoured the speeches of communist leaders, gathered and published with such dubious titles as Khrushchev’s Mein Kampf.

Hitler was eventually to recognise how unnecessary, how dangerously unnecessary the book had been as power became a realistic possibility, distancing himself from parts of the message in the early ‘moderate’ days of the Third Reich. He wrote a second book in 1928, this time focusing more directly on his foreign policy aims, which was buried during his days of power, only published after the war with the English title of Hitler’s Secret Book. 

You see, for Hitler the spoken was always more important than the written word. It’s virtually impossible to quantify but I would hazard that that while Mein Kampf may have converted thousands- and I do stress may - the speeches converted tens of thousands. Indeed, Mein Kampf is more likely to have discouraged any potential convert by its convoluted and rambling message. If racist and fascist groups promote it today it’s because it’s Hitler’s ‘book’, a kind of icon, not because it has any real political power, any proselytising power.

Publication was banned in this country for more than twenty years after the Second World War. Republication in 1969, in an edition edited by D. C. Watt, was opposed by all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons. It was opposed, I believe, by some Jewish groups. I can understand this. At the time the crimes of the Nazis must still have been raw in a lot of minds. Yes, it was understandable but misguided. Father bought Watt’s edition while he was still at school.  He told me that it was the dullest thing he had ever read, duller even than Cicero!

“Oh, that my enemy would write a book”, really is the guiding thread here. Well, he did, and it reveals much more about him than he ever intended, much more about his inner psychosis; reveals more about his intellectual and mental confusion than he could ever have imagined. That is the crucial thing. Publication in England was opposed by Jewish leaders. It’s a sign of how things have moved on, how understanding has grown, that publication in Germany has been backed by Jewish leaders.

Oh, I should also say that, contrary to Macintyre’s view and contrary to what you might have heard, Mein Kampf is actually quite readable if clumsy and ill-organised, the meanderings of a semi-educated high-school drop out.  You might very well read it; I doubt very much if you will gasp at it.  It’s unlikely to give you any greater insight than you already possess.  

Tomb Raiders

Stephen Fry, a huge twit, all round mouth and super luvvie, recently argued that Britain should “redress a great wrong” by returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece, as a gesture to mark the London Olympics. 

These precious reliefs once adorned the Parthenon in Athens. They were brought Britain by the seventh earl of Elgin in the early part of the nineteenth century.  They can be seen in all of their pristine beauty in the British Museum’s purpose-built Duveen Gallery.  Lord alone knows what they would be like if they had remained a further two hundred years in situ. 

This is not a good time for antiquities in Greece.  Driven made by EU imposed austerity, many people have taken to digging up the ancestors in a spot of tomb raiding.  Even Olympia, the birthplace of the ancient games, has been desecrated by pirates looking for buried treasure.  Running short of cash, the government is struggling to provide adequate security for some of the most precious locations in human civilization. 

Last month, according to a recent report in the Times, grave robbers were seen digging pits in the ancient Mycenaean cemetery on two occasions before a farmer raised the alarm.  Without any official support, local people mounted their own guard for ten nights running in an attempt to scare the thieves away.   Nikolas Zirganos, a journalist who has helped to retrieve pillaged artefacts places the problem in a bigger context;

In any political, social, economic crisis you always see a rise ion looting and robberies, whether it’s a war or a collapse of society.  I don’t say we are at war, but we are in a very deep crisis and this affects the cultural heritage very much. 

The tragic thing is that the problem has become so bad that the culture ministry has decided to rebury recently discovered sites of historic importance, including an early Christian basilica at Thessalonica.  Michalis Tiverios, professor of archaeology at the local university, said of this “Mother Earth is the best protector of our antiquities.  Let us leave our antiquities in the soil, to be found by archaeologists in 10,000AD when Greeks will perhaps show more respect for their history.”

The prof, in his sardonic whimsy, seems rather too optimistic.  In 10,000AD there will be no Greece just an undifferentiated Euromass, a unity of wealthy northern Herrenvolk and abject southern Helots.  By then all antiquities will have disappeared into the central core, the new capital of this monster land, a capital that might very well go by the name of Germania. 

Meanwhile, back in 2011AD, the situation gets worse by the day as the recession and the austerity bite ever harder.  Fewer jobs mean more tomb raiders.  Shortage of cash means fewer security guards.  Even the Acropolis, from whence the Elgin Marbles came, is being closed at 3pm on weekends, instead of 7pm, for want of staff. 

Please do not think that this is a problem restricted to open sites.  Even museums are under attack.  In February that at Ancient Olympia was looted.  After tying up the sole female guard, the thieves smashed display cases with hammers, making off with various artefacts including a three thousand year old gold ring with an estimated value of £3.3million. 

This is not the time to consider returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece.  That time, I rather think, will never come, no matter how much Stephen Fry bleats.