Conservative Commentary
"the blogger whose youthful effusions have won him bookmarks all over Whitehall ... horribly compelling" - The Guardian
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Conservative Commentary "the blogger whose youthful effusions have won him bookmarks all over Whitehall ... horribly compelling" - The Guardian |
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Wednesday, June 30, 2004
The silver lining in this dark cloud
Shortly after Belgium bans its most popular political party and a courageous priest is jailed in Sweden for preaching against homosexuality, France brings an end to open discussion of religion - or rather of a particular religion. No prizes for guessing which. An e-acquaintance who lives in France tells me that over there things are now at the point where you can get into trouble just for mentioning the fact that Muslims are ever any kind of a problem. Synagogue burnings - a pretty regular occurrence in France - are routinely blamed on "right wing neo-Nazi white males," he tells me. In fact the perpetrators are extremist Muslim Algerian Arabs. French people all know this, but have to pretend not to. It would be easy to make glib comparisons with various tyrannies of the past, but I don't think they'd be quite accurate. Nor do I think a slippery slope case would persuade anyone who can see nothing wrong with banning such views. I don't see any Gulags or concentration camps around the corner, and that's not really the threat. The threat - and the clear reality - is far more the soft tyranny of compulsory consensus that can be seen emerging all across Europe. The process goes like this. As an ever-narrowing set of views is accepted across all mainstream parties, partly because those same parties have surrendered most of the power to make a difference to their constituents' lives to the European Commission, people can only turn to fringe figures and extremists if they want any measure of change. In turn, those centrist parties ban such fringe figures - many of them increasingly less fringe - and further narrow the consensus around which all politicians must hover. This provides still more incentive to abandon the Chiracs and Shroeders at election time, and so the cycle continues. With every tension bottled up or stamped upon, society is less secure and everyone is less free. There is no sign of any reversal in this process. Indeed, once the European arrest warrant comes into force, anyone who expresses an opinion on Flemish independence or Islamic integration that some government somewhere in Europe has banned will be open to arrest. The laws of the most repressive country in Europe will set the standard by which all who live under the EU Constitution can debate and vote. That is the medium-term political future of the continent to which our own Prime Minister wants us to hitch our fortunes. Its economic prospects are scarcely any more rosy, and as Europe occupies an ever shrinking share of global population, it would be quite a journey were we to mount this beast. There may, however, be one advantage to this unenviable situation. Although its leaders plainly do not recognise it, Europe's greatest threat comes from outside. There are many in this world whose greatest ambition, the cause for which they would and do kill and die, is the eternal annihilation of the Western civilisation to which Europe gave birth. Their ultimate end is to transform the Europe of religious tolerance and freedom of speech, of culture and debate, of women's rights, of Gay Paris and liberal Amsterdam, of Goethe, Socrates and Mozart, into a barren, totalitarian wasteland where the only remnant of any of these things is the call from the minaret of the local Mosque and the knowledge of what will happen if it goes unanswered. These people have not just the governments of all of mainland Europe blind to their threat, but the continent's birthrates and migration patterns working firmly in their favour. Maybe these circumstances will change. We must certainly hope so. But if they do not, then therein lies the advantage of the current state of affairs. For what better appetizer could Europe have to prepare for this main course, what better way could its people become accustomed to their coming way of life, than the soft tyranny of compulsory consensus that is quietly and gracefully sweeping away liberty across the continent? Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
The consequence of narrow horizons
My new post at England's Sword. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Saturday, June 26, 2004
Orwell the anti-socialist trumps Orwell the socialist
Over at Harry's, American leftie Gene Zitver notes that yesterday would have been George Orwell's 101st birthday, and expresses an understandable exasperation with the degree to which the Right has laid claim to the memory of this leading twentieth century socialist. One of the frustrations of being a left-wing admirer of Orwell is dealing with those on the Right who -- because of his devastating depictions of Soviet totalitarianism -- try to claim him as one of their own As with the much longer post Gene quotes, the suggestion is that Orwell's professed politics should trump any claims made on him by those not of his democratic socialist tradition. I'm not so sure. First, it should of course be noted that there is no reasonable sense in which one political camp could ever lay claim to a particular figure to the exclusion of all outside it. People can draw inspiration from all manner of sources, and the capacity to do so is surely a good thing. Despite my obviously conservative credentials and views, I can see features worth admiring in such left-wing, liberal and radical figures as Oliver Cromwell, William Ewart Gladstone, John Stuart Mill, Nye Bevan, Hugh Gaitskell, Richard Perle and Nick Cohen. I don't understand any view that would lay claim to the views and thinking of these men to the extent that my respect for them would cease to exist or to count. I'm with Jonah Goldberg when it comes to those narcissists who love to beat their chests about how their own carefully-judged independent views won't fit into any party box, as if anyone who does go along with a particular party is some thoughtless drone. But that doesn't mean huge numbers cannot find inspiration in the actions and writings of those not of their side. Political thought is a continuous spectrum, not a discrete series of mutually exclusive theologies. There is no good reason to deny that a conservative can claim inspiration and motivation from a thinker as complex and contemplative as George Orwell. Second, one has to ask why Orwell is so important, why he remains a household name half a century after his death. It seems difficult to argue that it has anything to do with his socialism. I'd certainly lay no claim to expertise when it comes to his ideas, but I've read enough of his works to make the sort of judgement that would be common to most people familiar with some of what he has written. And in none of those works, in none of what I have read of his ideas as described by others, have I come across a case for socialism either remarkable or memorable. His sympathetic portrait of tramps in Down and Out in Paris and London sticks in my mind, but only an already convinced socialist would argue that the discovery that poor people have a hard time of it provides in itself an argument that the Left have the means of solving such problems. Orwell's socialism was in many ways among the least interesting, least informative things about him. He is remembered and revered not for holding some left-wing views, but for his phenomenal and piercing insights into what we can broadly call his fellow travellers. It wasn't merely communists, but fellow left-wingers too, whom he was able to criticise so vigorously and devastatingly. The details of his two great works warning against (especially communist) totalitarianism won't require repeating. But what of his comment that "as with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents"? What of his deep and rebellious patriotism, even more lacking in the British Left today than then, a quality whose absence led Orwell to charge that "any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box"? It was this legacy that made Orwell a legend, that confirmed his place in literary and political history. If he'd remained simply a very experienced and eloquent polemicist for socialism all his life, would all his books be in print today? Set against this reality, the fact that Orwell was himself a socialist is almost an irrelevance, rather like the fact that Karl Marx denied he was a Marxist. By their words and deeds are both judged. And Orwell's words and deeds may have formed the basis of constructive criticism, may well have improved the left, and probably did form in the back of most minds a slight wariness of any move towards the ultimate compassionate nanny state, Big Brother. But the most important parts of Orwell's legacy have more to comfort Right than Left. While different people could quite legitimately say that reading George Orwell led them to feel more secure either as lefties or as conservatives, I suspect that the latter group would be far larger, and rightly so. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Misc
1. I haven't posted much this week, so I'll write a couple of weekend posts in a moment. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Thursday, June 24, 2004
As cultured as the Philistines, as moral as Gomorrah
As he was climbing up the bank again, the sun shone through a gap in the clouds. At the same time a pigeon flew down and perched on him. Jesus took this as a sign that God's spirit was with him. A voice from overhead was heard saying, 'That's my boy! You're doing fine!' The best analogy that comes to mind is of someone scrawling a cheesy grin on the Mona Lisa. Oliver Kamm comments: "if I were a Christian I would find this new translation - which is apparently not a joke - little short of blasphemous. The problem is not only in rewriting St Paul to render his message the opposite of what he says, it is more fundamentally about rewriting a sacramental language to render it banal." To which I would only add that for the Rowanised Church of England this spinelessness and idolatry is, as Tony Blair said of Clare Short, entirely consistent. The more interesting issue for me is the mindsets of the people who wrote this garbage. What right can they possibly feel they have to delve into the Bible, scribble out the Christian bits and replace them with PC claptrap? Unwilling to question a letter of the unwritten rules of modern society in which sensual pleasure and personal gratification are everything, they are still quite happy to tinker with the Bible - the one book that is above all supposed to provide an alternative to follies and sins both passing and permanent, rather than reflect and endorse those of them given temporary favour by society's liberal elite. How dare they second-guess Saint Paul and then write their own pathetic hormonal morality into his books? Just how ignorant of history, of human nature and of civilised ethics does one have to be to achieve such arrogance about their own historically anomalous mores as to do so? I am not at all sure there is a heaven, but of one thing I feel rather more confidence. If there is a heaven, then sincere and moral Jews, Sikhs, Muslims and atheists are likely to face far less trouble when they arrive outside the pearly gates than those fake Christians with their fake Bibles who use God's name to promote exactly the sort of values to which real Christianity has always been in fiercest opposition. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Europhile pride comes before a fall
Hence Mr Blair's assertion that the truth will out on the European Constitution, and that the "tabloid myths" that fool us into believing Britain should be a self-governing country will be refuted. The perennial arrogance of the liberal elite may be annoying, but it certainly isn't to their advantage. I welcome the presence in the leftist camp of so many snarling inadequates who argue that only ignorance and primitive xenophobia could lead Britons to oppose a federal Europe, just as I like seeing legitimate concerns about immigration and the family dismissed by them as racism, 'Islamophobia' and 'homophobia'. Such rhetoric and such closed-mindedness does not win any converts, and only shows fair-minded people that many liberals cannot even summon rational arguments in their defence. On Europe, this is perhaps truest of all. Name-calling, psychoanalysis and accusations of ignorance and myth-making are the centrepiece of the europhile case because the rational arguments for a European superstate simply cannot be voiced in a way that would win the support of a majority of Britons. Whether economic, constitutional, patriotic, historical or political, the case is on our side. As David Smith noted in this week's Sunday Times, Euroscepticism is now the "intelligent option", the perspective most congruent with an informed assessment of the state of post-Thatcherite Britain and Europe. Charmingly, this is true even for those increasing numbers who plan to retire to the continent: it's because people sense that Europe is not going to be a thriving centre of work and industry that many retire there to appreciate the peace and quiet. Britons retire to Europe because of its economic slumber, not because they fail to recognise that setting up a business or attempting to earn a living in France is a bad idea. Let the europhiles campaign on the basis that it's only ignorance that makes people disagree with them. Let them sneer at the patriotism of the voters, let them chastise the 'bigotry' of those who don't want three million Roma gypsies to be granted immediate access to our shores, let them have a fun campaign letting out all that impotent anger and rage at a people who remain quietly determined to preserve British democracy. It won't work because none of it is true. People oppose the EU Constitution, and the Euro, and the current state of the European Union, because they understand their workings and their architects' motivations all too well. UPDATE: The Sun's Trevor Kavanagh destroys some of the leading Euromyths. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Quote of the Day
"[Michael] Moore's current status ultimately says more about the impoverished state of liberal thought than it does about Moore himself" - Mark Goldblatt Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Monday, June 21, 2004
A reason to vote Labour
Indeed, there's a sense in which Hattersley's Guardian article today was written two years ago, albeit in a much wittier and more revealing format, by one Telegraph columnist. The right-wing Alan Judd and the left-wing Roy Hattersley are both correct in saying that Labour is either the party of holding the line on the frontiers of the state, of saying that when it comes to education and healthcare the bureaucrats know best - or it is nothing at all. Once one accepts that the man who is having an operation may be better placed than a civil servant in another city to decide when and where his tax money should pay for it, and once one accepts that parents have their kids' best interests closer to heart than do government ministers for whom those children are simple statistics to be massaged and manipulated, one has given up on the last reason for voting Labour. That is the piece of land where Labour has pitched its tent and continues to fly the flag of uniformity and mediocrity. What a sad and reactionary principle on which to stake one's ground, and what a feeble foundation it will prove to be. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Bush and Clinton - the difference
In a Guardian interview to promote his memoirs, Bill Clinton is very briefly given a tough question or two regarding Saddam Hussein. It's all very well you criticising the Iraq War now, Alan Rusbridger and Jonathan Freedland note, but wasn't it the Clinton Administration that first made regime change US government policy? His reply: "Our policy had been, since 1998, regime change, but our policy toward Castro had been regime change, too, and we hadn't invaded Cuba! There is more than one way to pursue that objective." Quite. And we saw that difference on January 1st: while Saddam Hussein was just getting accustomed to his new prison cell, Fidel Castro's dictatorship was celebrating 45 years without regime change. In his time, Castro has seen off not only Clinton but all of his predecessors since Eisenhower. There's more than one way to skin a cat, too. But if your sophistimacated diplomatic methods mean the moggy still has all its skin four and a half decades later, its best not to be too smug about the guy who used a knife. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Fantastic II
Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
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Oliver Kamm has a 
When a leftie politician - and it nearly always is a leftie politician - explains that a "real public debate" is essential to "raise awareness" on a certain issue, it's a pretty safe bet that what he really means is that most people disagree with him, and thus a widespread propaganda campaign is necessary to educate those poor unenlightened souls. The old socialist tendency to lionise the average worker and romanticise working class life was always out of proportion, but how well it contrasts with the modern liberal's contempt for ordinary people, whose prejudices and small-c conservatism can inspire in them the most ferocious snobbery.
Roy Hattersley is 
