Nuclear Facejobs

So, North Korea has announced plans for further rocket launches and a nuclear test as ‘New phase of the anti-US struggle.’ The official communiqué could not make it any clearer;

We do not hide the fact that a variety of satellites and long-range rockets will be launched by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea one after another, and a nuclear test of a higher level which will be carried out by it in the upcoming all-out action will target against the US, the sworn enemy of the Korean people. Settling accounts with the US needs to be done with force, not with words. The world will clearly see how the army and people of the DPKK punishes all kinds of hostile forces and emerge as the final victor while following the just road of defending its sovereignty.

I know, I know; the prose is not very elegant, but surely it creates a mood of dread? The hermit state really does seem intent on settling accounts with America but, contrary to assertion, not with missiles but with a lethal barrage of...words. Yes, let’s bore the hostile forces to death with intercontinental verbal incontinence. Quick; take to the shelters; here comes a dirty bomb of nouns and verbs!

Do not be too concerned by the latest petulance from Pyongyang. As far as real intercontinental capability is concerned, it’s almost certain that the country lacks the capacity. Of course it can still do a lot of damage with short range weapons aimed at South Korea and Japan. Still, look at the facts. Regimes that plan aggressive actions do not generally announce their intentions in advance. Look out, America; here we come: the Imperial Japanese fleet is on its way to Pearl Harbor.

It’s getting just a bit boring, this pseudo-nation behaving like a petulant child. We’ve been here before, in 2006 and again in 2009, nuclear tests that provoked international outrage. But there was no advance publicity with these past travesties, no bluster, no suggestion that the regime was set to punish ‘all kinds of hostile forces.’

The truth is Kim Jong Un, the Fat Leader, and his military chiefs are a bit like a collection of mafia dons, making an offer you can’t refuse. No test, no missile, and no words, just as long as the price is right. After all, this is a country that can build weapons but can’t feed its own people.

The biggest threat North Korea presents is not its weapons arsenal but itself, and the greatest threat is not to the US but to China, its ostensible ally. The Chinese, infinitely patient, are beginning to lose patience. They have had enough of their blustering and adolescent neighbour. But there is only so far they can go in expressing disapproval, least the baby starts howling and throwing his toys out of his pram.

Beijing said naughty, naughty after the last nuclear test, punishing baby with a series of sanctions that were not sanctions. The latest hot air is a cause of renewed embarrassment. But China can’t go too far in reigning in the Fat Leader. His ultimate threat is not the explosion of his nuclear arsenal but the implosion of his own benighted nation, causing millions to flee over the border, the stuff of Chinese nightmares.

Meanwhile the reports that the Fat Leader has been having plastic surgery to look more like the Great Leader, his dead grandfather, are entirely wrong. This falsehood is a hideous criminal act that the party, state, army and people can never tolerate;

Those hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the nation should not expect any mercy or leniency. Time will clearly show what dear price the human scum and media in the service of traitors of South Korea, slaves of capital, will have to pay.

Would it, I wonder be as high as the price for a nose job? Oh, well; I can’t say I haven’t been warned. Even as I write a severe incontinent reprimand is winging its way in my general direction.

Brave New America

Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel Brave New World is, depending on your point of view, a description of a soulless technocratic nightmare or a prescription for a far more rational society.  Personally I’m inclined to the latter.  What a good idea it would be to control the world’s population.  What a good idea genetic engineering would be.  How much happier we would all be as citizens of the World State.  The lower castes, the Betas, the Gammas, the Deltas and the Epsilons, all created in decanting bottles to be of lower intelligence, would be content in their modest and mediocre lives.

It’s just a beautiful dream.  We could not possible create such a rational world, a world devoid of thought, reflection and insight; a world devoid of such unsettling things as freedom.  Or could we?  I was delighted to read that educators in the United States have taken a major step forward in creating a more streamlined society. 

Apparently such unnecessary and inharmonious modern classics such as J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are to be dropped from the school curriculum by 2014.  Instead the Betas, the Gammas, the Deltas and the Epsilons will be able thrill to Recommended Levels of Insulation by the US Environmental Protection Agency or, if that’s too exciting, Invasive Plant Inventory by California's Invasive Plant Council.  Yes, I know, not much in the way of plot or human interest but – ask yourself – do the lower orders really need these things?  They are just so unsettling for the humdrum, for those who aimed low in life and missed.

The new school curriculum for this brave new American world will come into force in 46 of the 50 states, making it compulsory that at least seventy per cent of the texts studied should be non-fiction.  A new generation is to be raised on informational handbooks.  It’s all part of a scheme to ensure that Americans are ready for the workplace, assuming the workplace ever comes. 

The new standards are apparently backed by the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.  It’s also backed by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Apparently it’s intended to help pupils develop the capacity to write factually and accurately, far more useful in the workplace than Shakespeare.

That’s it; that’s the key.  Employment in Obamaland has been so high because people are wrongly adapted.  Think how frustrated employers must be, think how frustrated Bill and Melinda must be, when job applicants come along reciting Whitman or Longfellow but know nothing at all about invasive plants or insulation. 

Plato and Aristotle and the rest of those all Greek fossils got it completely wrong.  Education should not be about encouraging curiosity or developing fully rounded human beings.  It should be about indoctrination, streamlining and targeting.  The aim should be to ensure that the clones are undifferentiated, all fit for purpose.  It’s about ensuring that the ordinary remain ordinary, sub all expectations.

Meanwhile the Alphas for wholly unexplained reasons send their offspring in ever increasing numbers to private schools, those insulation and invasive plant free zones.  There they can continue to wile their time away uselessly musing on Shakespeare.

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

We Cannot Legislate against Lunacy

This is the most difficult article I’ve ever written.  In the face of the appalling tragedy in Connecticut it’s almost impossible to find the right words.  I love words but sometimes they are so inadequate.  Here it might be said that respectful silence is the only response, silence and sorrow in silence. 

But others are speaking and some are shouting, bawling almost.  I raise my voice in a perfect storm, knowing that I’m unlikely to be heard, or if heard I am likely to be misunderstood.  Just about every report I’ve read about the mass shootings last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the town of Newton has raised the issue of gun control, the equation being that the Second Amendment right of US citizen to bear arms equals periodic massacres.  Few seem to pause and think.  The Second Amendment has been in place for over two hundred years but rampaging madmen are a feature of the modern age.  Why, why and why again? 

I’m going to push these whys but first I should declare an interest.  The thing is I enjoy shooting, which opens be to an additional accusation - that of selfishness. I have licences for both a .22 rifle and a four-ten shotgun. I enjoy target practice and I enjoy rough shooting. I really do have to stress that all of the people I have met through this sport are sensible, intelligent and well-balanced. I first learned to shoot staying with family friends near Moultrie in Georgia.  I have little doubt that most Americans who are in legal possession of firearms are also sensible, intelligent and well-balanced.

I do have firearms but unlike Americans I have no constitutional right to bear arms.  It wasn’t always the case.  The 1689 English Bill of Rights – upon which the American version was later based – enshrined the right of people to bear arms for defence.  And so it remained, right into the twentieth century.  In his A Brief History of Crime Peter Hitchens points out that when in 1909 the police in the Tottenham district of London came under fire from a gang of foreign anarchists they asked the public for assistance. Not only did they borrow guns from the local citizens but they also appealed to members of the public to help shoot back.

Over the course of the last century gun control in Britain got tighter and tighter, largely because governments started to fear the people, chiefly for political reasons.  But tight gun control did nothing to stop the Dunblane School Massacre in 1996.  Gun control has done nothing to stop more and more firearms getting in to the hands of criminals.  The truth is the tighter the gun laws have become the more prevalent gun crime has become.  It might be said that while we have disarmed honest citizens we have armed dishonest gangsters. 

Looking to Europe there is Norway, which has particularly strong firearms control.  That did not stop Anders Behring Breivik going on a rampage.  Now consider another example altogether; consider Switzerland.  This is a country whose proportion of gun ownership per capita is among the highest in the world, not far behind the United States.  This is a country where almost every adult male is required by law to bear arms.  Yet it’s also a country with a particularly low murder rate.  Such gun crime as there is mostly involves illegally held arms.

Now I turn my eyes back over the Atlantic.  So far as the clamour for gun control is concerned it would be as well to consider the words of Sammy Gravano, one-time mobster.  In a 1999 interview with Vanity Fair he said – “Gun control?  It’s the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters.  I want you to have nothing.  If I’m a bad guy, I’m always going to have a gun.”  The simple truth is that many types of crimes, as Hitchens pointed out in his book, fall sharply in those districts where normal and law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry concealed weapons. 

It might interest you to know that in England approximately half of all burglaries occur while people are at home.  In America this is as low as one in eight.  In those States which openly licence citizens to use deadly force against intruders burglary is virtually unknown.

What happened in Newton was not normal; it was an obscenity, just as Dunblane was an obscenity.  Adam Lanza – I can barely bring myself to write his name - , a maladjusted twenty-year old, went on a ghastly killing spree.  Why, what was his motive?  Will we ever know with exactness?  Possibly not, but possibly it was no more than a desire for notoriety and fame, that shallow contemporary obsession, the shallow obsession of losers and mediocrities everywhere.

But there is more.  As I noted above, this kind of mass shooting followed by suicide is a feature of our age.  Lanza was not normal; Lanza, as I understand from the Washington Post, had some mental or developmental disorder.  The New York Times reports that it was Asperger’s Syndrome, a high functioning form of autism. Accordingly it seems he was on strong medications. 

Here I can only agree once again with Peter Hitchens.  Writing recently on his Daily Mail blog, he says that it would make sense for the press to explore this route rather than raise a futile wail in favour of gun control.  Is it possible, one has to ask, that there is a correlation between what happened at Newton and the increasing use of modern medications for mental illness?  We badly need answers here.  Instead we are likely to get the usual clichés. 

A world away from Newton there was another murderous rampage last week, though it has attracted far less media attention.  In central China a knife-wielding man stabbed twenty-two children outside a primary (grade) school.  It was less terrible than Sandy Hook because none were killed, though several were taken to hospital, some with severed fingers and ears.  According to police the perpetrator, since detained, is ‘mentally-ill.’  Tight control on firearms means that gun crime is virtually unknown in China.  Instead knives, and sometimes explosives, are used in mass attacks.  The sad truth is we cannot legislate against lunacy.  

Laughing in the Face of Absurdity

Burn the Witch!

I hugely admire Nick Cohen, a journalist and author of fearless integrity.  He is one of those people almost impossible to classify politically.  On the face of it he belongs to the left, but that has not stopped him from voicing the most trenchant criticism of his fellow travellers.  His book What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way is a brilliant polemic, exposing the shallow opportunism, intellectual barrenness and moral vacuity of so much contemporary ‘progressive’ opinion.  He might be said to occupy the same position once held by George Orwell, for whom honesty came well before party loyalty.

A recent blog of his drew my attention to a scandalous episode of heresy hunting that might even have shocked the witch hunters of Salem.  It concerns the illiberalism of liberal academics in the States.  It concerns a hysterical onslaught against one Naomi Schafer Riley, an education correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Rather she was a correspondent for this publication.  She was fired for daring to question an unquestionable orthodoxy. 

What was her offence?  She raised doubts over – horror of horrors – the academic rigour of black studies departments in US colleges.  She wrote a response to a laudatory piece previously published by the Chronicle.  Going to source, she examined a number of graduate dissertations, concluding that they were, to use her words, “purveyors of left-wing victimisation claptrap”.  Her punches were not spared:

Topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?’

All at once the thunder rolled – racist! racist!, racist!, burn the witch.  What price freedom of speech in the land of the free?  Very little, it would seem, when it challenges the shibboleths of the academic left.  They demanded a sacrifice.  The editor of the Chronicle tried to make it an issue of free debate.  But that was not enough.  Shamefully 6500 people, mostly academics, signed a petition demanding that Riley be sacked.  Shamefully the editor gave way to the pressure. 

Cohen’s observation is telling;

Now suppose that the US government said that universities should fire academics who excused the Iranian regime. Or right-wing Christians demanded that the Chronicle fire a writer who insulted teachers at theological colleges. Or universities had acted on Riley’s argument that black studies departments were a waste of space and closed them. Cries of ‘McCarthyism’ would rend the air. Earnest professors would remind us that academic tenure was an essential protection of free inquiry. 

But when the blood hounds start baying there is little room for reason.  The dog who barked loudest was one Stanley Fish, a law professor who writes for the New York Times.  His argument was, as Cohen says, both sinister and clownish.  He told American liberals that it was OK to abandon liberalism.  They must deny conservatives free speech and enforce censorship.  There is no shame here; no, for we are the righteous hypocrites; we demand free speech for ourselves while denying it to all those we disapprove of.    

In defending herself Riley pointed to the black American scholars who have been saying exactly the same thing about black studies department, namely that they reinforce stereotypes and encourage victimhood.  But that’s alright; they are black.  For her to make the same point is akin to a white person using the n word.  You see, by their double standards shall ye know them.

There are no limits to the sea of hypocrisy in which Fish swims.  Oh, but let me be fair: there is no dissimulation here; for he is an honest hypocrite, defending hypocrisy as hypocrisy.  In a recent Times piece he wrote that it was quite in order for liberals to condemn Rush Limburgh for making sexist remarks while excusing Bill Mahler for making equally sexist remarks.  The thing is, you see, the former is one of the good guys while the latter is “on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy”.

One has to wonder about the nature of American democracy, the partial nature that would favour freedom for some and silence for others.  Yes, one does indeed wonder when one reads this piece of idiocy:

I know the objections to what I have said here. It amounts to an apology for identity politics. It elevates tribal obligations over the universal obligations we owe to each other as citizens. It licenses differential and discriminatory treatment on the basis of contested points of view. It substitutes for the rule “don’t do it to them if you don’t want it done to you” the rule “be sure to do it to them first and more effectively.” It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that.

Such is the degeneracy of liberalism.  People like Fish want to cast democracy in their own image.  This is a pond where the little fishes can be untroubled by countervailing thoughts; where, if they disapprove of what you say they will fight to the death to prevent you saying it.  How Voltaire would have laughed.  That’s all one can do in the face of absurdity – laugh. 

Profit and Loss

I love fascinating discoveries, just as I love surprises. I was both fascinated and surprised to learn that the American constitution recognises three sovereign entities: the federal government, the individual states and – this is the surprise – the Indian tribes. Yes, the Indian nations are effectively that – nations.

Clearly these sovereignties are not equal. The Civil War showed that federal authority trumped that of states’ rights. The position with the Indians – I refuse to use the term ‘native American’ – seems to be more ambiguous. Their legal status rests on the various treaties signed in the past with the federal government, bargains which were often just made to be broken.

Though one-sided these deals, when they were not breached, allowed the Indians a certain amount of leeway. They could not raise armies or create a separate currency, but they enjoyed the kind of rights normally exercised by fully sovereign nations, including the right to issue passports.

The right to issue passports is one thing; having them recognised quite another. The Iroquois have their own passports but they have no international recognition, as their lacrosse team discovered when it was refused entry into Britain in 2010. But, my goodness, they take their national rights seriously, even separately declaring war on Germany in 1941, as did the Sioux and some other tribes.

It’s actually only in fairly recent times that the supposed rights of the various Indian nations carried any weight at all. The treaties concluded with the government in the nineteenth century were really ‘bad faith bargains’, ignored when it was convenient to ignore them, especially if it was discovered that the territories allotted to the tribes were subsequently discovered to have hidden value. It was not a relationship of equals. The treaties were most often a way of diminishing native rights by removing them into ever more marginal land, a policy of ghettoisation, which in some ways recalls the ‘homelands’ created by the old apartheid state of South Africa.

These ‘red ghettos’, as one Indian author described them, effectively became rural slums, noted more for poverty, unemployment, alcoholism and crime than the preservation of traditional values. These so-called sovereign nations were really no more than federal dependencies, overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A change of attitude came in 1934 when Congress endorsed a degree of self rule, though – amazingly – it wasn’t until the late 1970s that the persecution of traditional religious practices was ended with the passing of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

That same decade the bogus treaties of the past were given real legal substance with the adoption of the Indian Self-Determination Act, beginning the transfer of administrative authority from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the various tribal governments. So what did this mean in practice, what innovations did it bring? Buffalo hunting may have been out but the hunting for punters was in! The business of America may be business but the business of the Indian nations is gambling.

There is another parallel here with the South African homelands, where supposedly independent entities made money through gaming, free of restrictions applied elsewhere. Indian independence, such as it is, has been built in the modern age on the roulette wheel and the slot machine. When early attempts at gaming on reservations came into conflict with state law the matter went as high as the Supreme Court, which in 1987 decided that the tribes, as sovereign entities, could not be barred from running casinos and other gambling facilities. This was followed by an act of Congress which specifically allowed Indian gambling, provided that the proceeds were used for “tribal economic development.”

Now, according to a report I read in the Economist, the various Indian gaming houses take up to 44% of America’s total gambling revenue. Almost half of the tribes across the land have taken advantage of the opportunity, not hunting bucks but making bucks. The key to success or failure here is location: the closer to major population centres the better things are. White settlers in the nineteenth century may not have been welcome; white gamblers in the twenty-first most definitely are.

According to David Wilkins, professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, gambling has become the biggest economic boost to the tribes since the fur trade in the nineteenth century. The results, though, seem to be mixed. There have been some positive benefits in “tribal economic development” when the proceeds are spent wisely, which, sad to say, is not always the case.

In some reservations profits, shared out as dividends, are little better than doles, reinforcing a culture of dependency. It has also led to a form of racial discrimination which would be shocking if practiced elsewhere in America. Some tribes have adopted ‘blood quantum’ laws, obliging an individual to prove his genetic antecedents. More than that, thousands have been disenrolled from tribal membership because of doubts over their ancestry. Gaming, or the profits of gaming, is clearly in the blood.

In times gone by the more braves the greater the power. In times present the fewer braves the bigger the pot. For those unfortunate enough to full victim to greed or simple spite the results are fairly dire. The loss of guaranteed revenue is bad enough but what makes it worse is the potential loss of tribal housing, education, welfare and other benefits. Beyond that it entails a compete loss of community and identity.

The whole thing seems quite invidious. But there are bigger questions over the true benefits that gaming has brought to the tribes. Unemployment on the reservations is still eye-wateringly high. Drug and alcohol abuse are both endemic problems, as is obesity and diabetes. Crime rates are twice the national average. For a great many of the people locked into these ‘sovereign nations’ life itself would seem to a game, one in which the odds are not very favourable.

No Sale

I said in discussion recently that Barack Obama’s slogan for the coming Presidential election should be “No, I can’t”, a more honest and apt statement about him as a man, a leader and a chief executive than “Yes, we can.”

There was something else I said, that if a play is ever written about his time in the White House it really should be called The Death of a Salesman. It’s such a pity that it’s already been done. But I wasn’t actually thinking of Obama in the guise of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. It’s another salesman I had in mind – Samuel Bick from the movie The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

This is a movie about personal drift and decline that I saw last year on DVD, with Bick drifting in ever faster eddies, a yacht without a compass or a rudder. Bick is a salesman in a furniture store, not a very good one, diffident and lacking in self-assurance. His boss tries to motivate him in various ways, pointing to the then President Richard Nixon as an example of the perfect salesman. Why? Because in the Presidential election of 1968 he sold America the idea of ending the war in Vietnam and then failed to deliver. Nothing deterred, he sold exactly the same idea in 1972. Bick, in an increasing mood of despair, then takes Nixon as the avatar for all that is wrong in his life.

Obama is far more like Bick than Nixon. He tries so hard to be a salesman, tried to sell the idea that all that mattered was positive thinking. Time and again he has shown that it doesn’t. As his abysmal presidency, in so many ways the worst in American history, drifts from one nadir to another, he flails around, looking for scapegoats and excuses, looking for his own personal Richard Nixon, if I can put it like that, as an explanation for his failure

I noted from an article by Andrew Roberts in the political journal Standpoint that he is now is blaming the “millionaires and the billionaires” for blocking the recovery – i.e. tax hikes - , the kind of scapegoating that small people always resort to when in difficulty. But it’s the millionaires and the billionaires who have been taking up the reins that the state has allowed to drop.

The Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy, a research body which monitors corporate giving trends, reporting from a database of 184 companies that corporate giving has increased by 53% since 2007, not at all bad in the midst of one of the most serious recessions since the 1930s. The total contributions across all respondents in cash and products amounts to more than $15.5billion. The biggest increase of all has been among companies working in the healthcare sector.

There are individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, Mr Facebook himself, who has contributed $100 million to create a better grading system in public schools. And then there is the financier Toby Forstman, who responded to America’s failing education system by setting up the Children’s Scholarship Fund, a programme that so far has provided scholarships to the value of $483million for thousands of low-income children to get into private schools. In foreign aid programmes the state now provides a mere 15%, the balance coming from private capital.

As Roberts says in his article, this is the ‘can do’ attitude that built America in the first place. Get the state out of the way, and then see what happens. This is yes, we can, in sharp contrast to Obama’s no, I can’t, and I never could. All he sells is hot air, big, windy meaningless speeches.

In 2008 many greeted Obama as a new Lincoln, the same grand words, the same lofty vision. In reality he has turned out to be more in the image of Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan. Yes, the fact that many of you probably now have to pop over to Wikipedia is a measure of how little trace they have left, a measure of their mediocrity. In generations to come other people, I suspect, will have to do the same for Obama.

The Rise of the Morlocks

Sociology is not my subject. More than that, it seemed to me to be one of more tendentious academic disciplines, the happy hunting ground for all sorts of lefties. Bogus theories compounded by bogus politics that, for me, is sociology.

Or, rather, was sociology. I’m pleased to say that my view here was far too partial! I delight in serendipity, the art of discovering things by chance. Charles Murray is a new discovery for me, a sociologist of unique and refreshing vision. Presently working for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington, he is best known for a book called The Bell Curve. In this he was rash enough to discuss the IQ levels of different ethnic groups, attracting a rush of liberal hatred.

But it’s his views on poverty that I find most compelling, his argument that state action in this area, the so-called ‘war on poverty’, has the reverse effect from that intended – it increases the number of poor people. More than that, it’s corrosive of personal responsibility and independence. This is my own view exactly. In an article I published here at the beginning of last year (The Dead Hand of Welfare, January 11) I opened in combative style;

The one certain consequence of aid, of any kind of welfare, is poverty. Look at this country, look at the dreadful Dependency State, a financial burden that has crippled us for years and resulted in a form of entrenched, institutionalised socialism, almost impossible to shift, no matter the political complexion of any given government. Billions of pounds have been spent and we are not a step closer to ending poverty.

In his work as a number cruncher Murray has added substance to this assertion in an American context. Like Britain, billions have been spent on antipoverty programmes but poverty remains stubbornly entrenched. Worse still, those targeted, the recipients of benefits, have lost the incentive to work hard and raise children within the context of a stable relationship.

Murray is also, I’m delighted to say, a libertarian, very much of my own kidney. He explained himself in What it Means to be a Libertarian, a book published in the late 1990s. In this he calls himself a ‘lower-case’ libertarian, too fond of the “indispensible role of tradition and classic virtues” to go along with the likes of Ayn Rand. Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, his heroes are my heroes!

In 1989 he was asked by the Sunday Times to investigate if we have an ‘underclass’ a term he popularised that same year, in this country. He used three measures in his investigation: drop-out from the labour force among young males, violent crime and births to unmarried women. These, he concluded, were associated with the growth of a class of “violent, unsocialised people who, if they become sufficiently numerous, will fundamentally degrade the life of society.”

He returned to the same theme, again at the behest of the Times, ten years later, saying that Britain had become “just another high-crime industrialised country”, and that the underclass was “driven by the breakdown in socialisation of the young, which in turn is driven by the breakdown of the family.” Last year’s London riots are sufficient proof of his claims, if any proof is needed.

He has now published Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 in which he discusses the growing fractures in American society and the dangers presented by an underclass, cut off from a common set of values. His fears are my fears; for, in the end, I suspect the Morlocks will consume us all.

Robin of the Right

I’d never heard of Andrew Breitbart, the American conservative activist, author and blogger. I’d never heard of him until last Thursday, when news of his death was announced in a post on Blog Catalogue.

I took exception to the early tone being set, one of minor celebration. Considering that he died at a relatively early age, considering that he leaves a wife and four young children, I described it as despicable and distasteful. There are times when political differences are irrelevant. In response I was given a link to another blog and asked, once I read it, if I would feel the same way. This is part of what I read;

Let’s face facts here; the man was an asshole, fashioned after the many conservative assholes who are currently residing in our media. He was a racist, misogynistic, homophobic elitist bastard, who gleefully attacked the character of anybody who didn’t share his hateful, narrow minded views. He was the model of today’s Republican as featured in our present day media.

What is there to say? If that’s the level to which criticism and discourse has sunk in the States then things really are in a bad way. It seems the justification for this kind of venom was Breitbart’s own invective. Soon after the death of Senator Edward Kennedy he described him as “villain”, a “duplicitous bastard”, a “prick” and “a special pile of human excrement.” The favour has now been returned, with one Kenneth J Bernstein greeting Breitbart’s death using the same terms in a diary entry on the Daily Kos, seemingly an American political blog that publishes ‘progressive’ (how I loath that word) views.

I actually wrote my own obituary on Edward Kennedy, published at the time of his death on the Daily Telegraph readers’ website. It took the form of some musing by Sir Mordred, the rebel knight at the court of King Arthur (Sir Mordred Reflects on the End of Camelot). Here is part of his, sorry, my reflection;

So on to Ted, the last of the ‘great’ senators and the clan’s weakest link. I suppose he deserves the accolade of greatness simply for being around long enough, the Methuselah of the upper house. And what a variety of super liberal and semi-socialist causes he embraced, making lots of sound and fury in the process that signified nothing. Was it enough to wipe away the shame of Chappaquiddick, the shame of leaving a nineteen-year-old woman to drown while he made his escape, the shame of failing to report the incident for hours after? For some it seems to have been, for Super Obama it seems to have been, but not for Mordred; no, never.

There is other evidence of Ted’s turpitude beyond Chappaquiddick. The older Kennedys’ extra-marital exploits escaped press scrutiny a little in the same fashion as royals did at the time, but Ted lived long enough to see the emergence of a much less deferential age. His exploits were a dream for his Republican opponents. In 1988 in a speech on the Regan administration’s secret deal to sell arms to Iran he asked rhetorically “Where was George Bush?” The reply was made on bumper stickers across the land, “Dry, Sober and Home with his Wife.”

Am I speaking ill of the dead? I suppose I must be, but so much ill was directed at me by poets down the ages; so please allow me some return. Even so, while I welcome no one’s death I do welcome the end of a shabby modern Camelot, a tawdry illusion so much worse in every way than the original; an illusion that served to poison America with the lie of liberalism and the lie of socialism.

In other words he was a villain, a duplicitous bastard, a prick and a special pile of human excrement! But I’m not American; I don’t express myself in such earthy terms. Breitbart did, though his faults are nothing compared with those of the tawdry Kennedy.

On the basis of some very brief research I’ve concluded that there was so much to admire in his approach to life and politics. He wasn’t a knight at Camelot; no he was Robin Hood, fighting against the barons who dominate American life.

Time Magazine referred to him as the internet’s “most combative conservative impresario”, which seems to have been a well-deserved accolade, one I feel sure that made him proud. A champion of the Tea Party and baiter of Obama (he described him as Marxist in an interview with the New York Times), he set up conservative websites like Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood, the three areas of American life which he considered to be dominated by a liberal elite, unreflective of the views of ordinary people.

In an interview with Time he said “Most conservatives are individualists. For years, they have been pummelled by the collectivists who run the American media, Hollywood and Washington. The underground conservative movement that is now awakening is the ecosystem I’ve designed my sites to tap into.”

As I said, a modern Robin Hood of the right, fighting against the vested interests that would silence any view but their own. Yes, he was brave guerrilla, tackling the awful orthodoxies that dominate so much of our life, not just in the States but in Europe also, where the ghastly and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels smothers dissent with silence.

Even if his weapons are not my weapons, his words not my words, I can recognise a fellow rebel. I regret not knowing of him when he was alive. John Donne’s poem For Whom the Bell Tolls comes to mind. We are, indeed, diminished by our loss. But the words I want to conclude with are those of the first respondent on the Telegraph article reporting Breitbart’s death;

Now, we shall see the CLASS of friends and foes. I wish I could say that I expect to witness respectable decorum. But I know, as Andrew would, it simply won't be. The left has divided our people into warring camps. They will rejoice at our loss. So be it. This is a body blow to conservatives, no doubt about it. Time to offer prayers to friends family and to remember him for energy, brilliance and focus. Time to pick up the flag and soldier on.

Time and History

I originally only planned to publish my recent article on the decline of American power contrasted with the rise of China’s (How Are the Mighty Fallen, 30 January) on BrooWaha. I published it here because the editorial process there was log jammed for several days. Now it has appeared there it elicited an interesting response from a fellow contributor, one who lives in India. I think my own detailed reply, slightly modified, deserves to stand here on its own.

Greatness and power have nothing at all to do with freedom and human rights. The Roman state survived for centuries as a slave power and rapacious conqueror. China has never enjoyed a full democratic existence in the sense that you and I would understand the concept. Even before the Communist takeover it was ruled, when it was ruled at all, by dictators, warlords and freebooters of one kind or another in the period after the revolution of 1911, which overthrew the last imperial dynasty.

I’m sorry, I complete disagree with you; the present government of China shows little in the way of communist orthodoxy; it shows not the least interest in exporting its brand of high holiday politics, unlike its economic imperialism. Mao would simply not recognise the China that has emerged after his death. The Chinese government is simply an oligarchy, interested in the perpetuation of its power, a power over which Marxism is draped like a fig leaf. Their brand of realpolitik owes far more to Machiavelli than Marx, more to The Prince than to The Communist Manifesto.

A nation survives by conserving its power, not wasting it. Yes, governments have a responsibility to ensure the security of the land. But America under George W Bush did not contain a threat; it simply made it worse. Where was the logic in invading Iraq, a country with a secular government, a country with no connection to terrorism, a country actively opposed to Al-Qaeda? Where was the logic in invading a country that had effectively been neutralised after the First Gulf War, and neutralised to the advantage of the West?

There are so many things I could say about this disaster, things I have said previously. Not only was the Al-Qaeda genie let out of the bottle, not only was the power of Iran immeasurably increased, but the aftermath of a war, which Bush described as a ‘crusade’, led to the tragic destruction of the age-old Iraqi Christian community, rather ironic in the circumstances. Has the invasion of Afghanistan made America safer? I rather think not. Anyone with even the lightest grasp of history would have kept clear of this ‘graveyard of empires.’

America has spent trillions beyond its means; America is now in hock to China, a further proof of my argument that one power has waned while the other has waxed. If the country has, as you put it, protected its interests, its gone about it in a wholly cack-handed fashion. Would you, as an Indian, someone surely with a better understanding of regional politics and history, ever have envisaged your country invading a hopeless place like Afghanistan, even with the co-operation of Pakistan? Was the British example not enough; was the Russian example not enough? The invasion of Afghanistan did not destroy the Taliban, merely submerged it for a time. The invasion of Afghanistan did not destroy Al-Qaeda, merely allowed it to relocate in the tribal highlands of Pakistan. Muscles were not flexed; muscles were lost.

I am no wiser or prescient in these matters than any other. I cannot see into the future, only project on the basis of present trends. These trends allow me to predict that this will be the Chinese century, but on this question only time and history will sit as the final arbiters.

How Are the Mighty Fallen

I admire China; I admire the present Chinese government. Oh, please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that I admire communism; I don’t; I loath it, but it’s doubtful that the Chinese system has anything to do with communism in any meaningful ideological sense. No, as an idea it was effectively abandoned at the same time as the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia and China then took the high road to capitalism, chaotic for the former, controlled for the latter.

What I admire is the technique of realpolitik, the wholly Machiavellian outlook of the Chinese. This is likely to be their century not simply because of their economic power but because they play the game carefully, looking always to their own interests.

What a sense of humour Clio, the goddess of history, has, what an acute love of irony. There was America at the end of the Cold War, the only great power left in the world. There was Francis Fukuyama saying that history itself had come to an end, a humourless plagiarism of Sellar and Yeatman’s contention in 1066 and All That, published in the 1930s, that America was clearly Top Nation and history came to a .

But it didn’t, did it? America, the paramount power in 1991, has frittered it all away in one fruitless crusade after another, war after war, intervention hard upon intervention, the gift of the neo cons who have nothing at all to do with genuine conservatism or any kind of political realism. All they achieved was more and more spending with fewer and fewer results. Now the country has reached the lowest point in its history, the nadir, headed by the hopeless and incompetent Barack Obama, not a neo con just a con, a Marxist in Marxist clothing.

Now look at China, the communist capitalist super power. This is a country with the good sense to stand and stare, to consolidate its power, not waste it all away. This is the new empire, extending its influence over much of the developing world, particularly Africa, large parts of which are effectively a Chinese economic colony. I simply could not imagine the Chinese getting bogged down in a hopeless place like Afghanistan for a hopeless cause. I simply can’t imagine any country headed by an intelligent leader doing so, a leader with even the lightest grasp of history.

But America did, here, there and everywhere, taking the wolf by the ears, unable thereafter to let it go. Good sense and good politics would have kept America out of Iraq, a country which, no matter how repellent its dictator, kept a check on the regional ambitions of Iran. But good sense and good politics was not at a premium in the Bush Whitehouse; it has not been at a premium ever since. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle.

Nietzsche in America

In an article I wrote about the infamous prosecution of John T Scopes (Monkey Trial, 14 October, 2009), an American teacher put on trial in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee for teaching the Darwinian view of evolution, contrary to local law, I made the point that Clarence Darrow, Scope’s defence attorney, was an enthusiast for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the biology of Charles Darwin.

He was influenced here by H. L. Mencken, a leading American journalist. It was Mencken who introduced the German thinker to America in his 1908 book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His Nietzsche came as an angry Moses, a prophet armed, ready to knock away the cosy nostrums of American life. The strong only grow stronger by despising the weak and, so far as Mencken was concerned, by despising Christian morality. The Scopes trial was an ideal opportunity to pour scorn on “booboisie”, the backward ignoramuses of the Southern Bible Belt.

That’s one American perspective on Nietzsche. Interestingly a totally different one was to come from another participant in the Scopes trial - William Jennings Bryant, a former presidential candidate, who acted for the prosecution. The year before he appeared at the trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb – this time for the defence -, both accused on the kidnap and murder of a teenage boy, for no better reason than to prove that they were Supermen, beyond all conventional notions of good and evil. At least that was Darrow’s argument, claiming that they were acting under the influence of Beyond Good and Evil!

Bryant won both cases, clear in the first (at least insofar as his clients escaped the death penalty), pyrrhic in the second. But perhaps his more immediate victory was over Mencken and Nietzsche. His view certainly was more in harmony with American thought, insofar as Americans thought of Nietzsche at all. After all, this was a thinker contaminated by association with German militarism, then even more contaminated by association with the Nazis. What is the philosophy of an anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman doing in a culture like ours? Why Nietzsche? Why in America?

Actually these questions are not mine. They are posed by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, published by the University of Chicago Press at the end of last year. The answers she makes clear in the course of this lively, thoughtful and entertaining book. It begins with America and it ends with America; or, rather, it begins with American thought and ends with American thought. You see, when I was a teenager I was reading Nietzsche; when Nietzsche was a teenager he was reading Emerson!

It was in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson that Nietzsche found a “brother soul”, as he puts it. Here was a thinker free from all inherited burden, a believer in the sovereignty of the self, full of scepticism about traditional morality and received religion. “The most fertile author this century so far has been an American”, he declared. Nietzsche used Emerson not to get closer to him but to get closer to himself, as Ratner-Rosenhagen puts it. I would simply add that Americans, in their various ways, have used Nietzsche to get closer to themselves.

To use the cliché, here is a man and a thinker who has been all things to all people. His admirers did not just include obvious social Darwinists like Mencken, but Emma Goldman and others on the left, who saw Nietzsche’s attacks on democracy and religion as a way of arousing the masses from their lethargy.

He was also admired by Jack London, a socialist whose views on the ‘degeneracy’ of the herd are not so far removed from those of Mencken. There is also Margaret Sanger, the high-priestess of American birth control, who read Nietzsche selectively, attracted to his views on Christian sexual ethics, ignoring his obvious misogyny.

That’s just the thing about Nietzsche and America – he has been read selectively, something the author herself is mildly guilty of, a point I’ll come to a bit later. He has been sanitised, if you like, made acceptable to an American audience, a democratic audience; an audience where every man, and woman, has the capacity for endless self-discovery. It’s the Superman as the ordinary man!

It’s true that his reputation suffered – unjustly – by association with the Nazis, but after the war America was given a new reading. Here was a soulful voyager for the existential age, an interpretation advanced – irony of ironies – by Walter Kaufmann, a Jewish scholar and translator who escaped to the States from Nazi Germany in 1939.

The American Nietzsche, as Ratner-Rosenhagen makes clear in a dedicated chapter, is largely Kaufmann’s Nietzsche. I have to be frank and say it’s a slightly dishonest interpretation, more wholesome and less challenging than the raw original!

In some of the more bizarre readings I’m reminded of the character of Otto in the movie A Fish Called Wanda, who, when accused of being an ape, said that apes don’t read philosophy. “Yes they do, Otto”, came Wanda’s response, “They just don’t understand it.” How else is one to interpret the view of Huey Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Movement, that Nietzsche thought “slave morality” was a good thing?!

One of my favourite chapters is devoted to the ‘fan mail’ sent by ordinary and unknown Americans and kept by Elizabeth, the philosopher’s Nazi-sympathising sister, a woman who did more to poison his legacy than any other individual. Some of theses missives are beyond eccentric. There is one letter of condolence sent after the philosopher’s death in 1900 by John I Bush of Duluth, Minnesota, who announced to Elizabeth that he was the Superman her brother had been looking for;

May you hereby have the consolation and delight to have lived long enough to know that the visions, prophecies, and hopes of your brother have been fulfilled to the very letter; for the author of this scribbling is the very man prognosticated in Zarathustra.

Bush, hmm; is there any connection here, I wonder?

Now, I said earlier that the author is slightly guilty over her own misreading. Her book, she claims, is less about Nietzsche than interpretations of Nietzsche. But if she begins with Emerson she also ends with Emerson by way of Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty, all of whom have tamed Nietzsche to a degree, leaving out his more anti-democratic sentiments.

Yes, it’s Nietzsche by way of Emerson, a transcendentalist, free of the sarcasm and aggression so evident in his manner of thought and mode of expression. This is a philosopher for all seasons, a philosopher for an American season. It is perhaps a misreading, but who cares. I’m sure Nietzsche, the greatest of all of the great iconoclasts, would have loved it, as much as I loved this book, as much as I admire a country and a people who are continually striving for fresh and novel interpretations. It’s the very thing that keeps thought alive.

American Disease

When I take timeout I have to climb a mountain of emails on my return. It takes a while to catch up and to respond. But on this occasion there was one that quickly caught my attention and spurred my intellect.

Sent by a friend (thanks, Nobby!) who shares my general political outlook, it was a link to a YouTube video, a documentary about the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the evolution of political correctness, with particular regard to the United States.

In The World Crisis, his book about the causes and course of the First World War, Winston Churchill, in a particularly memorable simile, wrote that the Germans transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia. Well, cultural Marxism and political correctness, its most toxic cell, were similarly transported like a plague bacillus from Germany to the United States.

Interested? I bet you are! I’ll make things a little bit clearer further on but first a word or two about the context, the medium, if you like, carrying the message. The presenter is William S. Lind, the former Director of the Centre for Cultural Conservatism, which doubtless means that some will dismiss the thesis without further consideration. That’s a pity, really, for there is real meat here, a thread into the labyrinth of the present American malaise.

The argument itself is simple enough: that Marxism in its classic form was a failure because the working class did not perform the walk-on part allotted to it in a turgid drama that went by the name of Historical Materialism. But the play did not die. Instead it was rewritten as a cultural critique of Western society and civilization as a whole.

The Institute for Social Research was set up in Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany in 1924. Here a new hybrid was created as if on the island of Doctor Moreau, a melding of Marx and Freud. The basic theme here was that everyone was repressed by capitalism, politically and sexually, if only they knew it, if only they weren’t so beset by ‘false consciousness.’ With the ascent of the Nazis, a particularly virulent form of false consciousness, the School relocated in America, where its ideas were to have the greatest impact of all.

The documentary did not really tell me anything that I did not already know, either about cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt School or the corrosive effects of political correctness in general. In reviewing Anthony Browne’s The Retreat of Reason, which examines the creature in a British context, I wrote;

The author identifies what might be referred to as the pre-history of PC. Although Marxism failed in both political and economic terms it made significant advances in the cultural arena, through universities and opinion-forming bodies, to the point where ordinary debate was contaminated by a new orthodoxy, one which amplified the perceived injustices done to minorities, even so far as silencing debate over uncomfortable issues.

The documentary therefore did not come as a revelation but it helped put things into a slightly sharper perspective, particularly in an American setting, where PC is overwhelming FC – factual correctness -, where, supported by a repressive totalitarian mindset, it has advanced to the point where liberty and free speech, those core American values, are in real danger.

The Frankfurters were quick to make an impact in the States, especially after the publication of Theodor Adorno’s book The Authoritarian Personality. In this fascism was freed from a specific set of historical and political causes. Instead it found a new home in the human psyche, in the psyche of the American people at large, who, according to Adorno, possess many of the traits associated with fascism. In other words, the supporters of traditional American culture and values are psychologically unbalanced, prone to the worst forms of sexual repression and authoritarianism.

So here, in short, we have what was to become the ideology of the counter-culture. Here we have, paradoxically, a new orthodoxy taking shape, which allowed all those who took a contrary view to be dismissed as ‘fascists’, people in need of analysis or ‘sensitivity training.’ Herbert Marcuse, who was to be the most influential of all the Frankfurters, added to the mix in Eros and Civilization, which condemned all established sexual norms, calling instead for ‘polymorphic perversity.’

While the old-fashioned working class, too wedded to the material benefits of capitalism, had been abandoned, a new carrier of Utopia was alighted on in the 1960s - the Politically Correct Coalition, a variety of fashionable causes and movements, which stormed campuses across America, in the process creating a new narrative, a new hegemony, one which continues to dominate contemporary discussion.

Know it or not, the carriers of the counter-culture, are under the direct influence of the Frankfurters, particularly Marcuse, not just in embracing ‘polymorphic perversity’ but in cudgelling any view different from their own. Free American society, Marcuse argued, was actually a deception. Instead he argued for something he termed ‘liberating tolerance’, another paradox, for the tolerance only extends to the politically acceptable.

It was tolerance for all views coming from the left; intolerance for all views coming from the right. While political Marxism killed free speech in Russia, cultural Marxism is killing free speech in America, rather ironic, don’t you think? That’s the legacy of Frankfurt; that’s the effect of a plague bacillus that continues on its course.

Death Crosses the Rio Grande

We have a serious problem with mass immigration in England. The United States, I know, has similar difficulties, with migration across the Rio Grande now at alarming levels.

Naturally enough, this kind of thing produces a backlash, especially in times of economic difficulties, a time when there are too many people chasing too few jobs. This is certainly the case in England. There is also, I have to say, an additional fear: namely, that we are allowing in too many people with traditions inimical to our way of life. Right across Europe there are concerns over the growth of Islamic fundamentalism.

That’s not something that affects the States, at least not to the same degree. But there is another alien tradition, I recently discovered, serving to deepen anxieties about immigration, going beyond concerns over mere numbers. It’s not just people who are coming in: Death is there also, riding on their backs – “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

It’s not some nebulous concept I have in mind, not some apocalyptic revelation; no it’s Santa Muerte – Saint Death -, the patron saint of Mexico’s drugs cartels. Illegal immigration may very well fuel xenophobia but, let’s be frank, death cults have a tendency to fuel it even more.

Santa Muerte is fairly typical of the religious syncretism found right across Latin America, combining Catholic with pagan traditions. The trouble is that this gruesome spectre, with its toothy grin and scythe, has the loyalty of a particularly vicious tribe of devotees, the pushers of a new kind of murderous Juggernaut.

The fear is real enough: that Mexico’s vicious drugs war is pouring over the border, not in part but in whole, a war that in a mere five year period has been responsible for some 35,000 fatalities. This is bad enough but the death cult gives the whole thing an even more alarming gloss. Santa Muerte is following the main narcotic routes throughout the US, from Arizona to New York. She was there in a tunnel discovered a few weeks ago, a tunnel some six hundred feet long running right under the border, looked over by a shrine to the saint.

People have every reason to feel worried by this phenomenon, a sign of a deeper malaise. By their very nature gangs are territorial and fissiparous, drug gangs more than most, but the Santa Muerte cult provides them with a perverse cultic and iconic focus, a possible basis for cooperation and unity. Writing of this in the Daily Telegraph Tim Stanley said;

The goal of these groups is to undermine democracy and govern autonomous secret societies through family, blood and religion. It’s a global trend. The Lord’s Resistance Army that slaughtered and raped its way across Uganda from 1987 to 2007 was led by a man who claimed to channel the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the culprit behind this apocalyptic criminality was the death of Communism, which deprived thugs and thieves of a secular ideology to justify their actions. Organisations like FARC and the Real IRA converted overnight to pushing drugs. But in Mexico, family and religion filled the vacuum left by the failure of socialism.

The assumption in Europe, particularly in the pages of the hyper-liberal Guardian, is that American fears over Hispanic immigration has been brought on by racism, nothing more, and that the country is on the threshold of a new Jim Crow era, a time when racial apartheid was law. But the truth, for once, really is pure and simple: mass immigration, coupled with the importation of malign foreign cults, represents a serious threat to American civic and political culture.

As the country faces a threat from without it also faces a new threat from within, brought on by a loss of confidence and direction, shown in the wave of populist, anti-business hysteria sweeping across the land, a canker spreading outwards from New York, given encouragement even so far as the Obama House. It’s worth reflecting on this, as we here in England also face a threat from an informal alliance between jihadists and anarchists. Santa Muerte, it would seem, has a long reach

Jamie Oliver – the Nanny Cook

I've discovered that Jamie Oliver, a telly cook who could bore for England, not content with lecturing us on what to eat is now lecturing America in a show called Food Revolution. What follows is my response to this news, posted on a discussion thread. It’s been slightly adapted for use here.

I saw this thread yesterday and decided to hold back, for the simple reason that my first emotion was one of anger at the subliminal message that is being peddled by this ghastly cook, this frightful male Mary Poppins. The reference here is a deliberated one, but let me hold off on this for a bit until I've made some more general points.

So, his preaching from the culinary pulpit is being broadcast in the US as Food Revolution, is it? One should always try to understand revolutions, in politics or in food, by looking at previous examples, by looking at the route they have taken. In this regard America’s present is our past.

The last government here, the government of Tony Blair and latterly Gordon Brown, was one of the worst in our history, chipping away systematically at all sorts of civil liberties, seeking to micro-manage lives, right down to the most intimate and personal levels. Things got so bad that it was even the subject of a book - Philip Johnston’s Bad Laws. In the introduction he made the following points;

Yet despite the claim to represent the British people, New Labour actually felt like an alien interloper in an ancient land, preaching the fetish of modernism and despising tradition. It evinced a predisposition to micromanage individual behaviour and ride roughshod over liberties, both of which are very non-British traits.

I wrote my own gloss on this book, posted on 17 May last year (Bad Law), but for short here is one key passage;

We now have more CCTV cameras than any other nation in the world though there is no evidence at all that they are effective in reducing crime. We are observed even more closely than the citizens of such places as North Korea and Cuba. We are beset by armies of parking enforces and clampers, as well as being pestered by a growing army of health fascists. The smoking ban threatens to destroy the pub, one of the great British institutions. Latterly the nation’s health supremo has alluded to the deleterious effects of ‘passive drinking.’ Even school lunch boxes, an intimate bond between parent and child, can be investigated by the healthy eating brigade.

Yes, that's one dimension of this appalling onslaught - the fascists of the healthy eating brigade. And who do you think they adopted as an avatar, who do you think Tony Blair adopted as the food guru, one who would bring a 'revolution' in eating, focused on school lunches? I don't think I need to say, do I?

Oliver was sold as the food Poppins; well, he wasn't; that's just how I see it - a sanctimonious, hectoring Hector, who was out to 'reform' the nation's eating habits. Up and down the country schools, anxious not to appear out of step, anxious not to be victimised by the snoopers, the government inspectors and the do-gooders, adopted 'healthy lunches'.

People were even empowered, as I have said, to look at the contents of lunch boxes and send lecturing written warnings to parents if they did not like what they saw. Even in the worst days of Soviet tyranny I doubt things ever went that far. What was the result? 'Healthy' options went uneaten; children went hungry; mothers were seen at school gates, handing through emergency 'food aid.'

It really is appalling that this disease has now hit the States, this nannying Jamie-knows-best approach. I see from one recent news report that Chicago has even banned home made lunches. My God, what’s happened to America, what's happened to the Land of the Free, when this sort of state-tyranny is allowed to pass without major protest? How far are people prepared to allow things to go? What’s next: compulsory work camps for the deviant eaters?

Oliver is no more than the populist face of the nanny state, a lisping culinary megalomaniac and school-dinner obsessive, as Brendan O’Neil wrote in last week’s edition of the Spectator. If that's not bad enough he, so far as America is concerned, is a foreigner, a sanctimonious outsider. Actually if the American people like him so much I wish they would adopt him on a permanent basis. The sooner my country is free of this ass the better.

I'm annoyed; it's obvious I'm annoyed, but I do emphasise it's not at those who watch this show - it's at the lie they are being sold, that people can be corralled like sheep into adopting a 'healthy' lifestyle, the kind of lifestyle sanctioned by Oliver and his insufferable kind. For America to be seduced by this condescending and patronising food moralist is just too awful. If the price of freedom is fat kids then let it be.

The Peace President

I wrote the following piece for another site not long after Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. I've decided to archive it here in the light of a discussion on Blog Catalogue, and in the light of recent developments on the world stage.

Those who have read my previous blogs will know that I have little time for Obama politically. Still, I can recognise that he is a clever man, a good speaker and a public figure with a warming personality. I also thought that he had a certain degree of tactical skill. The acceptance of this award proves that he has none.

Just think: how much greater he would have looked if he had declined, if he had simply thanked the committee for its generosity but said that the goals set out have still to be achieved. But he could not, because this unexpected and quixotic decision by the Nobel people came at the end of a bad period for Super Obama, capped by a humiliating personal snub by the International Olympic Committee.

I now have a deeper understanding than ever of Obama: he is no more than a celebrity president for a celebrity age, an age where style and image have triumphed over substance and results. Having failed in Copenhagen he bounced back in Oslo. As far as the X factor stakes go he is still up there with a chance.

Now a word or two about the Nobel Committee. My first reaction on hearing the announcement-after thinking it must be a spoof- was that it says nothing at all about President Obama, nothing about his achievements, and heaps about them, about the obvious political bias of these people and, I would add, their desperate attempts at political correctness. It seems obvious to me that Obama is being awarded less for what he is and more for what he is not; he is not a Republican; he is not George W Bush. I also suspect that he was awarded because he is the first black American president, which, if true, is an act of appalling condescension.

Look back on the history of this absurd prize, to whom it was given and, just as important, to whom it was not. Did you know, for example, that Ghandi was nominated five times but never recognised? Those who were recognised included such doves of peace as Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat and Menachem Begin. And now Obama joins their company, still at the outset not at the end of his career. From this point forward he has the burden of being a peace laureate who most likely will have to take his country ever deeper into war. On the domestic stage he raised expectations that he has been unable to meet. Now on the world stage impossible expectations have been thrust upon him. Who, but a fool, would accept the role of Messiah for a day?

So, there he stands, with one disappointment laid hard upon another. He is dithering over Afghanistan while Americans die; his health reform programme slips and slips; Guantanamo Bay is still open in the face of all of the liberal hopes; he has provoked a quarrel between the politicians and the generals; he looks less and less plausible. And in the midst of all this, all the domestic and foreign problems, he and Michelle had the time to slip over to Copenhagen to put their weight behind Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, yet another failure, another sign that ‘Obama power’ does not work.

But cast down in one Scandinavian capital he was raised up in another, a form of personal compensation. He did not get the Olympics but at least he got ‘Peace.’ I rather suspect that the celebrity President has not the wit to understand that he did not get peace either, that he is unlikely ever to get peace. It’s the triumph of pious hopes over solid achievements.

Smoking will make your nose drop off

Sorry about the alarmist headline, inspired by a snippet of information on disinformation in one of my history periodicals. Seemingly in 1934 the rumour spread that the Chesterfield Cigarette Company, based in Richmond, Virginia, had employed a leper to pack their product. A little like the famous Orson Well’s radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, the story caused a wave of panic, seriously impacting on Chesterfield sales.

Ligget and Myers, the tobacco company that owned the Chesterfield factory, issued official denials, but presumably on the basis of ‘they would, wouldn’t they’ the public was not reassured. Even the added support of the Board of Health (think of the irony here!) and the mayor of Richmond made little difference. A business rival was suspected; the company even offered a $25000 reward if the source of the rumour could be traced, but no definite evidence was ever forthcoming. As it was it took fully ten years for sales to recover.

I’ve done a spot of internet research on this subject and it seems that the bizarre association between leprosy and tobacco predates the Chesterfield panic by decades. In 1882 the Chester Times, a newspaper based in Pennsylvania, published the following alarming notice;

A physician who has studied the disease says that it is dangerous to assume that it can only be contracted by actual contact. The very atmosphere in which a leper moves is contaminated. It can be caught by using a chair or room which has been occupied by one afflicted with the disease, or by using a drinking vessel or anything that has been touched by a leper. The street cars are a prolific source of the contagion. Lepers are employed in the cheap cigar and cigarette shops, and scores of instances of the disease are known to have arisen from smoking the articles made by their plague-stricken fingers.

Now if that does not stop you smoking absolutely nothing will!

The association between leprosy and smoking continued to surface from time to time, even as late as the Vietnam War, when it was alleged that the marijuana cigarettes, freely available in Saigon and widely smoked by American soldiers, were made in a leper colony. This came with lurid added detail: that the individual lepers took part in the production process according to their disabilities, with the sickest of all licking the wrappers which sealed the joints! This was so gothically over the top that many solders suspected that it had been started by the Pentagon as part of an anti-drugs campaign, a fair deduction, I would have thought.

Rumour has long had power in human affairs which the advent of modern multi-media has done nothing to reduce. If anything the reverse is true, especially when it is combined with a growing X-files distrust of government and official sources of information. In the 1980s, to take but one example, a story emerged that Procter and Gamble, the American multi-national, was associated with Satanism, all on the basis of its moon and stars logo. In this case the rumour was eventually linked to a business rival, Amway, a direct selling company, resulting in a series of law suits, the most recent in 2007.


In the days before modern media hearsay was often the only way in which news spread. After the onset of the English Reformation during the reign of Henry VIII, a sensitive and dangerous time both politically and socially, the government had one blunt tool against the spread of damaging rumours – it traced them back to source. Those caught repeating a story were forced, under threat of dire penalties, to reveal who exactly they had heard it from, and so on and so on until the original malefactor was pinned down, presumably someone totally devoid of imagination or the wit to blame some passing tinker!

Superman the fascist

Moral panics are as old as civilization itself. Socrates was executed for ‘corrupting the minds of the young’, a perennial fear among the old, among those who have reason to fear. Socrates was a threat to any kind of self-satisfied gerontocracy, but moral panics have alighted on far more innocuous things than his demanding dialectics; things like comic books!

I’m continually indebted to the stimuli I receive from other bloggers, paths opened before me that I might not otherwise have explored. Jeremy Janson drew my attention recently to an article in The Washington Post by George F. Will, published towards the end of last month. It concerns a case before the Supreme Court, a challenge to a law passed in California banning Postal 2, a violent video game.

Lawyers acting for the games manufacturer are arguing that this ban violates the First Amendment, guaranteeing free expression. They have also, rather ingeniously, drawn the justices' attention to previous moral panics over cultural ephemera, including one in the 1950s over comic books. The whole thing is just so amusing, an insight not only into the character of moral panics, the absurdity of moral panics, but also into American cultural history.

In the early 1950s American legislators were so concerned over what was referred to as ‘juvenile delinquency’ that the Senate even established a sub-committee to look into the problem. Comic books, read by an estimated 90% of children, were quickly singled out as a possible contributor to the phenomenon.

It should not be assumed, though, that this was just more evidence of prejudice and conservative reaction against popular culture. The Senators would have been able to draw on sociological support for their deliberations, including the work of one Frederic Wertham, a political progressive. A psychiatrist by profession, he had previously opened a clinic in Harlem, which he named after Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, the man responsible for translating the old beast’s Das Kapital into French, “thereby facilitating the derangement of Parisian intellectuals”, which Will offers as the sting in the tail of the scorpion!

Since 1948 this fellow had been campaigning against comic books, in 1954 publishing a book entitled Seduction of the Innocent, suggesting a causal connection between them and the desensitisation of young criminals – “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry.” I find it difficult to believe, but this tendentious, pseudo-scientific rubbish quickly became a best seller. It was even praised by C. Wright Mills, left-wing sociologist and the doyen of progressive thought at the time.

So, would you like to know what concerned Wertham the most? Was it pulp fiction horror comics? Was it ghouls and vampires? Yes, but his targets also included Superman. Superman! Gosh, if one were to choose an archetype for the all-American ideal one could do no better than alight on Superman, clean-cut, decent and horribly goody-goody! Not so, said Wertham: in his ongoing fight against the bad guys Superman paid no attention to due process, which made him a “crypto-fascist.” And as for Batman and Robin, they demonstrated “homoerotic tendencies.” Absolutely, it could not be clearer: the older man and his little chicken!

It’s all terribly droll, but just as the Fatty Arbuckle scandal had been responsible for a crackdown on movie makers in a previous generation, lurid suggestions like this quickly impacted on the comic book industry. Hill says that more than a dozen states passed laws restricting the sale of comic books and some civic groups even staged book burning sessions, I suppose reducing that ‘crypto-fascist’ Superman to ashes.

As movie producers previously adopted their own standards of censorship in response to the political climate so, too, did comic book publishers. But silly panics of this kind are most often replaced or sublimated by other panics. By 1956 the hysteria over comics had been replaced by Elvis and his pelvis!

Will concludes his article with some pertinent observations about Progressivism in general, which he defines as a “faith-based programme”, a secular substitute for the religious admonitions of a previous age. Though Progressivism is a uniquely American intellectual and political phenomena it belongs to a wider current, to what I would refer to as the fascism of the left, the fascism of any philosophy based on the belief that people can be made perfect through the actions of the state. At the one extreme there is the attempt to modify action by censorship; at the other there is eugenics and the sterilisation of ‘bad stock’, a programme that at one time united people as diverse as Adolf Hitler and H. G. Wells.

The regrets of Hanoi Jane

There was an interview with Jane Fonda, the daughter of the late Henry Fonda the actor and herself an actor, in one of the glossy Sunday supplements, introducing itself with a picture of her on the front cover. There she is, a seventy-two year old woman, certainly with a reasonable figure, bending over and reaching out to touch her toes as she turns smiling towards the camera, obviously the result of her endless workout routines, allowing her to retain a high degree of suppleness. Indeed, there she is, just below a text saying, You'd be smiling too if you could do this as 72 (and this is just the warm-up). What does she do for a second act, I wonder? Keep reading; you will find out presently.

There are more pictures of her inside, including one closer to her face. The hair is obviously dyed and she has clearly had as many facelifts as some people have breakfasts. She certainly looks younger than her years but this is not youth; this is a grotesque parody of youth, this unnatural, stiff face, devoid of the signals that give people life, expression and feeling. In a bogus search for something beyond her she has lost all dignity, including the dignity of age, the grace of change. She looks good in the way that a three thousand year old Egyptian mummy looks good. But the same picture also shows her hands, the real give away, the hands of a woman in her seventies. Presumably it's beyond the power of even the most skilled cosmetic surgeon to do anything about this, to alter the true signs of advancing time.

She is just a sad old woman trying so hard not to look like a sad old woman. Oh, what a catty thing to say. I simply can't help myself. I'm not particularly interested in Jane Fonda, or so much of the celebrity ephemera that appears in the supplements. I simply glance through them, usually never reading the articles in question. Fonda, along with so many others of the Hollywood set, can spend as much money as they wish looking for eternal youth. But there was one other picture that made me pause and take this unserious person seriously. It was a picture of her in Hanoi in 1972 during the Vietnam War, a picture of her posing by the side of a manned anti-aircraft gun, sitting, looking as if she is taking part in the action. There she is - Hanoi Jane.

I simply do not comprehend treason, comprehend those who side with foreign powers and foreign ideologies. Fonda thought the Vietnam War was wrong. I do, too; I believe it was a noble cause fought for the wrong reasons, based on a series of mistaken assumptions. If I had been American and alive at the time I might have argued against it, as I argued in my schooldays against the Second Iraq War, but I would never, no matter what, have taken the Baghdad Step, or the Hanoi Step, in the case of Jane. I could never do or say anything that would go against the fundamental interests of my country.

Not so Jane. When she went to Hanoi she denounced the leaders of the United States as 'war criminals.' Then came that infamous pose, looking as if she was helping shoot down American planes. This is no naive youth; she was in her early thirties at the time. She was asked in the interview if she regretted anything in her life. The stock response came immediately;

I regret one thing: I regret sitting on an anti-aircraft gun and I will go to my grave regretting that...I take responsibility for my actions. I wasn't thinking. Going to North Vietnam was no big deal, but being photographed like that changed everything. I will pay for it for the rest of my life and deservedly so because it was a terrible thing. Terrible thing.

I suppose I should commend her for her honesty but I can see only the treason and only the traitor. There are some things that are simply beyond forgiveness. After all these years she has still not been forgiven by some, those who also went to Vietnam, though under less luxurious circumstances. During a recent book tour Fonda was spat upon by one of those people, one of those little people, one of the people presumably whose scars are more than skin deep. I can understand because I have met people in Georgia, men who went to Vietnam as boys, much younger than me now, who were spat upon on their less than glorious return, accused of being 'baby killers'.

But Jane regrets, at least some things she regrets, regrets, I suspect, the negative impact this had on her career. Some things, I say, because she does not regret broadcasting on Radio Hanoi. Tokyo Rose or Hanoi Jane, what’s the difference? Treachery always seems to have the same face, no matter how tight the skin is pulled.