Reflections of a stormy petrel

The narrow defeat of the Obama administration in the Hobby Lobby case has sent its supporters into ecstases of rage and hate that have to be seen to be believed, and that in some cases can only be described as murderous. I am glad I don't live in the USA. But this fury, that bewilders many conservatives and independents, does not bewilder me. The Mandate was criminal from the beginning, criminal in its prehistory. Remember how deliberately the President lied to poor Bart Stupak and destroyed his career. And the Mandate is really much more basic to the Obama project than people realize, because they can't see its actual purpose. Le me draw a historical parallel.

Ireland has one of the saddest modern histories of any country in the world. Repeatedly invaded and devastated by the larger neighbouring island, its Catholic majority was reduced to a pulverized peasantry, paying tax they could not afford to Protestant landlords and being tithed for Protestant parsons; a miserable swarm of penniless, ignorant and leaderless grubbers of the soil, fed by potatoes, with no middle class or aristocracy or any consistency. But what you have to realize is that, the destruction of the Irish educated classes, in spite of the frightful massacres and repeated wars, were not the result of military oppression or even of mass murder; they were, in the main, the result of laws. England wrote dozens, indeed hundreds,of laws, to destroy the Irish nation as elaborately and as legally as possible. As the Irish Protestant Edmund Burke said, the English laws against Irish Catholics - or "penal laws", as they are shamefully called - were "a complete system, full of coherence and consistency, well digested and well composed in all its parts. It was a machine of wise and deliberate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”

The Mass, of course, could not be said: to have it said or to say it meant life imprisonment. But neither could Catholics be educated: to set up a Catholic school was equally a matter of life imprisonment. And Catholics were to be robbed by law: "Every Roman Catholic was... to forfeit his estate to his nearest Protestant relation, until, through a profession of what he did not believe, he redeemed by his hypocrisy what the law had transferred to the kinsman as the recompense of his profligacy." The law encouraged Protestants to steal from their Catholic relations, or even pretended relations; and not just large amounts, but everything - every bit of property they had. "When thus turned out of doors from his paternal estate, he was disabled from acquiring any other by any industry, donation, or charity; but was rendered a foreigner in his native land, only because he retained the religion, along with the property, handed down to him from those who had been the old inhabitants of that land before him."

"....Catholics, condemned to beggary and to ignorance in their native land, have been obliged to learn the principles of letters, at the hazard of all their other principles, from the charity of your enemies. They have been taxed to their ruin at the pleasure of necessitous and profligate relations, and according to the measure of their necessity and profligacy,"

"Examples of this are many and affecting. Some of them are known by a friend who stands near me in this hall. It is but six or seven years since a clergyman, of the name of Malony, a man of morals, neither guilty nor accused of anything noxious to the state, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment for exercising the functions of his religion; and after lying in jail two or three years, was relieved by the mercy of government from perpetual imprisonment, on condition of perpetual banishment. A brother of the Earl of Shrewsbury, a Talbot, a name respectable in this country whilst its glory is any part of its concern, was hauled to the bar of the Old Bailey, among common felons, and only escaped the same doom, either by some error in the process, or that the wretch who brought him there could not correctly describe his person,—I now forget which. In short, the persecution would never have relented for a moment, if the judges, superseding (though with an ambiguous example) the strict rule of their artificial duty by the higher obligation of their conscience, did not constantly throw every difficulty in the way of such informers. But so ineffectual is the power of legal evasion against legal iniquity, that it was but the other day that a lady of condition, beyond the middle of life, was on the point of being stripped of her whole fortune by a near relation to whom she had been a friend and benefactor; and she must have been totally ruined, without a power of redress or mitigation from the courts of law, had not the legislature itself rushed in, and by a special act of Parliament rescued her from the injustice of its own statutes..."

It says enough about the power of brute prejudice, of a kind we see in the highest places today, that this unanswerable attack on a disgraceful law lost Burke an election he should have won. The English had been taught to hate Catholics so much that they evidently thought that nothing done to them could be wrong or unjust.

What the Mandate is designed to do, mutatis mutandis, is exactly this. This is why the political and media leadership of your country has fought for it so obstinately, so savagely, and so underhandedly; this is why it took even a narrow defeat with murderous rage. It is because the real purpose of this abomination is to exclude Christians and especially Catholics from economic life. In a world in which money is the only power that can really affect politics - as Obama and his people know all too well - it is intolerable to them that there should be a number, however small, of rich people and of company owners who take their Christianity seriously. In this day and age it is not yet possible to make it legal for a man of the government's party to simply steal the property of his dissenting relatives; and besides, there is not - or not yet - a simple test of identity to separate the government's friends from its enemies, as membership in the "Protestant" church was in Burke's time. But they can impose a tax for a purpose that no Christian can accept, and then savagely penalize them - not by jailing them, which is not what they want, but by fining them into ruin.

Look at it in this light, and the whole mechanism becomes lucid, clear, rational and perfectly designed for its purpose. It is intended to make it impossible for Christians to have any independent economic activity in the USA, by making sure that they either have to resign their principles or be taxed into bankruptcy for them. Of course, they could not possibly declare their purpose; of course they lied from beginning to end. But that, and nothing else, is what this Mandate does.

Incidentally, this also gives you an insight into the real view that Obama and his henchmen have of the political process in your country, and of the nature of political power. This law is not meant to strike at Catholic or Christian faith. It does not try to obtain conversions. It does not set up anything like the imposing apparatus by which republican France, after 1875, worked tirelessly to break the ancestral Catholicism of its masses. The only thing that matters, the thing for which they have fought, the thing for which they have lied, the thing for which they ruined Bart Stupak and compromised the word of the President of the United States of America, was to be sure that no rich Catholics or Christians should exist. Wealth had to remain exclusively among people who had no problem with paying tax to distribute IUDs and abortifacients with a shovel. Because in the eyes of Obama and his crowd, only the very rich are politically significant. This attempt to winnow the Christians from their numbers makes it perfectly clear.

Today Cameron and Hollande declare the omnipotence of corrupt politicians. "IF WE SAY THAT GAY MARRIAGE IS MARRIAGE, THEN IT'S MARRIAGE." Everybody bend their heads to the almighty deities Corruption and Mendacity, thundering down their law from the mountains of Davos.

Read this - http://townhall.com/columnists/dianawest/2011/11/18/shine_a_light_on_americas_afghan-iraqi_rathole/page/full/ - with a strong brush or with a steel comb to put back your hair, because it is sure to stand on end. UNIMAGINABLE. That at a time of crisis the Washington DC leadership should frivolously waste TENS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS - and I am not, repeat not, exaggerating - on failed policies simply beggars belief. I was in favour of the Afghanistan war, but unless it is fought as a war ought to be fought - rather than this crazed nation-building waste in a place that does not want to be nation-built - then I say take the soldiers home and we'll take our chances with Al Qaeda and the other swine. We can't afford this trash, and I don't just mean the USA. Unless crazed war spending is curtailed, it's not only the USA that will lose. You can't bribe people into being your friend, especially if you entered their country by force. The WWII parallel simply does not hold: not only in Italy and Germany, but even in Japan, there were considerable forces - ultimately the majority - that ranged from a willingness to put up with, to an enthusiastic support of, democratic governance and American supremacy. Guess what? In Afghanistan there aren't. And that is not just because this is a Muslim country, but because the forces that supported a secular and westernizing policy took the Soviet side in the first civil war and were destroyed. London is thick with Afghani refugees from the old pro-Soviet government, who will never go home again. The barbarous murder of Najibullah represents the utter defeat of these forces, and successive waves of mujaheddin and Taliban tyranny have pushed Afghanistan ever further in one direction and one direction alone. When the Allies entered Italy, Germany and Japan they found whole groups of liberals, Christian democrats, social democrat, republican opponents, coming out of millions of hiding places and blinking in the sudden sunlight; in Afghanistan, they found... tribal Muslim warriors, and more tribal Muslim warriors. The whole hearts-and-mind project is nonsense and must be killed; it has degenerated into the most monstrous festival of corruption and theft in history, in which enormous sums go directly over to the enemy and allow them to go on murdering (what they do is not really fighting) our troops. And if the war can't be fought without this monstrous waste of money, then it must not be fought at all. As for those who allowed it to take this grotesque shape, impeachment's too good for any one of them.

I haven't been this disgusted at my country since 1982, when we betrayed Britain over the Falklands. (The British won, too, which means that Italy got nothing for its betrayal of an ally except shame and disgrace. But then Italians are like that: they are always at their most stupid when they think they are being crafty.) The Meredith Kercher murder was one of the most squalid and cruel events in recent memory, and the guilt of Knox and Sollecito was obvious to anyone who could read. So that is how you get off with murder: be pretty, have a shameless and prosperous family who sets up a media circus on your behalf among gullible American hacks, and manage to look pathetic every time you are on screen. Then evidence be damned. Well, the need for wide structural reform of Italian justice has been cryingly obvious for decades, but this proves once and for all that a moral reformation is even more desperately needed. Nobody who took their oath to justice seriously for two minutes could ever have released such a sentence. When the Supreme Court hears the inevitable prosecution appeal and finds Knox guilty as they have to, she and her accomplices will be mocking at us from her bolthole across the ocean. And her victim can rest in her grave - abused, forgotten and unavenged.

The arrogance of the pundit can be excused if s/he has something at least moderately intelligent, interesting or arguable to say. But that a grown man with enough brain cells to move on two feet should deliver himself of the following atrocity and live not to even be mocked or subjected to proper invective (not insult, for to call such a man a moron is not an insult but a description) is quite frankly more than flesh and blood can stand. So, if nobody else will take the trouble to brand Emmett Tyrrell as a mind-repelling moron for it, I will:
Will no one from a younger generation note the obvious -- to wit, in the arts and in politics, the 1960s generation was a bust?

There are no Faulkners, no Hemingways, no Fitzgeralds. There are no Aaron Coplands or Virgil Thompsons. In drama, there is David Mamet, but that is about it. In Europe, there may be a little more life in the 1960s has-beens, but not much.

Jeff Jones, the greatest painter since Picasso, the greatest American painter of all time, has just died. The grief for this terrible loss would be enough to comment on this piece of excreta excreted from the wrong orifice; but that a man should seriously claim the already-forgotten Virgil Thomson as an everlasting glory for the nation that produced Jack Kirby and Robert Altman simply beggars belief. This man has lived through one of the epochs of Western art and has learned nothing from or of it; which can only mean that he has made a conscious decision to reject it - to refuse the best and finest products of his time. Now it might be said that things like the agonizing circumstances of Jones' death - surely due in part to substance abuse in the past and possibly to his/her sex change operation - could point to a destructive and dangerous aspect among Sixties artists; after all, many of them, from Janis Joplin to Jerry Garcia, suffered similar fates. The fact is not in dispute, and a discussion on it could well be constructive. Only that is not what Tyrrell does: on the contrary, he mocks those who have lived into their seventies, from Bob Dylan to Paul McCartney. Evidently, not enough of the greatest and finest of their time have died to satisfy him. One would never have thought that anyone could possibly make Ann Coulter look good, but she, at least, likes the Grateful Dead.

So the BBC - among others - professes itself surprised at the depth and width of rage revealed in the demonstrations against student fee increases.

Well, let's see. Any Briton who is not a member of the class of down-and-outs - those who have no hope of permanent work and who are housed by councils - is already under a heavy doom to own money to the banks all his/her life because of his/her supposed universal duty to "get on the housing ladder" - that is, to make a life-altering debt in order to "own" the title to a house that really will belong to a bank so long as s/he lives. Now they are informed that, because the British state is itself near bankruptcy thanks to its unconditional support to those same banks, they are now going to be saddled with debt from the moment when they begin their initiation into adulthood and middle-class living.

(That is what a college course in Britain is today; an initiation period, in the anthropological sense of the term. It is not a coincidence that universities began to swell in size just as the previous initiatic period, military service, was being abolished. People instinctively seek to build these entrance rituals to adulthood.)

In other words, this government has decided that there is no moment in the adult life of a productive, wage-earning Briton in which s/he will not be in debt to the banks. The transfer of the country's capital from the public to the financial institutions is virtually complete.

Incomprehensible anger? Sounds to me like someone is beginning to wake up.

If the Glenn Beck rally has been the success it is claimed, that is the worst news, for the American right, for America, and for the world, that anyone could conceive. Beck is a creature of Rupert Murdoch, and anyone who looks at Murdoch knows that he is corruption incarnate and personified. A thrice-married libertine who managed somehow to worm his way into a Papal knighthood while his newspapers persecuted the Church, a tax fraud who manages to pay less than one per cent of his British income in tax thanks to a monumental structure of tax-haven corporations, an enemy of competition and free trade whose purpose in every industry he enters is monopoly, a brute who sells his newspapers on nothing but sex and thuggery, this man was born to poison everything he touched.

To deal with him is to be compromised. Ask Brent Bozell III (who however has been growing depressingly silent on the monster of late) which of the four TV networks is most outrageously committed to obscenity, moral looseness in every area, exaggerated violence and showy, narcissistic sex; and then ask all the conservative pundits and personalities, beginning with Sarah Palin herself, how they can keep a straight face preaching the benefits of Judeo-Christian culture and family values knowing that an hour or two later the same network would be broadcasting "Family guy" or some obscene "reality" show. Debbie Schlussel may be a self-righteous harpy notable mostly for her failures, but in opposing him, everyone who works for him, and everything he stands for, she is doing righteous work; and someone has to.

When Dr.Martin Luther King called together the famous rally which Beck imitated, he had spent more than a decade building up the civil rights movement and his own position in it; he had risked his life (which he was one day soon to lose) in its service, and had acquired such stature that almost every notable black personality in America, beginning with Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson, was willing and glad to stand by his side. Who is Glenn Beck? What has he done to give him the moral authority to imitate Dr.King, to call out a political movement in the nation's capital, to claim to speak in the name of God and the constitution? Nothing. He is there because he has been promoted by Murdoch's bloodsucking, liberticidal organization; and the hand that moves him is the hand of the international crook from down under. This is the take-over of the conservative movement by the media colossus that pays no taxes, that teaches (and pratices) sexual looseness and mental brutality, that has nothing but a negative, acidic, destructive impact on society. God help us.