Time to stop digging

It used to be the received wisdom that when you find yourself in a hole, the sensible thing to do is to stop digging. Nowadays, however, the new orthodoxy is that when in a hole, you should dig ever more frantically until – with luck – you re-emerge at the Antipodes.

With scarcely a break in the serried ranks of government and opposition until the other day, when Kim Howells took upon himself the honourable role of the little boy who pointed out that the emperor was naked, the lunatic policy pursued by the denizens of Westminster Walter Mitty Land with regard to Afghanistan has been to redouble our futile efforts to bring Western-style 'democracy' to a country whose proud people have never bowed their necks to a foreign invader, or to foreign notions, in a thousand years. Afghanistan has always been a thorn in the flesh of its neighbours, including the erstwhile British Raj and the Russian Empire. As the gateway to India, it was the focal point of the 19^th century 'Great Game' between the two great powers. Successive British and Russian attempts to invade and subdue the warlike and lawless Afghan tribes in their mountain fastnesses have always ended in disaster for the invaders.

The history of all this is an open book to any who cares to read. So why should we imagine that the present Western incursion into Afghanistan will end any differently? Listening to idiotic politicians and well-meaning servicemen prattling on about how we are performing an essential service to the Afghan people by bringing our alien and unwanted notions of freedom and justice to them, and so it is obligatory upon us to remain for as long as it takes to achieve our purpose, would be comical if it were not so tragically sickening.

As the procession of coffins returning through Wootton Bassett gets longer, grieving wives and mums mumble through their televised tears that their brave boys were heroes – but isn't it time now to bring the other lads home, because we don't really know what they are there for? The mood of the country is turning increasingly negative, with a tinge of defeatism creeping in. So the Prime Minister yet again defiantly dons his fake Churchillian mantle and sombrely tells us that the 'mission' remains essential for our home security. His repeated assertion that British troops fighting the Taleban in Afghanistan make terror incidents at home less likely is absolute tosh – the reverse of the truth, in fact – and the crass politician or civil servant who first dreamed up this glib mantra deserves to be hung, drawn and quartered. For the plain fact is that young Muslims born and growing up in Britain are being antagonised, and radicalised, by the spectacle of British troops fighting their co-religionists in faraway places.

If we don't succeed in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown insists, fundamentalist Islamists and that shadowy entity, Al Qaeda (whose existence – like that of God - is always assumed, but never demonstrated, by Western leaders) will take over Pakistan and its nuclear weapons – and then the real balloon may well go up. So the Afghan 'mission' must not fail. And it is for the benefit of the Afghan people – we are their liberators, not their invaders. Strange, then, that the Taleban, who were almost wiped out by the first onset of American and British troops, are now steadily increasing their hold over more and more territory.

Brown, however, has neither sent adequate reinforcements nor equipped the unfortunate soldiers already there with the weapons and armoury they need to do their assigned job successfully. And now, while still insisting that we must remain in Afghanistan and triumph there, he has started to hedge his bets by making the sending of more troops conditional on the Karzai government in Kabul rooting out corruption. This is asking the leopard to change its spots with a vengeance. What we would term 'corruption' is not an Afghan aberration, nor, in their eyes, a malpractice – it is endemic in the way of life of those regions, where business is customarily accompanied with 'sweeteners' – backhanders – which are regarded as a normal part of any deal by all the parties involved. To expect a government, or a people, to abandon its customary cultural practices in the name of bringing them 'democracy' which most of them do not want is as purblind as the flatteries of King Canute's courtiers. And for Gordon Brown of all people to make such a demand is consummate hypocrisy from someone whose own government, and that of his predecessor, has been riddled with corruption and venal behaviour on the part of politicians – the classic case being the abandonment, on Tony Blair's personal instruction, of the BAE Systems fraud investigation over Saudi contracts. Sauce for the gander?

It could well be that the Brown 'condition' is a cunning pretext for an early withdrawal on the ground that the Afghan government is not fit for purpose, and that therefore our 'mission' cannot succeed. If so, it would be the first glimmer of sanity in an otherwise manic policy – and also, of course, gives the lie to his incompatible argument that our remaining there is essential for Britain's own security.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been a shameful and troubling episode in our national history. Launched on false or at least flimsy pretexts at the behest of a frightened and bullying power-drunk ally, they have been little short of disastrous in performance and even more so in diminishing Britain's world reputation. And they – Afghanistan in particular – are far more dangerous than most people, including those involved in running them, seem to realise. There are no wars without consequences. It is not simply a matter of either 'winning' or else calling it quits, bringing the boys back home, and resuming normal everyday life as if the whole thing had never happened, or was just a friendly football match. The material carnage and the stench of death left behind will be as nothing compared with the legacy of lasting bitterness against the West, and Britain in particular, which this latest post-imperial adventure will leave in the hearts and minds of Iraqis, Afghans, and their fellow Muslims around the world – not least here at home. We have stirred up a hornets' nest. How these negative emotions will work out in the future remains to be seen. But the outlook is far from rosy.

Political fatheads

Three items of recent news typify the inane incoherence of current political thinking (or what passes for it).

First, elections: Having squandered much treasure and many young lives on fruitlessly endeavouring to ensure that the Afghan people were given the chance to vote “honestly”, the Americans and British are now wringing their hands about “corruption” and a “failed state”. They are fine ones to talk! If they looked nearer home, they would find both in their own back yard. Does anyone honestly think that George W. Bush, with his hanging chads, the stopped Florida recount, and the wafer-thin award by the Supreme Court, was really the legitimately elected president of the USA in 2000? And can a British government with an overall majority based upon just over 35 per cent. of the votes cast at the 2005 election (on a 60 per cent. total poll) credibly lecture Afghans or anybody else about the virtues of democracy? Phooey!

Next, politicians versus experts: While it was quite funny to see the normally laid-back Alan Johnson going ballistic because one of his scientific advisers had had the temerity to question the logic of his refusal to accept advice to downgrade the classification of cannabis – presumably because that wouldn’t have gone down well with Sun and Daily Mail journalists (some of whom, it’s a pretty safe bet, are personally familiar with more arcane illegal substances), the logic of his “scientists are all very well, but ultimately these are political decisions” stance rang pretty thin. The usual clap-trap was then pumped out about ‘having scientists on tap but not on top’. He was promptly backed up by the Prime Minister, whose message amounted to “our minds are made up – don’t confuse us with the facts”. Obviously, Postman Pat has no intention of going down into history as Postman Pot.

Finally: David Cameron’s abject wriggle out of his ‘cast-iron’ promise that the Tories would hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. There’s no point, he says, because it’s too late now. And – needless to say – it’s all the government’s fault. The way in which all the mainstream parties duck and weave to ignore the obvious desire of the British people to have a direct say about our continuing membership of the European Union is contemptible. Even more contemptible is their failure to initiate, less alone to sustain, an informed debate about the pros and cons for the UK of belonging or not belonging to the EU. Such a debate is long overdue.

Irony rules, OK?

One of the most egregiously silly posters on the Guardian’s comically named and rigorously censored 'Comment is Free' site solemnly informs us that Islam is an “overwhelmingly peaceful and gentle religion whose people have been abused by the West for hundreds of years”.

Here is the latest peaceful and gentle story from that land of milk and honey and haven of sweetness and light, Saudi Arabia, with whom, our revered Queen assured us not so long ago, we have "shared values".

As Private Eye would say, “Shome mishtake, shurely?”

Brown's weasel words

According to the BBC News website, our increasingly bemused and bemusing Prime Minister has come up with a splendid new vote-winning election promise: COMPULSORY VOLUNTEERS!

He does not, of course, mean compulsory VOLUNTARY service, but compulsory UNPAID service. Some difference there, I should have thought.

One of my earliest run-ins with authority was when, as a wartime schoolboy, I was sent to a boarding school which proudly proclaimed that all activities – apart from lessons – were “voluntary”.

In practice, if you refused to take part in weekday games [the head was cricket-mad] or the Sunday cadet corps, you were relegated to an especially disagreeable gym session conducted by an utterly incompetent master.

I strenuously objected to this, as I considered it to be arrant humbug.

After long tussles with the head, and the intervention of my parents, I was grudgingly permitted to spend my Sunday afternoons on my own as I wished – usually going for solitary walks.

I considered the concept of “voluntary compulsion” or “compulsory volunteering” a totally dishonest and bogus one. It was dishonest and bogus then, and it is dishonest and bogus now. But it is precisely what we have come to expect from New Labour.

They should call it Youth Conscription, and have done with it.

Come back, George Orwell. We need you.

“We feel your pain – tee hee.”

COMPASSION is the New Year 2009 buzzword among thuggish world statesmen.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, says:

[It is] compassion and tolerance which characterize us."

His opposition number, Binyamin [‘Bibi’] Netanyahu, says:

"We grieve for every one of them [the many hundreds of Palestinian casualties in Gaza]; we genuinely do."

But the Isreali foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, has assured the world that

"there is no humanitarian crisis in the [Gaza] Strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce."

So THAT’S alright, then.

These gems of humbug are easily outstripped, however, by the mercifully retiring US President George W Bush, who asserted at his farewell presidential news conference that:

“the world respects America for its compassion”.

As Paul Craig Roberts - http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21755.htm

- sarcastically enquires, did he mean

The compassion of bombing a UN school for girls?

The compassion of herding 100 Palestinians into one house and then shelling it?

The compassion of bombing hospitals and mosques?

The compassion of depriving 1.5 million Palestinians of food, medicine, and energy?

The compassion of violently overthrowing the democratically elected Hamas government?

The compassion of blowing up the infrastructure of one of the poorest and most deprived people on earth?

The compassion of abstaining from a Security Council vote condemning these actions?

Will there ever be an end to this shameful Orwellian doublespeak?

Amnesiac America

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates "ruled out the use of US military force in Georgia, saying there was 'no prospect' of American troops being deployed in the region. Military personnel will only be used in a humanitarian capacity to deliver aid to civilians, Gates said."

They said that about Vietnam, didn't they?

Out of my pet goat's mouth

President George W. Bush has solemnly announced that "The US believes the people of China deserve the fundamental liberty that is the natural right of all human beings."

This from the man who is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people around the world, and for the drastic curtailment of the civil liberties of his own citizens.

Words fail me.

Whitewashing Whitehouse

The BBC’s play Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story was a curious piece of revisionism from one of the main targets and victims of this smugly self-righteous lady’s ire. Obviously written and performed by people who had little knowledge and no direct experience of the 1960s, the arch-dragon of the ‘Clean Up TV’ campaign was portrayed as a slightly batty but well-intentioned and basically honest eccentric, while the BBC’s Director General, Sir Hugh Greene, was made out to be a degenerate, flippantly cynical buffoon. This is a travesty of the truth, and a strange abandonment of brand loyalty on the Corporation’s part.

As I can testify from bitter personal experience, Mary Whitehouse was far from being the paragon of truth and virtuous behaviour she claimed she was. In the late 1970s, Mrs Whitehouse and her ‘Moral Majority’ allies [several mostly Christian groups who campaigned for ‘family values’ and against what they disapprovingly termed ‘permissiveness’] kept up a ferocious onslaught against the Albany Trust, of which I was then Director, for many months on the utterly false ground that we were ‘promoting’ paedophilia.

This totally spurious charge was launched by Mrs Whitehouse in a widely publicised speech she made in November 1976, luridly claiming that the Trust [which she flatteringly but inaccurately described as “the homosexual lobby front runner”] was using public funds to ‘support paedophile groups’ so that “we are all subsidising and supporting, at least indirectly, a cause which seeks to normalise sexual attraction and activity between adult males and little girls”.

The same speech contained several other inaccuracies about the Trust; she quite wrongly claimed, for instance, that our Youth Officer – who was funded and supervised by the Department of Education and Science, and whose actual task was to work with teachers and youth workers on adult education programmes to tackle the difficult, and today still serious, problem of homophobia in schools and youth clubs - was “counselling gay teenagers” and spreading pro-homosexual propaganda through “pornographic magazines”.

There was not a shred of truth in these nasty smears. The facts were that the Trust, whose purpose was the improvement of psychological health, especially where sexual minorities were concerned, had been approached for advice by some paedophiles who felt acutely threatened and isolated by public hostility. In those days, the term ‘paedophilia’ was not yet perceived solely as a euphemism for ‘child molester’ [which it has since become, largely thanks to the hysteria generated by Mrs Whitehouse and her friends], but more precisely denoted the psychological condition of adults who were emotionally and – sometimes, though not always – sexually attracted to children who had not reached puberty. Such people obviously had a hideously difficult problem, and there was a dearth of skilled counselling help for them. So the Albany Trust convened some private meetings of concerned psychiatrists and other professionals, to which we also invited some of the paedophiles who had approached us, with the aim of exploring how to provide more adequate therapeutic and counselling facilities for those in need of it. The total amount of material help given to these people by the Trust was a few cups of tea.

Naïvely, as I realise with hindsight, we mentioned in our newsletter that these meetings had taken place. A few weeks later, Mrs Whitehouse launched her bombshell. Our first reaction – also, I now realise, naïve – was that she had been misinformed, and that when she realised this she would retract and correct her false allegations. So we wrote her a detailed letter, setting the record straight point by point, stating that we regarded her remarks as seriously libellous of the Trustees, individually and as a body, and requesting her co-operation in publicly withdrawing her assertions.

One would have expected somebody who was fond of loudly proclaiming her adherence to the ‘four absolutes’ of the Buchmanite Moral Rearmament sect – “absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, absolute purity, and absolute love” – gladly to seize the opportunity to make amends and set the record straight. But Mrs Whitehouse did nothing of the sort. Not merely did she sit back smugly while her allies repeated and embroidered her baseless charges against the Trust for many months through a flurry of articles and parliamentary questions; she never replied to the Trustees’ letter and, when pressed, said she “could not recollect” having received it [although it had been sent to her by recorded delivery]. Yet she contrived to quote it in a book which she published before the Trust made its contents public!

She even reiterated her preposterous charges in a heated exchange of letters between her, myself, and the Trust’s chairman in the Guardian, in the course of which she said: “for [the chairman] to deny an association between the Albany Trust and PIE [Paedophile Information Exchange] is to move the debate into such a realm of unreality as to make rational argument impossible.” To which he retorted “‘it is she who makes rational argument impossible by refusing to accept the truth if it doesn't suit her purpose”.

Which, for my money, is a just summing up of Mary Whitehouse. Far from being the lilywhite, if sometimes simplistic, crusader for truth, justice and decency perceived by her past and present admirers, she was an artful, devious and quite unscrupulous operator who had no qualms about inflicting totally unwarranted injustice and damage upon those whom she chose to dislike at the behest of her God. Claiming the loftiest Christian principles, she did not hesitate, when it suited her, to be a moral hooligan. Far from practising the high ideals of love and truth which she trumpeted forth, she more than once dragged the level of public debate down into the gutter, flinging blatant lies around with unctuous abandon.

That is how I shall always remember her – not as the cuddly, winsome figure of Julie Walters’ bland pastiche.

Thankfully she has gone, while the Albany Trust is currently celebrating its 50^th anniversary.

No room for moral relativism

Although taking a rest from blogging, I still read the news, and others' views, attentively. This item from today's 'Observer' so shocked me that I feel bound to post it and make a comment:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/11/iraq.humanrights

My response is that beliefs and behaviour such as this show up the moral relativism of 'multiculturalism' for the humbugging sham that it is.

Far from 'political correctness' being a socially benign salve to 'hurt feelings', there are times when spades need to be called bloody shovels, and the only term to be applied to religious and cultural beliefs such as this is Barbarism.

The self-delusion of someone who, after murdering his own daughter, can say "everyone knows that honour killings sometimes are impossible not to commit" is not only appalling; it is utterly disgusting and downright wicked.

Where are the voices of the once strident feminists on this issue?

Why buy Snake Oil?

One of life’s puzzles is why people pay good money for rubbish. Shoddy merchandise – useless ‘remedies’ – crap art – brainless talk – the purveyors of all this ghastly stuff rake their profits in and run laughing all the way to the bank. Why?

Cannot people discern between products and ideas of value and those which are scams? It seems not – or else my junk mail box would not be flooded with messages urging me to buy bogus Viagra or to invest in the latest stock market hot tip ‘guaranteed’ [of course] to be a winner. Happily I have enough sense not to send these hopeful guys and gals my credit card details, but hundreds obviously do or it would not be worth their while to write and email their pitches.

I see the Chinese [some of them, anyway] are kicking themselves for their stupidity in paying Tony Blair $500,000 for a three-hour visit to a luxury housing complex and a vapid speech witheringly described by China Youth Daily as “full of pleasantries and clichés” and no more insightful than the reports of local officials. Having been subjected to Blair’s blatherings for a couple of decades, we British can only sympathise with the Chinese for their yawn-provoking
experience.

But Blair, egregious though he be, is small beer as an earner compared to the top US televangelists – the Swaggarts, Haggards, Robertsons, Bakkers, and Oral Robertses – who coin in the dollars with their unashamed invocations of the Golden Calf and their proclamations that Jesus is the God of Success [theirs, first and foremost]. Why Americans are so prone to lap up this pitiful appeal to credulousness and greed remains a mystery. But far too many of them do.

Free competition, in ideas as well as goods, is all very well but there does need to be some quality control. Unfortunately Western society is suffering from slippage in this respect, which makes it all the more necessary and important for those of us who don’t want to be patsies and suckers to speak out against the encroaching tide of material, mental, and intellectual garbage.