TONY BLAIR’S SPEECH
MANCHESTER UNITED
ENGLAND A CHRISTIAN COUNTRY?
THE OFFENSIVE BBC
FLYING NIGEL
AMERICA THREATENS JUST ABOUT EVERYONE
MAKING SAINTS
Yesterday the Vatican and its Argentinian
Pope made two more saints out of former Popes! Now to be made a saint it’s in
the rules that you’ve got to have worked some kind of miracle during your time
at the top and that miracle had to be witnessed. Okay, that’s fair enough. In
the end it’s all a matter of judgement only the people who’ve done the judging down
the centuries all seem to have come from the same outfit and let me tell you my
friend, we’re not talking Chief Rabbis here!
Naturally once nominated no-one ever gets
turned down!
In the current bevy one of the candidates was
said to have cured someone with severe back ache by a laying on of hands!
Sounds pretty bona fide if you’re one of the goggle-eyed faithful but then
think of it another way. Okay, you’re some humble Italian peon out of the
sticks who’s gone to the Vatican with a back ache around Easter and been lined
up with a few hundred others to meet the man who’s closest to God. Suddenly you
look up and see him smiling down on you and next thing you know his hands are
massaging your shoulders! Well if that isn’t enough cause for producing divine
electricity, next thing you know you’re gratefully kissing his hands out of
which he pops a couple of paracetamol. A few hours later your back pain has
gone and you know you’ve seen God!
It’s a miracle and maybe it is divine
because it’s the Pope that’s done it and he is after all quite simply god’s
representative on earth. And it’s with this kind of cred built up over countless
centuries that the lads at Saint Peter’s have been able to hold the faith over
the humble and keep it preserved. The Borgias were masters at it!
Manicuring the miraculous has been an art
form well maintained into the modern era and kindly don’t knock it! The great
ceremony at the Vatican with the Pope creating new saints brings tens if not
hundreds of thousands of tourists to St Peters and the cash flow generated is
as important to the Italian GDP as pop music is to the British. Excuse me, I’m
talking serious money here with a vast industry of key rings, fridge magnets, plaster
cast saints, virgins, crucifixes, beads, holy water, candles (electronic or
otherwise). Most of it straight out of China. And that’s apart from food and
hotels. All the media in Italy primed up and ready and everyone taking some kind
of cut. Making Saints therefore is as much a traditional part of world catholic
culture as eating chips is for the protestant heritage.
In recent days former Labour Prime Minister
Tony Blair has made an interesting and well balanced speech pointing to the
dangers of Islamic extremism making inroads internationally into societies and
countries all over the globe. He highlighted its dangers for pluralist liberal
democracies, pointed to its areas of advance in recent decades through
political manipulation and military violence then laid out the consequences of
a political failure of Western societies to act in concert in order to counter
its malevolent results. This was a measured, carefully thought out piece of
advice. Its words no doubt a consequence of developments over recent decades
and how he now perceives the current reality. His argument was succinct and
cogent with its major points well integrated throughout.
Yet as I listened to it I had the strange
sensation of having been there before! That he was repeating a history of
circumstances that we had both certainly
lived through but more important than anything else, a history of circumstances
that he as a political leader, WAS PERSONALLY
RESPONSIBLE FOR CREATING.
Let’s take a look at your time of running
the country as Labour Prime Minister from the decade beginning in the
mid-nineteen nineties Mister Blair. One of the things that British people
remember most was the ease with which Islamic religious radical preachers had no
difficulty whatsoever getting into Britain and endlessly preaching
fundamentalist religious and racial hate sermons on London and Birmingham
streets to large crowds of youths. We remember the character of these speeches
and the fact that these people seemed to be able to make them with impunity… that
the police did absolutely nothing to stop them and seemed to have the perpetual
excuse that there was nothing they could
do to stop them. Not only did these preachers seem to have police
protection from the Home Office but seemed to be welcomed as part of New
Labour’s vision of a tolerant society. Indeed, anyone criticizing these
fundamentalist Islamic preachers and their sermons and pointing out their
dangers were, under New Labour, ostracized as intolerant. That
is what British people clearly remember Tony Blair. That you and your
Government welcomed these monsters.
Another thing that British people remember
about you and New Labour was the proliferation of attacks against British
people and Western Culture by Islamic extremist groups that sprang up and
operated with impunity during your time in office, busy with threat and
intimidation on the streets of our major cities as well as throughout the
electronic communication services with their main focus of their attack on the
Jewish Community. Your Government allowed these things to happen and encouraged
them. You furthermore encouraged a diplomatic relationship with the Islamic
Republic of Iran that openly denied the existence of the Holocaust with Jack
Straw maintaining a friendly relationship with senior members of that regime.
However the most interesting and visible
characteristic of your period in office was the facilitation by your Government
of a policy of unchecked and uncontrolled mass Muslim immigration into the
United Kingdom. Over a ten year period some three million Muslim immigrants arrived
here throughout which time the British people were told that they would all add
economic value to British society. And with this a pattern was build up so that
those who questioned or criticized this unrestricted mass Muslim immigration
were told that they were in some way racists!
It was your New Labour Government Tony
Blair that turned northern British towns and cities into large scale Muslim
communities and breeding grounds for Islamic extremism AND NOW YOU HAVE THE DAMNABLE
CHEEK HALF A DECADE LATER TO POINT TO WHAT HAS HAPPENED WITHOUT SAYING WHO WAS
TO BLAME FOR IT. Well thank you for the warning. You yourself did very
nicely in financial terms from your time in British politics while also being
responsible for fundamentally changing the appearance and character of British
society. BUT DON’T GET UP NOW AND TELL US HOW DANGEROUS IT ALL IS WHEN YOU AND
YOUR GOVERNMENT WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR PUTTING IT ALL THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
In short Mister Blair thanks for the speech
but keep your mouth shut.
So, some poxy British English football club
fires its manager and it’s a more important news story than anything else
happening in the world for almost three days!
But then the club is Manchester United and
supposedly it makes all the difference! So what’s so special about Manchester
United?
It’s an interesting question. The club is
American owned, it has no internationally famous players of great or
outstanding ability, it’s not known for any major contribution to charity, its
players are moderately educated at best and their behaviour on the football
field more often poor with no firm example of diligence set. In terms of the
sporting media however, they have developed and nurtured a certain iconographic
status, becoming a carefully manicured brand for a fair part of Manchester’s
working and underclass population. In short they are a business that has become
integral to the culture of one of Britain’s great northern cities.
Not only integral but psychologically
essential. To say that it’s only a poxy football club may sound like a heresy
but that’s only because of the crucial importance of the game in the modern
history of the British working class. And it’s now more important than ever,
firstly because of the recent crucial importance of money and finance in the
promotion of clubs, mainly through the vast inflation that has permeated player
valuation and the transfer system where the REAL profits are made, and
secondly, because of the increasing psychological importance to working people
of ‘their’ club’s success given that they’ve got so little else of worth in
employment or any other forms of status enhancement. In short the club and its
players have become everything!
It’s actually something of a joke! These
Manchester United players who in general terms are not wondrously or
phenomenally skilled or endlessly brilliant, commanding adulation and
offensively ridiculous salaries for a ninety minutes performance which would
not be earned by a teacher, ambulance driver, nurse or policeman in ten years
hard work! Clearly it is not the actual performance that is financially
important but the massaging of a player’s capability and therefore value for
the transfer market, where profit made on the sale of flesh is everything. So
players who earn tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds a week are watched
by fans who pay a very fair portion of their income to see them, and in the
process, quite frankly, ensure that their own children eat poorer food. In all
truth, what kind of working class cultural servility is that? Answer? It’s a
cultural servility built up over time and through tradition resulting in the
fact that the game itself has become subsumed beneath its clubs, i.e. it’s
tribal structure, its players, its clothing (fashion) accessories, its famous
names and its whole iconography. The players may be individually pathetic but
that doesn’t matter because the fans no longer know any better. Anyway, they’re
blinded by a loyalty that verges on an emotional sickness!
The British News media, particularly the
rat end of the tabloids along with BBC Television and Sky, well recognise this
pathetic character of working class culture and play it up for all that’s its
worth. If it’s as important to the working class as life itself it’s because IT IS
LIFE ITSELF.
And that is why, when the relatively new
Manchester United football club manager, David Moyes was sacked after only eleven months on the job
after replacing the long serving Scot, Alex Ferguson, knighted for services to
sport no less, the news became central to the life of the country! More
important than the economy, than employment, than international affairs in the
world, than war and peace… What does this actually say about its people? Actually
there’s a kind of pathos about it, a kind of soporific sickness, that must make
banking executives along with the rest of the British upper middle class feel
full of contempt.
ENGLAND A CHRISTIAN COUNTRY?
Well that’s how David Cameron regards
England. As a Christian country. And why not? That is its heritage which I as a
Jew who has the privilege to live here gladly accept. It has no problem for me
and really shouldn’t have any problem for anyone else only it does. It’s
clearly a problem for Muslims many of whom do not want England to be a
Christian country but a Muslim one. These are people who do not want to live in
a pluralistic, liberal, democratic society where such values as tolerance
predominate. They want England to be a society where women get stoned to death
for adultery and kids get their hands or legs chopped off for nicking a bottle
of water. They want Islamic Sharia law to operate in England and have found
themselves a nice little niche to operate out of in BBC Television!
How many people have noticed how BBC
television programs, Sundays or weekdays, having to do with questions of
Religion or Politics always seem to have a careful concentration of
strategically placed vociferous Muslims,
both men and women, sitting right at the front who seem to take over the show
whose voices drown out those of any other faith. It has become more noticeable
than ever in recent years, particularly when these people are given a kind of
endless carte blanche to attack the Jewish State of Israel on every occasion
possible by the program’s presenter. Historically and currently England is a
Christian country where the values of fair play and tolerance meld happily into
all forms of life. These values are now under threat. The leadership of the
church itself is of the opinion the England is a post-Christian country due to
the decline of Christian worship, the rise of Islam as a religion practiced and
the multiplicity of new faiths worshipped and practiced. Quite frankly and to
put it bluntly, saying this is to stick your arse up for a whipping. Go into
any one of the thousands of churches whose doors are open on a Sunday for
prayer or ceremony and you’ll get a friendly tolerant welcome.
Tolerance is everything. It’s often but
sadly not always, part of a mutuality. An understanding that people need to
work together. Christianity wasn’t always like that. It had to go through
modification and change over the centuries to become a more humanized form of
guidance and even today it might still work for many. What doesn’t work anymore
is an unreconstructed intolerance and the knife at your throat. The English
people of the early 21st century don’t want that kind of thing
because they don’t want to be regulated, neither by the bureaucratic strictures
of a European polity or the religious strictures of Islam. So let me tell you,
packing your bags is easy if you don’t like it here.
Given the activities of BBC Television and
its reporters in recent months is has become increasingly relevant to ask, just
how many of you people are working for the American National Intelligence
Agency or the British GCHQ at Cheltenham?
Considering the total bias of its reporting
of all the events in the Ukraine and the quite extraordinary conduct of its
reporters actively participating in various events on behalf of Nazi
nationalist groups in Kiev, one cannot but think that their journalistic remit
came directly from the British and American intelligence services who were behind
the nationalist inspired coup d’état. There is simply no other explanation for
their conduct which had an unvarnished surface character of extremism. Let us
be clear on this point. I’m not talking about any simple political support for the
nationalists. What I mean here is an actual involvement in and manipulation of
events.
BBC Television has an interesting history. In
the 1950’s it was politically Foreign Office Establishment, packing its Russian
Broadcasting service with ex-Baltic States émigrés whose Second World War
contact with home grown Nazis was more than dodgy, same as it was with
Ukrainians! Never mind, the Corporation was pretty good at using Nazi SS
marching tunes as a background for its sports programs. Charming, but that was
nothing compared to the unbridled snobbery of its reportage and panel games most
of which were presided over by BBC Establishment Snob-In-Chief Richard Dimbleby
who’d literally go into utterly reverential hush tones when anything Royal was
in the air. It was Dimbleby himself who was the official connection between
anything Royal and the masses.
However despite its quintessentially
Establishment character it somehow always managed to portray a certain balance
of political point of view. Balance is a key word here. You kind of knew which
side it was on but the opposing point of view was never left out or openly stated
then simply attacked. You might disagree with a BBC Television presentation of
facts but it always left room for dialogue and debate which was never far from
forthcoming, whether it was Korea, Vietnam, or a wide variety of conflicts. In
the case of the Ukraine on the other hand, all of this has been firmly chucked
out the window. There had been absolutely no presentation of any other
viewpoint except that of the United States with the snappy tones of William Hague
yapping like a poodle not far behind. If
it wasn’t such a serious abandonment of proper conduct in journalism it would
be more like a joke because it is, simply, extreme.
What we are hearing from BBC Television
reporters in respect of anything coming out of the Ukraine are the words of the
American State Department and quite frankly, why are we paying our license
money for that? More important than anything else however is that the
abandonment of impartiality has been so total, so shameless. How much did these
squidgy people sell themselves for I wonder?
He’s a man at the head of a political party
without a single elected representative in Parliament. He’s a man that all the
other political parties along with large swathes of the media would love to
damage and do anything they can to damage! How
about your wife, Nigel, isn’t she German, when the media rats are quizzing
him about UKIP’s policy about using European labour… But low blow or high he
knows how to take it. Always that indefatigable smile keeping him aloft and
flying high over any plain dirt.
Nigel Farage is no ordinary politician. He’s
a man with a very serious issue who speaks the same language that so many of us
do. If he’s visceral and so naturally at one with such a wide framework of the
electorate right now it’s because he and the electorate coincide. They’re
speaking to each other in a way that doesn’t demand any effort and with that
kind of mountain on his side he won’t be thrown over or dismayed by anything
small… any reactionary rubbish in his own camp, any mischance remarks or past
mistakes long forgotten. He’ll ride it all like a wave, confident that he’ll
return flying high. The same can’t be said for Clegg and the Liberal Democrats
or Cameron and the Tories. One more skeleton coming out the cupboard from that
neck of the woods like another Lib-Dem paedophile job and Clegg loses it all. As
though this pasty faced little mumchancer hasn’t lost it already!
But then Nigel of the sharp profile hasn’t
got anything to lose. This is all about Europe, in or out, and he knows
instinctively that British people don’t like being bullied or told what to do…
and not getting the chance to have their say in a Referendum is more like
bullying than anything let alone lack of trust. Enter Nigel Farage and they get
the chance to have their say. That’s all it is. If Cameron had given it to them
a year back it’s less likely he’d take a kicking now but take a kicking he will.
Only thing then is where will Nigel go after the 15th? Onwards and
up I suspect. These May elections are only a springboard for UKIP. The real
challenge for the Party will come next year at the General Election. If they
can bust the Liberal Democrats, pinning them back to 20 seats and take twenty
more off a nervy Cameron, with forty of Nigel’s Blue Devils in Parliament he’ll
be a real force to be reckoned with.
With the prospect of national power hanging in the air for the Party only then will we really see what he’s made of. You just never know what power can do to a man!
Early in the 1950’s America extensively
bombed North Korea on behalf of the United Nations. During the 1970’s it bombed
North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and invaded all three countries. From 1960 to
1985 it sponsored invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua and during these decades facilitated
the establishment of brutal right wing military dictatorships in Indonesia and
Greece, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, Bolivia and Guatemala. In the early
nineties it was responsible for politically dismantling the federation of
states that made up Yugoslavia and then bombing Serbia. Soon after it bombed
Iraq then leading a military coalition invaded that country. Meanwhile it
bombed Libya, sponsoring the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi. It also invaded the
British Commonwealth island territory of Grenada removing its political leader.
Currently it has an extensive military presence in Afghanistan. This thumbnail
sketch of America’s global political and military activity over the last six
decades is by no means fully inclusive!
It’s current presence on the world stage
however presages potential political and military engagement of an altogether
more serious nature bringing it into direct confrontation with Russia, a former
world superpower and China, one that’s emerging. The possibility for direct
military conflict with either cannot be ruled out at this stage given its
recent highly aggressive posturing in both Europe and the Far East. With
President Obama’s recent visit to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the
Philippines still fresh in mind the situation in the Far East has suddenly felt
America’s finger on the ignition switch.
The 7th Pacific Fleet of the
United States currently stationed off Japan is the world’s most powerful
military striking force. Japan currently has a serious territorial dispute with
China over the ownership of a handful of islands in the South China Sea which,
by the way, both nations also have with South Korea and the Philippines! Over
the last year this dispute has burned mild to lukewarm in the shape of various
confrontations involving vessels on all sides ranging from fishing boats to
minor naval craft. Nothing serious, but still fraught with potential for
matters getting out of hand. Both China and Japan have serious claims on the
same islands which are currently under Japanese stewardship. The question
always at issue is this… is it worth having a hot little war over a few lumps
of rock?
Time to heat up the ante! ENTER
THE UNITED STATES!
During his visit to Tokyo, President Obama
reminded his hosts that the United States had a military treaty with Japan
which would see it coming to the aid of that country in any military or
territorial dispute with anyone else! Obama’s remarks were, make no mistake,
very pointedly directed at China and were a clear military threat!
In the context of a dispute over a handful
of islands, of the growing military and economic power of China in the region
and of the huge trading relationship that America has with that country, with a
vast surplus held by the latter, the American military assurance to Japan can
only be seen as a sturdily confrontational gesture and a throwing down of the
American military gauntlet as a challenge to China. To put it at its best, in
any economic or geo-political sense, such an action, whether calculated or not
is extremely risky. America is clearly putting a marker down in China’s face as
the main economic and military power of the region. The problem with this is
that the United States is economically bankrupt and in hoc to China for
trillions. The challenge is indeed no more than a very dangerous flight of
fancy by a military superpower not quite what it was and military superpowers not
quite what they were are psychologically dangerous. The Chinese can certainly
afford to wait but they are not quite
a people who are likely to forget.
The Americans have been around for a few hundred years. With the Chinese it’s thousands!
President Obama’s new Pacific Facing
Strategy for the United States is likely to run into the hard rock of emerging
Chinese power and might turn out to be an ill thought out win or lose strategy.
In other words reckless. In the West however, the gauntlet thrown down by the
American State Department to Russia is equally strategically serious. Taking
hold of the Ukraine and putting NATO military bases there a short distance from
the Russian border would represent a huge strategic advance for the United
States military in geo-political interest to contain the old enemy. For the
Russians it would represent far more than a catastrophe given the historical
circumstances of the relationship between the two countries. The Ukraine was
fought over to the death between the armies of the Soviet Union and the Nazis
in the Second World War. Russia lost many millions of its soldiers there
fighting the Nazi military machine and emerged triumphant after some of the
bloodiest battles of the entire war had taken place there. From the early
1920’s the Ukraine had become an integral part of the Soviet Union with its
people, both Ukrainian and Russian a key part of that political union. Apart
from its agricultural and industrial wealth, both mainly concentrated in the
east it would be historically inconceivable for Russia to allow the United
States to get a military foothold there, yet this is exactly what the Americans
are pushing for and in doing so are inevitably facing up for a conflict with
Russia. In this we are seeing them attempt to draw Europe into a combined
military camp.
This presages the possibility of a major
armed conflict between the military forces of the United States and Russia in
the West, the outcome of which could be catastrophic. Yet this is exactly what
the current foreign policy of the United States seems to be driving for. As
things stand the character of this conflict could indeed become global with the
United States engaged militarily with China in the East. As outlined earlier
the United States has certainly been no stranger to military conflict in the
last six decades. However, such conflict has always involved conventional
military hardware. This is hardly likely to remain the case. It is my judgement
that for fundamentally economic reasons the United States will provoke global
conflict in order to retain the economic hegemony that it is now losing fast.
As it once sought to fix national political regimes through local wars,
corruption and covert political manipulation, so it will now resort to
altogether wider and more dangerous military actions.
The danger currently posed to the peace of the world
by the United States to my mind borders on the catastrophic.
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