Editorial from Irish Political Review, November 2009
A Watershed
When the Irish electorate voted for the Lisbon Treaty, it voted for a probable Blair Presidency in a Great Power Europe in which little countries must toe the line. The Taoiseach seemed to acknowledge this fact by initially declaring his support for the chief warmonger of our time, Tony Blair, as President. But something caused him to recoil from Blair and transfer his support to the low key ex-Taoiseach and ex-EU Ambassador to the USA, John Bruton. What caused him to change his mind? Could it be the "underhand diplomacy of bloggers and pygmy politicians" on which John Waters (ex-Dancing At The Cross-Roads) pronounced anathema in his Irish Times column on October 30s (Only Blair Has The Right Stuff For Top EU Position).
"Blair has the skills and personality to communicate a renovated message about the nature of community, to nurture relations between Europe and the rest of the world, and to speak authoritatively about issues such as climate change, immigration and new models of economy. The danger is this perhaps final chance for the EU to become a genuine political organism may be scuppered by the underhand diplomacy of bloggers and pygmy politicians…"
What new model of economy does Blair stand for? What he stood for during his ten years as Prime Minister was globalist uniformity under the direction of the USA, with Britain holding the position of agent of the USA.
What "relations between Europe and the rest of the world" does Blair stand for? The subordination of the rest of the world to a Europe guided by Britain acting as agent of the USA.
The British Labour Party was suspicious of the European Union during the 1970s and 1980s, seeing the "social market" ideal as an obstacle to the full-blooded socialism which it was committed to establishing in Britain. Blair came to power as a committed European and his Party, overwhelmed by charisma, followed him. He appointed an ultra-leftist of the mid-1980s as Minister for Europe—or was it Minister for Competition in Europe? Kim Howells was a die-hard Scargillite ideologue in the suicidal strike into which Scargill pushed the National Union of Mineworkers. When he became Blair's Minister, Howells' job was to destroy the socialist element of European Christian Democracy, which was an obstacle to free globalist capitalism.
Blair's "new model of economy" was only Thatcher's model. Thatcher acknowledged him as her successor. She gave him her seal of approval right at the start. She had done the heavy lifting. All he had to to do was carry on privatising and deregulating, carrying the message to parts she could not reach.
Globalism can be presented in ideology as egalitarian meritocracy—a universal struggle of each against all, in which each has an equal chance of doing down his neighbour to his neighbour as everyone else has. But it cannot be realised in that form. And those in power who preach it must fervently know that it can't. Globalism is necessarily hierarchical. It is realisable only as a world hierarchy with gradations downwards from the controlling influence of the United States.
The English bid for world domination began with the victory at the Battle of the Boyne—which we are now officially obliged to celebrate—and the subsequent conquest and subjugation of Ireland by the Glorious Revolution. The European strategy of the bid was the balance-of-power. The first ideologue of English balance-of-power strategy was John Toland, who grew up speaking Irish in Donegal, converted to the fanatical English variety of state-oriented Protestantism in Derry in the 1680s, and evolved after 1688 into a skilful pamphleteer in the service of the Whig gentry.
The strategy was to prevent Europe from being consolidated into a political power. England set out to keep Europe "balanced", or in conflict, by allying itself with the weaker Powers against the Power which might have made a hegemonic settlement in Europe as Britain itself did in the 'British Isles'. Britain itself was never in the balance. It stood outside the balance and manipulated it.
That was the English view of the world for close on three centuries. It fell into confusion when the British Empire fell apart as a result of its second War on Germany, but it was not specifically rejected until Blair took office and declared for a unipolar world—a single world power structure under the dominance of the US, with Britain as No. 2. In that conception the world was Ameranglia and its hinterland. And John Waters signed up for it enthusiastically, fanatically, under the impact of the destruction of the World Trade Centre.
If Osama bin Laden plotted the WTC event with a view to driving Ameranglia crazy, he succeeded brilliantly in the case of John Waters.
The idea of the world as a systematic hierarchy run by the White House was a delusion of the early 1990s. The closer it came to realisation, the less practicable it became because of the forces of resistance that arose in opposition to its wild brutality.
Waters looks to Blair as a Hero for our time:
"If the EU is to shake off the sense of disconnection that has rendered it culturally moribund, what is required in the new job is a leader who can define the presidency outside the bureaucratic framework already established by EU institutions, signalling to the citizens of Europe and the wider world the EU is at last becoming a community of peoples…"
A "community of peoples" is what the EU was under its bureaucratic institutions, and what it is unlikely to remain under the new arrangements. The Commission, the rotating Presidency, and the consensual mode of decision-making were what made the Six a community, and carried over a sense of community to the Thirteen. But the Commission has been emasculated—with Irish PD Liberal Pat Cox acting as catspaw in the matter. The Presidency will no longer rotate. And majority rule is on the way.
Judge Barrington was surprisingly frank about this when championing Lisbon in a Radio Eireann debate with Joe Higgins. He said that the greater States must have a greater say in the running of the EU, and that the EU must have the military power to defend—and everyone should now know what that means—to defend its interests in the world.
Under the rotating Presidency, every little State had its moment when all the other States had to look to it, and when it could show what it was made of. The Irish Presidency under Charles Haughey was a nodal point on the way to the Celtic Tiger. Ireland was from that moment a force in European affairs, and the view of it as an appendage of Britain fell away.
Lisbon arranges that such aberrations will happen no more.
Under the old 'bureaucratic' arrangement, Europe was federal in substance because of the requirement that decision-making should be unanimous. That federal Europe has now been displaced (in principle at least) by a Europe of Great Power dominance.
The Irish voters voted for this Great Power Europe because of the threat that it would be punished if it refused to do so. The threat was issued by the German representative in Ireland. At about the same time Germany wiped out a village in Afghanistan. That is to say that, acting in a moral capacity, it called own an air-strike on an Afghan village. It was reminiscent of mediaeval times, when the Church called on the secular power to deal with heretics. Germany fingered the villagers and America wiped them out.
Chancellor Merkel disclaimed responsibility. There will be no German compensation for survivors, or for relatives of the victims. And she was right. Germany has handed its conscience into the keeping of the USA. It own moral posturing is spurious. The lesson it learned from the carpet bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, etc. by the Ameranglian air force in 1944-5 is that it must never again commit atrocities on its own account, and that, so long as it acts at the behest of Ameranglia, it will be physically secure and therefore morally in the right.
But we are not Germans. We do not need to render ourselves mindless out of a sense of ancient guilt. And the least we can do in response to the 'good German' extermination of an Afghan village is to strike Lidice out of the catalogue of war crimes. The action against Lidice was a reprisal. And the assassination of the German Governor of the Czech Protectorate that was organised by Britain in furtherance of its policy of "setting Europe ablaze" by acts of terror. This was after declaring war on Germany, losing the battle, and refusing to make a settlement.
The Czechs had given in to British intimidation in the Autumn of 1938 and handed the defensible Sudetenland over to Germany. Hungary and Poland then took other parts of the artificial Czechoslovak state, and the Slovaks declared independence. The Czech remnant was then made a German Protectorate without Czech resistance, or any action by Britain, in March 1939. The Czechs began to settle down as a Protectorate. They did not launch a resistance, even after Britain in an apparently capricious change of policy, decided to make war on Germany—or at least to declare war on it and get others to fight it. Britain therefore dropped in an assassination squad to kill the Governor, making it appear to be a Czech action. A number of Lidice villagers were executed in reprisal—which was not illegal under the 'laws of war'—and the village was razed.
The German-inspired action against the Afghan villagers was, by comparison, a wanton act of destruction. And if that was OK, let us strike Lidice from the list of horrendous atrocities.
We have become decadent, says Waters, as a consequence of "six decades of tranquillity, interrupted momentarily by 9/11. At the core of this culture is the idea that peace is natural".
We were saved from drowning in the swamp of pacifist decadence when Blair made his appearance in the image of 'Bambi', which of course delighted us, but was camouflage for—
"a deep seriousness that counterpoints his superstar image… Blair seemed instinctively to know what was necessary for survival in an age in which charismatic vacuity was prized over everything, and to guard his deeper thoughts and talents until he was able to put them to what he regarded as their proper use… And while it is true that the situation in Iraq since 2003 has gone from bad to appalling to better and, right at this moment, back to appalling, none of that should be the measure of the morality of the cause… Tony Blair was motivated well in advance of the invasion by a desire to rid the world of its ugliest dictator. There are few who, when the argument is couched in these terms, can argue convincingly he was wrong. But the well of popular opinion has become so contaminated on this issue it is almost impossible to be heard in Blair's defence…"
—except of course in Britain's newspaper for the Irish.
(The Irish Times is on the verge of bankruptcy. Those in the know are convinced that it will go out of business within the next few months, and wonder what they will do without it. If it does go out of business, then it will, of course, cease to be Britain's newspaper for the Irish, and the aberration of the past 20 years will possibly be rectified.)
Blair went up a mountain in Spain and he came down with a message from God telling him to make war on Iraq. That's what he said, in his own disarming way to John Lloyd of the Financial Times. At that moment Ireland had its brief moment of prominence in world affairs, with Buggins turn as Chairman of the Security Council. Brien Cowen gave it as his opinion that an invasion of Iraq was allowed for by resolutions for a different purpose, adopted a dozen years earlier. The British Foreign Secretary of the time disagreed, as we recall, on the ground that Iraq—disabled and impoverished by sanctions, and closely supervised—did not constitute any threat to international peace. But Blair decided to make war, and when he could not get a fresh UN Resolution, he covered himself with the Irish agreement. And Ireland played its little part in the War—urged on by Waters, Kevin Myers, and Eoghan Harris.
War was right because Saddam was a dictator, Waters says. Is that not a view from the swamp of democratic decadence which cannot face the realities of world affairs.
Iraq was a state haphazardly thrown together on the spur of the moment by the British conquest of the Middle East in 1918-19 so as to secure the source of oil, which had become vital to it in the course of the Great War. It never had a democratic election. Its first election was openly rigged by Britain, which kidnapped and deported the rival candidate. It was only under Saddam's long dictatorship that representatives of the disparate elements were drawn together into something like a functional Iraqi body politic sustaining a regime. The 2003 invasion deliberately broke up that body politic. It sought a semblance of internal support by throwing Iraq back into its constituent elements, setting Shia, Sunni and Kurd against each other.
The amount of killing done by the Saddam regime in the course of hammering the disparate social elements into an Iraqi body politic is grossly exaggerated by the invasion propaganda. It is sometimes put at unspecified "millions". Most of that killing occurred in war against Iran—which was actively supported by the West for the purpose of containing the Islamic enthusiasm of the Iranian revolution. Amnesty International estimated the internal killing for the purpose of maintaining the regime at "hundreds" in 2000, "scores" in 2001, and again "scores" in 2002 (see Amnesty website at http://web.amnesty.org).
How many have been killed within Iraq since 2003? And to what actual purpose.
Saddam's regime was a secular welfare state, in which women had begun to behave in the European manner. A separation of Church and State, without the oppression of religion, but restricting of Islam to the private sphere, is considered to be oppression.
Irish businessmen traded freely with Saddam's Iraq, and Irish nurses felt at ease in it.
The Irish Government facilitated the war on Iraq for trivial reasons. The Irish voters authorised the formation of a new Great Power Europe for vital reasons, but reasons which had nothing to do with the actual purpose of Lisbon.
Bertie, at his book launch by Charlie McCreevy (8th October), boasted that Ireland was in safe hands when he and McCreevy were running it. But the depth of the crisis was brought about by the way he ran it. We do not say he was wrong not to curb the Celtic Tiger. In order to do so, he would have needed an Opposition demanding that it be curbed,and the general demand was to make hay while the sun shone. But the suggestion that the crisis happened because he was ousted is absurd. (It is not surprising, however, as we repeatedly described him as having the world-view of a huxter.)
The Celtic Tiger had illusions about itself which we did not share—hence our Winnie the Pooh variation of Tigger. It was created by Charles Haughey, which it repudiated and blackguarded. In its collapse the hope of a resurgence of tigerishness is maintained by Brian Lenihan in the face of general opposition and ridicule, and an element of bad faith. Let us hope that the experience will have a de-Anglicising influence on him.
Anyhow, the decision to run the economy on the basis of future property prices in the hope that those prices will be realised in the future is a bold venture.
It depends on ultimate European funding: the Irish economy has still been much too small, and too dependent on globalist flows, to undertake such an extreme Keynesian measure on its own. So, in the referendum, the electorate played the tune that was paid for.
CONTENTS
A Watershed.
Obama Bows To Israel.
Readers' Letters:—Insidious History-Telling
Shorts from the Long Fellow.
On Press Suppression Of The Unpalatable.
Cologne To Ballinlough.
Constitutional Change.
Remembering 1969 (Report of Hanley Meeting).
Reviews.
Turncoat (Poem).
More On 'What If' Lynch Had Attacked Britain.
Let's Stick To Facts (Biteback).
Casement 2008 (Part 2).
Comments On A Criticism (reply to B. Ó Ceallaigh).
Biteback: Ireland And The Two World Wars.
Does It Stack Up?
Benedict Chifley, PM Of Australia 1945-49
War Guilt & Other Nonsense.
Labour
Comment
The Great PRSI Swindle.