Quandoque dormitat Homerus

Oops. Soothscribe and Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill should have proof-read James Heartfield's review of The Taste of War, which contains this howler:

It was Britain that first pushed the world into protectionism with its ‘imperial preference’ tariffs in 1932.

Bull-shit. The game of beggar-my-neighbour was kicked off by the protectionist US Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, as anyone who presumes to comment on 20th century history should know.

What's the point?

Today Christopher Booker, backed up by Richard North, has written about the EU-made shambles that is rubbish collection as exacerbated in Britain by its maniacally elaborate enforcement. The words "cost effective" are kryptonite to bureaucrats everywhere; but the British sub-species seems to be particularly aggressive in seeking ways to impose niggling, unnecessary burdens on the rest of the population.

It may seem OTT to ascribe a philosophical underpinning to the squalid scramble to feed at the public trough, but it is essential to seek an explanation, not so much for the behaviour of people living at public expense, but for why that public has put up with their exponentially rising exactions, increasingly flagrant corruption and chronic incompetence for so long.

Part of it stems from envy. The ideal of equality or "fairness" in Britain comes down to the squalid sentiment that if I can't have it, nobody should. Envy is the enemy of aspiration, and it works at all social levels - particularly among the young. There is no difference between ghetto youths attacking the "oreos" who want to make something of themselves and public schoolboys victimising the studious as "swots".

From this, possibly, comes the apathy and cowardice among the general population that has been the main enabler of a relentless drive for the lowest common denominator in all aspects of social engineering. The adventurous and the ambitious have been fleeing Britain's deadening consensus for centuries, and the genetic pool left behind must have been diminished by the diaspora.

Unfortunately, although in the past immigration by Huguenots, Jews, Eastern Europeans and others fleeing oppression injected new dynamism, more recently it has mainly added ethnic sub-groups nurturing historic grievances and demanding special entitlements with the active encouragement of the British bureaucracy.

But something else must be at work for those more blessed by nature to subscribe to the general malaise. Although most of them will never have heard of it, I believe it lies in the perversion of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative:

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. 

It is the sentiment that underlies a sense of duty and of social obligation; but the sting in the tail is the last bit, the "will that it should become a universal law". From "will" to "enact" may seem barely a step, yet there is a gulf between the two into which, without exception, all social engineering legislation falls, however well-meaning. That gulf is the moral disempowerment of the population the legislation is supposed to benefit.

From which, after many decades of relentless social engineering, we have a de-moralized as well as demoralized society, governed either by cynics who use the slogans of a more idealistic past as a smokescreen for looting the public purse, or by arrogantly ignorant theorists like our current prime minister and deputy prime minister. Ignorant because what they fondly believe are new ideas are old and failed expedients; arrogant because they believe that their will can overcome profound institutional inertia and widespread societal indifference.

They all end up in the same place. Those who enter politics with an eye to filling their pockets do so. The idealists take another course: they come to despise the people who do not respond to their exhortations and, most notoriously in the case of Blair (on whom the charisma-lite David Cameron seeks, without success, to model himself), persuade themselves that their public service deserves generous private reward.

I do not see any way that the Gadarene rush to the final extinction of everything that was once distinctive and admirable in Britain can be halted or even re-directed. As Yeats put it in "The Second Coming":  

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Bear in mind he wrote that in 1919, in my opinion the moment when British society changed irrevocably for the worse. If Britain had been governed by decent people instead of the profiteering scum and opportunists* who backed Lloyd George (who himself stole money donated by Carnegie to help the war wounded), the enormous sacrifice of the Great War and the social solidarity of the trenches might have transcribed into a more just society.

Instead there was a betrayal of hope so egregious that I believe it broke the spirit of the British people. The welfare state that might have been created in 1919, when Britain was still a wealthy nation, was built instead in bankruptcy after World War II. The will for a better life dashed in 1919 came back in 1945 as the grimly determined sense of entitlement that has been the curse of Britain ever since.

Barring defeat in war and occupation, I know of no society that has ever broken out of a spiral of decline. Social revolutions are generally conservative phenomena sparked by economic changes that threaten the lower middle class, which supplies the principal clientele for socialist parties.

That class, roughly defined as shitting downwards and snarling upwards, holds absolute sway in Britain. It is unmoved by facts or logic, and knows no reasons other than its precarious social and economic status, and the desperate fear of change it generates. Everything else follows from that. 

* Including the devouringly ambitious Winston Churchill, desperate to recover from his humiliation over the Dardanelles fiasco.

Even soothscribes sometimes stumble

Oh dear - Spiked's Brendan O'Neill uncritically cites one of those Americans who thinks that everything in the world is either the result of or in reaction against US policy:

The immediate precursor to the Brotherhood, in the early 1920s, was an Islamist-leaning organisation called the Society of Propaganda and Guidance, which was tacitly supported by the then British colonialists in Egypt (Britain maintained a military presence in Egypt until 1936). They considered the Society to be a useful counterweight to anti-colonialist groups keen to expel British forces. The Society’s journal, The Lighthouse, met with British approval with its articles denouncing Egyptian nationalists as 'atheists and infidels'.

Until 1936? WTF does he think defeated the Italian invasion in 1940 - the Egyptian army? There are more howlers, but that one takes the biscuit.

EU - just another in a long line of failing organizations

Sociopolitical organizations constantly encounter problems that require increased investment merely to preserve the status quo. This investment comes in such forms as increasing size of bureaucracies, increasing specialization of bureaucracies, cumulative organizational solutions, increasing costs of legitimizing activities, and increasing costs of internal control and external defence. All of these must be borne by levying greater costs on the support population, often to no increased advantage. As the number and costliness of organizational investments increases, the proportion of a society's budget available for investment in future economic growth must decline.
                                          Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge 1988)

So-called

When watching the so-called documentaries broadcast by the so-called British so-called Broadcasting so-called Corporation, it occurs to so-called me that these so-called documentary so-called makers are seeking to imprint their so-called vision on a so-called population that has had all concept of so-called truth erased from its so-called consciousness by a so-called education run by so-called people very much like themselves.

Oh, and also to fill their so-called pockets with the so-called money extorted from the so-called population by commissioning these so-called programmes from their own so-called production so-called companies.

I'm not sure which is worse: their assault on objective truth, their perversion of language or the fact that they are running a racket at the expense of the common people while smugly posing as their champions.

Bitchy Boys' time warp

Astonishing. BBC 2 managed to package every single fellow-travelling cliché about the United States in the 50s into "American Dream", broadcast in prime time on Saturday.

Cud by lefty zimmer framers, complete with a 90 year-old ex-communist folky Pete Seeger, and one of the Rosenberg orphans still trying to wriggle around the indisputable proof that his father was a spy for the serial rapist Beria and that his mother cared more for the party than she did for her children.

McCarthy; Nagasaki; tupperware; valium; big bad corporations; inequality; on and on it went. "Consumerism" bad; money doesn't buy happiness; suburbs are "boxes made of ticky-tacky". They probably concluded that the American Dream was a nightmare, but I had given up by then.

Meanwhile the regime for which all those persecuted idealists betrayed or denounced their own country, and which by implication these geriatric Bitchy Boys still believe represented the "progressive" option, was a totalitarian empire run by a genocidal dictator surrounded by perverts.

I not only furiously resent my money being spent on this lying crap, I am disgusted by the thought that I may breathe the same air as the mental degenerates who made it.

History is a slut

The following from Dorothy Rabinowitz in the WSJ:

Whatever the outcome of today's election, this much is clear: It will be a long time before Americans ever again decide that the leadership of the nation should go to a legislator of negligible experience, with a voting record consisting largely of "present," and an election platform based on glowing promises of transcendence.

Then she says that when Franklin Roosevelt died, an "anguished country" mourned as it had not done since the death of Lincoln.

Ah, yes. Lincoln. A legislator from Illinois with negligible national experience and an election platform based on glowing promises of transcendence. What a fuck-up he was!

Raedwald and history

Been wanting to add the boat-dwelling author of Raedwald (the name of his boat) to the Soothscribe Laureates, but have been stopped by a suspicion that he looks back on British history through rose-coloured specs.

Today's post comes to confirm my suspicion. "What, if I had the choice, would I leave a future Britain by 2020?" he asks. There follows a list wildly beyond any political possibilities there have ever been or ever will be. It would be sadistic to deal with all of them, but these two go to the heart of them all:

A moral nation - the wealthy and privileged as well as the wretched underclass have rotted the moral foundation on which good society must be based; greed, sloth and lust are not 'lifestyle choices', envy and materialism pit man against man. A virtuous people and the open recognition of the fundamental Christian values at the centre of our lives and our nation.

"Rotted" affirms that there once was such a moral foundation. There was not. The future Pope Pius II found the English and Scots to be a bunch of drunken fornicators in 1435, and so they have remained.

Freedom - Britons can once again become the most free nation on the earth; free from persecution, coercion, injustice and the oppression of the evil that is socialism and free to speak, communicate, gather and make decisions ourselves with strong and independent recourse against the power of the State

Individual freedom relative to other nations probably peaked - in England, not collectivist Scotland and certainly not Wales or Ireland - under Elizabeth I. Things began to go to shit after the union with Scotland, only fully consummated in 1707. For the founding mythology of a uniquely free and prosperous Britain, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992).

So if we want to get seriously nostalgic, we'd best start by cutting loose Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which would certainly require leaving the EU as well.

Sounds like a plan!

Why is The Sunday Times trying to rehabilitate Orlando Figes?

A favourable review by Max Hastings in the "Culture" supplement, a seven-page interview and a book extract in the "Magazine" - WTF is going on?

This is a man who posted damaging reviews of rivals' books on Amazon using the pseudonym "Historian", hired lawyers to threaten one of them with a massive libel suit for revealing that the user name behind the pseudonym was "orlando-birkbeck", let his wife try to take the rap and finally admitted his culpability only when he realized the hard drives of his family's computers were likely to be seized.

Did he voluntarily make amends to the people he blackguarded? No - his lawyers negotiated a private settlement. Did he resign from his professorship at Birkbeck College? No. Does he accept that his actions were those of a slimy, back-stabbing little coward? No.

No, indeed - he "doesn't understand why I acted as I did". He blames "depression and long immersion in the miseries of Stalinist Russia". He blames the "sense of isolation [that] happens with academic work". Then the interview plays the poor little persecuted Jew card: his family were German Jews and his mother's family escaped from Berlin to London  abandoning his grandparents and - possessions! His father left home when he was young and his mother worked, so "he remembers a succession of au pairs".

Awww - diddums! With supreme irony he says his mother "gave me strong morals and values". Possibly she did, but quite evidently this stain on the underwear of academia lost them along the way.

Cameron interview with Schama

Good to be reminded by this in-depth FT interview that Simon Schama, an insufferable presence on TV, remains a fine, properly donnish wordsmith. His views are still made-for-Bitchy Boys Club, but he does bring some historical perspective to a political discourse normally dominated by intellectual mayflies. Key extracts:

Cameron is hard to take against: easy in his own skin; unstuffy, intellectually curious, and, unlike so many Conservative leaders – from Pitt (both father and son) to Peel, from Churchill to Thatcher – conspicuously untroubled by inner demons.

. . . that Schama was able to identify - or does he mean, simply, that Cameron lacks a cutting edge?

Just as he seems to be casting himself as the heir to Churchill’s reforming Liberalism and Macmillan’s One Nation pragmatism, Cameron lets slip a comment of breathtaking lordliness. Of course he is concerned that the poor don’t fall below the safety net, but it should be understood that "if we don’t make cuts it will be the poorest who will be hardest hit by the failure of the economy … too much of [Labour’s attempts] was about redistributing money through the tax credit scheme, rather than trying to tackle the causes of poverty".

WTF is "lordly" about that? Even the Labour pukes now admit that they screwed the pooch on welfare dependancy. Of course Schama is a 60s lefty, but even so he really should not have written this:

Whether ["the Big Society"] is actually anything more than neo-Victorian cant about the citizenry (them what can afford it, that is) getting stuck in for the local good, I’m not at all sure. But he makes a spirited attempt to invest it with some human reality, even claiming it had always been part of the Conservative tradition to invite people to ask “What do I put back into society?” rather than just have them fork over taxes and let the elected decide.

That crack about the Victorians is so day before yesterday, as is the patronising bit of bad grammar that follows it. The Victorians built well - Britain still stands on the foundations they laid down, from railways to sewers to parks to schools and other public buildings. Lytton Strachey was a bitch, and his prissy sniggering still infects the leftism of people like Schama.  

But what can a good Conservative do about this sorry state, save hand-wringing and a call to voluntarism? I point out the difficulty for any government legislating behavioural modification. But the prime minister persists with his call to civic awakening for the common good.

Having just emerged from thirteen years of more "legislating behavioural modification" than in all previous governments put together, that little comment is remarkable not only for its hypocrisy but also because it completely misses the point. Such legislation is not "difficult" - it has been proved to be demoralisingly counter-productive. Greater voluntarism can only arise from the abolition of such legislation, not from new laws.

Schama just doesn't get it. Like most of his generation of leftist intellectuals, he refuses to accept what even the Labour party has conceded - Thatcher was right to say "There Is No Alternative" about the economy. Possibly Schama is right and British society is too far gone to bounce back as the economy did, but the international evidence is that nations recover quite rapidly once governments admit they are in a hole and stop digging.

It is said that on first encountering a screw in a baulk of wood, a primitive man would know no better than to apply ever-greater force to pull it out. By that standard Schama and the like are very primitive people indeed.

A colossus for the Thames

My thanks to The Count for drawing my attention to this. The Telegraph reports that the mayor of Dresden is in Britain to open an exhibition on the bombing of London, her city and Coventry. It seems Dresden and Coventry are now twinned - how sweet. While here, Frau Helma Orosz intends to lobby against the proposed memorial to the Bomber Command aircrew who died during World War II.

My first reaction is: Right after you demolish this vaunting memorial to the U-boat crewmen killed during the war, you presumptuous bitch.

But hey, why not? Starting in 1945 with Air Chief Marshal Portal and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the architects of the strategic bomber offensive, the British establishment has behaved with consummate shabbiness towards the young men who were the only ones to take the fight to the Nazis before D-Day.

Enough of monuments to dead white males! Better, surely, to spend the money on a colossus to match New York's Statue of Liberty, perhaps bestriding the Thames, representative of modern, multi-cultural Britain.

My suggestion? A mouse-coloured man with his trousers around his ankles, bending over to peer past his flabby buttocks and shrivelled testicles, with the bold motto: Fuck me - I like it.

Bitter anniversary

Richard North comments on how fitting it is that British forces have just handed over Taliban-infested Sangin to the Afghan army (with US forces taking over responsibility for the still extremely volatile province) the day after the weekend chosen to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

The hand-over, he comments acidly, "follows in the great tradition of recent campaigning in Afghanistan, where British forces can add Sangin to the growing list of towns and settlements pacified, and where US forces can only stand back and admire the sheer skill, dedication and fortitude of the UK military and its leaders."

The template for this success, however, was undoubtedly forged in recent times by the experience in Iraq, where the British military brought us the stunning success of the al-Amarah campaign, followed by its storming success in Basra, which has earned the undying gratitude of the Iraqi people – those that survived the experience.

But for those who think such successes are recent, we need to look back 70 years to another great victory, where the RAF so successfully beat off the German air force that the citizens of London and elsewhere only had to endure another eight months of bombing and a few tens of thousands dead and injured as the Luftwaffe roamed almost without challenge in the barely-defended night-time skies.

Steady on, Richard. The daylight Battle of Britain was a victory. It was the pre-war British government's refusal to institute any kind of civil defence provisions, despite believing that "the bomber will always get through", that acted as a tragic multiplier for the Luftwaffe's relatively light night bombing.

Horrible history

The following from Nosemonkey's Eutopia, a sometimes sensible blog, made me cringe this morning: 

At its heart, the English Civil War laid down the concept of the rule of law.[1] This was such a good principle that pretty much the entire world runs on it now, in one form or another. The idea that no one should be above the law was the first principle of the emancipation of the people.[2] Without this fundamental concept, the subsequent developments in Western ideas of liberty and democracy (primarily via the French and American Revolutions, both partially inspired by aspects of England’s Civil War rhetoric)[3] could never have progressed – for without the rule of law, we are nothing.[4] We survive merely upon the whim of others.[5] All we have and all we are can be taken away in an instant, and there is nothing we can do about it.

1. Oh for heaven's sake - the concept of the rule of law is as old as human association. Hammurabi was the first known codifier of existing laws, about 3,500 years before the English Civil War.
2. Sigh. Emancipation from what? Were the English slaves before the Civil War? Did most of them have the vote after it? The principle at stake was sovereignty, a concept I would have expected a europhile to have studied very carefully.
3. The American revolutionaries did indeed recycle the rhetoric of the English Civil War and the outcome of their rebellion was an essentially conservative polity. The French revolution produced something entirely different - a populist, totalitarian democracy that soon collapsed into dictatorship.
4. So much for natural rights; and English Common Law as well - all hail European Statute Law.
5. Oh dear - come back Thomas Hobbes, all is forgiven.