Commies are getting a good press
Lefties are somehow assumed to be doing things for idealistic reasons, and for the collective good, and their high motives excuse their appalling solutions. That is why the servants of communist tyranny get sympathetic obits, and modern British girls wear CCCP T-shirts, and that is why a Labour Government can enact a series of authoritarian measures that a Conservative government could not contemplate
Why do these mass-murdering commies get such a good press?
It is not given to us to know whither the Almighty has dispatched the soul of Melita Norwood, who died quietly last week in Bexleyheath at 93. Whether she is reading her obits from above or below, I reckon she will be pretty pleased. There she is, sniffing a rose, or smiling with hair-clipped innocence, like some author of wholesome books for children. Her deeds are reported in the affectionate tones that obituarists reserve for the practitioners of some romantic but moribund faith. She might be the last speaker of old Cornish, or the last person to have consecrated her life to proving that Stonehenge was built by spacemen as an observatory for the study of worms.
As it happens, she was “the most important British female spy ever recruited by the KGB”. From the 1930s she used her position as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association to pass ever more vital atom secrets to Stalin’s Soviet Union. In other words, she was a tool for one of the most murderous regimes ever seen, and continued blissfully betraying this country throughout the Cold War, and, as she later admitted, in full knowledge of Stalin’s slaughter. File after file she shovelled to her KGB handlers, to the point where she is credited by some with accelerating Russia’s acquisition of nuclear weapons by two years. She was only unmasked in 1999, thanks to the testimony of a Soviet defector; and after a brief hubbub it was decided by the then home secretary, Jack Straw (himself a former Trot), that at 87 she was too old to prosecute. I do not quarrel with that decision, but there is something in the eirenic tone of her valedictions that reminds me of the amazing indulgence we show – now that communism is meant to be dead – to commies, socialists and Lefty tyrants of all kinds.
Cycling through London, I check out the words on people’s T-shirts, and I was amused the other day to see the letters CCCP on someone’s chest. Yup, folks, that’s what the fashion-conscious British youth is wearing, a celebration of the great doomed Soviet experiment of 1917-90.
Remind me: who was the greater mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to have been responsible for about 50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere 25 million. What Hitler did in his concentration camps was equalled if not exceeded in foulness by the Soviet gulags, forced starvation and pogroms. What makes the achievements of communist Russia so special and different, that you can simper around in a CCCP T-shirt, while anyone demented enough to wear anything commemorating the Third Reich would be speedily banged away under the 1986 Public Order Act?
Just to prove my theory that commie tyranny was still chic, I sent a Spectator assistant to Camden Lock market, and she returned shining-eyed, with tales of hammer and sickle T-shirts, and laden with badges of the foremost commie creeps of history. There was a badge of Lenin – good old Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. He was responsible for killing about five million people, but a Lenin badge is obviously cool, as cool as hanging out and showing your midriff in the new chain of vodka bars called “Soviet”. She had a badge of Castro. Charismatic old Fidel. Yours to pin to your nipple for only £1.99.
Now will someone explain the moral difference between enthusiasm for Fidel Castro and enthusiasm for Augusto Pinochet? Both are appalling Latin American dictators. Both have bad human rights records. Both have had their misdeeds winked at, one way or another, by Uncle Sam. Tell me, O ye coolers and groovers, why is it OK to wear a badge with Fidel on it, but very much not OK to wear a badge showing Pinochet?
There is only one man in Britain who might even consider wearing a Pinochet badge on his lapel, and that is Norman Lamont, and much as I admire Norman I would not describe him as cool. Even more extraordinary than badges of Lenin for sale in London, I read that Lefty tyrant chic is to be found in the territories once tyrannised by Russia.
How is it possible that in Lithuania there is now a Stalin theme park, complete with 13 giant effigies of Lenin (remember: he killed five million)? Why is it somehow post-modern and ironic and slick to commemorate these thugs, while any theme park in honour of the Nazis would be rightly denounced as mad and in the height of bad taste? Why is it so obvious to everyone that Melita should be left to a quiet old age in Bexleyheath – with not even a whiff of a prosecution – when we continue to chivvy out every last collaborator with the Nazis, now matter how decrepit, and herd them into the courts?
Remember the case of that nonagenarian Italian who was finally arraigned last year, at vast expense and with extreme evidential difficulty. On the first day of the trial the prisoner was asked to identify himself by the judge, and promptly expired. I do not say that we are wrong in hounding these relics of fascism; my point is that we are curiously indifferent to the behaviour of their extreme Left-wing counterparts, and that in general the Left is able to get away with things that would otherwise be viewed as nauseating and shameful.
Why, to put it bluntly, is Labour allowed to get away with all this? Imagine the howls of hate, if a Conservative government had spent the past few weeks eroding the right to trial by jury, abolishing habeas corpus, curtailing free speech, and then slapped on the plastic poll tax – the ID card. Lefties are somehow assumed to be doing things for idealistic reasons, and for the collective good, and their high motives excuse their appalling solutions.
That is why the servants of communist tyranny get sympathetic obits, and modern British girls wear CCCP T-shirts, and that is why a Labour Government can enact a series of authoritarian measures that a Conservative government could not contemplate. I cannot explain this injustice: I merely point it out.
133 Comments
Macarnie: “Hitler was certainly known, at the time we are discussing , for extreme opinions in certain political aspects; however his extreme views on certain subjects were not, at the time, negatively weighted against the social scheme of things. This bias came much later.”
I am not entirely sure I follow what you saying here.
Regarding my comparison between the Nazis and gangsters: the paramilitary SA ‘Brownshirts’ were in operation from the beginning of the 1920s, intimidating people more or less like street gangs. (The SS ‘Blackshirts’ also date from the 1920s.)
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Melissa: ” . . . you are incredibly political you latest commentators”
Hey! We are just amateurs, you know.
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Melissa: Really. Incredibly political, indeed. (Reminds me of that line in The Producers: “We find the defendants incredibly guilty.”)
Reaching for the smelling salts does not cut the Colmans, dear. Pitch in and show them how it’s really done.
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Simon: During Hitler’s rise to power, from the very first meetings in the Muenchener Bierkellern , to his elevation to Kanzler, he attracted a certain type of person to his cause; true , many were thugs, whose main reason for joining in the movement was to be allowed to have the occasional punch-up. Clarifying the point you made: his views on the so called inferior races were known only to those nearest to him, and their acolytes. The rants ,in public, about the Jews in particular, but also included Gypsies; Slavs; the mentally impeded , and homosexuals, came later on. I don’t know if you have seen some of his most fevered , rabble-rousing speeches, but I have, and I believe that the Nation,as a whole, having been deprived of self, and National, respect for so long, would have basked in the promises of respect; prosperity, and future glory, which he so eloquently presented.This feel good factor was never so clearly in evidence as when the long term unemployed, merely by paying 10 Pfennige, and giving a signature, were within the shortest of time spans, once again back in gainful employment. Seven million grateful ex unemployed are a good foundation on which to build, even if the majority paid only lip service to the ideology.
He duped the majority into a sense of renewed worth under his ‘august’ leadership, whilst that minority, who were of the same mind as he, were bolstered into believing even more in his megalomaniac dreams. Only those who experienced this, first hand, can truly know and understand the complete change of lifestyle and ensuing utter misery which was to follow, and even I cannot pretend that I do.
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Mac:
Chilling figures: 7 million Germans unemployed in the 30s, the 6 million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust in the 40s – did the German petit-bourgeois think that this was a price worth paying to revive their Nation, even as they averted their eyes, kept their noses clean and didn’t ask awkward questions?
And now the victims victimise another race in their turn, who victimise the other in their turn, and so on down through the years: Revenge.
Vengeance is mine saith the Lord. An eye for an eye for an eye for an eye: until the whole world is blind (Gandhi).
And what about us in this green unpleasant land: It Could Never Happen Here? O yes it could, old chums, not on our own soil perhaps but by just allowing the deaths of countless fellow humans, Johnny Foreigners, to continue unseen and unmourned Over There, beyond the white cliffs of Old Blighty.
Live8 may be another media spectacle in a Society of the Spectacle but what if we really put its sentiments into practice instead of surfing the next wave of media attention? Even St Bob might be taken aback by the mass impertinence he’s encouraged.
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I think your rhetorical question is well placed Kevin, but I do not think that anyone not having had the fear of reprisals impregnated into their very psyche, as the Germans did inter bellum, can imagine the utter helplessness of even the bravest of anti Nazi citizens; even in their worst nightmares. Big Brother was not an invention of a certain Mr.E.A.Blair aka George Orwell: BB was part and parcel of everyday life in Wartime Germany , each apartment block had its Gauleiter; each headteacher, whose membership of the Nazi Party was a must, was an active , if sometimes unwilling, informer. The slightest deviation from ‘Gehorsamkeit,’(obedience), discovered, was punished by imprisonment or worse. State terrorism was in force. It is simplistic to believe that those Germans, not actually in the armed forces, priot to and during the war, were merely remaining stumm whilst horrific things were being done to other unfortunates. A dead hero is no less dead, and the majority of people I know are not willing heroes.
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On the subject of Sir Bob and co. – Live8 was a commendable series of events in many ways: commendable but not credible.
It simply isn’t good enough to ask world leaders to “end poverty” without in any sense discussing terms or what you might be prepared to do to achieve the end.
Do the organisers mean the end of relative poverty? Do they mean only the end of starvation? Do they mean every individual in the world should have exactly the same amount of consumables?
I would guess that if we wanted to end “obvious distress” in Africa (which is what I think most people are concerned about) it might take 20% of our GDP, military intervention and a kind of neo-imperialism (perhaps under the guise of the UN).
Obviously none of the entertainers (as far as we know) have felt moved to give up 20% of their personal wealth – except perhaps Bill
Gates but he’s at the point where an extra billion dollars in his bank account probably makes him physically sick.
If the banner on the stage had said: “Come up here and sign a pledge to give 20% of your monthly income to Africa” I doubt there woudl be many takers. And there would be no takers for “let’s invade Africa and impose sensible government”.
The problems of Africa for me were summed up by a TV news item which followed a UK police officer in Sierra Leone trying ot help them run a polcie station efficiently. She’d been there a year and she still couldn’t get them to fill in the custody register AT ALL – let alone properly. When you’ve got that level of maladministration you’ve haven’t got a hope in hell.
I don’t know what the solution is but it isn’t funnelling more aid through governments to destroy local economies. We could perhaps look into our own history as to how we eliminated endemic corruption in the past. We did this by introducing examinations for all sorts of public positions in teh civil service and elsewhere.
In Africa even examinatinos are completely corrupt but if some way coudl be found of introducing objective exams for appointment and preferment, Africa might begin to lift itself out of the mire. Not very rock and roll or sexy but there you go: “Make exams compulsory” instead of “make poverty history”.
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Macarnie: I’m sure you are familiar with the Niemöller quote, but for anybody here who isn’t, here it is:
“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out -
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out -
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out -
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me -
and there was no one left to speak out.”
Martin Niemöller (1892-1984)
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It’s Niem – o umlaut – ller. . .
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SH -
Yes I’m familiar with that quote but have never been that convinced by it.
If we are talking about the Communists of the Weimar period, they were actively seeking the subversion and destruction of the Weimar Republic. Just like the Nazis.
After WW2 the Federal Republic learnt the lesson . They outlawed both the Communist and Nazi parties.
This is a difficult area for democrats but it doesn’t help to muddle up guilty-as-charged communists and innocent Jews.
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Simon, the fifth estate, et al,
‘It’s a recession when your neighbor loses their job; it’s a depression when you lose it.’
This kind of analogy was recently drawn by a friend who is facing a redundancy … I could not agree with you more in the context that the Czechoslovak sentiment of political depression cannot be applied universally.
Still, I have come across a number of Chinese Australians who identify strongly with many of the plays [theatre of absurd] Vaclav Havel has written.
While few people are willing to endorse Soviet type of Communism openly there are plenty who are always willing to make excuses for the communists along the lines of “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” and so on.
With his characteristic turn of phrase, Lenin called people of this type “fellow travellers” to their faces and “useful idiots” behind their backs.
Would I call people behind their faces “useful idiots” as Lenin had done? I hope not … I hope I would give the omelette a miss and just labour over hard boiled eggs while allowing the fourth estate such as independent Pravda (Truth) and other media outlet report to expose my ability to cook eggs … I might even let them to watch me make the sausages. [On a lighter note, I used to be very good at making sausages with my cousins Gejzo and Tibo - our secret ingredient was galic]
What would I do if I was in Lenin’s shoes? It is impossible to fully answer such two-edged question as it really is like asking along the lines: ‘When will you stop beating Uncle Trotsky?’
The Moscow university is filled with 100,000 words thesis which often fail to satisfactorily answer such a colourful question. How would you answer such a proposition in a deep and meaningful way, Simon?
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Field: “I’m familiar with that quote but have never been that convinced by it”
Members of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) were rounded up and died in the Holocaust.
Field: “If we are talking about the Communists of the Weimar period, they were actively seeking the subversion and destruction of the Weimar Republic.”
That’s exactly what the Nazis said. They accused the Communists of causing the Reichstag fire.
In fact the KPD participated in Weimar Republic elections. They won 100 seats in November 1932. There was a KPD candidate in the 1932 presidential election. (Their slogan was “A vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler; a vote for Hitler is a vote for war.”)
The KPD did call for an insurrection – after the Nazis had taken power – in 1933.
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Simon, of course , the quote from Niemoeller is known to me: it was not known to those people who had to live during the repressive regime. Everyone can be a genius after the event.
As for the KPD having a largish number of seats in 1932. Have you ever heard of rival factions actively praising one another? The Communist slogan you quoted might, in other times; in another place; have been uttered in Westminster, by one party against another.
Dead heroes are per se , unable rebuild a Nation. What the World might see as cowards can , especially when it needed a special sort of heroicism ,to bite one’s tongue,despite the urge not to, in order to survive and rebuild a modern State from chaos.
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Josef Imrich : “What would I do if I was in Lenin’s shoes? It is impossible to fully answer such two-edged question . . . How would you answer such a proposition in a deep and meaningful way, Simon?”
Fair enough to put the question back to me.
Can we should first of all agree to drop the rubbish about ‘Lenin killed 5 million people’? Get it out of the way as an irrelevance? Good.
OK, we know Lenin had a tough job. Let’s also remember he was shot in the lung in an assassination attempt about 9 months into the job, may have been suffering from syphilis, and was incapacitated after a stroke in December 1922. Hardly enviable, even if you are going to be very famous posthumously, and not a lot of time to get anything done. (Lenin as a writer and thinker is something else of course. We may disagree with his conclusions, deplore his influence etc.)
If I had been in Russia in 1917, not as Lenin, but as Simon Holledge, I am sure I would have emigrated.
But to return to the question – if I were Lenin . . . . I would have tried to end the war as soon as possible (as Lenin actually did at Brest-Litovsk), pacify the country, repair the economy etc. – more or less what he did in fact attempt. Would I have handed over to Stalin? No, obviously not, if I could have helped it.
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Macarnie: “the quote from Niemoeller is known to me: it was not known to those people who had to live during the repressive regime. Everyone can be a genius after the event.”
Niemoeller was a prominent Lutheran pastor who spoke up against Nazism between 1934 and 1937, when few others dared to do so. What he said and wrote during that period is on record. He was arrested and ended up in the Dachau concentration camp (which he survived).
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Simon:He was imprisoned during the time when the holocaust was taking place. In Dachau of all places. Neither I nor anyone else can, or indeed could ,argue that he was not a bastion of rectitude in his stand against antisemitism and other forms of extremist activities under Hitler. The fact that he was hors de combat at the relevant time must mean that his views, although generally known in certain restricted circles,, were not widely disseminated. After his release to Switzerland in 1945,his views became widely known. Had he not been a Pastor , he would surely also have perished.
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*Everybody* knows that left-wing bullets don’t hurt as much as right-wing ones — it is a scientific fact.
I am also really glad to see Kay having a go at pirates, though I guess she was joking to make a point. They were not nice cuddly people, and I am appalled that here in the Southwest we have a radio station named after them.
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Simon
As Joseph Stalin said ‘A single death is a tragedy. [5] million deaths is a statistic.’
I quoted a historian who has spent more time than I ever could examining the life of Lenin. If the historians have miscalculated the number of people who died due to certain action of any particular movement I stand to be corrected. However, I still go to my earlier comments where I seconded Boris’ suggestion that certain fashionable trends are absurd in terms of political history. I would not recommend to any foreign visitor, for instance, to wear Stalin’s image on their T-shirt in Kiev or any place in Ukraine. It would be callous and/or foolish to do so …
Life was not supposed to be simple or easy. It is in our very nature, in fact, to make life absurdly indifferent to the memories of those who suffered.
Gandhi said: ‘Whatever you do will seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it … Everything we do is futile, but we must do it anyway.’
The future might depend on what we do in the present, but sadly history repeats itself, to boot, no two historians agree quite how…
I am partial to the findings of the historian George Orwell:
‘One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England… “We have reached a stage when the very word socialism calls up, on the one hand, a picture of airplanes, tractors and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), or earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth control fanatics, and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers. “If only the sandals and pistachio-colored shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaler and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.”
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Macarnie: Niemoeller was not a minor figure. He organized a protestant rally attended by 20,000 people at Dahlem in 1934, at which one of the leaders declared “There are false prophets abroad in this land preaching the doctrine of blood and soil and racial mysticism, which we reject”. Neimoeller himself said, “it is a question of which master the German Protestants are going to serve, Christ or another.” Niemoeller said much the same thing to Hitler himself, face to face.
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Simon: I have no idea from which word ; phrase or sentence of mine you might have the idea that I considered Niemoeller as a minor figure.
Indeed the opposite is the case, but, consider the fact that his anti Hitler activities were curbed by his arrest and imprisonment in 1937.
This undisputed fact alone must be taken into consideration in giving credence to the amount of so called ” inflammatory” information allowed out of Dachau: namely none. His voice was. in reality ,silenced for the length of his incarceration. This does not minimise his prior opposition to the monster that was Nazism.
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Macarnie: Good. I misunderstood your comment “Everyone can be a genius after the event.”
Thank you for an interesting, and I hope worthwhile, discussion.
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Jozef: Lay off the tired old Orwell quotes for Chrissake old chum, you sound like Hitchens, who now thinks he’s Eric’s rep on earth. (See his latest Orwell’s Victory, or Apologia for having sold out my erstwhile chums on the Left, smirk smirk).
I’ve observed a worrying tendency among so-called free thinkers (Nick Cohen step forward) to use Orwell as an icon – a holy relic? – with which to beat the Left (that well known monolithic world conspiracy that as Boris and his pals know really runs the BBC). Beating up Chomsky seems a fave of this gang (and step forward Francis Wheen).
There’s a good if rather ranty book on all this Orwell v Left bollox by a contributor (whose name escapes me, sorry) to the New Statesman, that rather dreary read: the sensible elder brother to the tearaway sparky Speccie.
Where was I? O yes! (Boris stylee)
Melissa, there should be an embargo on tired old Orwell quotes so that we are forced to think or at least write for ourselves – to the extent that we are capable of course – which in my case, if you’ve seen my blog (Click!) is not very far…
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On the contrary Simon : thank YOU for allowing an intelligent discussion to unfold.
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Kevin,
Seeing a Red or a Nazi, tired old Orwell felt scorn and danger … as we all should, minus the quotes, next time I will paraphrase.
Fist fight is usually the only way to settle any political differences (hard irony intended
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Many thanks for your gallant and eloquent debate Simon and Macarnie – both very admirable
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As I was googling for something else I came across the Moscow Times which explains some of the sentiments touched on in this 107 commentariat than I ever could …
Open Letters, Closed Minds
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/07/01/006.html
‘Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress’
- Mahatma Gandhi
Amen and Awomen …
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Ach, if you encounter registration screen consider:
User ID: frankiboy
Password: frankiboy
Open Letters, Closed Minds
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/07/01/006.html
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Josef: Though I certainly agree with kevin b (‘Lay off the tired old Orwell quotes’), last year I was on Jura, where Orwell wrote 1984, and I put this on on my blog:
“The most important Scottish book of the 20th century? Perhaps George Orwell’s 1984? It was written at a house called Barnhill on the north end of the Isle of Jura. We visited it in July. Was it signposted? No. Was there a museum there? No. Was it open to the public? No. Do tourists ever go there? No. It is at the end of a closed (and almost impassable) five-mile road only accessible to walkers. The house itself is privately owned and let for self-catering. The good news is that the house seems to be in a reasonable state of repair – more than can be said for the birthplace of our national poet, Robert Burns . . . . ”
How about a campaign to save Barnhill and turn it into an Orwell museum?
Melissa: Barnhill would also be the perfect setting for the first Boris-Johnson.com blogging and hill walking conference, although we’ll need land rovers. (Thanks for the kind compliment as well.)
Josef: Unfortunately frankiboy doesn’t work. Perhaps he’s been purged?
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Simon:
I looked up the Isle of Jura and Barnhill and thought it was just the place to seek refreshment and rest awhile away from every care. You wouldn’t get haute cuisine but perhaps lots of fresh fish:
http://www.isleofjura.com/visit/places.asp
Who knows? there could well be a blogging conference one day somewhere remote and exciting
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Melissa: There are some more pictures of Barnhill at:
http://www.orwelltoday.com/jurabarnhillvisit.shtml
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Melissa: “You wouldn’t get haute cuisine . . .”
Ah. If that’s a source of anxiety, fear not, there are a couple of good restaurants in the area (though not actually on the island) that are listed in Michelin etc.
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Eric Blair (let’s call him the Good Blair, as opposed to the Evil One with the grin)was notoriously indifferent to the delights of food and other worldly pleasures, despit being an atheist. He was an ascetic, a bit like someone totally unconnected but strangeley akin in his independence of mind, Ludwig Wittgenstein (with his famous deck chair at Cambridge).
Such asceticism is a tad unexpected after you’ve read his rants about sandal-wearing vegetarian socialists.
Any road, Simon, don’t think Michelin-starred establishments would be up Mr Blair’s lonely road.
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In the Hebrides, according to my brother’s brother in law; a worthy crofter in the said Isles; haute cuisine is defined as what you might get served, at an elevation of 500 Ft above sea level. The fish is a must.
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Hmm. You seem to share the views of Jacques Chirac. (Personally I think he should have left poor Finland out of it).
Incidentally, I think we should all congratulate each other. I think we have written a record number of comments (115?) just overtaking the popular smoking entry.
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You are so right Simon! Let’s pat ourselves on the back
Tho’ not sure what I think about the New Statesman who decided not to award anyone for politics – though did have that category. Apparently it was a ‘postcode lottery’. The less said the better.
Am so glad this site is going so strong despite what lowly impression others may have of politics/politicians. It’s greatest fun! If you’re tired of Westminster politics – you’re tired of life I tell myself!
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Simon: there is nothing you could possibly have said,to or about me, which would have occasioned the overwhelming sense of hurt I now feel; my national pride is mortally woundfed. Oh! The shame of having been thought to have anything remotely in common with Chirac. Staggers off; a bitter; broken; prematurely bereft of the will to live.
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Kevin -
You’re right.
Orwell was right about many things but his idea of a nutritious diet was gallons of strong tea and inhalation of strong pipe tobacco as roll-ups. He was in many ways a puritan who wanted -like that other tobacco smoking and tea drinking politico Anthony Wedgwood Benn – politics of ideas rather than personalities.
Of course puritans are always proved wrong by history since people are far more irrational than the Orwells and Benns of this world would like – which is why the Not So Nice Blair manages to hoodwink the public most of the time. I say that with a tinge of regret as I prefer my politics with a strong philosophical content.
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Simon,
Your soulful reply is much appreciated. I do hope that history and mountain loving Melissa as well as Boris will take you on the suggestion to invade Jura.
You sure are fountain of intriguing facts … judging by the way you spill ink at your blog.
Indeed, the login and password has been purched now even the alternative Login: moscow Password: moscow failed to get me past the registration. Shame as it is a thoughtful article.
So Mea Culpa if I misled you. It worked for me last night.
BTW, Melissa, Marcanie, Simon, KevinN et al it was a pleasure to watch the way you all played the honest political tennis of disagreement …
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Talk about lack of accountability http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n13/harr04_.html [ Where has all the money gone? ]
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Josef: “I do hope that history and mountain loving Melissa as well as Boris will take you on the suggestion to invade Jura.”
One of the paradoxes of our time is that every time they have a holiday, Eurosceptics in the south of England dash straight to the continent. However if it is possible, sometime in the future, to arrange a Jura Summit, or what the Japanese apparently now call an ‘off meeting’ (i.e. offline meeting), I will certainly recommend there are no “gallons of strong tea and inhalation of strong pipe tobacco” – or porridge!
Instead I will see that the party are supplied with wine, food and coffee from Valvona & Crolla of Edinburgh, maybe the best food shop in Britain (where Labour celebrated their 1997 victory).
The cost will be very reasonable compared to Klosters, the Cote D’Azur and the other places our Westminster friends usually go to.
Barnhill would only cost 55 pounds a week per person (5 bedrooms sleeping 9 for 500 in the summer), and the Michelin restaurants (mentioned earlier) are of course cut price ‘bib gourmand’ places (to appeal to the Scottish market).
In addition to honouring Orwell and talking politics, we would be able to play with the seals and otters on the beach, walk up to the Corrievrechan whirlpool (one of the largest in Europe), climb the celebrated Paps of Jura, and drink the local Jura whisky.
http://www.roomfinderscotland.co.uk/search3.php?regionid=17&accommid=150
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/1015/paps.htm
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That’s it! you’ve convinced me – am ready now. Sadly will have to wait for a suitable time – not too long I hope.
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Where does Easyjet and the other cut price air compnies land Simon. To fly Manchester/ Glasgow / Manchester with BA costs a fortune, and then comes the train;( not cheap): ferry( also not without its pain) and finally; presumably ;taxi( 4 wheel drive of course).YThe weather is not noted for its clemency, which makes me say what I hav e always said about these latiti=udes, ” If Scotland were as easy on the feet, and the mackintosh wearing, as it is on the eye, nobody would think of holidaying ( or will it now be called Holledging,)anywhere else in the world. Children of the mist indeed!
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Macarnie: Ideally everybody would fly to Glasgow and then on to Islay (the airport is attractively located by the best whisky distilleries in Scotland: Lagavulin. Ardbeg, Laphroig), then hire a land rover, drive 40 minutes, cross over to Jura (a short crossing) and then drive another two hours to Barnhill at the top end of Jura.
The cheap flights come into Prestwick, about an hour south of Glasgow. It would be possible to go from one airport to the other, also to hire a car at Prestwick and drive down, but a high-axle 4×4 is needed for the last four miles to Barnhill.
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THe Communists and Nazis. Were they the worst?
———————————————–
Yesterday, the 7th July 2005, we were attacked, in the most cowardly and uncivilized way, both in the London Underground and other means of public transport. The death toll is not yet complete, and casualties, wounded and maimed are legion. Does this mean that we are at war? Not a conventional war, since a Nation cannot declare conventional war on an idea. It has been said that we wage war against terrorism, but you cannot grasp the body of an idea since it does not exist: it is not corporeal. We can only wage war against terrorists.
However, war remains war, under whatever name it might masquerade, and if this heinous attack should prove to be as a result of Jihad: that is war by its very description. A holy war, waged on behalf of Islam: a religious duty. Who will play the heroic part of Churchill in this matter, and who will be Chamberlain and appease. I have in my hand, a piece of paper.
If we should be at war, no matter who the enemy; surely the first rule of war is to try to isolate any of the enemy; or enemy sympathisers, within our boundaries. In W W II, Britons were made to feel safe, because of the internment of suspected enemy sympathisers, and we should be looking to do that now.
For anyone to seek; knowingly; to deflect public opinion away from the most likely cause of these explosions, and their resultant deaths; by naming the most unlikely factions and splinter groups as the perpetrators, is at best naïve, and at worst criminal. Political correctness has no place in a war. The Marquess of Queensbury rules are put on hold for the duration.
In the normal run of things, the rules of war, as applied since centuries, an attacker does not target defenceless non-combatants. War has been declared, albeit at present apparently unilaterally, because we are unable, at least positively, to identify our attackers, either by name or by cause. If this act should prove to be an act of war, rather than an isolated, dastardly act of terror, surely, at least temporarily, military rules should apply, and anyone being suspected of acting in a hostile manner, or of giving aid and succour to hostile agents, should be arrested, and under those wartime military rules, should be interrogated as to possible complicity in an act of war against the State.
Have we, as a Nation, in our liberality, clasped an asp to our collective bosom. If this should prove to be the case, it is probably too late to extract the venom. All right thinking people, of whatever persuasion, colour or creed, have today united in their avowals of righteous abhorrence for this act of terrorism, and should remain united in the cause of stamping out its causes.
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Please help this bill thrown out, its far to expensive, the cost benfit is just not their. On top of that they are not realy after the cards they are after the database. You can see this by the fact that people will not be required to carry the cards with them. This does not matter beause they will be able to use mobile finger print scanners to check some ones id. From chatting to the local police about it they say they dont have any problem iding people as it is, in fact its realy hard to imagin what problem they are trying to solve.
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It is good to see Boris J addressing himself to the problems of the day and staying at the cutting edge (the Sovient Union). Really!
Stalin was not the CCCP nor did he embody or create the political beliefs on which CCCP was founded in the same way that Hitler did for National Socialism and the Third Reich – mass murder (or the total disdain for certain groups that makes it possible) is not the logical conclusion of communist policital theory. If you can’t see the difference you need to work on some logic puzzles and sharpen up the old noggin. If you just want to mitigate the inate sins of the right… well that confirms my suspicions about a number of ageing tories. If women with CCCP across their chests offends you, avert your eyes!
Boris wrote (I assume in the comedy Spectator):
“Remind me: who was the greater mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to have been responsible for about 50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere 25 million”.
“A MERE 25 million” – I know he doesn’t mean that in a dismissive way but it comes all over all wrong. I had forgotten how silly Tories can be because you are such a rare breed, but the above words bring it all back.
Someone else above wrote:
“My daughter bought a T-shirt only the other with “Come back Adolf – all is forgiven” emblazoned across the front. When I asked her who “Adolf” was, she replied “I think he was the President of Germany or somewhere”. So you see, despite the millions who died in the name of freedom, the younger generation haven’t learnt and they will go down the same path in the near future”
Sweet Jesus – hang your head in shame for producing offspring who could be so crass and uneducated as to mess with that kind of sentiment, not admit it on a website!!.(Prince Harry has an excuse – weak genes).
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Sorry, my last comment was an unwarranted, cheap and easy shot and I take it back! He seems like a reasonable lad of fine stock.
Not normally got much time for the Royal family but was impressed by his grandmother after the bombings in London.
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the intellectual failure to make any distinction between communism and stalinism is (unsuprisingly) lazy.
Is it because upper-class intellectuals don’t understand Marxism or because it is easier to have the two associated? Perhaps both in this case.
The tradition of struggle continues however.
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“Tell me, O ye coolers and groovers…”
Boris,
I’m a 17 year old with medium long hair, but you sir, are the coolest and the grooviest of the lot!
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Hi kl Kevin -
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