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.

It was once possible to believe that Ann Coulter was, if not either couth or convincing, at least convinced; that what she said, she believed. I even once had an argument with someone on the issue. Well, as far as I am concerned that was disproved to the hilt by her behaviour in the last election, where that supposed maenad of the movement right aimed all her slings and arrows at John McCain - even going on the record as saying that he was more liberal than HIlary Clinton! - while promoting, as the hero of the conservative conscience, none other than the sleazy, conscienceless, thousand-faced deal-maker Mitt Romney!

For anyone who wanted to see, that should have been the sign that this posturing professional of aggression and insult was in the pocket of the party establishment, the RINOs and Rowes, and that her game was to keep conservative anger stoked while herding it along safe, establishment-friendly ways. Anyone who supports Romney - or Giuliani, for that matter - cannot possibly be a serious conservative. Even the poor excuse that his shameless performance as Governor of Massachusetts was dictated by the complexion of that state holds no water: Romney had no need to look for the governorship of Massachusetts, of all the States of the Union. How about Utah, for instance, the Mormon homeland, whose winter Olympics he was reputed to have saved? And this was the man Coulter promoted to her readers as the champion of conservative causes.

Now, however, it has to be impossible to hold any illusion about her genuineness. Anyone who does not agree that she is a party hack eagerly in the service of party management must be wilfully blind. Some of us still remember one of her low points, when she made a nasty joke about John Edwards, with the clear implication that, one, Edwards was homosexual, and, two, that this made him contemptible (http://fpb.livejournal.com/231050.html). Well, now it seems that homosexuals are only contemptible if they are Democrats. Republican homosexuals are fine, upstanding members of the community, whose money she is glad to take as keynote speaker in a meeting. What a complete fake.

Not so long ago, I got into trouble with several of my more conservative friends by making a no-holds-barred attack on Jonah Goldberg's view of recent European history. One of my main points was that Goldberg rewrote history for purely partisan reasons.

Now Mr.Goldberg has come out with a piece so monstrous in its tribal atrocity, so completely beyond the pale, so appalling in its demonization of political enemies, that one wonders whether any of his supporters could possibly bring themselves to defend it: http://townhall.com/columnists/JonahGoldberg/2008/08/15/nightmare_on_dem_street.

I have no words bad enough for this kind of production. Treating a human being, even a bad human being, as a monster from a horror movie, revelling in the imagery of hacking, cutting, killing, destroying the monster, seems to me completely impossible to justify. Now, I find Clinton detestable in many ways (his public declaration that he would not take on any public servant who opposed Wade vs.Roe was unforgivable), and I have been known to giggle at the discomfiture of his wife. But there is a difference. I have been accused of dehumanizing my enemies; but I swear that at the most raging depths of my fury, in the most shameful of my outbursts, it never even occurred to me to use about the worst of my enemies the kind of language that Jonah Goldberg uses - it really seems as if he does - as a witticism. Yes, may God forgive and endure us all: he really seems to think that he is saying something funny and that we should be laughing. He means to brighten our day.

This is the man who argued that socialism and Fascism are so similar that there is no great need to draw much of a distinction; indeed, who talks of "Liberal Fascism" as if Liberals routinely murdered their enemies in the streets, locked them up in concentration camps, or sent them to starve in lonely islands. This is the man who could see no difference between any political opponent and a murderous enemy. And no wonder; because I have seen the kind of mind on display in this article before. I have seen it in Il Popolo d'Italia, in the Voelkischer Beobachter, and in Der Sturmer.

Most of us know that ever since the bloke with the beard took over Cuba, homosexuality - associated with the island's supposed pre-revolutionary past as a haven of Yanqui degeneracy - has been suppressed, persecuted and punished by (what passes in Cuba for) law. Well, no more. Raul Castro seems to have noticed that his putative allies in the extreme left have changed their view on that little matter - and so, from one minute to the next, Cuba has turned from hell for homosexuals to San Francisco without the Diet Coke. In a few days, with the speed and efficiency of tyranny, the Cuban government has passed rules that allow the changing of one's identity, sex-change operations and the eventual legalization of homosexual unions.

Now understand me: I have absolutely no intention of making any direct comparison between the promotion of "gay marriage" and the like, and the horrors of the nineteen-thirties. However little I may like some features of this (and on sex-change operations I am agnostic), it is simply not on the same moral level as the promotion of mass murder. So I positively beg the looking-for-offence brigade not to distort what I am about to say. But this sudden and extreme change of tack by a hardened tyranny looking for support where they had previously had enemies reminds me of nothing so much as Mussolini's appalling race laws of 1938. Apart from their own native loathsomeness, which itself cries vengeance to Heaven, these vicious perversions of the concept of law were execrable because they represented a complete about-face on a matter on which Mussolini had been consistent since 1919, namely toleration and protection of Italy's Jewish population. He sold the Jews down the river, and broke his word given to them over and over again, in order to align himself to a man whom he had previously treated as an enemy and actually nearly gone to war with only four years earlier. Now countries change allies, and Italy's reasons to do so in 1938 were only too easy to see; but to change ally is one thing, and to change your whole ideology to suit your ally is another. Mussolini made himself, not the ally, but the slave of Hitler; in that one dreadful act there were the inevitable seeds of all the seven years that followed.

Of course the Cuban Communist about-face is not on the same level. It does not, for one thing, represent the State suddenly turning a hate-ridden and murderous face to a class of citizens it had always protected before. Where murderousness and inhumanity are concerned, el partido is pretty much where it has always been, not better, but not worse. What is clearly reminiscent of Mussolini is the way that a tyranny throws away decades of practice and implicit principle, however bad, not out of principle but out of transparent and undignified grovelling before an ally.

I wrote this essay some years ago. I still think it is interesting, and besides it has something to do with my remarks (to follow) about JK Rowling.

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