David Calling on National Review Online

David Calling on National Review Online http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com David Calling is the daily web log of David Pryce-Jones, a senior editor of National Review and author of nine novels and twelve works of nonfiction. en-us © National Review Online 2009. All Rights Reserved webmaster@nationalreview.com (NRO Webmaster) Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:00:03 -0500 Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:00:03 -0500 NRO RSS Generator v1.0 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 5 http://www2.nationalreview.com/images/nro_rsslogo.jpg David Calling on National Review Online http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com 144 80 National Review Online Remembering the Fall of the Berlin Wall -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDQyZGZkYmRiZDM4MzQ0NjExZmQxYzQ4NDE1NjQ4NzE= The sight of the Berlin Wall told you all you needed to know about Communism. The way it ran through the city, the ugliness, the armed guards with field-glasses dominating it, were a monument in cement to inhumanity. As a soldier stationed in Germany I had had sightings of the whole Iron Curtain, its minefields, electrified wiring, and watchtowers. Later journalistic assignments in East Berlin were enough to convince me that Soviet Communism had East Germany in its grip and would never relent. In October 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev came to East Berlin and warned his faithful party servant Erich Honecker not to be left behind by history. Gorbachev and Honecker -- I didn't believe anything they might be saying, and prepared myself for a declaration of emergency, military rule, the shooting of large numbers of demonstrators, nuclear alert, the lot. Honecker would have had no scruple about giving orders to fire on the crowd, and nor would Erich Mielke, brutal head of the Stasi. Egon Krenz likes to boast that as prime minister he killed nobody but this was because he lost the chance to do so. Plans for armed repression certainly existed. Instead, as often seems the case at historic turning points, accident took over. Gyula Horn, on behalf of the Hungarian Communist party, decided to open the Hungarian section of the Iron Curtain. To a certain extent, the Hungarians wanted to make life difficult for the Soviets, but more generally, they hadn't perceived that from that moment East Germans would come and go as they pleased in huge numbers. The moment the Soviet bloc was no longer a properly controlled entity the Berlin Wall became a relic. That November 20 years ago, Günter Schabowski was the East German Politburo member who had the task of explaining to the world's press this sudden and unexpected breech in the Soviet empire. He had drawn the short straw. Maybe he was even an honest man, as such types go. Once he was no longer a Communist apparatchik, he took a job as a lowly journalist in Rothenburg, an unspoilt little town in West Germany, and there I interviewed him. At the outset of his famous press conference, he was to say, he had had no intention of declaring that the Berlin Wall was now open. But the questions threw him off balance, (Daniel Johnson, son of Paul Johnson, was one of the questioners) and he misspoke -- as politicians like to put it -- giving the unintended impression that people could indeed now cross the Wall freely. Within a short time, the picks and jack-hammers were out and cheering people were dismantling the Wall. In another interview, I questioned the Stasi officer who had been on duty that night at the crucial point. When Schabowski's press conference brought the demonstrators charging towards him and his men, he would willingly have opened fire but needed the order to do so to cover himself. His urgent telephone call to his superiors for instructions went unanswered. What is the likelihood that this was deliberate rather than incompetent? So this officer and his bewildered Stasi men were overrun with their weapons in hand, and so Schabowski played the sort of minor role on whom the plot turns that Shakespeare loved to write about, and so Gorbachev was as surprised as the rest of the world to be granted the great good fortune of entering the history books as the man who freed millions from Communism. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDQyZGZkYmRiZDM4MzQ0NjExZmQxYzQ4NDE1NjQ4NzE= Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:54:24 -0400 Stop Press -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWUxNzhkOTlmZTAyMjRiMTEwZTE3MGNmNzgzYzg3OTg= Abdulbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, is alive and doing quite well, thank you. In July he was declared to have terminal cancer and therefore was sure to be dead within three months. On compassionate grounds, therefore, he was released from prison and sent back to a rapturous reception in his native Libya. The three months have passed, and Megrahi is reported in the Sunday Telegraph to be showing “no sign of deterioration” but having telephone conversations long enough “to suggest that Megrahi is not at death's door,” as the Telegraph puts it. If he dies within a short span -- a year or two, say, it will come as a surprise. I rather expect him to turn up in Cairo or somewhere like Monte Carlo. The man is a walking lie, and everything that has passed between him, Muammer Gaddhafi and the British government stinks to high heaven. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWUxNzhkOTlmZTAyMjRiMTEwZTE3MGNmNzgzYzg3OTg= Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:53:49 -0400 We Need a Muggeridge for Iran -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmRjNDY0YjVjMGYzYTkwOTg0ZWNiODcyMDBhMmU3MmU= Malcolm Muggeridge in his day was one of the rare foreign correspondents who reported what the Soviet Union was really like under Stalin. And what satirical scorn he reserved for those who thought they were wandering in Utopia. Listen to this extract from a book of his about the rich idiots then to be encountered: <blockquote> There were earnest advocates of the humane killing of cattle who looked up at the massive headquarters of the OGPU [the secret police at the time] with tears of gratitude in their eyes, earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented when the necessity for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was explained to them, earnest clergymen who walked reverently through anti-God museums and reverently turned over the pages of atheistic literature, earnest pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across Red Square and bombing planes darken the sky, earnest town-planning specialists who stood outside over-crowded, ramshackle tenements and muttered: 'If only we had something like this in England!' </blockquote> The credulity of these fellow-travellers, Muggeridge recorded, astonished even hardened Soviet officials. This anthology passage has come to mind several times recently in connection with present-day fellow-travellers visiting Iran in just that same spirit of willing self-deception. Here are advocates of human rights enthusing over the general happiness of Iranians even while disgusting crimes of murder and rape are routine in the prisons. Here are ecologists promoting windmills everywhere at home, obsessed with their carbon footprint while oblivious to the Iranian nuclear program. Socialists and Leftists in a permanent fury about American foreign policy have nothing to say about Iranian sponsorship of terror far and wide. Pacifists and aesthetes are so eager to see the splendours of Qom and Mashhad that they are oblivious to the Islamist Republic's testing of long-range missiles and repeated threats to exterminate its enemies. Feminists eager to uncover gender discrimination in their own sphere respond to the plight of Iranian women by praising the attractive colours of their clothing. Tourism to Iran is apparently the latest fashion among rich Westerners, and they come back saying that the country is peaceful, prosperous, no danger to anyone but altogether a brilliant success. My dear, let's meet up at Isfahan, you have to see those mosques. Only a few short years ago, these very same rich Westerners were adamant about refusing to go to South Africa for fear of seeming to condone apartheid. As for Franco's Spain, it was out of bounds for such people for decades on the strict moral principle that the regime's violence was intolerable. Even Salazar's Portugal was forbidden. Iran is a great deal more vicious, indeed fascist, than those formerly pariah states, yet it is excused as they were not. There doesn't seem to be anyone with Malcolm Muggeridge's powers of mockery to explode this latest odious example of double standards. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmRjNDY0YjVjMGYzYTkwOTg0ZWNiODcyMDBhMmU3MmU= Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:46:15 -0400 Blairly Hopeful -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjRhYjU2NTMyNzdkMzg5NTZmZTMxNzQyNTVjODllZWE= England is a strange place these days. A sort of political volcano has exploded, and the significance of it is not clear. According to pretty well everyone with access to free speech, fascism has erupted. The British National party has been making surreptitious headway for some time now, but restricted to winning a seat on some local council here or there. Suddenly in elections for the European parliament in Brussels, the BNP got about 900,000 votes, entitling it under proportional representation to two seats. One of those seats goes to Nick Griffin, the BNP leader. Griffin is far from a Hitler or Mussolini, far even from suitably streamlined European fascists of today like Jorg Haidar or Jean-Marie Le Pen. Overweight, he waddles. His face seems designed to be incapable of smiling, and he has no humour, no powers of persuasion, no gift for repartee. This glum figure is undoubtedly a racist, an anti-Semite, an ignoramus, and a liar about the unsavory things he has done and said on his way towards the top of the BNP. Was it right of the BBC to invite this man on to Any Questions, its flagship program devoted to discussions of the political and social issues of the day? By and large, the public approves that decision, seeing this as an issue of free speech and the need for debate. But unfortunately the chairman of the program and the other panellists -- party political hacks for the most part -- and especially the hand-picked audience, behaved as though they were there to lynch Griffin. Opinion polls afterwards showed that this created a backlash, and as many as 22 percent have said that they now would consider voting BNP. Argument and good sense should have destroyed Griffin but instead rudeness revealed only the poor character of those being so offensive. Griffin has only one point to make, namely that immigration is out of control and British people no longer feel that this is their country. He hasn't the intelligence to make this point very well, but it resonates with the people who find themselves living amidst the immigrants. Nobody seems to have worked out that mass immigration and the welfare state are incompatible. British people see immigrants receiving benefits, housing, and the rest of it on a scale that is neither deserved nor available to them. Post-war governments, whether Conservative or Labour, have created this confusion and taken every measure to pretend either that it is not happening or that it doesn't matter. In short, these politicians have been effective fascist-spawning agents. The BNP and Griffin are monuments to their incompetence and cowardly dissembling. As though on cue, a speechwriter for Tony Blair now reveals that the Blair government had a deliberate policy of encouraging mass immigration while ensuring that the electorate was told nothing about it. As the well-known columnist Melanie Phillips has put it, here was “a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage.” In the next 25 years, moreover, some 7 million more immigrants are expected to be added to the population. There is of course a genuinely fascist element in the country, consisting of groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, al-Muhajiroun, al-Ghurabaa, and others who also have only one point -- they want a Muslim Britain as part of their projected Muslim caliphate, and they are working for what is ultimately conquest of everyone else. So as might be expected, the Islamo-fascist front and the BNP feed one another. Again as though on cue, Tony Blair is in the headlines, as he looks set to fill the new post of president of Europe for a fixed term. His supporters are waging a campaign to soften up the electorate to his appointment. Democracy in Europe being what it is, the decision will be taken by the 27 heads of state meeting in secret conclave, a process just as closed and pre-determined as the selection of the Communist party general secretary in Soviet days, or a new pope in the Vatican. If President Blair handles immigration in Europe with the dishonesty and fecklessness that he did in Britain, then the continent will have to deal with other and nastier Griffins and their nationalist parties. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjRhYjU2NTMyNzdkMzg5NTZmZTMxNzQyNTVjODllZWE= Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:30:45 -0400 The Zeal of the Converts -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzczMzQ5MTIyNTIxZDY0ZWFlMjhkNGM1NjU2MDYxMzg= The Pakistani army is advancing in strength into South Waziristan, and in that wild and tribal region it is encountering training camps. A sort of Muslim International Brigade has been forming, on the lines of the volunteers who once flocked to the Spanish civil war. Ominously, those being trained, according to the Washington Post, include a number of jihadis recruited abroad. Some are Muslims who have taken up citizenship in one or another country in Europe. For instance, four Swedes have been arrested, one of them being Mehdi Ghezali, an alumnus of Guantanamo. Quite a few come from Britain, which already has its quota of home-grown and Pakistan-trained Muslim terrorists, including the four who exploded the bombs in the London subway, killing over 50 people and wounding 700, and the two who set off bombs in Tel Aviv. The U.S. has in custody one Bryant Neal Vinas of Long Island, N.Y., but originally from Peru and Argentina. On a Taliban video released for German consumption appears a gunman identified as “Abu Ibrahim the American,” whose real identity remains to be discovered. Not so long ago in Iraq, a Frenchman was killed fighting American troops, and a Belgian woman blew herself up. Both these were converts to Islam. Figures are very uncertain, but I have seen 50,000 mentioned in the French press as a figure for converts to Islam every year, while the Dutch press has had a figure of 30,000 converts annually to Islam. A rather pathetic convert, a man with a medical condition, injured himself setting off a bomb in a restaurant in the British city of Exeter. No doubt many or most Muslim converts are sincere, but some are sad cases of the kind, globalistas who travel the world to attack G7 meetings, ecology and climate-change freaks, and others whose identity rests on the shaky foundations of discontent and conspiracy. Just a few of such types are enough to wreak havoc. The more successful the Pakistan army is in Waziristan, or the surge forces in Afghanistan are, the more likely we are to have to deal with this new International Brigade. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzczMzQ5MTIyNTIxZDY0ZWFlMjhkNGM1NjU2MDYxMzg= Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:38:46 -0400 Defenseless -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmMzMTBjMDNmN2QwMmY4ZWY1YjZjNDFhMDU5ZmQ3OWY= To the Obama administration the key to dealing with Iran evidently lies in Moscow. Get the Russians on board, the thinking goes, and then there will be a united front, and hey presto, diplomacy will somehow convince the Iranians that their nuclear ambitions will have to be suspended, or perhaps emended, or perhaps redirected, or perhaps something else which we will be excited, or perhaps dismayed, or perhaps terrified, to discover in due course. To that end, Mrs. Hillary Clinton has just been to Moscow, in the role of humble petitioner. She might have expected a welcome and even a hearing, granted that President Obama has scrapped the projected missile shield in central Europe that Moscow liked to pretend was a threat. Not a bit of it: This gratuitous gift cut no ice with Vladimir Putin, who in any case doesn't take kindly to humble petitioners, much preferring to kick them. Putin came out in favor of leaving Iran to carry on with everything it is doing. Talk of sanctions, he said, was “premature.” At a subsequent meeting with the Chinese, he summarized his policy of choice towards Iran, “We need to look for a compromise. If a compromise is not found, and the discussions end in fiasco, then we will see.” That should have them sitting up and begging for mercy in Tehran. The discussions are already a six-year fiasco. As for Putin, he doesn't hesitate to send the tanks into Chechnya or Georgia, to threaten all his neighbours and cut off gas supplies at will, and even wage cyber-war against Estonia. Who does he think he's deceiving? I happened to catch Mrs. Clinton being interviewed about her trip to Moscow on BBC television. Her body language indicated that she knew Putin had delivered the good kicking reserved for weak petitioners there. But as best she could, she let it be understood that the Russians are really on board, never mind what they say or do, never mind the lengths they go to in order to thwart the United States even if that means sabotaging any hope of world order. Who does she think she's deceiving? <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmMzMTBjMDNmN2QwMmY4ZWY1YjZjNDFhMDU5ZmQ3OWY= Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:10:41 -0400 The Obama Prize -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGY4OTViNTMxMDI4Zjk5NDE0YjMwNDI1ZjdlM2I1NTc= <div> <div>The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama is an outstanding example of European anti-Americanism. The Norwegian prize givers are evidently full of glee because in their view Obama is diminishing the standing of the United States all over the world, surrendering power on multiple fronts, abandoning missile shields in Central Europe, hesitating to reinforce the mission in Afghanistan, buckling to Iran, and much more of that kind in prospect. The motive for encouraging all possible American retreats is almost wholly malicious, spiteful. Europeans are all too well aware that their own continent is going fast down a slippery slope towards a total loss of power, with immense social and political trials in store. It becomes unbearable for them to observe the strength and vitality of the United States, that upstart who made its way by rejecting Europe in the first place. Few will say so, but most will be gloating that this award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama may look like rewarding a president but actually is a rebuke, even an insult, to the American nation. Obama would be wise to refuse the prize.</div> </div> <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGY4OTViNTMxMDI4Zjk5NDE0YjMwNDI1ZjdlM2I1NTc= Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:10:43 -0400 A Dangerous Place to Be -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Yjk1NDlhN2UxYWQ3NmMyMDJhYjY2NDE1NDE3NjVjYjM= The uncertainty in Washington about how to proceed with the war in Afghanistan is dismaying, and potentially very dangerous. Disagreement between politicians and the military is the sure-fire path to disaster in war. It’s a bad omen that members of Congress are trooping into the White House to give their opinion about what should be done in Afghanistan. What does Nancy Pelosi, say, know about the conduct of war? Nor is any member of the general public in a position to judge whether General McChrystal is right to ask for 40,000 more troops, or what the number ought to be. The general has to be assumed to be making a correct estimate. What is totally fatuous is to measure this request for reinforcements against public opinion, and come up with some compromise figure, as reports are suggesting. The aim to satisfy all parties will end by satisfying none. The men in the field are demoralized by the political process going on over their heads, allies become even more cynical and unhelpful, and the polls show a quickening disapproval of the war itself. Delaying, prevaricating about “strategy,” President Obama is going wobbly in full view of everyone. General McChrystal has made it clear that in present circumstances failure in Afghanistan is as likely as success. At the tactical level it is indeed wasteful to capture a position from the Taliban only to withdraw because there are not enough troops to hold it, thus allowing the Taliban to return only to be thrown out again -- it’s a vicious circle that needs to be broken. It’s also a microcosm of the entire predicament. We are in Afghanistan because the terror attacks of 9/11 were originally conceived and mounted there, and inaction on our part was bound to encourage Islamists of every stripe to further acts of terror. In their mindset, they destroyed the Soviet superpower, and now are tackling the United States, so weak-willed that it is virtually a pushover, hardly a superpower at all. Nation-building in Afghanistan is the only possible riposte, and that is going to be a long haul, demanding, and probably imperfect on account of the ethnic, tribal, and sectarian mix. The alternative of leaving the country to the Taliban is also to offer nuclear-armed Pakistan as their next objective, and then other Muslim countries too. Should Islamism have a free hand both against other Muslims and against us, all sorts of wars become all too easy to imagine, and we won’t be speaking of needing 40,000 more troops here or there but more likely 4 million. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Yjk1NDlhN2UxYWQ3NmMyMDJhYjY2NDE1NDE3NjVjYjM= Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:33:52 -0400 Lisbon, Falling -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGVjYTA2NmUzNDk4MTg3YjVkYzU1M2FlNTJmYjRjY2M= Democracies play by the rules. That's the test, is it not? A country with a political system that does not play by the rules cannot be a democracy. Witness Iran or Afghanistan or Russia, where the powers that be have openly and recently rigged votes. Such countries are dictatorships even though they may not declare themselves as such. And now Europe joins them. Those who run the European Union have been trying to create a single state out of the 27 component countries. The so-called Lisbon Treaty was drawn up for the purpose. If ordinary people everywhere were asked for their opinion, this treaty would be rejected outright. The French and the Dutch did actually vote to reject the treaty, but their rulers simply ignored that fact. In Britain, Mr. Blair promised to hold a referendum, but then with no apparent strain on his conscience decided not to, leaving his successor to sign up to it without the legitimacy to do so. The majority of European governments have followed this path, cheating their electorates one by one, moreover keeping them in the dark as though they were Romanov or Habsburg emperors, and politics were some private domain about which voters should not be consulted. Except for Ireland, whose constitution mandated a referendum. Irish voters then rejected the Lisbon Treaty, whereupon the powers that be in Europe insisted that the Irish vote a second time in order to reverse the first vote, spending a great deal of money to gain support and raising all sorts of fears about the future that Ireland might face. Operating more or less clandestinely, refusing to play by the rules, a junta of determined European politicians have succeeded today in getting the Irish to obey them -- in plain language they have rigged the vote to obtain the outcome they wanted. The Lisbon Treaty is virtually certain to be certified. Among other consequences, the people of Europe are likely to have a president for whom they never asked but chosen for them by the junta of heads of state in an exclusive process of horse-trading behind closed doors. Worse still, they can neither vote for him nor dismiss him from office. According to leaked reports, Mr. Blair will soon become president of Europe as his reward for having broken his promise to hold a referendum in Britain -- without doubt the British would have said no to the Lisbon Treaty with an overwhelming majority (incidentally throwing a spanner into the complete works of the European Union). In which case the Irish who sought so long and so hard for independence from Britain will have a British super-official wished on to them above their heads, about which they can do nothing. In normal circumstances, democracies will not tolerate trickery of the kind. Treated with such open contempt, genuine electorates take to the streets and build barricades and start burning institutions that do not represent them. A state built on deception is not worth having, and for the future it looks as if force alone will be able to maintain it. Europe is set either to collapse with unimaginable consequences or harden into some sort of authoritarian monster. It so happens that I have just finished reading Christopher Caldwell's far-sighted Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, with its final conclusion that Europe is “a civilization in decline.” The handling of the Irish proves his point, and it bodes ill for all of us. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZGVjYTA2NmUzNDk4MTg3YjVkYzU1M2FlNTJmYjRjY2M= Sun, 04 Oct 2009 09:13:01 -0400 The Association for the Elimination of Trendy Opera Producers -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmI4OGIyMzg2YzFlMjdlYzdmOWMyYmQzYzNiYWU5Zjk= The destruction of opera has been the aim of opera-house managers and producers for a good many years now. It isn't too difficult an objective. Ignore the composer's intention in order to insult and offend the audience, which in any case has no right of reply. Recast the setting to make some present-day social point, most usually to do with sexuality. Design brutalist sets, for instance furnishing a Renaissance palace with tank traps or oil drums, and if at all possible getting in some reference to Auschwitz, with barbed wire or striped prisoner garb. The predictability is boring beyond boredom. The house managers and producers do all this for fear of being taken as elitists, catering to people with a taste for an art form requiring appreciation and knowledge, and therefore not for everyone. Taking the easy way out, they prefer to ruin the art form rather than perpetuate it. This has led to the formation of the Association for the Elimination of Trendy Opera Producers, and I must declare an interest, namely that I am the ex-officio president. A producer or house manager on whom the Association passes the verdict of guilty faces summary execution, without right of appeal. The Association attended Tosca last night at the Met. “It's a New Met. Get Over It,” the New York Times has just declared, and this patronizing sergeant-major-type instruction was a dire warning of what to expect from the house manager Peter Gelb, and the producer Luc Bondy, the latter already on our Association's books for horrors perpetrated on his Zurich stage. Gelb is quoted in the paper boasting that he's always tried to popularize classical music, that he favors “realism” and “theatricality” and “stripping away clutter.” These are all sure signs that he is a populist destroyer terrified of being thought elitist. The previous Zeffirelli production had paid due respect to Puccini's masterpiece, and so a new production under this regime was bound not to do so. Predictably of course, the sets are hideously bleak, with Scarpia's apartments in the grandiose Palazzo Farnese reduced to something like an antechamber in the Lubianka. Scarpia, supposed to be the archetypal police chief of an authoritarian regime, here is represented primarily as a crude sexual sadist. Predictably again, this misreading of the character provides the opportunity to introduce call-girls, one of whom shows her breasts. The poverty of imagination at work here is truly stupefying. Puccini was famously angry with whoever took liberties with his scores; he made clear how he wanted this supreme opera to be staged, and small-minded men like Gelb and Bondy do not know better than the great composer. Tosca finishes with a firing squad and a summary execution. My Association is taking note. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmI4OGIyMzg2YzFlMjdlYzdmOWMyYmQzYzNiYWU5Zjk= Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:49:42 -0400 Obama and the Iranians -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTdkOTUxYzYxNmE5ZmM4MmU2YjYxMDNlMDUxM2I4MDc= Let's grant that it is difficult to deal with masters of deception -- all right, liars -- like Iran. Apparently Western intelligence services have known for some time that Iran has been building a secret plant for nuclear enrichment. The plant is situated underground within a Revolutionary Guard base near Qom, a city of shrines and mosques and seminaries. The plant's size, furthermore, is right for bomb building but not for civil purposes. This is a matter that has to be discussed at the negotiations next Thursday with Iran upon which President Obama has staked his credibility. Someone must have leaked to the Iranians that the United States knew about the secret plant at Qom. So Iranian officials at the last minute delivered a note to say that indeed they had a small “pilot” nuclear facility there, further describing it as a “semi-industrial fuel enrichment facility,” whatever that may mean. Obama, flanked by the British prime minster and the French president, for all the world looking like attentive waiters in a restaurant, then used a public platform to accuse Iran of representing a direct challenge to “the basic foundation of the non-proliferation regime.” Oh, is that what it is doing? The rest of us thought Iran was aiming to throw the United States out of the Middle East and diminish its world standing everywhere, develop missiles to threaten its homeland and eliminate allies like Israel, with Egypt and Saudi Arabia chucked in for good measure. Obama is going round in circles, meeting the trickery of the Iranians with illusions that they can be talked out of their ambitions, and confusing the issue with euphemisms that do not match the real danger of what is evolving. Pretty well everyone in the know thinks that in this coming week Iran will concede nothing, fail to negotiate, break off the meeting, claim to be victorious and do whatever it can to humiliate Obama. He is going to have to spell out to the Iranians that he sees through their deceptions, and is not going to allow a re-ordering of the world on Iranian terms. Otherwise negotiations will merely have endangered the lives of millions of people. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTdkOTUxYzYxNmE5ZmM4MmU2YjYxMDNlMDUxM2I4MDc= Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:02:27 -0400 A Spirit of National Defeat -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWE3YzAwNDNmOGM2NmE4ZTE3YTZhNTdkOWU1MmMyZmY= Evidence of the hold that Islam is acquiring over Britain piles up all the time. The release from prison of Abdel Baset Ali Al-Megrahi, sentenced to life for the Lockerbie bombing, shows that a Muslim country can already dictate British policy. More extraordinary still is the stranglehold that Muslim demands are acquiring on British practices and values at home. Such Muslim demands are in fact more often imaginary than real, which makes the British surrender to them all the more inexplicable. Shirley Chaplin has been a nurse for some three decades. She is a committed Christian and wears round her neck a small silver cross, about one inch big. Her employers, the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, warns her that she must remove this cross or be fired, in effect forcing her to choose between her faith and her job. Muslim nurses, however, are allowed to wear the hijab. Meanwhile in Liverpool, Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang have been running a hotel, and they are also committed Christians. A guest in their hotel was a Muslim woman, and she came down to breakfast one morning in a hijab. A discussion began, apparently about the status of Jesus in Islam. Mr. Vogelenzang allegedly said that Muhammad was a warlord, and his wife said that Muslim dress is a form of bondage for women. The Muslim woman went to the police, and the Vogelenzangs are now charged with breaching a Public Order Act, thus causing harassment, alarm, or distress. If convicted, they face fines of £2,500 each and a criminal record. On top of that, publicity has put a stop to business, and they have had to sell the hotel. On yet another front, the civil servants of the Home Office -- in charge of domestic affairs -- have been warned not to eat in front of Muslims during Ramadan. Operating officially within the department, it turns out, is a Home Office Islamic Network, paid for by the taxpayer, and it has inspired what it calls this “sensitivity” to Muslims. However, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, established to promote Islamic interests, has put out a statement that “We don’t care how much non-Muslims eat in front of us,” -- which is very kind, perhaps even sensitive, of them. It is hard to know what exactly motivates this regular and obsessive obeisance to Islam, its practices and values. Obviously some profound collective cultural readjustment is under way in the country. Is it prompted by guilt about the supposed wickedness of the British colonial past, whose atonement will only be attained though a Muslim Britain? Or on the contrary, by fear of being overpowered? Is there a total loss of confidence in being British and Christian, and therefore a spirit of national defeat? The international spokesman of the Muslim Brotherhood is Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. He is very well known as a Muslim supremacist, advocating in blood-curdling terms the death of those he considers enemies. Da’wa is the Arabic word for call, generally used in the sense of outreach, of converting or proselytizing. Some years ago, Qaradawi declared importantly, “We will conquer Europe; we will conquer America! Not through the sword but through Da’wa.” But even so one-track a sheikh as him can hardly have foreseen the enthusiasm of the British to do his Da’wa for him. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWE3YzAwNDNmOGM2NmE4ZTE3YTZhNTdkOWU1MmMyZmY= Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:17:29 -0400 President Petraeus -- If Only! -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzNjZmRjNDFmYzMwODZiNDAyZTNhN2E2Njg3ZGZiZDg= Gen. David H. Petraeus is an impressive figure. At a lecture that he gave yesterday in London under the auspices of Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank, he came across as level-headed, modest, and with a sense of humor. The audience was on his side, even the BBC sourpusses were not making their expected faces of disapproval at being addressed by the head of Central Command. General Petraeus made the point that Central Command covers the critical area where Islamism is trying to claim the allegiance of the local people, all 530 million of them, potentially a massive threat to the West, its interests and its societies. Counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism are linked, the general emphasised, in fact here are two sides of the same Islamist coin. We are in for the long haul, there are no quick fixes. We have to prove to the populations involved that their lives will be better, safer, under our dispensation than under the extremists and Islamists. That’s more or less the case in Iraq, where daily attacks have diminished from 160 to 20. Afghanistan and Pakistan are really one problem, and although “significant damage” has been done to extremists, we can’t yet be sure they won’t once again be able to establish sanctuaries, what with corruption, the marred election, the shaky infrastructure. As for Iran, he said that its “malign activities” are helping us to recruit friends and allies in need of protection. I came away heartened, only to learn that President Obama has decided to cancel the shield planned for Poland and the Czech Republic against Iranian long-range missiles. This decision is a tremendous boost for the malign activities of Iran, and it scrubs 20 years of progress in building alliances in central and eastern Europe. The Poles and the Czechs receive a slap in the face. They and the neighbouring Ukrainians are left to the mercy of Russia. The Russia of Putin and Medvedev, in contrast, can conclude that its artificially manufactured opposition to the missile shield -- indeed its whole policy of aggressive nationalism -- pays rich dividends. Sanctions against Iran is the overriding issue of the moment, but if Obama believes that the Russians are now more likely to join in such sanctions he is likely to be greatly disappointed. They’ve discovered that a hard line makes Obama fold up, so why should they give him anything when they already obtain what they want so easily? Besides, they have just been caught smuggling weapons to Iran and are accused of selling to that country the most effective anti-aircraft missiles. The Kremlin must be full of mocking laughter. George W. Bush is reported by one of his speech writers as saying about Obama before he was elected, “This is a dangerous world, and this cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it.” That has the ring of an obituary. If only General Petraeus was in the White House. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzNjZmRjNDFmYzMwODZiNDAyZTNhN2E2Njg3ZGZiZDg= Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:06:21 -0400 Quite a Party -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZWE1NTIwN2I2Y2EwZTc3NjQ4MGI4YWI0YTcwYzViY2M= George Weidenfeld has just celebrated his ninetieth birthday. It is a pretty fine thing to be that age, and still partying at two in the morning among four hundred guests. We were some 20 miles outside Geneva deep in the Swiss countryside. The host of this occasion, Norman Foster, the eminent architect, lives out there but his house was deemed too small and for this occasion he had designed and built a special pavilion on stilts and with several apple trees growing on the hill-side incorporated into it. At one point there was a tremendous show of fireworks, and next morning I heard it said that people all those miles away in the center of Geneva had been able to catch sight of the rockets and whatnots. And who is George Weidenfeld? Everyone with an interest in books on either side of the Atlantic will agree that he is the most eminent of publishers in London. His is a wonderful story. Born in Vienna in 1919, he was still a teenager when the Nazis took over Austria. He managed to get himself on a scholarship to England, and to save his parents just in time. Sheer chance must have played its part, I suppose, but he’s an example of how courage and intelligence can win out in the end. After the war he built his firm, bringing to the public a range of writers, among them the best in the United States and Europe, altogether enlarging the parochialism of English life and letters. As you’d expect, he was never afraid of taking a risk. This extraordinary career adorns the times, and it is probably unrepeatable. I was still a teenager when I first met him. My father had taken me to the Bayreuth festival, and George -- a devout fan of Wagner’s music -- joined us to call on Frau Winifred Wagner, widow of the composer’s descendant Siegfried. This woman had originally been Miss Williams from a Welsh valley not so far from the one the Pryce-Joneses come from, I am sorry to say. Framed and autographed photographs of Hitler and Goebbels stood on her desk, and she started telling us what great men they were, so fond of music, so generous in subsidising Bayreuth, and how much she missed them. I caught George’s eye, and we have been friends ever since. All 400 guests at the party sat down for dinner at a single table that snaked inventively around on itself. When it was George’s turn to make a speech, he told the guests to note in their diaries the date ten years ahead for the party when he’d be a hundred. That’s his character in a nut-shell. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZWE1NTIwN2I2Y2EwZTc3NjQ4MGI4YWI0YTcwYzViY2M= Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:44:58 -0400 R.I.P. Professor Kelly -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTA0ZDBmMjBkM2M1ZTcxYTM1ODA1ZjNjYjYxMTg5NGI= There are a few specialists who try to come to grips with the Arab world as it really is, and Prof. J. B. Kelly was outstanding among them. He had lived and studied there, he knew the peoples and the countries thoroughly. His great scholarly works concern the treaties made by the British since the 18th century with local Arabs and Muslims -- big books that are the last word on frontiers in the region and how they came about. In his career he taught imperial history in the universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, and in London. John was a New Zealander by birth, with a powerful physique and an engaging smile, and it amused him to consider himself “a wild colonial boy.” Nobody and nothing was going to prevent him speaking his mind. He was all too familiar with the cruelty of modern Arab rulers, the disaster of Arab nationalism, the bigotry of Islamism, and the tremendous price that everyone in the Middle East has to pay for the frightful inhumanity that follows. But those John really went for and destroyed were the apologists in the West who pretend that everything is fine, that the Arabs are really doing well and we have only to give them everything they ask for. <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=B001NJIVZS">Arabia, the Gulf and the West</a>, his great attack on Western surrender and appeasement to a slew of Arab and Muslim tyrants in the process of harming their own people and us too, is one of the fiercest polemics written in the last 50 years. The prose sears with passion and scorn. The book brought him to Washington, and President Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher took note of him. The Foreign Office indeed sent an unforgettable warning to Mrs. Thatcher that in their opinion, “this man is not sound.” John was retained by the Sultan of Oman to argue boundary disputes with Saudi Arabia in which historic right and treaty agreement were with Oman. I well remember him telling me that when he presented the case to the Foreign Office he realized that the officials listening had spent their whole lives surrendering to the strong and were programmed by now always to ignore justice. That’s also all we need to know about the craven and self-destructive surrender the British have just made to Libya in the case of the Lockerbie bomber. John eventually retired to France, taking with him photocopies of the entire archive in the Public Record Office dealing with Saudi Arabia. His intention was to expose the House of Saud for the warmongering, corrupt, hypocritical, double-dealing, and selfish clique they have always been, oppressing everyone within range and blackmailing the West to cover up and lie on their behalf, all for the sake of oil. This would have crowned his life’s work. A few days ago John died and if the book is too incomplete to be publishable -- as I fear -- then the world will have to regret a missing masterpiece, another Unfinished Symphony. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTA0ZDBmMjBkM2M1ZTcxYTM1ODA1ZjNjYjYxMTg5NGI= Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:36:38 -0400 Forty Years of Dictatorship -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjdkZDRhMGY4MjllZjE1MmJmYWU0NzAxNTQxNzg0YTA= These are splendid times for Muammar Gaddhafi, the Libyan dictator. Exactly 40 years ago he seized power in a coup that ousted the then ruler, King Idris, a harmless old-fashioned ruler. True, this was more like comic opera than real-life politics. Libya had been forgotten by history. Tribalism was the country's distinguishing feature. There were not half a dozen Libyans with doctorates, and nobody with international experience. Gaddhafi belonged to a small insignificant tribe. The Egyptian President Nasser, and Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, were then uniformed thugs upon whom Gaddhafi successfully modelled himself. He has a long record of sponsoring terror. Agents of his have assassinated a good number of people in Libya and other Arab countries, in Germany and Britain, with his one-time foreign minister Mansur Kikhiya among them. Dissidents regularly disappear or die in jail, and among them is Fathi al-Jahmi. President Reagan rightly attached the label “Mad Dog” to the man, and bombed Tripoli to avenge an outrageous murder of American servicemen. For years Gaddhafi was a self-enrolled client of the Soviet Union, but even Vladimir Putin hesitates today to build on that, and stays away from the celebrations of 40 years of dictatorship. At the moment, Tripoli, the Libyan capital, is bedecked with hoardings showing Gaddhafi's face forbiddingly blown up in pure totalitarian style. In the main square, illuminated by coloured lights, ballet dancers are performing, and circles of men in some sort of semi-tribal garb are prancing round and about in odd formations. Odder still, most of these men are fat, too fat for any gracefulness -- perhaps they are members of Gaddhafi's tribe, showing how they have benefited from his appropriation of the state's entire oil wealth, as unexpected as it is undeserved. The highlight of this awful jamboree is the release by Britain of Abdulbaset Ali Al-Megrahi, who had been condemned to life-imprisonment for his role in the Lockerbie bombing. It is now unmistakably clear that for some two years the British government has been devising a way to free him and it set about it with determination and no sign at all of scruple. Whatever the British government might say, nobody can possibly conclude that its actions had anything to do with justice for the Lockerbie victims or had moral motivation. Quite the contrary. Self-interest and trade were governing their every move. By pure coincidence, this is also the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. The British government has evidently failed to learn that to be the accomplice of dictators is a betrayal of moral principles and brings nothing but shame. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjdkZDRhMGY4MjllZjE1MmJmYWU0NzAxNTQxNzg0YTA= Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:34:10 -0400 Champagne Socialism -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzVkN2U3ZjM2NjdmYjY3ZTFlMTZmN2NkOWEyOTFlMDc= Senator Edward Kennedy was, and will remain, an outstanding example of a champagne socialist. Sociologically speaking, the type has been well recognized for quite some time. Indeed, in Turgenev's great novel, Fathers and Sons, the hero Bazarov asks at one point if you can't drink champagne just because you call yourself a socialist. The French similarly talk about those who vote on the Left but dine on the Right. Such people are exploiting their privileged position in society to curry favor with those less privileged, and so find the way to continue being privileged while also being applauded for it. Clever, or what? The obituaries for Edward Kennedy have been more or less unmitigated eulogies. The general inference is that he was an outstanding and constructive politician with vast achievements to his credit. At most, there is an apologetic little insertion somewhere of the word “flawed” as though that excused and explained his failure to become president. In simple fact, he owed everything in his career, especially his position in the Senate, to the fact that he had been born who he was, too well-connected and too rich ever to have to work his passage on his own. If this isn't privilege, what is? The years of good living and self-indulgence showed in his face, as once handsome features turned coarse and bloated. Physically, he could only waddle. As for morals, Chappaquiddick is only one incident among others when his behaviour proves him to have been a man of bad character. Normally speaking, ordinary people would never tolerate someone like him as their elected representative. To present himself as a tribune of the people was the only possible protective covering available to him. That he was successful in this respect, and comes to be buried in Arlington with the president speaking at the graveside, is really the only arresting feature of his career. He has enjoyed the sort of lifelong allowance that once would have been made for a corrupt eighteenth-century English duke. It is hard to believe that he was ever sincere in the populist causes he took up, declaiming about righting wrongs only to go home and commit plenty more wrongs of his own without having to account for them. That's champagne socialism for you, and it seems a taste everybody and anybody can get drunk on. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzVkN2U3ZjM2NjdmYjY3ZTFlMTZmN2NkOWEyOTFlMDc= Sat, 29 Aug 2009 16:14:39 -0400 Al-Megrahi's Comfortable Retirement Back Home -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjljYzJhZGY3YWUwZTA5ZDRkMmEzZTMzYjA0OTYyODk= The authorities in Scotland have been giving extensive hints that they were about to release the Lockerbie bomber, Abdulbaset Ali Al-Megrahi. And sure enough, today they have released him. As a result of devolution -- one of Tony Blair's most destructive schemes for Britain -- Scotland has its own administration. Its justice secretary is one Kenny MacAskill. In a convoluted ramble of a speech this morning, he began by declaring that the courts had found Al-Megrahi guilty, and that was that. He had noted Mrs. Clinton's request to keep the man in prison to serve out his life sentence for mass murder, and he had also heard what the families of the victims had to say. 189 of the 270 murdered were American. Justice had been done, and he was not about to release the culprit. But then he contradicted himself. Doctors have assured him that Al-Megrahi has terminal cancer, and so he has to be freed. Al-Megrahi had shown no mercy to those he killed, which is why we have to show mercy to him. This is the sort of somersault in logic and morality with which lawyers like to baffle the rest of us. The BBC immediately put on air people who thought this release was right and proper. But the affair leaves a stink in the nostrils. Last November, Britain signed a Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Libya, and hurried it through Parliament. This could refer only to Al-Megrahi and was evidently the necessary preliminary to letting him go -- there are no other Libyans in British prisons or Britons in Libyan prisons. Al-Megrahi had appealed against his sentence, lost, but then put in a second appeal. This might well have cleared up whether he was guilty as charged, and satisfied the victims' families. But he could not be released while this second appeal was pending. Lo and behold! He withdraws this appeal, is suddenly revealed to have terminal cancer, and his boss, Muammar Gaddhafi, the Libyan dictator and hardened practitioner of terror, sends his private jet to Scotland. The opportunity is lost to learn whether Libya blew up the Lockerbie jet, or, as some say, Iran and its Palestinian hirelings. The suspicion is that the British government cut a secret deal with Gaddhafi to return his agent for the sake of the lucrative oil and gas contracts that British companies are obtaining in Libya, but the truth of that will also probably never be known, to leave a general cloud of contempt for the British government and the way it does business. And it's good news for terrorists that they needn't really pay much of a price for their way of doing business. In the course of his wretched speech, Kenny MacAskill said that once Al-Megrahi is in Libya “he may live, he may die.” That weasel phrase is designed to cover MacAskill's back in the event that the vaunted compassion and mercy shown by Scotland prove to be merely euphemisms for Al-Megrahi's comfortable and long-drawn retirement back home. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjljYzJhZGY3YWUwZTA5ZDRkMmEzZTMzYjA0OTYyODk= Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:23:00 -0400 The Curious Case of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjM4ZmEwM2Y4MDJiNDcxMDg2YjQwOWUzNzc0M2JjYzY= The case of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi raises several extremely disquieting questions. He is the Libyan imprisoned for blowing up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing 270 people, a majority of them American. He has been acknowledged as a Libyan secret agent. The Libyan dictator, Mu'ammar Gaddhafi, in power since 1969, handed al-Megrahi over to the Scottish courts and paid over a billion dollars in compensation to the families of victims, while also refusing to accept responsibility for the mass murder. When asked about this, he gives a derisive laugh by way of an answer. Genuine doubt has always existed about the perpetrators. Some, especially in the United States, are convinced that this was indeed a Libyan operation. Others, equally firm in their opinion, hold that Iran and Syria together paid the Palestinian terrorist group led by Ahmed Jibril to blow up the jet -- the spokesman for this line of thinking is Dr. Jim Swire, an Englishman whose daughter was killed that day. Dr. Swire has devoted time and energy to investigating this act of terrorism, and he believes that the imprisonment of al-Megrahi is a miscarriage of justice. Jibril was a particularly foul criminal who murdered a lot of people including many of his own men, and was himself finally murdered, seemingly at the orders of Saddam Hussein. That's how they do things over there. The corpses pile up but the trail to establish culpability somehow always peters out, and you never know exactly whom to blame. Al-Megrahi lost a first appeal for another hearing. In 2007 his lawyers put in a second appeal on the basis that more evidence was available and it would show the miscarriage of justice. The appeal was granted. The families of the victims were encouraged to believe that they might get closer to the truth. And now, suddenly, Al-Megrahi is said to be dying from prostate cancer, and therefore it would be only humanitarian to release him to Libya. Simultaneously, his lawyers happen to have withdrawn his second appeal. The connection between these two events is murky. Pretty well everyone, however, concludes that the British authorities were well aware that Al-Megrahi would win his appeal, and they would be exposed as having framed him. So they offered to set him free in exchange for the dropping of the appeal. A former British ambassador to Libya has said that a deal of this kind was surely done -- but this man is a typical Foreign Office specimen and from his record we ought to be grateful that he doesn't think Ariel Sharon actually crashed Pan Am 103 in person. Magnus Linklater is a columnist in the London Times. A serious man who routinely beats a drum for his native Scotland, he wrote with incandescence about “what looks suspiciously like a cover-up.” Tony Blair forced through devolution, and this has made the Scottish legal system responsible for the Al-Megrahi case. In Linklater's opinion, this whole legal system has been compromised, as either ham-fisted, or duped by Libya, or worst of all, complicit. He throws about words like “farce” and “stitch-up” and “shameful.” Other newspapers have published photographs of Blair or Gordon Brown shaking hands with Gaddhafi, evidently willing to rehabilitate this ruthless dictator whose record of terror goes back for forty years. The further suggestion is that B.P. has a concession for new oil and gas deposits in Libya, but this is conditional on the freeing of Al-Megrahi. The British government is certainly cynical and underhand enough to go along with an understanding of that kind. After all, Saudi Arabia threatened to cancel valuable arms contracts if the supplier, British Aerospace, was investigated for paying bribes to Saudi princes, whereupon Blair was quick to ensure that the Saudis got the immunity and anonymity they were wanting. What events like these really prove is the way that the demands and practices of absolute Muslim states are encroaching on Europe, however dangerous this may be to democracy, justice, good governance, and in the final analysis, independence. And if Al-Megrahi is indeed freed in the next few days, as widely forecast, you can safely bet that quite soon he will be giving an interview in some expensive villa on the beautiful Libyan coast, happily informing the world that his cancer has been miraculously cured. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjM4ZmEwM2Y4MDJiNDcxMDg2YjQwOWUzNzc0M2JjYzY= Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:50:37 -0400 Sandhurst: A Glimpse of the Future? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTdkMWRhMjVmY2EzY2QzZmU4OGZlNjEzMDA2OTAyMjQ= The Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst is the British equivalent of West Point, the barracks-cum-college where cadets train to become professional army officers. Every year there is a passing-out parade, and a fine affair it is too. The most outstanding cadet is awarded the Sword of Honour, and this year it went to E. A. Hillman of the Parachute Regiment. The future of the British army is in the hands of such men. Among the several hundred cadets listed as on parade, not one, as far as I could see, had a name that suggests Muslim identity. Overseas cadets also train at Sandhurst, and in the past one such was King Hussein of Jordan. A Coldstream Guards drill sergeant earned a certain immortality by shouting at him on the drill square, “Stamp your feet, you idle little man, Mr. King of Jordan, Sir!” King Hussein liked to be reminded of it. This year -- again as far as I could see -- sixteen overseas cadets are identifiable by their names as Muslims. Two belonged to the Al Khalifa family ruling Bahrain. The others came from Brunei, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Qatar, Tanzania, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The hope is that some fellow-feeling and maybe even gratitude towards Britain will have been instilled in them, as was the case with King Hussein. But what if the opposite occurs, and they put their training to wage jihad against British interests? On the same day as this parade, Israeli top brass was warning that the Palestinian forces trained on the West Bank by the American General Dayton for security in the Palestinian state on which Barack Obama's heart is set are likely to use that training for another bout of fighting against Israel, another intifada. Where would that leave General Dayton and the policy of the United States? David Randall Jaquith is the name of the one and only American who was on this parade, and he was awarded the Overseas Sword of Honour. It would be fascinating to know what this intrepid man can tell us about his time at Sandhurst. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTdkMWRhMjVmY2EzY2QzZmU4OGZlNjEzMDA2OTAyMjQ= Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:59:58 -0400 Putin Flexes -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWU3ZGY4MDM3NDU1NTE2NmQyZGMwYzVlZTJjMjljMTc= Every summer Vladimir Putin, the Dracula figure now in charge of Russia, likes to strip down to his trunks and invite the world to admire his bulging pectorals. In the same spirit of showing off, he also likes to go shooting -- whether bears or Georgians. Newspapers are again carrying their seasonal photographs of Putin in physical mode. And in case anyone fails to pay due tribute to his power, the Russian navy is doing its duty by sending two nuclear-powered attack submarines of the Akula class to the eastern coast of the United States, some 200 miles out in international waters. Reporting this fact, the New York Times quotes a Defense official saying that it has been fifteen years since the Russians have seen fit to take such a step -- in plain words, it's back to the Cold War. One of the submarines even headed off to Cuba. Perhaps Putin thinks he's set to run rings round Obama. Perhaps the test of Obama that Joe Biden forecast during the electoral campaign is getting under way. The Times speculated alternatively that the submarines might be a cover for the failure of a test-firing on July 15 of the Bulova long-range missile. Dictators like to start wars in August, and there's yet another possibility that the Russians are distracting us from keeping a close watch on the way they are suddenly stepping up their bullying of Georgia. All in his own locker-room idiom, Putin has said that the Georgian president, Saakashvili, ought to be hanged in a particularly degrading manner, and maybe those bulging pectorals are meant to indicate that he's the one to do this job. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWU3ZGY4MDM3NDU1NTE2NmQyZGMwYzVlZTJjMjljMTc= Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:29:52 -0400 The Book of Isaiah Berlin -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzQzYzUyMDg1MzllZmZkM2RjYzM1NWE1M2Y1ZmU3ZDA= Literary London is buzzing with reactions to the harsh and patronizing review by A. N. Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement of a book with the title Enlightening, consisting of the letters from 1946 to 1960 of Isaiah Berlin, and edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes. Hatchet jobs like this are rarely printed. He judges Berlin to have been no sort of philosopher but merely a lightweight historian of ideas whose best book, The Hedgehog and the Fox, survives as “an after-dinner game.” In these letters realistically but ludicrously he was dictating streams of malice about his academic colleagues; he was self-important, finally “malicious, snobbish, boastful, cowardly, pompous.” Somewhat contradictorily, Wilson thinks that the letters are “thunderingly boring” and not worth the effort required of them. Now the editors of these letters wrote in to the TLS to concede that Berlin was no saint, but they took issue with Wilson’s “bizarre and petulant judgements,” correcting many errors of his. In the Spectator, in contrast, Paul Johnson praised the book, ending “thanks be to God” that another volume of letters would follow. The one issue that really mattered to Berlin -- and he made no secret of it -- was his Jewishness. He was a Zionist through and through. Chaim Weizmaann was a friend and correspondent. We find David Ben Gurion calling on him, and asking him for definitions of being Jewish. We also find many observations about Israel and people living there. Although certainly disliking controversy, he was still prepared to confront critics of Israel or blinkered Arabists like E. L. Hodgkin and Harold Beeley. Wilson wrote a biography praising Hilaire Belloc, one of the premier Jew-baiters of his day, a man who believed that the Bolshevik revolution was a conspiracy of Jews. Wilson has several times proclaimed in print the intelligence of Diana Mosley, the wife of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley and an unreconstructed Nazi to the end of her days. He has also copied word for word in a column of his the anti-Israeli remarks of an American Holocaust denier, he has asserted that the creation of the state of Israel was a historic mistake, and signed letters in the press about the supposed mischief of Israeli policy. Can anyone see a pattern that would explain his rubbishing of Berlin? <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzQzYzUyMDg1MzllZmZkM2RjYzM1NWE1M2Y1ZmU3ZDA= Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:01:27 -0400 R.I.P. Bela Kiraly -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTEyZmY3ZGVkZjE5ZGNhYzVlMTRhNDg0ZjVlYmRiOGI= The death of Gen. Bela Kiraly at the age of 97 ought not to pass unnoticed. At the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, he commanded the National Guard, and had the distinction of fighting the invading Soviet forces to the bitter end. Everyone in the Europe of the 20th century suffered at the hands of the Nazis and Communists, but Bela Kiraly met the history of his times with particular courage. A conspicuously handsome and commanding man, he’d been a professional soldier in World War II, and a marked man because the course of events had left Hungary an ally of Germany against the Soviet Union. At one point Kiraly had a labor battalion of Jews under his command and saved them by putting them into Hungarian uniforms, for which afterwards the Israelis honoured him as a Righteous Gentile. Captured by the Russians in 1944, he escaped from the train carrying him and others to Siberia. Joining the Communist party then didn’t save him. Stalin apparently had singled him out. In 1951 he was arrested and sentenced to death for subversion and spying for the United States. After years in the death cell he was released just in time for his leadership in the Revolution. Fighting lasted nearly a fortnight after which the Soviets pretended to be ready to come to terms. It was a trick right out of primitive times. They arrested and hanged all their guests, and pushed their traitorous stooge Janos Kadar into power. In this respect, Nikita Khrushchev was a faithful pupil of Stalin. Staying in his headquarters, Kiraly avoided the trap, fortunate once again to escape in an armoured column that crossed the Iron Curtain frontier into Austria. For the next three decades, he was a professor in the United States, and the author of important books. Returning to Hungary after the collapse of Hungary, he became a member of parliament, and a living legend. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTEyZmY3ZGVkZjE5ZGNhYzVlMTRhNDg0ZjVlYmRiOGI= Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:44:13 -0400 The Vitality of Israel -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTZiZmE5NTg2ZDU2NDdjYzM5YTRhYzdmNDE4ZWRiNDk= George Gilder was one of the speakers on the recent National Review cruise round the Mediterranean, and he gave me a copy of his new book <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0980076358">The Israel Test</a> -- there, I’ve declared an interest. He can be relied on to say striking and original things. At the moment, Israel is treated as a pariah among the nations, blamed for defending itself against the various Arab and Muslim states or terrorist groups trying to destroy it. To support the Arabs and Muslims in this endeavor has become a moral imperative for the Left everywhere. So figureheads like Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have revived and updated anti-Semitism: That is their contribution to the world we live in. Nobody but Gilder could have written this book. Israel of course has its defenders, but they use arguments based on nationalism, territory, ethnicity, defence of minorities, rights, historicism, and so on. Gilder sees Jews since their emancipation as the vanguard of human achievement. They may be few in numbers, but their creativity has brought prosperity to themselves and those around them, and that prosperity in turn has brought freedom. Thus Jews spearhead capitalism and the democracy indispensable to its proper functioning. Marxists, Nazis, and now Muslims and their apologists envy Jews because they cannot emulate them, and so set out to destroy the success that shows up their failure. The attitude you take towards Israel and Jews decides whether you love or hate freedom, and beyond that, mankind -- that’s the test he is proposing in the book’s title. And just in case the reader risks failing this test by jumping to a false conclusion, Gilder has a portrait of his very non-Jewish ancestry, saying, “We were classic WASPS all.” To go to Israel even for a brief visit is to be struck by the vitality of the country. Everyone seems to be in a whirl of fulfilment, grabbing life with both hands. The middle part of this book is an account of some prominent Israeli inventors in computer science and physics, fascinating personalities at least the equal of their great Jewish forebears like Heinrich Hertz, Robert Oppenheimer, or John von Neumann, the latter a particular hero of Gilder’s. An essential aspect of the test he thinks we all face when it comes to taking a position about Israel and Jews is to value the exceptional individual because, as he puts it, “the good fortune of others is also one’s own” -- simple, brilliant, and true! These rare people, he thinks, will see Israel safely through whatever trials lie ahead, and they are also benefactors of us all. An attack on Israel is a blow against the entire West. And alas for the Arabs and Muslims, stuck in their hate and envy when they are lucky enough to be so close to Israel that they could join in its success. By the time they get the point of this book a bright future may have passed them by. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTZiZmE5NTg2ZDU2NDdjYzM5YTRhYzdmNDE4ZWRiNDk= Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:20:11 -0400 Self-Destruction as Art -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2JiM2JlNTY0NzMyMzI4ZTc2NTY3MmRmYTUzZWIzNDc= The National Review cruise around the Mediterranean these last ten days included Rome, Dubrovnik, Corfu, Ephesus, Athens, all places where our civilization took shape. Ruins from the classical period, mosaics and painted rooms, medieval fortresses, churches and cloisters, sculpture, pictures, variously amount to a statement of what mankind at its best can create, and what these works tell us about ourselves and why they are worth visiting and preserving. And then almost the first thing I encounter back on shore is the obituary in the Daily Telegraph of one Dashiell Snow. This told a sad story, but more than that, it was a negation of everything we’d been seeing and doing on the way round the Mediterranean, a sort of anti-cruise. I had never heard of this poor Dash Snow, needless to say. He had been born in New York in 1981, into the very well known de Menil family, heirs to the Schlumberger fortune that comes from oil and related technology, and collectors of art as well. Here was one of the lucky ones for whom privilege was a birth-right. And what did he make of it? Already at 13, he had to be sent to reform school in Georgia. Soon he was stealing, drifting to the lower East Side in Manhattan, drinking himself silly, and then starting the “Irak graffiti crew” specialising in theft and in daubing walls. Through pursed lips, the Telegraph says the photographs these people took were “explicit portrayals of the sexual and drug-taking excesses of his circle,” and they “created a popular stir.” Hedge-fund managers, visual-arts editors, gallery owners, and such like, thought he was one of the most talented artists in New York. But this involved shredding phone books, blankets, and curtains, to make “a hamster nest” in which to curl up and take drugs. Once he destroyed 2,000 phone books over five nights. A drug overdose killed him at the age of 27. What a mirror held up to our times! For Snow himself, it is possible only to feel pity. What he was doing has nothing to tell other people, but was merely bad mannered, devoid of anything imaginative, creative, and human. The de Menil wealth probably gave him some sense that he didn’t have to work but was free to indulge in whatever he liked. For the fawning gallery owners and visual-arts editors, though, it is possible only to feel rage. Those who flattered and encouraged Snow should properly be held responsible for his degradation and early death. Everything he did was bogus or self-destructing, and they called it art. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2JiM2JlNTY0NzMyMzI4ZTc2NTY3MmRmYTUzZWIzNDc= Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:09:08 -0400 What Counts When It Comes to Nuclear Weapons -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzlhOTZjMTA2MzA0ZTVmZjMzZTgyMDQ4NWY3ZGUzNWE= So President Obama and the Russians have apparently struck a deal to reduce their nuclear weapons. Perhaps I am too wary, but it seems to me to be of little practical significance, but rather a cosmetic measure. Russia at present is in an aggressive mood, and Medvedev and his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, excel at playing hard cop, soft cop. They seek by various methods including the use of force and chicanery to reincorporate former Soviet republics like Ukraine, Georgia, and Estonia into its sphere of control. The supply of gas is treated as a tool to dominate supine European customers. Unlike the cold and brutal Putin, Medvedev says he believes in the rule of law, but his election was flagrantly rigged, critics and Muslim dissidents have a way of being murdered, and the unfortunate former oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky has already served eight years in prison on trumped-up charges and looks likely to have the sentence indefinitely extended. Obama babbles that he and Medvedev together can aspire “to strengthen democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” Oh please! Nothing very positive can be achieved in talks about any of these issues. One thing matters at present, and only one thing, and that is Russia’s stance towards Iran and the nuclear program being developed in that country with Russian technological input and anti-aircraft weaponry to defend the sites involved. What counts is who has the nuclear weapon, not the numbers in the stockpile.We’re told that the Russians object to the missile shield against Iran that the United States would like to build in Poland and the Czech Republic on the grounds that it is aimed against Russia. This objection has no validity, and it is raised evidently for the Russians to be able to bargain about it and extract something they want. To give way on the missile shield is bad, but to leave the Russians in a position of supporting Iran is deadly. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzlhOTZjMTA2MzA0ZTVmZjMzZTgyMDQ4NWY3ZGUzNWE= Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:20:36 -0400 Take the Inverse of the Times -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzM3M2IwOTdiZjMzMzI2OWM2NGJmNDg3YWE5ZmM3OTk= One of those spats that from time to time give the literary world the appearance of animation has just occurred. Alain de Botton has published a book on the subject of work, and someone dismissed this book in the loftiest manner in a review in the New York Times. So lofty was this reviewer that he has enraged Alain de Botton enough to write a response. He cursed the reviewer with the words, “I will hate you until the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.” Now Alain de Botton is quite a friend of mine, and I know him to be mild-mannered, modest, and full of humor. He is also formidably intelligent and wide-ranging. Needless to say, the New York Times reviewer is totally unknown, ignorant, and uses this column as an opportunity to preen himself, like most of those who write for that paper. And that is why Alain ought not to have lost his temper, but be grateful for this bad review, because it must mean that he has written a good book. In old Soviet days, the reader of Pravda was obliged to interpret things by simply reversing whatever the paper was saying about them as it was only reporting the party line. So it is with the New York Times book reviews. An apparatchik in charge of that section equally makes sure to cleave to the party line, which in this case involves 100-percent political correctness plus worship of popular culture. Any good or original book is certain to be ignored there, side-lined, or given to some wretch for a hatchet job. Speaking for myself, I take it that the snubbing or boycotting my books have received in the New York Times over the years is evidence that I must be on the right lines, and praise there would make me anxious that I hadn't thought through what I was writing. Now when Mark Steyn published his wonderfully rumbustious book America Alone, it was on the New York Times bestseller list for six months but never got a review there nonetheless. Let's all buy Alain's new book, and get it too on their bestseller list, for another loud laugh at the small-mindedness of these comrades. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzM3M2IwOTdiZjMzMzI2OWM2NGJmNDg3YWE5ZmM3OTk= Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:12:34 -0400 Mullahs Make Mistakes -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDU5YjZkY2UyOTIwNjYzNTNjMzhiY2M5YjA1NzFhMjQ= <div> The arrest of eight people on the staff of the British Embassy in Tehran is a clear portent of what is to come. The eight are themselves Iranian, but that is of no great significance. They are innocent victims of a series of mistakes on the part of the mullahs, one mistake leading with grim logic to the next. The process of repression is gathering. Informed sources say that as many as 4,000 have been arrested, not just activists but journalists and bloggers. To involve embassy staff, however, with its echo of the 1978 hostage-taking that destroyed the pitiful Carter presidency, is to contrive to conceal a domestic issue by externalizing it. The mullahs’ initial mistake was to fix the election so blatantly that nobody could possibly credit its outcome. The percentage of the vote allocated to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was absurdly high, evidently in order to boost his image as really popular in every section of the community. Similarly the percentage allocated to the other candidates was absurdly low, evidently with the purpose of showing that they were unsupported even by their own clansmen and people in their home areas and towns. The outburst of anger that followed was a spontaneous mass protest. How could this anger be explained away? The mullahs are never going to blame themselves. Instead they resort to the hallowed conspiracy theory that outsiders have been interfering. To believe that there are outsiders with the power to mobilise the masses requires the suspension of reason. But still, this is a country in which the slogan “Khomeini, tool of the British” was once painted on the walls - the idea being that Khomeini was so damaging the country that only the British could have had the malevolence to put him into power. The next step now is to fabricate a case against Britain. Not long ago, the Iranians took hostage fifteen British sailors in the Gulf, and paraded them on television in a humiliating piece of theatre. The mullahs can calculate that the British government will be as supine about its diplomatic staff as it was about its sailors. A dim and ineffectual Foreign Secretary says that he is “deeply concerned,” thus airing what must be the most pointless cliché in the entire vocabulary of politics. If the arrest of these staff members does not lead to anything much that the mullahs can exploit, then the Foreign Office can expect that British diplomats and even visitors will become hostages, in a reprise of that tactic. One lie engenders another. “O what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.” The mullahs are proving the truth of Walter Scott’s famous lines. The length of time that passes before some British or even American official says that none of this bears on willingness to enter negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program will be the measure of Western defeatism and masochism. And the mullahs will then conclude that they have only to extend the chain of mistakes and lying. </div> <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDU5YjZkY2UyOTIwNjYzNTNjMzhiY2M5YjA1NzFhMjQ= Sun, 28 Jun 2009 13:39:32 -0400 People Power -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjQ1ZDIwOWViYWUwZmQxNmY5N2YwODZiZmMyYzExMzc= These are heart-stopping times in Iran. Two rival blocs are jockeying for power, two mass movements capable of mobilizing hundreds of thousands on the streets. No way exists of measuring numbers and giving victory to the larger. One bloc or the other is likely to make a mistake, and that will settle it. In this plight in 1979 the Shah made the mistake of ordering his troops to open fire, on a scale not enough to terrify everyone but only to enrage them. In the Shia practice, moreover, the dead are commemorated after a certain period, and these commemorations were the occasions for yet larger and more and more violent demonstrations. So the Shah fell, the Islamic Republic of Iran took his place, and the world has had to deal with militant Islamism at the cost of much fighting and many lives. It is possible, even likely, that the ruling mullahs will repeat the Shah's mistake and try to settle the issue of who has power by ordering the troops or secret police to fire on the demonstrations. In that case, the loyalty of the troops becomes the question of the moment. Already there are reports that some secret policemen have gone over to the protesters. When the orthodox Communists staged their coup against Gorbachev in August 1989, Boris Yeltsin put himself at the head of the protesters, famously climbing on to a tank to address the crowd. The troops under General Grachev had already been called out by the Communists. But Yeltsin had telephoned Grachev to plead with him not to give the fire orders. Telling the story afterwards, Yeltsin said he heard Grachev sigh into the receiver at the burden of responsibility. The troops withdrew. Yeltsin said of this call to Grachev, “He was deciding not only his fate, but also mine. And the fate of millions of people.” Who says that the individual and his choices do not count in the making of history? A repeat of that fateful exchange is surely taking place in Tehran, and the fate of millions once more hangs on how it is resolved. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjQ1ZDIwOWViYWUwZmQxNmY5N2YwODZiZmMyYzExMzc= Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:34:10 -0400 1984 in 2009 -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2NkN2NlZDcyNTNhMzU5ZDc3NTdiYjY0NTQ0NTQ5ZTg= Sixty years ago, George Orwell published 1984, and I can think of no work of fiction in the past century with a comparable influence right across the world. Plenty of writers had already warned about the twin horrors of Nazism and Communism, and many of them had first-hand experience of these totalitarianisms. Orwell was telling a story about what it would be like to live in such a nightmare society. From the novel's opening sentence in which the clocks are striking thirteen, the reader finds himself in the grip of an imagination so true and so detailed that it has far more power than any political tract could have. At that time editor of the Times Literary Supplement, my father had received a proof copy of the book. I remember the well-known critic Raymond Mortimer coming to the house to say how important this book was and to ask how the TLS was going to review it. Overhearing the excitement, I managed to get my hands on this proof but could read only a little before I had to return to school. When I then asked for 1984 in the school library, the librarian, a desiccated figure by the name of Mr. Cattley, said it was “filth,” and reported me. My 12-year-old self was scared, but “You must forgive Mr. Cattley,” said the master in charge, “he is a very simple soul.” (Incidentally, Orwell had been a scholar at the school and another of the masters had been his contemporary. This man was bald, with a strange blotch or even growth on his scalp, rumoured to have been caused by Orwell pouring chemicals on him in the laboratory. We used to pester him, “Please sir, tell us what Orwell was like, was he good at science?”) The love-making of Julia and Winston, it is true, stands out as pure escapism from everything around, so appealing (and thus upsetting to poor Mr. Cattley) because it is the one remaining individual experience. Privacy allows them to be happy and free at least temporarily from state control -- which is why it cannot be tolerated and the supervising tele-screens and the Junior Spies are ubiquitous. Winston is always searching for other things that might free him, for instance, nursery songs or well-made artifacts from the past. The really frightening element in 1984 is the manipulation of the past, the whole social record, even language itself, so that truth and reality become irrecoverable and Big Brother can make of them what he likes. A Western historian at a conference, so the story goes, once said that the future is unpredictable, to which a Soviet historian replied that for him the past was unpredictable. The Left has tried, and still does spasmodically, to pretend that the novel is not really anti-Soviet. But 1984's Big Brother is undoubtedly Stalin, and the figure of Goldstein is Trotsky. Orwell had lived through such murderous events as the Communists turning on the Trotskyists and anarchists in the Spanish civil war, and the Hitler-Stalin pact. It is particularly penetrating to have invented the phrase of the Two Minute Hate to describe the totalitarian mechanism for falsifying public opinion to suit the ends of power. Two Minute Hates occur all the time. Just look at the way the Left switched from supporting Israel to lambasting it, or how the Shah's pro-American Iran converted overnight into Khomeini's anti-American Iran. To travel in old days in Soviet Russia and the Soviet bloc was to find oneself deep in 1984. The hopelessness of daily life was exactly as Orwell had captured it. How sinister it was too, how thoroughly Orwellian. Everyone was against everyone else; under the all-encompassing propaganda about progressiveness there was no communal or social spirit, only the Party. One of the compulsory Intourist or KGB guides once told me proudly that she had renounced her mother for failing to be a Communist. “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.” Orwell's imagination had been exactly right. Orwell agonized over the writing of the book, and he was anyhow stricken with the tuberculosis that killed him six months after publication. Drugs to cure the disease had just become available in the United States, and had Orwell been a different character he might have procured them but seems instead to have thought this would be exercizing privilege. At that time, France and Italy appeared likely to go Communist, and in both countries extremists in the Party were ready for a coup. The Soviets occupied East Germany, were isolating West Germany, provoking the Berlin airlift, and opening the whole German future to doubt. The fact that the worst did not happen does not detract from Orwell's vision. 1984, it seems to me, had the effect of saving the English-speaking intelligentsia from the Communist snares and delusions rampant on the continent of Europe, and any future totalitarian society will be obliged to ban it just as the Soviet Union did. That<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Courier New'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;">’s an immortal achievement. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2NkN2NlZDcyNTNhMzU5ZDc3NTdiYjY0NTQ0NTQ5ZTg= Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:00:43 -0400 The Cedar Freeze -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2IzNjY3YjVhM2EyZTJiYTU5ZWE4MTkxNDE5MzM5ODY= Grimly foreboding though the Middle East looks, things could be worse. For instance, the general election in Lebanon has left the country almost exactly unchanged. Things will stagger on as before in all their contradictions and dangers. The coalition of Fouad Siniora, comprising Christians and Sunnis, has the slight majority required to govern. The opposition, Hezbollah, the Shia party, is really only a foreign-policy arm of Iran, and quite a few Lebanese Shias are brave enough to defy it. Most observers thought it would win, but it got only 58 seats in a parliament of 120. Enough to be wreckers but not to form a government. That passes for good news in these parts. Hezbollah’s leader is Hassan Nasrallah, and he offers an outstanding example of the kind of men who come to the top in Arab and Muslim politics. He knows exactly how to obtain arms and financing, how to organize his supporters into a militia that will jump to do whatever he wants on pain of death and disgrace. He’s a perfect miniature of the one-man ruler that this system of politics invariably throws up. Within hours of the election results, he made a distinction between a parliamentary majority and a popular majority. In plain language he is reserving the right to use force if he sees advantage in doing so. More blunt still, a spokesman of his lays down that the Siniora majority must promise not to question Hezbollah’s role or the legitimacy of its weapons. That means reserving another right, namely to fight Israel again, when convenient. Hezbollah only has its numbers thanks to General Michel Aoun, another outstanding example of the kind of men who thrive in an absolute political system like this. A renegade Christian, a warlord, Aoun fought for years against Muslims, in the end fleeing to Paris as an exile. Throwing his lot in with Hezbollah is purely and simply a careerist move, quite natural, however unnatural it may look. A Lebanese Christian friend of mine sends him e-mails imploring him to abandon personal aggrandizement that could bring down the whole country. There is never an answer, needless to say. The Lebanese election freezes the situation, unless or until the imminent and more decisive election in Iran heats it up again. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2IzNjY3YjVhM2EyZTJiYTU5ZWE4MTkxNDE5MzM5ODY= Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:59:00 -0400 Europe's Backlash -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzIwYTE0NWIxMzg4NGUyYzAwZjhjYjFjYjQxMTllNzc= Britain is engulfed in political turmoil. And about time too. Prime Minister Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair two years ago, and has shown consistently poor judgement ever since. For reasons that must stem from a narrow and self-regarding character he is unable to admit to mistakes, but always justifies them, thus reinforcing these poor judgements. In local elections in England (i.e. not Wales or Scotland), his Labour Party has been more or less wiped out, left without control of a single council even in its heartlands. In simultaneous elections for the European parliament in Brussels, Labour has done even worse. In a very minimal turnout of 34 percent, Labour received only 15 percent of the vote, lower than the Conservatives by a long margin and UKIP -- the United Kingdom Independence Party, a ramshackle single-issue party aimed at getting the country out of the European Union. Third, after UKIP! This is really unprecedented. Socialism itself is becoming a thing of the past. Also unprecedented for Britain is the election to the Brussels Parliament of two members of the British National Party, which undoubtedly has a fascist core. Sir Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader of the 1930s, never succeeded in having a member of his party elected to parliament. Nick Griffin, today's fascist leader, is a good deal less intimidating than Mosley, an uncharismatic man without much powers of speech or intellect. But the Brussels Parliament is elected by proportional representation, and the BNP will therefore find quite a like-minded fascist bloc in it, comprised of various nationalities, including now Hungary which in the Jobbik Party has a real throwback to the 1930s. However, this voting pattern does not derive from nostalgia for Hitler and Mussolini, but far more simply from the way that every European government has bent over backwards to favor Muslim immigrants over local populations. In one country after another, the government has privileged Muslim immigrants in matters of welfare benefits, housing, communal subsidies, concessions over customs that are illegal and brutal but supposed to be untouchable because sanctioned by Islam, and even in the practice of law. The ensuing Islamization of the continent is the source of immense popular anger, hitherto unexpressed. Put another way, European governments may have had benevolent intentions towards Muslims, but in practice they prove to be efficient fascist-making machines. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzIwYTE0NWIxMzg4NGUyYzAwZjhjYjFjYjQxMTllNzc= Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:08:37 -0400 Obama in Egypt -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTlhY2Y4Yjc4YjI2ZTM2ODJhOTkzMzUwZTkyNDY5Njc= President Obama has been signaling since well before his election that he would be making an important address to the whole Muslim world. Expectation had therefore been aroused that the United States is about to change its policy in the Middle East and perhaps everywhere with a Muslim population. There was widespread but largely unspoken anxiety that the Islamic element in his family tree might give precedence to emotion over national interest. The post-election interview with al-Arabiyya television and the bow to the Saudi King in London seemed ominous omens. I think I was hardly alone in expecting bad things when at last Obama arrived in Cairo, the venue chosen to broadcast what is in his mind about Muslims. A new beginning for the relationship between the Unites States and Muslims, that is what he puts on offer. A certain high rhetorical style is becoming his trademark and it allows him the appeal almost of preaching, able to switch from sounding tough to appearing frail -- an unusual gift in a politician. This speech has an element of apology, with its implicit acceptance that the United States is responsible for the bad old relationship, and surely that is how most of his Muslim listeners will take it. It’s all George W. Bush’s fault, is it not? The Arabic language greeting, and several references to the Koran, will have served to suggest to his listeners that really he is one of them. And under cover of this bit of play-acting, he advised tolerance, repudiation of violence, rights for men and women, and a carefully measured move towards democracy and universal values. In reality, one good reason why there is no democracy is that the United States has been a steady supporter over decades of authoritarian regimes, for instance in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. George W. Bush made serious attempts to bring democracy to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, and look how unpopular that made him. Obama does not propose stopping the supply of advanced weaponry which actually keeps in power Arab dictators and allies who are prime obstacles to everything he is asking for, democracy included. Humbug? Probably not. The situation is just more complex than he allows. Another flaw in the reasoning is the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian stand-off. No progress is possible unless and until Hamas forswears violence, but that means tackling Iran as it is orchestrating that violence. He offered no practical proposals about to do this, only reiterating that Israel has to stop settlements on the West Bank, something about which Obama seems to be obsessing. Israel dismantled its settlements on the Gaza Strip and instantly was repaid with terror. Iran anyhow wants a one-state Islamist solution, and that is another issue too complex to be raised in Cairo. The speech was shown in full on Egyptian television, and listeners everywhere in whatever languages can hardly doubt Obama’s well-meaning intentions (an exception is Osama bin Laden who at the very same moment chose to put out his Islamist counter-proposals). The audience applauded. President Obama smiled, he waved, but as he left the platform he seemed mysteriously frail. On balance, he probably did not much good, but no harm either. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTlhY2Y4Yjc4YjI2ZTM2ODJhOTkzMzUwZTkyNDY5Njc= Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:54:02 -0400 Amos Elon, R.I.P. -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2FlM2E3NWYyNDIyZmZkNmZmNTdjZWI0NjY5NTFmZDI= Amos Elon was one of the most prominent Israeli writers. He's just died at the age of 82. By coincidence, we were both born in Vienna, where his father was a businessman, and my father had gone as a concert pianist. There was a sense that we were two of a kind, who should have been arguing in a café late into the night, except that the Nazis and the Communists had stolen the life we might have led as though characters in a novel by Arthur Schnitzler or Joseph Roth. Amos's last and finest book, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0312422814">The Pity of It All</a>, is about the tragic interaction of Germans and the Jews in their midst, and it is filled with a kind of historic regret that mass-murder was the end of it. So -- some vignettes. I was a correspondent in the Six Day War in 1967. I called on Amos in Tel Aviv. Exhausted, he just wanted to sleep. He'd been in the Sinai, a junior officer in a jeep with General Avram Joffe, a large and rumbustious figure who'd been surveying the battlefield through field-glasses. When the Egyptians began firing at them, Amos told how he had taken cover by lying on the floor, but General Joffe remained upright, and Amos heard him say, “God, war is so boring!” The Duke of Wellington at Waterloo couldn't have bettered it. Then at the time of the first Gulf War, with Saddam Hussein threatening to burn half of Israel, Amos appeared on Austrian television. Walking to his hotel in Vienna after the program, he passed a bookshop with a lighted window containing a mass of Middle East material. Standing there, a little old man said to Amos that he hoped Saddam would drive the Jews into the sea. Rather dismayed, Amos asked him why. Because then, came the unexpected answer, some of the Jews might come back to Vienna, and life would become interesting and tolerable once more. Amos was a man of the Left, contentious and caustic. For reasons I could never quite fathom, I had some special license to debate with him, pressing him to admit the false assumptions, inconsistencies, and follies of the Left, and especially the belief that the famous two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation is practical politics rather than the Utopian fantasy it so clearly is. It really was as though we were out-of-date cosmopolitans from a Viennese café. One day I was about to go on a National Review cruise and he was about to go on a similar cruise for The Nation. He suggested that the two cruises ought to meet on the ocean like pirates and do battle, all of us naturally wearing formal evening dress and black tie. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2FlM2E3NWYyNDIyZmZkNmZmNTdjZWI0NjY5NTFmZDI= Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:03:57 -0400 A Serious Menace -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NGIyYjU4MzM2NmZlNjRkZGEwMWI5N2MwNDE4YWEzNDk= The news that North Korea has just exploded another nuclear device is a heavy slap in the face for President Obama. The explosion was underground, but as big as Hiroshima. Obama pleads for a world free from nuclear weapons, and holds out the prospect of diminishing the stock held by the United States. He proposes more of the six-nation negotiations on the issue begun under President Bush but which got nowhere, indeed strengthened the hand of North Korea. That state is a tin-pot dictatorship held together by fear and oppression, but instead of collapsing as it ought to, it has become a serious menace. We know that North Korea was in the process of building the nuclear weapons’ facility in Syria that Israel bombed and destroyed -- it therefore has an active foreign policy on behalf of what used to be called the axis of evil. North Korea is intimately connected with the Iranian nuclear weapon now thought to be in the final stages of production. This April, North Korea launched a long-range missile that flew over the Pacific. And maybe things are coming together. Holding out that famous open hand of his, President Obama expects to negotiate Iran into desisting with its nuclear development. The only realistic alternative is a military strike by the United States or Israel, or both. But in that event, North Korea might freeze the situation by brandishing its nuclear weapon on behalf of Iran. Time is running out. The more sincere Obama is, the more naïve he seems. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NGIyYjU4MzM2NmZlNjRkZGEwMWI5N2MwNDE4YWEzNDk= Mon, 25 May 2009 14:04:50 -0400 'In the name of God, go' -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZWRlMDU3YzhmNDI4ZGI5M2FhMWU4OWQxYzIxMTNlMDM= The mood in Britain is unlike anything I have experienced. The electorate is enraged by the conduct of its representatives. Some members of parliament daren’t show their face, a former Labour foreign secretary has been booed by a television audience, and a Conservative member has had a brick heaved through her office window. It is all about expenses, fraudulent claims, tax evasion, making private fortunes by looting the public purse. Worse still, much of it has been legitimate, within what MPs are calling “the system,” and that is what is provoking the revulsion and rage. It turns out that the Blair-Brown Labour government could not bring itself to raise salaries for MPs, but instead set up “the system” of allowances that were privileged and kept secret. An MP could claim thousands of pounds more or less on his own say-so, with shaky receipts for dubious expenditure, and the result is that some have built property portfolios worth a million pounds or more. Some of the claimants were already rich in their own right, others used to be poor. All but a handful have been shamelessly greedy, and brought disgrace upon themselves and Westminster. The spectacle of them pretending that “the system” is to blame, or that they made accounting mistakes and are offering now to return ill-gotten gains has added elements of farce. Supervising this milking of “the system” was Michael Martin, the Speaker. In the early days of Tony Blair, this man was press-ganged into a job for which he was unfit. An old hardline socialist and trade-union man, he saw himself as defender of entitlements rather than liberty and proper government. He put in outrageous claims for himself and his wife. He did his very best to suppress information about the embezzling and spivery going on under him, in the classic manner of a trade unionist getting whatever he could for his comrades. Someone leaked the facts and figures to the Daily Telegraph, which has been publishing them for the past fortnight. Demonstrating folly and arrogance, Speaker Martin tried to cover up, seeking to set the police on whoever leaked rather than on malefactors. He has personally insulted the handful of MPs who had the courage to criticize him. The Telegraph exposes MPs who have claimed a range of things from porn videos, bath plugs, and dog food up to horse manure, building work to eliminate dry rot from a home, and clearing the moat of a stately manor house. The revelations have been appalling. People ordinarily do not live like this. Yesterday a motion of no-confidence in the speaker came before the house. A number of MPs called for his resignation. One of them likened the moment to the debate in 1940 when Leo Amery borrowed Cromwell’s rebuke to parliamentarians, “In the name of God, go,” and so got rid of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Speaker Martin gave an evidently insincere apology, fluffed his words, couldn’t read his statement, and had to refer to his clerk about procedure. The media of course had a field day. Today Speaker Martin resigned in a speech lasting half a minute and without apology, forced out as he should have been long ago. The last speaker to suffer this indignity was Sir John Trevor, in 1695, for taking bribes. Prime Minister Gordon Brown knew the outline of the MPs’ misdemeanours if not the details, and if the speaker implicates him the scandal may not stop at this point. The Mother of Parliaments has had to endure a lot in its history, but previous rogues like Charles James Fox or Horatio Bottomley at least had a certain style. This lot are just tawdry. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZWRlMDU3YzhmNDI4ZGI5M2FhMWU4OWQxYzIxMTNlMDM= Tue, 19 May 2009 14:44:27 -0400 The English Schindler -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGJkOGUwMTZhMmRkMjgwMzdlZTlhYTA2MjJmYjVlNjA= On May 19, Sir Nicholas Winton will be celebrating his hundredth birthday. My colleague Jay Nordlinger, always quick to praise those who deserve it, reminded me of this man. He did something memorable in the last months of peace in 1939, when the Nazis were dismembering Czechoslovakia and it was clear that soon they’d begin persecutions. Winton was then aged 29, and a stock-broker’s clerk, not someone special but a person as ordinary as any other. He went to Prague, set up an office there, and organised eight trains that brought Jewish children to London. These children needed sponsors, papers, and funding, all of which Winton arranged. The ninth train was due to leave on September 3, the day war was declared, and therefore it was cancelled. The 250 children who would have been on that train were soon murdered. Winton saved 667 children in all, though sometimes this figure is given as 669. There’s been some recognition. Books have been written about him, and films made, and he’s been called the English Schindler. The Queen knighted him, Vaclav Havel decorated him, and the Czechs proposed him for the Nobel Peace Prize. It so happens that a few years ago I caught him on a television programme, being interviewed by David Frost, he of the Nixon tapes. Frost brought in Alfred Dubs, one of the children saved, and who has made a success of his life in England, becoming a member of the House of Lords. Winton kept his composure even during this emotional encounter. His modesty is as exemplary as his conduct. He says of himself, “I just saw what was going on and did what I could to help.” The reward of the virtuous, according to the psalmist, is a long life, and that’s the case here. Happy Birthday! <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGJkOGUwMTZhMmRkMjgwMzdlZTlhYTA2MjJmYjVlNjA= Thu, 14 May 2009 09:17:22 -0400 The Two-State Solution Is No Solution -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTQ4ZjA0YzQxZDBhNTY5YzczMThhODQzNWNhNThkYjE= In a few days Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be meeting President Obama in the White House. There is something imperial, almost Roman, about these occasions. The satrap of some distant province is coming to bend the knee in obeisance to the emperor wearing a laurel crown. Last time Netanyahu visited as prime minister, Bill Clinton was in the emperor’s role, and he let it be known that he greatly resented the visitor’s independence of mind. Wasn’t this arrogant fellow really just a petitioner, and didn’t the emperor have only to snap his fingers to have his way? Nobody knows what is going on in the head under Obama’s laurel crown, but the vice-president and the national security advisor are among well-placed personalities to declare that the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock is about to be broken. They are going to put pressure on Israel to accept the famous two-state solution; peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians will follow once they live in states side by side. In the background, voices are prophesying that Israel will have similar negotiations with Syria, and that the United States and Iran are going to lie down together the way lions and lambs do, according to the psalmist in a rare liberal mode. You hardly need to be a Middle East expert to realise that none of this is probable. Recent concessions by Israel -- evacuating southern Lebanon or Gaza, for example -- have merely opened new areas for terrorism against it. Like other Arab societies, the Palestinians are so irrevocably divided between secular nationalists and Islamists that they are in a state of latent civil war. Besides, both Palestinian parties are so richly subsidised by outsiders that neither truly wants a state and the demands of government that this would involve -- better, easier, more continuously rewarding, to make nuisances of themselves and be paid for it. Syria makes the return of the Golan Heights a pre-condition of any talks. Iran has arrested, tried, and sentenced Roxana Saberi, only to release her, a cat-and-mouse game that allows the mullahs to conclude they can do whatever they like to anyone, and Obama is an imaginary emperor whose feet are clay. The two-state solution is, anyhow, an anachronism. The failure of the Oslo accords and the character of Yasser Arafat killed the whole idea. The one conceivable move at present is to return to pre-1967 conditions, and for Egypt to have the Gaza Strip and Jordan the West Bank. The snags involved might be surmountable. But right on cue, here comes King Abdullah of Jordan to say at the top of his voice that Israel and the Palestinians must make peace immediately, and failure to do so means a war with a year or 18 months. No responsible leader should hold out such a threat -- but let that pass, the king doesn’t really mean it. Palestinians already comprise three-quarters of his population, and he is fearful of acquiring the West Bank and a couple of million more. The threat of imminent war is a way of issuing a caution, “If the Israelis won’t have the Palestinians, I’m not having them either; get them off my back.” In other words, he’s anticipating that whatever Obama ordains won’t work out, and he’s not the only one to be doing so. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTQ4ZjA0YzQxZDBhNTY5YzczMThhODQzNWNhNThkYjE= Tue, 12 May 2009 10:10:11 -0400 'Only Connect' -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWM3OGRlZmI1MDNiODY2YmEyMjI3ZWVmYTdhMGFmN2U= “Only connect,” was the advice that the novelist E. M. Forster gave to anyone who wishes to understand the world. He wasn’t a very forceful personality, but the advice remains sound. And recent events have provided a rather startling illustration. In September 1933, Josef Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, arrived in Geneva to address the League of Nations. He stayed in a smart hotel and gave a press conference to admiring journalists. His purpose was to claim that Nazi persecution of Jews was justified. Jews had too much power and influence, and, besides, they weren’t German and had no right to be in the country. (I owe this information to <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0393062295">Flight from the Reich. Refugee Jews, 1933-1946</a>, a thoughtful study just published by the historians Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt.) In April 2009, Mahmud Ahmedinejad, the Iranian president, arrived in Geneva to address the United Nations, the successor to the League of Nations. He too stayed in a smart hotel and gave a press conference to admiring journalists. His purpose was to claim that Muslim aggression against Jews was justified. Jews have too much power and influence, and besides they have no right to be in a country of their own. Only connect, eh? <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWM3OGRlZmI1MDNiODY2YmEyMjI3ZWVmYTdhMGFmN2U= Wed, 06 May 2009 09:20:31 -0400 Emperor Jones -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDk1OGNmMjFiMDBkMTBiOWE5N2M3ZDNiZjRhZmRhNGY= When the decline of Britain comes to be properly recorded by some future Edward Gibbon, the name of Jack Jones will feature prominently. He has just died at the age of 96, In his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s he was General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union with its 2 million members, and a representative, almost a caricature, of intransigence, selfishness and militancy in the name of the workers. How he loved class warfare! And how he laid down the law to Prime Ministers Wilson and Heath, both of them apparently defenseless to deal with so rigid, so Stalinist, a figure. He obliged them to agree to a social contract in spite of the contradiction in it, namely that money was evil but it still had to be taken from everyone else and given to workers. He was one of the master-minds of the British economic disaster of those decades. Paul Johnson nicknamed him “Emperor Jones.” A man in this mold, it always seemed to me, had to be a Communist, and more than that, a Soviet agent. Always drably dressed, sporting a proletarian cloth cap, he spoke in a voice loaded with both monotony and menace. This presentational style of being a Puritan revolutionary was surely imitated from those he admired in the Kremlin. Other trade-union leaders accused him of being a Soviet agent, but this he always liked to deny. Truth-telling has never been in the playbook of such types. One clue was that he had volunteered for the Spanish civil war, and risen out there to be a commissar in the British Battalion, responsible for “political and moral education and vigilance.” That word “vigilance” conceals the fact that as commissar he had the power to send men to the firing squad. You didn’t get a job like that unless you were a loyal Muscovite Communist. The obituaries, of course, fawn over him. To the Guardian, Jones had “unflinching integrity” -- that’s a perfect specimen of the kind of euphemism Leftists come up with for a hard-line Communist. The BBC, now guaranteed to be off-beam, rather comically suggested he enjoyed “vigorous contests” with management. The Times spoke of his “left-wing affiliations” -- another polished euphemism -- but conceded that he was “a good hater.” Even the Daily Telegraph found him “dedicated to the Socialist ideal of Each for All and All for Each.” At which point Oleg Gordievsky has lost patience. Famously, he was the KGB colonel and resident in London who defected. Since then, he’s been reminding the country how dangerous the Soviets and their agents were. Now he has written a letter to the Daily Telegraph to state that he had been the case officer for Jones and his wife, also a Comintern agent since the 1930s, and he had given Jones “a small amount of cash.” (So much for the Puritan revolutionary.) Gordievsky also read the volumes of his files, now in the KGB archive. We have to be grateful that Jones did not have the chance to practice in Britain the role of commissar he’d learnt in Spain. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDk1OGNmMjFiMDBkMTBiOWE5N2M3ZDNiZjRhZmRhNGY= Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:01:13 -0400 A Salute to the Boys from Italy -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzA0N2EwYjkyNTI3NWZiYjQ1MGE2ZGM5ZGNmZjM1MTc= I happen to have just passed through Pisa airport, hardly one of Italy’s largest, and observed a unit mustering there. The men were wearing green shoulder flashes with the initials ISAF and underneath them some Arabic script. I asked several what the initials stood for, but nobody quite knew -- I for International, AF for Armed Forces, but S? And in English too? It was obvious where they had been posted but they did not really like to say so. Kabul, Afghanistan. I did not like to ask what exactly their mission was. The Italian armed forces tend to receive a bad press, but these men were in great spirits, very soldierly, well turned out, calm and collected as they enjoyed a farewell pizza and espresso. They were also busy with mobile telephones, a new bit of kit since my army days and one that must change conditions in the field by keeping them in touch with home. Men over military age are a bit suspect when they say they wish they were younger and could go campaigning too, but that is just what I thought, with a surge of solidarity for these men and the task ahead of them. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzA0N2EwYjkyNTI3NWZiYjQ1MGE2ZGM5ZGNmZjM1MTc= Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:09:18 -0400 Send Iran a Message: Don't Mess with the U.S. -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjYwZDU2Mjk3YmFkYjQyNjcxMzFiOGViMjQzYjVmZWM= The sentence of eight years in prison just passed on Roxana Saberi in an Iranian court is a travesty. She is the 31-year-old with dual Iranian and American citizenship, accused of somehow obtaining classified information and passing it to American intelligence. What position was she in to obtain such information? And how could any facts be established when her trial lasted just one day? President Obama so far has restricted himself to denying that she engaged in espionage. Mrs. Clinton avers herself “deeply disappointed.” Such politeness, such self-control -- and how misplaced! Words, mere words. They appear to have no insight at all into the political culture confronting them. For months, they have been preparing the ground for some sort of negotiation in order to establish a friendly relationship with Iran, and at pains to stress how anxious they are for this. To the mullahs, that means the Americans want something, and the question therefore is how much can they be made to pay for it. This phony arrest has been staged for the sake of the information it will reveal about the thinking in Washington, or in plain language, how complete is the collapse of American morale and will. Obama and Clinton should demand Roxana's release, summon all the international help available, impose whatever sanctions will harm Iran, and maybe dispatch a fleet if only as a show of strength. Maybe even arrest a few more of the Iranians in Iraq posing as diplomats but who really are engaged in espionage. Never mind what the surrender-monkey Europeans do or say. Otherwise the mullahs will conclude that they can mess with the United States as much as they like, and there are no costs in doing so. They'll push Hezbollah and Hamas to fight -- they have just been caught promoting a Hezbollah coup designed to destabilise Egypt. After that, they'll suddenly boast that they've been lying all along, and do have the nuclear weapon. What's happening to Roxana shows that soon Americans and everybody else might not be safe in that part of the world. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjYwZDU2Mjk3YmFkYjQyNjcxMzFiOGViMjQzYjVmZWM= Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:59:33 -0400 This Is a Test -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmUyMjMyYzdhOGNkMDZhNjFjZGRjOGVjYWFmNDAzZWM= The case of Roxana Saberi is extremely troubling. She has dual American-Iranian nationality, and in the eyes of the Iranian authorities that fits her up perfectly for a political experiment. According to press reports, she was freelancing for the American broadcaster National Public Radio until 2006 when she had her credentials revoked. Since then, she has been in Tehran preparing for a master's degree and doing research for a book. Earlier in the year she was arrested, charged with buying a bottle of wine and, of course, being a spy. At a one-day trial she was found guilty, and is now in the dreaded Evin prison awaiting her sentence. This is an issue with precedents in other totalitarian settings. In 1935, for instance, a British nurse on secondment to a hospital in Frankfurt was walking home after duty. Uniformed Nazi storm-troopers waylaid her in the street and beat her up. Informing the British government, the British consul, Dr. Max Auwe, spelled out how serious this episode was. The fact that the storm-troopers were in uniform showed that they wished to be identified as acting for the Nazi regime. The Nazis wanted to find out whether the British would react strongly to such a provocation or cave in. When Dr. Auwe insisted on a policy of strength, he was fired from his post. Months later, the British government signed the Anglo-German Naval Treaty that gave Hitler his fleet and became the stepping-stone for the disastrous policy of appeasement. The failure to defend a British nurse who had been deliberately attacked, the Nazis rightly judged, signified that the British were in no frame of mind to defend the national interest, but could be pushed to make huge and devastating concessions. So it is exactly with Roxana Saberi. The Iranians are testing the frame of mind in Washington. They have heard President Obama lamenting over past American policy, and offering change, indeed pleading for friendship. Negotiations are in the air. It is even being suggested that in the event of agreeing to negotiations the Iranians need not suspend their nuclear development, hitherto a condition for proposed talks. The mullahs are in the process of discovering whether Washington might be willing to make further concessions. Hillary Clinton has expressed “deep concern” over Roxana Saberi, and if weasel words of the kind are the sum total of Washington's response then the conclusion will be that the United States can be pushed into abandoning its national interest and instead pursuing a policy of appeasement of the mullahs, in spite of their warmongering quite as evidently as the Nazis. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmUyMjMyYzdhOGNkMDZhNjFjZGRjOGVjYWFmNDAzZWM= Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:28:05 -0400 McPoison -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDU0Y2JhZDNiOGIwNGEzZjI2Y2Y3YzgwYTE4YTQ5OTE= The name of Damian McBride was virtually unknown in Britain, except to a small circle of political insiders, and some of them already called him McPoison. That nickname will now stick for the rest of his life, a reminder of disgrace and shame. For some time this man has been in charge of communications for Gordon Brown, the prime minister, with an office in Downing Street and a six-figure salary courtesy of the taxpayer. Brown likes to parade a fine set of morals on every conceivable occasion, stressing that he is the son of an upright Scottish clergyman, boasting that he himself is whiter than white, and that sleaze in his administration would not be tolerated because he has values (a favorite word of his, spoken with a strange little twist of his mouth). All this release of morality, it turns out, is for external consumption; for internally he has been directing McBride to release rats from the sewer. The Conservatives had apparently been winning the battle for public opinion in the blogosphere. Therefore McBride decided to launch a website, to be titled Red Rag, on which he would put lies and innuendoes to denigrate these political opponents. To a colleague and like-minded spin-doctor, also a Labour insider and advisor, by the name of Derek Draper, he sent samples, involving disgusting sexual fictions about Conservative leaders, including David Cameron and George Osborne. They also fabricated stories about Mrs. Osborne’s state of mind. Absolutely totally brilliant, Draper chortled to McBride. The pair were evidently certain that this filth would stick and win them the election to be held next June. It is inconceivable that they did this without at least the knowledge of Brown, and quite likely his approval, whether open or tacit. Brown used to consult McBride daily, and Draper was invited to Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence. A Conservative blogger somehow learnt about all this, and exposed it. The scandal is rocking Britain. At first Brown and the others tried to cover up, pretending that this was all juvenile, and never intended for publication. That could not wash. McBride has been duly fired. Brown tries to plead ignorance. The Conservatives are pressing for an apology, but moral Mr. Brown will do no more than express regret. In the centuries of British parliamentary and political life, hard things have often been said and cruel deeds done, but the cut and thrust did not involve deliberate and considered destruction of rivals through deception and lying and sexual scurrilities concocted behind the scene like this. Previous socialists would not have sunk so low, but such complete disregard for principle in the pursuit of power is nonetheless the outcome, the necessary culmination, of socialism. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDU0Y2JhZDNiOGIwNGEzZjI2Y2Y3YzgwYTE4YTQ5OTE= Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:35:48 -0400 Obama and the King -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmUyYzI5Y2QxYTE0OGM2YWY4MzU0YmVhOWMwMTcwOTg= President Obama’s tour round the world has been absolutely surreal, as he could not stop making promises he is in no position to fulfill, or apologizing for perceived American misdemeanors he is in no position to prove, never mind redress. Surely the unforgettable highpoint of this festival of illusion was in London, when Obama encountered King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. It’s an accepted courtesy to royalty to make a little nod with the head, but film and photographs show Obama bending from the waist in a gesture of humble obeisance, as it were, acknowledging his inferior status. And there were the rest of us foolishly thinking that the whole purpose of the republic set up by the founding fathers was that its representatives would be on equal footing with monarchs. Obama further has gone out of his way to praise a so-called “peace” initiative proposed some years ago by King Abdullah. This calls for Israel to give the Palestinians everything they demand, including the return of all refugees. According to Obama, Israel would be “crazy” not to do what King Abdullah specifies, although this means that it must dissolve itself. At the Arab summit just held in Qatar, King Abdullah had quite the opposite experience. Where Obama fawned, Muammar Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya these many years, showed open disrespect for the king, telling him to his face in front of assembled Arab power-holders, “It has been proven that it is you who have lies behind you and the grave ahead, and it is you who were created by the British and protected by America.” And he went on, “I am an internationalist leader and the dean of Arab rulers and the King of African Kings, and the Imam of Muslims, and my international stature does not permit me to descend to any other level. Thanks.” Gaddafi then walked out and visited the local (and superlative) museum of Islamic art. All right, Obama needn’t talk in that comically high-flown idiom, but it would be nice if he stated firmly and unmistakably that he’s the leader of the free world, and therefore that he’s the true internationalist, and as such has no call to bow and scrape to absolute rulers and despots. Today’s news is that three Pakistanis have just been publicly beheaded in Saudi Arabia, bringing to twenty the number of those executed in that country so far this year. And an American president bows to the man ultimately responsible for that? <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmUyYzI5Y2QxYTE0OGM2YWY4MzU0YmVhOWMwMTcwOTg= Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:06:02 -0400 A World Candy Committee? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWI2NDYxZTQzZGM5YTRmNmE4ZGUyMWQ2NjBiNGVhZWY= President Obama and Dmitri Medvedev have met and put out a joint statement. Quite like old times, eh? The USA and the USSR divvying up the globe. But times have changed, and, in any case, Medvedev is a cipher, conjured into the Kremlin by Vladimir Putin who is today's Strong Man of Russia. Diplomats naturally employ a language of boiler-plate, and this statement is a fine specimen of it. “We agreed . . . ” the paragraphs begin, and then “We will strive . . . ” the subsequent paragraphs continue. What a lot of alternate agreeing and striving! The two of them are to “demonstrate leadership in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world.” Next please: “We committed our two countries to achieving a nuclear free world while recognising that this long-term goal will require a new emphasis on arms control and conflict resolution measures.” New emphasis, really? In boring fact, the Russians are completing the process of making Iran a nuclear power, and protecting North Korea's nuclear armaments as well as rebuilding their former empire by subterfuge and force. What leadership? What reduction? Apparently lost in mutual admiration, Obama and Medvedev are also going immediately to sort out the world's economic crisis, to bring al Qaeda and the Taliban to heel, to stop terrorism, to end the narcotic trade, in short, to ensure sweetness and light in a dozen other festering issues -- as the statement lengthened I was expecting to learn that the World Candy Committee had been set up for the benefit of everyone under 18. Incidentally, all the agreeing and striving has to be over and done with by this July. Of course. Could it be that Obama only put his name to this preposterous statement in the hopes of building up a possible rival to Putin? But I fear he meant it sincerely and it's sending shivers down my spine. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWI2NDYxZTQzZGM5YTRmNmE4ZGUyMWQ2NjBiNGVhZWY= Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:13:09 -0400 The Saudi Version of Events -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmM2NTE2YTRjNzU0M2I2YzM2MDM4MGE5Y2MwNDIzMTQ= Saudi Arabia is as impenetrable a country as the old Soviet Union. The ruling family occupy much the same place as the former Soviet Politburo. The King and his close relations decide everything in closed sessions, and no outsider can really know who among them argues for what, or on what basis. This murky personalization of the political process means that favours have to be done, people have to be bribed, honor has to be saved, and so moral and financial corruption comes to be institutionalized. Saudi Arabia spreads this corruption far and wide, simply because it has oil that outsiders need and for which they prepared to abase themselves. Death of a Princess was a British film some 20 years ago about the judicial murder of a member of the Saudi royal family, and the Saudi man she had eloped with. The Saudis did everything they could to have the film banned, so much so that the British Foreign Secretary said he regretted being powerless to oblige, and could only apologize. A major British company, BAE, seemingly bribed the relevant Saudis to obtain lucrative contracts. If the matter were investigated, the Saudis threatened, there would be no more contracts. This blackmail worked. The then Prime Minister Blair squashed police procedures on the specious grounds of national security. These disgraceful episodes are preludes to understanding what has happened to Mrs. Jane Rodway. She and her husband Christopher, an engineer, were once living and working in Riyadh. One day in November 2000 they drove to a garden centre. A bomb had been set under their car, and its explosion killed Mr. Rodway and concussed Mrs. Rodway. It is unmistakably clear that Saudi jihadis were responsible, just as later they were responsible for shooting the BBC's defense correspondent, and killing the photographer he was working with. But that casts shame on the Saudis, so the authorities concocted a fable that the Rodways' bomb had been set by expatriates engaged in illicit brewing and selling of alcohol. Fourteen expatriates were arrested, beaten, and tortured. None of them knew how to handle explosives and there was no evidence against them. But Sandy Mitchell, an anaesthetist, was made to confess on television and was then sentenced to be beheaded. William Sampson, a Canadian, also was made to confess. After three years of this travesty, when the Saudis could feel their honor was safe, all were released. Mrs. Rodway is now a school secretary back in England. I read in the Times that she has written time and again to the Saudi royal family and their London embassy to ask for an explanation of her husband's murder, but has never received so much as a reply. I also read that the British Foreign Office offers “sympathy” to Mrs. Rodway but denies her request to receive compensation from a fund designed to relieve British victims of terrorism abroad. As Mrs. Rodway says, the Foreign Office has accepted the Saudi version of events. Submitting to injustice like this, the Foreign Office is ensuring that Britain becomes a vassal state, adopting the Saudi ways of doing things secretly and corruptly. The scandal is enormous, and the consequences dire. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmM2NTE2YTRjNzU0M2I2YzM2MDM4MGE5Y2MwNDIzMTQ= Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:17:58 -0400 Understanding Iran -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmJiNjU2OTAzZDdjMTIwNmE0ZWVmZGM3ZjZmNDEyOTU= Whoever drafted President Obama’s public appeal to Iran has little or no idea about the way minds work out there. This gust of hot air spouting from the president of the United States was disconnected from reality, and so more than enough to make the heart sink. Obama invited Iran to “take its rightful place in the community of nations.” This, he went on, “cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization.” Oh yes it can. The ayatollahs are certain that terror and arms will advance the greatness of Iran better than anything else. History, culture, daily experience, assures them that this is a fact of life, and that peaceful action is only for the weak. Centuries of fighting, much of it unsuccessful, have formed their identity, and now they believe that they are on a winning streak, with a victorious Islam for inspiration. What need have they of the ruins of Persepolis or the poetry of Saadi and Rumi when they are developing nuclear bombs and missile-delivery systems? Appeals like Obama’s merely sound patronizing. Who the devil is he to be burbling at them about their rightful place and true greatness? The patronization is not the worst of the damage, however. Here is the president of the United States, occupying the position hitherto openly acknowledged as speaking for the West, turning himself of his own free will into a petitioner. The ayatollahs are bound to treat this approach as a humiliation for Obama, and broad evidence that victory is in their grasp. Over and above that, Obama has shown that he is willing to pay a price to come to terms with Iran, and naturally they will want to find out how much more he might be forced to pay. They will therefore scorn any element of good will, and continually raise the stakes to test out how far to go in cashing in on their perception of American weakness and humiliation. And sure enough, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei lost no time at all brushing aside Obama’s appeal as a mere slogan, while a crowd of tens of thousands were out in the streets chanting their well-practised refrain of “Death to America.” Many epithets are applicable to the ayatollahs ruling Tehran, but naïve and sentimental are not among them. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmJiNjU2OTAzZDdjMTIwNmE0ZWVmZGM3ZjZmNDEyOTU= Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:17:26 -0400 The End of Israel? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Zjk3NzBkY2E4NzE0MmQyMTZmZjM2OWRlNTk2NjQ2YjM= “CIA report: Israel will fall in 20 years.” That is the title of an email that I received 48 hours ago. Pretty sensational too. My first reaction, I admit, was: So that’s what Chas Freeman and like-minded friends of his must be cooking up in American intelligence circles. Apparently a study had been carried out and “made available only to a certain number of individuals.” And who was leaking it? Someone by the name of Franklin Lamb, described here as an international lawyer, in an interview with Press TV. That same evening I happened to be giving a talk and I mentioned this email. Shocks all round. On proper inspection, however, the quoted language was certainly suspect. What projects the demise of Israel in this report is “the looming spectre of colonial Apartheid” -- a phrase lifted straight from the loony Left lexicon. The rapid disintegration of South Africa and the Soviet Union offers precedents for what would occur in Israel -- a notion also current on the loony Left. Israelis are said to be applying for visas and fleeing abroad, with California or even Russia as their destination. Having supported Israel for so many years, the American public “may not take it any more.” That, of course, is the deepest wish-fulfilment of every anti-Zionist and Muslim hater of Israel. Anything is possible these days, but could the CIA really have put its hand to anything of the kind? Well, no, it didn’t. Press TV exists to promote Iran. Franklin Lamb may or may not be real. The internet carries the information that someone of that name is associated with the American University of Beirut, and also wrote a rather childish primer in praise of Hizbollah, which is a strange thing for a real, live American to be doing. What we’re dealing with here is disinformation pure and simple. The usual smearing of Israel is made that much more believable by being put into the purported mouth of the CIA. In Tehran and Beirut they must be congratulating themselves on this wheeze and hoping that it will become an established fable manipulating public opinion in their favour. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Zjk3NzBkY2E4NzE0MmQyMTZmZjM2OWRlNTk2NjQ2YjM= Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:51:26 -0400 Freedom of Movement under Attack -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmExYTZlMjU1ZTE0NTVlZDIwYWNjNmUzZDE2ZTdkNmI= Revolution takes freedom away in one big bang, whereas democratic governments erode it one step at a time. And usually the step is stealthy, so that most people are lulled into a sense there is nothing much to be done about it except shrug. This is the case in Britain, where freedom of speech and freedom of association have already been drastically curtailed under the present New Labour regime. Freedom of movement is now also under assault. Anyone who leaves the country by land, sea, or air is to have the trip recorded, which involves tracking 250 million journeys annually. At least 24 hours ahead of the journey, travelers will have to supply addresses, credit card details, and exact itineraries (quite often impossible, of course). This information will be stored for ten years. Preposterously, the purpose is said to be catching terrorists as they leave for home in après-bomb mood. What will actually happen is bureaucratic oppression and loss of liberty on a yet more unprecedented scale for everyone law-abiding. Needless to say, there has been no consultation or parliamentary debate. This is the kind of measure that police states undertake. In Soviet Russia, the passport system meant that the authorities could control the movements of the entire population. The Pass Laws of apartheid South Africa were similar instruments of total surveillance. Britain must evidently expect its own version of Pass Laws. As was the case in Communist countries and South Africa, what actually happens is that government abuses soon become unbearable, and infuriated subjects become ever more ingenious at cheating and lying and forgery until the whole system of checking essential freedoms collapses under the weight of its contradictions and bullying. The British are at this point with New Labour. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmExYTZlMjU1ZTE0NTVlZDIwYWNjNmUzZDE2ZTdkNmI= Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:01:15 -0400 Talk or Bomb? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2NlMjMwMzdkZjBhNzYwMDZjODdmMzE5ZThiMTM1NmU= The issue of Iran going nuclear is shrouded in secrecy. Most of us just don’t have the information to form a worthwhile opinion about it. Someone who does is Emanuele Ottolenghi, who has been an Oxford academic and is now with a think tank in Brussels. <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1846682827">Under a Mushroom Cloud</a> is the title of his book on the subject. I went to a talk he gave in the appropriate setting of the House of Commons under the auspices of the Henry Jackson Society. To the question, why does Iran want the nuclear weapon, he gave the straightforward answer that the bomb is an instrument for the projection of power. In his opinion, the Islamic regime is not so much apocalyptic as out to change the balance of power in the region -- not that their rationality can be depended upon. A combination of Persian nationalism, Shia identity, and Marxism is at work, altogether mixing the divine with the subversive. Once Iran has the bomb, others in the region will want it too, as self-protection. Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt or even Turkey fear that the United States, nominally their protector, may not wish to embroil itself when push comes to shove. A nuclear Iran also means that the difficulties of Lebanon and Israel will be impossible to resolve. The dire alternatives appear to be bombing Iran or accepting its nuclear weapon, and Ottolenghi could not decide which was the worst-case scenario. What to do? Options are limited. The United States can either talk or bomb. Israel can only bomb. Europe can only talk, but it could talk tough. European exports to Iran account for almost half the national total and an embargo on them would thwart and complicate Iranian ambitions. Given the current economic recession, I doubt whether anyone in the audience believed that the European countries would ever commit themselves publicly to a policy of trade embargo, or stick to it privately if they did commit to it. As things stand, the offer of the United States to engage in talks with Iran is bound to increase the influence of Iran, and Ottolenghi raised the grim prospect of a Middle East Yalta. As I left, I made my way down the corridors of the House of Commons past the marble statues and busts of Gladstone, Disraeli, Palmerston, Canning, and could not help contrasting present doubt with past conviction. The free world is at a crossroads. There’s not much time left for President Obama to clarify the decisions he has to take on what surely will be the defining issue of his presidency. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2NlMjMwMzdkZjBhNzYwMDZjODdmMzE5ZThiMTM1NmU= Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:27:44 -0400 Sir Teddy -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmU1MzY0M2ViZmU0OGU4MmVjZTc1NmQxYmJkMmY3OTM= The news that Sen. Edward Kennedy is to be awarded an honorary knighthood adds to the battering that Britain is currently enduring. People no doubt feel sorry that the man has a brain tumor, but at the same time few Americans have ever been so disliked and resented by British public opinion. The honour of a knighthood to foreigners is itself quite rare. Kennedy is supposedly singled out for services to Britain. When President Obama was running for office, Kennedy’s endorsement of him seemed to matter, and plainly Prime Minister Gordon Brown calculated that on his recent visit he could please the White House by laying before it this piece of personal tribute. This is misconceived and humiliating. The fate of Mary Jo Kopechne has not been forgotten. As for Kennedy’s services to Britain, they involved playing the Irish nationalist card and promoting the IRA throughout his career. Most probably he did not really believe in this cause but was grandstanding for the sake of the Irish vote in Massachusetts. The effect was to generate violence, cynicism, and falsehoods. The British, he said in 1971, were in Ulster the way the Americans were in Vietnam. Anticipating ethnic cleansing, he proposed that the Protestant majority there “should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain.” He made a particular point of welcoming Gerry Adams to the United States, lobbying to have him invited to the White House, fundraising and posing for photo-ops with that deceitful agent of nationalist violence. Nobody has a comparable record of trying to make Gerry Adams and the IRA seem respectable. That too has not been forgotten. Compared to the major ills afflicting Britain, this knighthood is a minor issue, but nevertheless illustrates Brown’s special flair for rewarding those who don’t deserve it, and it is another step towards the terminal fate of him and his government. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmU1MzY0M2ViZmU0OGU4MmVjZTc1NmQxYmJkMmY3OTM= Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:12:34 -0400 The Rentier Population -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWE2MzM5Y2Y3NmMyNGZlNDFkYjcyM2E4NjU4OWRlOTc= $4.5 billion: That’s what a conference of donors has just decided to give to Gaza, and that’s in addition to the hundreds of millions already paid out by United Nations agencies. True, about half the new money is due to come from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, and they rarely deliver what they promise. According to Mrs. Clinton, the United States is in for almost a billion, and she seems to think this is fine. A rentier is someone who lives off the labour of others by simply cashing dividends, and this cascade of dollars makes the Gazans a unique example of an entire rentier population. No other people in the history of the world have ever lived at the expense of others on this scale. And what did they do to deserve their rentier dividends? Easy. They elected Hamas to govern them, in the certain knowledge that Hamas as good Islamists are bound to declare jihad with the purpose of wiping out Israel. Sure enough. Hamas duly fired daily barrages of rockets and mortars into Israel. Polls show that large percentages of the Gazans approved. A day came earlier this year when Israel had had enough, and went to war. By and large, the Gazans are not in a position to weigh whether or not Hamas’s policies are realistic and beneficial. Of course it is right and proper to feel pity that they are poorly equipped to make sound judgements about the balance of forces in the region, the certain consequences of resorting to force, and the morality of doing so. Nevertheless they freely elected Hamas and it has been acting in their name, attacking Israel on their behalf. To reward Gazans now with $4.5 billion shows that Hamas needs make no amends for the disaster its jihad brought down on everyone. On the contrary, the decision to attack Israel has proved a wonderfully paying proposition. Stick to Hamas, the Gazans can tell each other, and your status as a rentier is assured. Hamas has already resumed firing rockets in the certainty that it is cost-free and richly rewarding to do so. The donors have laid the foundation for the next round of warfare. This is hallucinating; this is madness. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWE2MzM5Y2Y3NmMyNGZlNDFkYjcyM2E4NjU4OWRlOTc= Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:06:15 -0400 Who Ensures the Peace? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTFhYzIzZTEzN2FjN2FkYTJiOGEyYTA0NjEyNzZhMDA= A bomb exploded this week in the Khan al-Khalili in Cairo, and killed a seventeen-year-old French girl, severely wounding a score of other visitors, some of them naturally Egyptians or other Arabs. The Khan al-Khalili is one of the great picturesque souks for which the Arab world is famous. What a place, and what a crowd! All human life seems to be there. When last I was in the Khan, I saw a man selling assorted second-hand plastic spoons, which seemed to tell me something all too real about Egypt and poverty today. When I think of the Khan, I recall Lord Cromer, who in the days of the British governed Egypt more or less like a viceroy for over twenty years. Before obtaining his peerage, he was Evelyn Baring, and so quickly known in Egypt as Over-Baring. <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0559786743">Modern Egypt</a> is the lengthy memoir that he published in 1906, and well worth reading today. In it, he describes how he used to enjoy a regular walk by himself through the Khan al-Khalili. Anyone could have shot him. One day, he records, he met an Italian lady of his acquaintance, and while they were chatting a young British officer, beautifully turned out, and on a magnificent horse, came clattering past. Everyone, including Lord Cromer and the lady, had to get out of the way in a hurry. “Che bella razzia,” the lady exclaimed, meaning how fine and commanding the English looked. Lord Cromer then reflects upon the redcoats up in the citadel who are actually ensuring the peace. No Egyptian ruler since Cromer could have dared to stroll freely like that in the Khan -- not King Farouk, not Nasser, not Sadat, not Mubarak. Thanks to the invaluable service of Memri, I have lately been catching up on some Egyptian clerics. One, Amin Al-Ansari, showed scenes of wartime genocide on an Islamic television channel and preached, “This is what we hope will happen, but, Allah willing, at the hand of Muslims.” Another, Zaghloul Al-Naggar, thinks the West wants to avenge its defeat in the Crusades, and also that the Arab world is ruled by the scum of the earth because none of its leaders have declared jihad. When ignorance and hatred come together like that, some poor fellow is left sitting on a pavement selling second-hand plastic spoons, an unfortunate French girl is blown to bits simply for passing by at that moment, and innocent bystanders have to be maimed. That Italian lady may have been a bit gushing, but the Islamists of Egypt (not to mention those of Iran, Hamas, or the Taliban) prove that Lord Cromer was surely right to maintain that if there isn’t any enforcement in these circumstances, there won’t be any peace either. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NTFhYzIzZTEzN2FjN2FkYTJiOGEyYTA0NjEyNzZhMDA= Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:31:53 -0400 Revolutionary Road -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzZmZjExODVhMzdhZjY5NzIwMjk0YjFmZTk1YTExZTY= Revolutionary Road is the movie of the moment, and a well-made and well-acted movie it is, too. But the view of the world that it conveys is a very familiar one indeed, namely that suburban life in America stifles individuality and creativity, and, in fact, is a form of living death. Inescapable frustration drives the film’s heroine to measures that kill her. Hopes and dreams in such a setting are impossible, just delusion. Richard Yates, author of the novel on which this movie is rather faithfully based, was a colleague of mine in the mid-1960s when we were both teaching creative writing in the University of Iowa. Dick, as he was known, presented himself as an East Coast gentleman, wearing a three-piece suit for his classes, superior in manner to everyone, not to say snobbish. One day, he urged me to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s diaries, and quoted how Fitzgerald on a visit to Princeton had observed (I haven’t checked my memory of the exact wording), “the faded banners on the chapel wall.” Dick was on the look-out for memorials. A glance at his pale and pudgy face was enough to reveal that here was a deeply unhappy man, so unhappy that he could not tolerate anything like happiness in others. By the end of the evening, he would be in his shirtsleeves, drunken and perspiring and vituperating about a failed marriage, and savagely resenting that he was not a household name. The identification with F. Scott Fitzgerald meant that he too had escaped the suburbs and was aspiring to a higher tragic fate. This cast of mind surely typifies the loathing of so many intellectuals in America and Europe for themselves and their own society. His closest -- perhaps only -- friend in the English department was the writer R.V. Cassill, a native Iowan. At the time, Cassill was publishing obsessive articles to the effect that President Kennedy had been the victim of a giant conspiracy, and the Warren Report was a cover-up. Cassill also believed that the Jews of New York controlled national publishing, and made sure that he did not have the reputation he thought he deserved. One professor had a young wife from Czechoslovakia whose parents had been murdered in the war by the Nazis, and Cassill said to her, “Next time we’ll be sure to get you too.” After that, and the row that then exploded, Dick Yates was almost alone in sticking with Cassill, perhaps more out of bravado than shared prejudice. The pair of them would stalk together through the campus, as though the surrounding unhappiness they had created was final proof of their innate superiority. Like Fitzgerald, Dick Yates died too young, with the pathos of unfulfilment clinging to him. As I sat through the movie, I couldn’t help wondering whether he would have changed now that his name and his work are suddenly in the headlines. Might his unhappiness have dissolved, and could he have found a wife and settled with her in the kind of pretty house with a lawn and trees that he had held in such contempt? As the film’s heroine takes the fatal steps leading to bloodshed and death, a man in a nearby seat suddenly fell to the floor, and cries and calls for an ambulance broke out in the cinema. But he had only fainted. The sight of blood had been too much for him. That fitted in very well with Dick’s view of the world. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzZmZjExODVhMzdhZjY5NzIwMjk0YjFmZTk1YTExZTY= Mon, 23 Feb 2009 12:01:10 -0400 Postscript Concerning Abu Qatada -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODI3YjNiODI3ODE5NmI0OGZhNzE0N2Q3YTI3ZjU5ZDI= Abu Qatada is indeed appealing to the European court in Strasbourg, and the appeal carries with it a claim to compensation for wrongful imprisonment and infringement of his human rights. There is no limit to the sum that the court decrees, which the British taxpayer must pay. How delighted Abu Qatada and jihadis everywhere must be with the turn of events. What an encouragement to violence! These barbarians come to kill us, and we reward them for their efforts. Only a society that has lost the basic instinct of self-preservation could get itself into such a mess. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODI3YjNiODI3ODE5NmI0OGZhNzE0N2Q3YTI3ZjU5ZDI= Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:46:21 -0400 The Case of Abu Qatada -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjI4ZjA5MzFiMjE5NmFjZjgwZDIzMjJkMWZhNzdlNmI= Abu Qatada can be deported from this country, so the Law Lords today have decided, and they are the British equivalent to the Supreme Court. And about time too. This case has exposed manifest absurdities in the way the British handle their affairs. A Palestinian-Jordanian by birth, Abu Qatada came to Britain in 1993 on a forged United Arab Emirate passport. He wasn't thrown out. On the contrary, the following year he and his family of five children applied for asylum and were granted it. Pretty soon the lot of them were living on benefits paid by the British taxpayer. The man is wanted for murder and terrorism in Jordan and several other countries, and they have asked for his extradition. In vain, of course. Meanwhile he specialised in inflammatory sermons, tapes of which were found in a Hamburg apartment used by some of the 9/11 terrorists. Reputedly raising funds in Europe for Osama bin Laden, he had £170,000 in cash in his house when the police at last came for him. And still he wasn't thrown out. An appalling game began as he played upon the weaknesses of the law. The British Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights protected him. He would be arrested, given bail, and either freed by the court or else went on the run. When the government tried to change the law to detain people like him without trial, the judges saved him. Lord Hoffman, a Law Lord, earned his place in British history alongside Ethelred the Unready by pronouncing that "the real threat to the life of the nation" does not come from terrorists but from the kind of law the government was seeking to introduce in this case. Today's ruling by his colleagues may well upset Lord Hoffman, but there's still a possible last chance for Abu Qatada. Three legal systems actually apply in Britain: its own code, sharia, and the European Court; and Abu Qatada may try to appeal to the latter. In which case, he may yet again avoid being flown home to stand trial in Jordan. This is not just a story about tying ourselves up in legal red tape on behalf of someone able to take advantage in order to abuse and injure us. Absurdities, did I say? Death wish is more like it. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjI4ZjA5MzFiMjE5NmFjZjgwZDIzMjJkMWZhNzdlNmI= Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:31:18 -0400 Parliamentary Procedure, Apparently -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWY4ZDM2NTgxM2E1MGU3MzUyYzkyZThhN2E2ZjcxODg= Things are happening on the political scene in Britain which even a few short years ago would have been unthinkable. Police have entered the House of Commons to arrest a Conservative Member of Parliament. The Home Secretary, one Jacqui Smith, is revealed to have claimed a six-figure sum for expenses in her home when she is living all the while in her sister's house, and this enormity is apparently within the rules parliamentarians have drafted for themselves. And now Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch Parliament, and therefore an elected democratic politician, has been refused entry at London airport and deported back to the Netherlands. He is, Jacqui Smith's Home Office pretends, nothing less than a threat to "public security." How so? Wilders was invited by a member of the House of Lords to show their lordships his film Fitna, all seventeen minutes of it. Among the meanings of this Arabic word in Wehr's Dictionary are "sedition, riot, discord, dissension, civil strife." The film is out to show that the Qur'an contains verses that encourage these bad outcomes, setting Muslims against themselves and others. This is a serious argument, even if clips of terror outrages make the film deliberately sensational, even lurid. Unfortunately, the acts of terror are real, and readings from the Qur'an bear upon them. Free speech has been a particularly English glory since Milton first argued that it was a principle of freedom itself. Dissidents, rebels, and freedom fighters from Karl Marx and Mazzini to Stalin and Salman Rushdie have had the opportunity to say what they wanted, whether or not anyone disapproved. Now thanks to one Jacqui Smith, so comfortably padded by the taxpayer, this principle of freedom is suspended. There is more. Lord Ahmed is a Muslim born in Kashmir and put into the House of Lords by Tony Blair. Two years ago, Lord Ahmed invited Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a Palestinian previously detained on suspicion of fundraising for groups associated with al-Qaeda, into the House of Lords. It was his parliamentary duty, he told critics, to listen to what Abu Rideh had to say. Evidently it's that self-same parliamentary duty to ban and suppress Wilders. It is reported that he warned the authorities that 10,000 Muslims would bring real Fitna to the streets by demonstrating in the event that the film was shown, though he denies this. But clearly intimidation has trumped free speech. "Public security" is just humbug. This is not a minor issue. On his way out, Wilders openly called the English "cowards." Losers, he might have added, shamed and shaming, people untrue to themselves. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWY4ZDM2NTgxM2E1MGU3MzUyYzkyZThhN2E2ZjcxODg= Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:33:52 -0400 World of Corruption -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGFhNTQxYjk5YTYwMDcwZDhiOTAwZGI5ZmQxYTBiZTk= You expect that Russians in the position of Vladimir Putin or the oligarchs will find ways of diverting millions of dollars to themselves. Of course the Palestinian big-shots of Fatah or Hamas are going to steal all the humanitarian aid they can lay hands on, down to blankets provided by the United Nations. It is always in the forefront of the minds of the likes of President Robert Mugabe and the thugs around him that they must appropriate whatever property they can while the going is good. These all live in kleptocracies. But what about public figures in democracies supposedly governed by the rule of law? The scandals come thick and fast. Look at the governor of Illinois. Look at Bernard Kouchner, the one-time founder of Medicins sans Frontières, and presently French foreign minister. Pierre Péan, one of the most prominent investigative journalists in France, accuses him of a conflict of interest, taking millions of euros from two African countries, Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville, on behalf of associates. Péan’s book prints relevant contracts signed by Kouchner. In a previous book, Péan established Mitterand’s disgraceful past as a collaborationist in wartime Vichy, and he looks like having a lock on Kouchner--who says, however, that everything he did is transparent and he’ll sue. We shall see. And look at Britain, where four members of the House of Lords have been revealed taking large sums of money in return for influencing legislation. Other peers have evidently been bribed, obscuring the line between their functions as legislators and consultants. You have to go back to the eighteenth century for corruption like this. And look at Ehud Olmert, outgoing Prime Minister of Israel, who must soon go to court to answer several charges, among them one of putting in false expenses. Evidently the imaginary world of rules hardly coincides with the real world of cash passing from hand to hand. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGFhNTQxYjk5YTYwMDcwZDhiOTAwZGI5ZmQxYTBiZTk= Sat, 07 Feb 2009 13:00:00 -0400 Obama's Carter Moment? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTUwZWMzOWQ0ZWMyZGY1ODM0MzQ2ZmY2OGJmMjhmZjA= Latent violence is pretty much everywhere in the world in these days of recession. Britain and France have already seen strikes aimed at protecting local jobs, and both their governments have been lucky so far to escape an escalating crisis. But the more eastward you go in Europe the closer this violence comes to the surface. In Latvia, Lithuania, and Bulgaria the various police forces have been very rough. Roughest of all, though, is Russia, where the authorities very well know where protest might lead, and so have never taken kindly to it. When in doubt, use the knout. Its riot police have been handily beating demonstrators to the ground everywhere from St Petersburg to Vladivostok. Unemployment in Russia is rising fast, and the currency, the ruble, has lost about a fifth of its value. $200 billion--a third of the reserves--have already been spent supporting the ruble, so that further devaluation seems a virtual certainty Foreign investors have withdrawn billions of dollars. All of which encourages the Kremlin to go on the attack in classic style. We already know how Putin and company treat Georgia. Now they are in the process of reestablishing their hold on the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. The Kremlin plans to form a force in the region, and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev specifically declares that it will be a match for NATO. To get off the mark, Russia has ensnared Kirghizstan with the usual blend of violence, cunning and bribery. In recent weeks, Russia began by attacking the Kirghiz internet infrastructure. Then it simply bought the country with a multi-billion dollar loan to plug the deficit in the Kirghiz budget, with additional hundreds of millions of dollars in write-offs and grants. More than that, according to the Daily Telegraph, what are delicately called “bonuses” and “emoluments” were paid to officials. The money may be running out in Moscow, and the currency about to crash, but power still remains power. As part of this murky business, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the Kirghiz president, has ordered the United States to quit the former Soviet base it rented at Manas, close to the country’s capital of Bishkek. Manas is needed to ferry supplies to American and other forces over the border in Afghanistan, and squadrons of fighter jets are also stationed there. President Obama has been promising increased operations against Afghan Islamists, but the closing of Manas will seriously impede any such development. And simultaneously there are to be renewed arms’ control negotiations, aimed at reducing nuclear stockpiles to achieve parity--that is to say, boosting Russia at American expense. When the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan back in 1979 and began that poor country’s destruction, then President Jimmy Carter feebly lamented that he’d just learned what he was up against. Obama looks like having his Carter moment. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTUwZWMzOWQ0ZWMyZGY1ODM0MzQ2ZmY2OGJmMjhmZjA= Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:58:03 -0400 John Updike, R.I.P. -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzcwZWFhZDBhOTg2YTdlYWUwYzY0NGQ3YTFlZWU2NGE= One fine summer day, I was walking home through the park. When I sat down on a bench, I noticed that the man already on it was wearing khaki fatigues and heavy combat boots. He had a huge notebook on his knee, and was writing in it in green ink, very very very carefully, one word at a time--a long pause, pen in air--and then one more word. The whole page was entirely free from erasures. This procedure was fascinating. I squinted in order to read what he could possibly be writing. It was pure vituperation against his wife and his marriage by someone staying in a Holiday Inn. I shrank away, and looked at this man next to me on the bench. He had a nose as shaped and individual as the nose of Federico di Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, in Piero della Francesca's magnificent portrait. The penny dropped. The boots and fatigues were misleading. I had had the privilege of catching John Updike in the midst of his astonishing method of composition. It happened that Updike had not long before reviewed very generously a book of mine. I was just working out how to introduce myself without seeming a Peeping Tom when a beautiful woman arrived, he folded his notebook and off they sauntered arm in arm under the evening sun. Oh, the style of the man and the writer! <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzcwZWFhZDBhOTg2YTdlYWUwYzY0NGQ3YTFlZWU2NGE= Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:33:34 -0400 Murder Most Foul -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2ViNzdlZGIzZGVjOGYxOWJkNTQyNWVjNzM5NmE4YWY= There’s been another example of it in Moscow, where they specialize in violence and outrage. A man in his twenties, Stanislav Markelov, was walking down a central street in the middle of the morning when a gunman wearing a woollen balaclava came up and shot him in the head. Anastasia Baburova, a young freelance journalist accompanying Markelov, went to help him on the pavement, whereupon the gunman shot her dead as well. Then he walked away in his own time, apparently confident that nobody would interfere with him. A photograph of Markelov shows him to have had the face of an idealistic student. In fact, he was a lawyer and human-rights activist. He’d taken up the case of a 19-year-old Chechen girl who had been arrested and murdered by a Colonel Yuri Budanov. Budanov confessed, and was sentenced to prison, only to be reprieved. Markelov was using legal procedures to try to keep Budanov in gaol. Nobody knows who shot Markelov and his companion, but it hardly takes Sherlock Holmes to figure out who had an interest in having them out of the way. A young friend of mine from France has been living and working in Russia these past 18 months. He came round yesterday to ask advice about a book he intends to write. The social and ethnic mix of Russia fascinates him. He describes parts of the country that modernity, even in the form of Communism, couldn’t touch. Russians, he says, are good at putting up a Potemkin façade of being European, but they’re different underneath, they have their traditional codes, and know how to live within them. A network of family, friends, employers, patrons, has to protect you. He was shocked by the Markelov murder, and compared it to similar outrages such as the gunning down of the journalist Anna Politskovskaia. And yet it has its context, as he confirms. In the absence of law that can be enforced, there is a sort of balance of power that every group senses and whose limits they understand. The murderer of Markelov certainly had the backing of some very powerful people probably right at the top, so there’s absolutely no question of anyone ever being arrested for it. End of story, then. No man, no problem, as Stalin liked to say. That’s how they’ve always done things in the days of the czars and of the Bolsheviks, and they will go on doing them that way, my young friend said as though stating the simplest matter of fact. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=N2ViNzdlZGIzZGVjOGYxOWJkNTQyNWVjNzM5NmE4YWY= Sun, 25 Jan 2009 10:42:26 -0400 Animal Farm Come to Life -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTRjOGQzYjAyZTk1NTNjODZhMjQ4YjRiNTJhZDZmYWM= This past fortnight I have been in the United States, hence the silence of David Calling. One of the purposes of my journey was to do some research in the Beinecke Library at Yale, where my father's papers are housed. Here is a mass of material for the memoir I hope to write. To be reading the correspondence between one's parents gives a creepy sense of peeping through a keyhole. It is altogether strange to confront letters from all my relations, my wife and children, and finally from myself--many rather insignificant family matters beautifully preserved. But for whom? The library came to seem something like a cemetery. The Britain I came back to is in full crisis. There is a run on sterling, as the pound has lost at least a third against the dollar and looks like it will be losing more. The stock market sinks. Unemployment is about two million, or seven percent and rising as businesses go bust. The folly of bankers has been almost unimaginable, and one insolvent bank after another is being nationalized, a sort of backstairs socialism that is likely to prove no kind of solution. Presiding over the meltdown, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer evidently have no coherent idea what to do to prevent recession blooming into a major depression. Familiar pieces of the landscape are falling away, and the Evening Standard is only the most recent. For a century and a half, this has been London's leading evening paper. Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail picked it up cheap when the previous owners, the Beaverbrook empire, got into financial trouble. Under Rothermere, the paper was pretty feeble and shallow, therefore making huge losses, said to be at least ten million pounds a year. And now Lord Rothermere has sold it on to one Alexander Lebedev for a nominal one pound. Lebedev is a former KGB agent, once stationed in London, and he glories in that fact. Nobody knows how he became an oligarch, but according to Forbes he is the world's 194th richest man, worth two billion dollars or more. He is said to have been a friend of Yeltsin, and now is on good terms with Putin. So a title with influence comes into the hands of a former Communist secret policeman and spy, whose past is as invisible as his present activities. Reportedly, Mikhail Gorbachev and Tony Blair will sit on some advisory board. The cabinet minister with responsibility for approving the transfer of title is Peter Mandelson, himself once a Communist and now a good friend of Oleg Deripaska, another dubious Russian oligarch. Does this not remind you of the end of Animal Farm, George Orwell's satirical masterpiece, when the revolutionary pigs and the capitalist humans celebrate together whatever they can grab, and nobody can tell which is which. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTRjOGQzYjAyZTk1NTNjODZhMjQ4YjRiNTJhZDZmYWM= Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:27:32 -0400 Totalitarians of the World Unite -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTBiNTVhMzM2YTBlNGM4ZjlhNDc3OTRlYzY0MTUyNTg= Russia has built into its armory the new weapon of natural gas. This may not have the immediate clear-your-mind impact of the former SS-20 inter-ballistic missiles, but it will do to be going on with. The Russians have only to cut off the supplies to their customers, and watch them come begging to heel. And that is what Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has done. He staged a little scene for the television cameras at which he was seen triumphantly ordering the CEO of Gazprom to shut down the pipe-line running through Ukraine. The intention is to punish Ukraine for its independence, its application to join NATO, its parting of the ways with Mother Russia, the rightful overlord of that country in the view of people like Putin. The best of it for the Kremlin is that customers further down the line are sufferers, for instance Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and Hungary, vassals from the Cold War for which Putin and his advisors feel Soviet-style contempt. Don't forget Germany, which depends on Russia for about a third of its gas. Of its own free will, Germany has made itself dependent on Russia honouring gas contracts -- and this when Russia is a country without the rule of law, and the whole point is for the strong to acquire power and use it against the weak as they are in the process of doing. The former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has played a leading part in making sure that his country is subject to Russian gas policy, more likely to become an enduring colony than the late lamented German Democratic Republic. Leaving office, he became a hired hand of Gazprom. This is absolutely typical of Europe today. European politicians appear to be running around in search of someone, Arab, Iranian, Russian, Chinese, anyone, even each other, to whom they can consign their independence. When the Russians cut off the gas, the Europeans said that they insisted forthwith on sending monitors to talks between Russia and Ukraine. Now that’s an ultimatum! We may shiver from cold, they’ll shiver from fear. Quite as effective as ferrying teams of politicians round the Middle East to make sure that Hamas remains strong enough to work whatever mischief it can. Totalitarians of the world unite; you cannot lose to headless chickens. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTBiNTVhMzM2YTBlNGM4ZjlhNDc3OTRlYzY0MTUyNTg= Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:24:10 -0400 "The Night the General Danced" -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzIzZWFjNDM1YjRjMzYxODZmYjlkOGI2ZGJkNjA2OTk= One way or another, events in Gaza must bring about some new stage in the perpetual wrestling match between Israelis and Palestinians. Best would be a clear-cut Israeli victory, one that puts a complete end to the firing of rockets from Gaza, and so frees the Palestinians from the Islamists of Hamas who are leading them to total perdition. This would further inform the Arab and Muslim world that hurt to Israel only carries a far greater cost to itself. We have often been in this position when Israel wins militarily but is deprived of the political consequences by the interference of the outside world in favour of the Arabs and Muslims responsible for the fighting -- for instance, after the Six Day War in 1967, again in 1973, and after the 1982 war in Lebanon, and the latest repeat was in 2006 with Hizbollah. The thwarting of victory invariably means a repeat of violence on the part of the defeated, for they find themselves relieved of what ought to be the finality of defeat. Failure to understand this fundamental reality leads French President Nicolas Sarkozy to call now for an unconditional truce, or Prime Minister Gordon Brown to say that cease-fire in Gaza is vital. Interventions of the kind are only attempts by rather secondary politicians to lay claim to an undeserved status, but more dangerously they ensure the perpetuation and repeat of violence. If Europeans are going to rescue Hamas, why should it change its conduct? These events brought to mind a short story entitled “The Night the General Danced,” by George Macdonald Fraser, the author of the wonderful novels recording the successes and failures of his hero Flashman, a British soldier in the days of the Empire. This story is set in the Gaza of 1947 when a British airborne division was still in occupation. A General orders his Scottish regiment to celebrate by dancing Scottish reels. As they do so, Jews and Arabs start shooting at each other out in the Gaza night. Worked up by dancing, the General and his Scotsmen go out after them. The firing stops because the Jews and Arabs run away, realising that there are men fiercer and more determined than themselves. And that is what the likes of Sarkozy and Brown ought to realise in turn: Either send in the troops or shut up and let others get on with it. Why, they and their likes can't even set anyone dancing. By chance, I happened to notice that George Macdonald Fraser died exactly a year ago today -- January 2. He was a splendid writer, a sane and realistic man in war and peace, and he deserves a salute. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzIzZWFjNDM1YjRjMzYxODZmYjlkOGI2ZGJkNjA2OTk= Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:58:53 -0400 Harold Pinter -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODBmNWIwMTMxOTNkNTBkM2E1NzQxZDdiZmVhZWQ3YzQ= The death of Harold Pinter brings back memories. I had first met him after the Six Day War of 1967 when he was full of excitement about the Israeli victory. He knew nothing about the Middle East, nothing about Arabs, nothing about politics or the Cold War, and in fact showed no interest in these topics. But Israel had won, hurrah. Lots of people whose opinion I respect think highly of Pinter’s plays. His obituaries are fulsome, treating him as one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, “incomparable” according to the Times, “creator of masterpieces” according to the Daily Telegraph. My trouble is that I could never see anything to them. The plays develop nothing, they are devoid of humanity, free of drama or ideas, and all in a language so flat and narrow that it is deadly dull. How could someone with so minimal a vocabulary and so one-dimensional a mind consider himself a poet? Chaim Bermant, a true wit, once started his review of a Pinter play with the sentence, “Pinter is a man of few words, most of them bad.” Bermant spoke for me, and so did the coruscating Mark Steyn when he categorized Pinter’s work as “a pause followed by a non sequitur.” I expect that Pinter sensed that I thought there was nothing to his plays. But something more profound must have happened to turn this upwardly mobile and originally pro-Thatcher Conservative into a radical ranter way beyond satirizing. I suspect that it was insecurity about himself, his origins, his social position, his talent. Maybe he felt he was a fraud, acting out a part that didn’t fit. At any rate he forfeited even residual good manners, taking every opportunity to shout out anti-American slogans in a four-letter saloon-bar manner, just a remorseless and ignorant bore. I first took him on at a dinner when he attacked the lady sitting between us, saying amid the usual flood of swear words that because she was pretty she thought she could get away with criticizing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua who were fighting against fascist America etc. etc. At another dinner he praised Ayatollah Khomeini for his anti-Americanism, and again I responded, only to discover that he had never before heard the terms Shia and Sunni. He caught prejudices in the air as other people might catch colds, and he lacked the information with which to cure them. One day he picked a quarrel with my wife, who answered that when he became commissar would he make sure that she was sent to an American prison and not the Soviet Gulag. Gobbling with rage, he jumped up to bad-mouth her to me, too angry to realize she was my wife. On yet another occasion, in his own house, he heard someone say that she was a friend of mine. Again he leaped away and left the dining room in fury. Apparently I had the power to deprive him of dinner at home. People used to telephone each other to pass on for a laugh the latest Pinter outburst. Paul Johnson as usual put his finger on it when he called Pinter “one of the great comic characters of the day.” Just a week ago, I went to a Christmas drinks party, and a very old and evidently ill man came hobbling in on a stick. If I had recognized that this was Pinter I would probably have done what I have been doing for years now, namely taken immediate action to avoid him. But instead I wondered who this poor fellow could be. Now I shall go on wondering whatever lay behind the comic act that was Harold Pinter, and, believe it or not, I shall miss it. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODBmNWIwMTMxOTNkNTBkM2E1NzQxZDdiZmVhZWQ3YzQ= Sat, 27 Dec 2008 10:31:45 -0400 Mahmoud and Jesus -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDllMDNkYTJhMDczYmQwYmZiMWU4MGUwYTljYmQ4YTM= Every Christmas Day Queen Elizabeth makes a short broadcast to the nation on television. She uses the occasion to support things like family ties, self-sacrifice, helping others. The personal and unpretentious talk serves to bring us together. Word is that she writes it herself. Every year, Channel 4, a public service television channel funded by the taxpayer, offers an alternative to the Queen’s Speech. As you would expect with any government-subsided media, Channel 4 is a play-thing of the Left, with virtually nothing to offer to any thinking viewer. An alternative to the Queen’s Speech is the Left’s idea of humor. This Christmas, Channel 4 gave the alternative speech to President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of Iran. Again as you would expect, he produced Islamo-agitprop. The world has only to follow the way of the Prophets. When he rebuked “bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers,” he took it for granted that we would understand the reference to ourselves. He said, “If Christ were on earth today, undoubtedly he would hoist the banner of justice and love for humanity to oppose warmongers, occupiers, terrorists and bullies the world over.” Here is the device common to the totalitarian mentality of accusing others of the crimes you yourself are committing. Iran’s proxy Hezbollah was responsible for launching the war of 2006; Iran is occupying parts of Lebanon; Iran sponsors terrorism at home and abroad; Iran is bullying its own subjects and its Arab and Israeli neighbours. Who really is the ill-tempered and expansionist power? What does this man know about justice and love for humanity? In Iran, they stone women accused of adultery, and they execute homosexuals and others in public. Iran is reliably reported to be completing the development of an atom bomb capable of killing untold numbers of people. Love of humanity, indeed. And who is he to be telling us what Christ might think today? A Shia Muslim himself, he runs a government that does not permit Sunni Muslim mosques in Tehran, that persecutes and imprisons and sometimes murders Bahai’s, Parsees, Jews, and Christians, and puts to death any Muslim who converts to Christianity. A photographer of Iranian origins was tortured to death in prison in Tehran because she was a naturalized Canadian. Dorothy Byrne is Channel 4’s head of news and current affairs, and she justifies this specimen of Islamo-agitprop under her supervision: “We are offering our viewers an insight into an alternative world view.” Insight? Alternative? Submission and disgrace are the proper terms for this program. Not so long ago, the Iranians were taking British sailors hostage, returning them in the words of Ahmedinejad as “a gift to Britain.” Now he doesn’t even need to resort to force to bully us, as Dorothy Byrne and Channel 4 of their own free will have made a gift of Britain to Iran. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDllMDNkYTJhMDczYmQwYmZiMWU4MGUwYTljYmQ4YTM= Fri, 26 Dec 2008 10:37:53 -0400 Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGI5MTUyNDZiYjdlYTlkNjJmOGZmNGY3YmQwMTdhOGM= "Who is to guard the guards themselves?” asked the poet Juvenal, or in his famous original Latin, Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes. One foremost guard ought to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, one Rowan Williams, a Welshman, a theologian supposedly of distinction, and the man in whose hands rests the Anglican community at a time of distress and splits and controversies so deep that Europe is openly labeled “post-Christian” and most people think that this fits the facts. Brecon Cathedral is close to my home in Wales, and a wonderful building it is too, rescued not so very long ago from such neglect that it was virtually a ruin. There has just been an appeal to raise money on behalf of the cathedral choir. I contributed, and this earned me an invitation to a reception at Lambeth Palace, these many centuries the proud and glorious residence of Archbishops of Canterbury on the banks of the Thames as it runs through central London. The palace has medieval and Tudor architecture, fortifications, a vast park, altogether speaking of faith and certainty emblematic of national identity. The Archbishop lately backed the introduction of sharia law into Britain, thus creating inequality for Muslims in matters that come before sharia courts. This could only have the effect of separating Muslims from the community, and that separation is already bad enough, what with Islamists in our midst threatening jihad and bringing Muslims generally into suspicion, however unfairly. I had decided that if I had the chance I would explain to the Archbishop that I had spent a lifetime travelling in the Middle East, could read Arabic, and had observed the damage done by sharia law to those Muslim countries that had it, and how reformers wanted to scrap it in favour of normal civil law. And there the Archbishop stood -- small, bearded, wizened -- at the top of a grand staircase with military trophies on the walls, and woe is me, it seemed rude to take him on in his own palace. Now it’s Christmas, and personalities of all sorts are customarily invited to select their favourite books of the year. In the Times Literary Supplement, surely as prestigious an outlet as any available, the Archbishop of Canterbury chooses to promote a biography of another Welshman, Raymond Williams (no relation!). He speaks of this other Williams as a “moral touchstone” of the British Left, engaged in “passionate struggles” and concluding “More to come, I hope.” In simple fact Raymond Williams was a stale old Marxist who never freed his mind. Not even the Nazi-Soviet Pact could shake him. When the Soviet Union attacked Finland in 1940 Raymond Williams collaborated with another veteran Communist, E.J.Hobsbawm, to write a defence of this aggression. Neither of them ever recanted. If the man supposed to be guarding our faith is actually engaged in apologetics on behalf of Muslims and Communists, how are the rest of us to guard ourselves? <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGI5MTUyNDZiYjdlYTlkNjJmOGZmNGY3YmQwMTdhOGM= Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:11:06 -0400 A Church in Mecca? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmNhNTVlZDEwMzQ3ZTg0ZmEwNDVjMzEwNTFiNDg2NjE= Paul Goble is one of those ex-CIA men with an academic bent. He made a reputation commenting on religious and ethnic matters in the old Soviet Union, mostly in the excellent bulletin published by Radio Free Europe. Undoubtedly a serious guy, otherwise <a href="http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/11/window-on-eurasia-saudi-mosque-in.html">a scoop</a> he's put out on his blog might be too good to be true. It appears that the Saudi King Abdullah is offering to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center in Moscow. As it is, four mosques already serve the city's Muslims, said to number two million. Russian Orthodox spokesmen have responded : the Saudis can have their mosque on condition that Christians build a church in Mecca. Mecca! Where infidel feet are not permitted to tread. And in a country where Christians accused of too much zeal -- for instance, trying to convert people or to say their prayers openly -- risk having their head sliced off. The city fathers of Geneva once made the same request for a church in Riyadh when the Saudi king asked for another mosque on the shore of their lake. No deal. Reciprocity evidently works. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmNhNTVlZDEwMzQ3ZTg0ZmEwNDVjMzEwNTFiNDg2NjE= Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:36:38 -0400 Where Is Our Lord Exmouth? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjNlNmUyZDEwNzA3ZGM3N2YwYjNhOWRjNTVjZmI0ZDM= Successive American presidents have tried for almost twenty years to give Somalia a government. Neither force nor aid worked. Not really a country any longer, Somalia is a free-for-all for men with guns, for warlords, tribes, and Islamists including al-Qaeda. They’ve taken to piracy for a living, and they have a thousand miles of the African coast to provide shelter and to hide in. In the Gulf of Aden this year, Somali pirates have captured some 90 ships, for which they have obtained ransom estimated at around $30 million dollars. The Sirius Star, a gigantic tanker with a cargo of oil taken on in Saudi Arabia and worth $100 million, is only one of at least a dozen ships recently hijacked and held in Somali harbours. Pirates have seized ships from many countries including Ukraine, Denmark, and France. Owners and insurers have so far chosen to pay up, which of course has meant that piracy is a successful money-making operation. Since 9/11, however, piracy has increasingly been seen more as a sub-division of terrorism than a threat to trade. Well-armed and equipped with modern technology, pirates operate from a “mother ship” and an Indian warship recently engaged and sank one of these. The hijacking of the Sirius Star may lead to more positive armed responses of the kind. Combined Task Force 150 already patrols the Gulf with ships of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, and some from other countries too. Two centuries ago, Lord Exmouth led a British fleet to shell and destroy the raiders’ base in Algiers. The civilized world had agreed to put piracy down, and it looks like having to repeat the performance. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjNlNmUyZDEwNzA3ZGM3N2YwYjNhOWRjNTVjZmI0ZDM= Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:56:49 -0400 Terror in Bombay -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTFlZjliYzdiOGYyM2U0ZDljNWJmYTE5YWNkNzRmNTU= The attack on Bombay seems to have much in common with 9/11. Another group of young men have been prepared to kill and to die. On both occasions, the intention was to leave as many victims as possible. The captured terrorist says that in Bombay they intended to kill 5,000, which would have been an atrocity on a wartime scale. A lot of planning and premeditation went into the attack. The terrorists had been trained professionally. They had also prepared the ground. The targets were carefully selected. In the big hotels and the café they could be sure to kill infidel Westerners. In the station they knew they would find local Hindus to murder. In Nariman House, the Jewish center, they captured, tortured and shot Jewish hostages. The New York Times suggests that this last outrage was an “accidental hostage scene.” The thinking behind that phrase is as bad as the grammar, but then the New York Times is more often ridiculous in its commentary than not. The terrorists were out to make a clean sweep of Christians, Hindus and Jews, and they succeeded in that. Islamists are out to confront the whole world. Iran believes it will master and subdue the United States. Al-Qaeda believes likewise. Hamas and Hezbollah aim to destroy Israel. Assorted Islamists seek bases in Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Egypt, here, there, and everywhere They are in the grip of fantasy, of course, and therefore it is pointless to argue with them about the nature of reality. The Muslim world is sinking in distress and failure, taking with it as many as it can. What ought to happen now is a reaction on the part of those Muslims who realise what is happening, and do not wish to be taken down by fellow Muslims. Repudiation of Islamism is requisite on the part of the Kings of Saudi Arabia and Morocco, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, the ever-voluble Tariq Ramadan and Sheikh Qaradawi, anyone and everyone with a voice in the Muslim world. As it is, President Asif Zardari of Pakistan is pleading with India not to go to war. The Bombay killers wanted such a war in the evident belief that Allah is with them and they would win it. Intelligence services are warning of other similar attacks in the offing. If Muslims themselves do not manage to control and contain Islamists, there is bound to be a great deal of reality enforcement, and very tragic that will be. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTFlZjliYzdiOGYyM2U0ZDljNWJmYTE5YWNkNzRmNTU= Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:10:49 -0400 Mithal al-Alusi & the Future of Iraq -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTVmZjdiY2ZiMzJmYjI3MTcwZjc4Nzc0ZTYwOWRjZjM= Good news from Iraq! Mithal al-Alusi has won a case which is a landmark of sorts. He's the leader of the small (all too small) Democratic party, and a member of Parliament. Some years ago, he went to Israel, and there he proclaimed to the world that he couldn't see occupation, only liberalism. All hell broke out in Iraq. And what did he do in the face of the storm? Why,he went back to Israel again to attend a conference, very publicly. The members of parliament voted to strip him of his parliamentary immunity, and the government brought a case against him. His lawyers argued that there is no law to forbid visiting Israel, and the judge duly acquitted him and restored all his rights. So he'll be back in parliament. If all Iraqis were like Mithal al-Alusi, Iraq would at last come into its own. Born in 1954, the son of an eminent professor, he was a determined opponent of Saddam Hussein, and therefore spent more than twenty years in exile in Germany. A Sunni, he nevertheless was an associate of Ahmed Chalabi's and the Shia intellectuals around him. Returning to free Iraq, he has paid a terrible price. Terrorists murdered his two sons, and also burnt out his house. These outrages only harden his determination to do the right thing by his country. Supporting him through these atrocities, his wife is as admirable as he is. And we salute the judge who was not afraid to give the correct legal verdict in Mithal al-Alusi's case. These are all extraordinary people, and they give real cause for hope. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTVmZjdiY2ZiMzJmYjI3MTcwZjc4Nzc0ZTYwOWRjZjM= Sat, 29 Nov 2008 09:59:23 -0400 Before We Re-Bury Sikorski -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Njc1NzA4ZTg5OWFmNjk2ODU5YjdkZTkxNjZjZjQxMzY= Footnote to the long-drawn saga of General Sikorski’s death, and now the exhumation of his remains. At the time, the governor of Gibraltar was General Sir Frank Noel Mason-Macfarlane, known far and wide as Mason-Mac. A brilliant soldier of the old imperial type, he had been military attaché in Berlin, and in that capacity was often in the presence of Hitler. In the Public Record Office is the memorandum he wrote in 1938 proposing to shoot Hitler. It would be worth killing Hitler, as he saw it, if the coming world war was thereby averted. He offered four scenarios, in all of which he was to be the man with the gun. Three of these proposals, he thought, would give him the chance to escape. The fourth proposal would entail his capture and certain death, but he was willing to sacrifice himself if his superiors decided that this was the course of action most likely to succeed. The margins of this memorandum are covered with the horrified comments in red ink of the British officials who read it, up to and including Lord Halifax, the foreign minister. Appeasement was then at its height, and Halifax was a leading proponent of it. One and all thought that Mason-Mac had gone mad, and he was duly removed from his post, landing up in Gibraltar. Mason-Mac knew and admired Sikorski, and was appalled by his death. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Njc1NzA4ZTg5OWFmNjk2ODU5YjdkZTkxNjZjZjQxMzY= Fri, 28 Nov 2008 10:26:14 -0400 Exhuming History -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGRlYzMwOWJjNGMxNzkyZThlOGIxZmRjODIzZDY3MDI= In Cracow the body of General Wladyslaw Sikorski has been removed from its monumental marble tomb in the cathedral, and taken for forensic examination. The Poles, from the President and the government down, hope that the remains of this great man may shed light on what happened on July 4 1943, when the general died in a plane crash just after taking off in Gibraltar. It is virtually certain that the crash was a genuine accident. The sole survivor was the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Edward Prchal, a Czech, who eventually emigrated to the United States. Until his dying day some years ago, he maintained that the crash occurred because his controls had jammed, probably through overloading or shifting mailbags. But Sikorski’s death had a huge bearing on the course of the war, and the subsequent fate of Poland. Leader of the Polish government in exile, Sikorski was already indignant about Stalin’s evident ambition to take over Poland and make a communist satellite of it. That April, the Stalinist murder of the Polish elite at Katyn had been revealed unmistakeably. Had Stalin arranged the plane crash to smooth the way for the communists? It so happens that Kim Philby was head of the MI6 section with responsibility for Gibraltar. Was sabotage by Soviet agents feasible? Conspiracy theories go much further. Sikorski was pressing Churchill to stand up to Stalin on the question of Polish independence, and as Yalta was to prove, this was something that could have been handled differently and better. Some Poles, and the Soviets, have accused Churchill of arranging the crash to be rid of someone who threatened the wartime alliance. In that case, really unthinkably, Churchill would have had to betray Sikorski with whom he got on well, and also to consent to the death of the liaison officer on the plane, Colonel Victor Cazalet, a well-known Conservative M.P. and a close personal friend of his. Almost certainly, exhumation and DNA tests and scans will reveal nothing. However, the whole process does underline the power of the past, especially in a country like Poland, so badly treated for so long. And it was blisteringly symbolic - or should that be prophetic? - that the day before the exhumation Polish President Lech Kaczynski was travelling in a car in Georgia with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili when Russian troops close to them opened fire. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGRlYzMwOWJjNGMxNzkyZThlOGIxZmRjODIzZDY3MDI= Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:22:30 -0400 He Fought the Good Fight -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWJkMmU5OWM1MjNlMzQ2YWIyOGFhOTQ0NWEyYjE3ZDg= <a onclick="WarnUser(1, '?cmd=body&Security=1&unfiltered=1'); return(false);" href="http://mail.nationalreview.com/exchange/ekarrs/Inbox/David%20Calling-132.EML/#"></a>Today General Faisal Alvi is being buried with full honours in the military cemetery in Islamabad. He lately commanded the Pakistani Special Services Group, or SSG, that spearheads the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He was loyal to then-President Pervez Musharraf, refusing to take notice of the damaging politics of the military in Pakistan. After a career like this, I suppose he was a marked man. Although retired, he had a security escort, but the government had just withdrawn it for no very obvious reason. The gunmen, presumably from al-Qaeda and the Taliban, must have seen their chance. They ambushed his car, and shot him and the driver dead. Now they are gloating. Not so long ago Faisal was sitting in my house. We spoke about the sad state of the Muslim world where violence rules and reforms seem impossible. Gunmen had previously shot and killed Shabbir Bokhari, his own brother-in-law and head of the Pakistani electoral commission. Youthful in his early fifties, Faisal made a formidable impression, a man with information, a practical intelligence, and a cosmopolitan outlook. Tall and handsome, he was also every inch a soldier. He spoke about his time in Waziristan, and described scenes of combat in Wana in the tribal areas. In his eyes, terrorists are cowards who don’t dare face you out in the open. He had nothing but contempt for them, and was himself evidently without fear. But now, alas, they are gloating. We owe more than we know to General Faisal for fighting the good fight. Men like him are rare and his murder diminishes everyone. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWJkMmU5OWM1MjNlMzQ2YWIyOGFhOTQ0NWEyYjE3ZDg= Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:37:29 -0400 Ali Salem -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTFkNjQyMGQ1MGM5NTczZDFiNDRhY2Y1YTMwNDFlNmM= The world needs men like Ali Salem. He’s one of Egypt’s most distinguished writers, aged 72, with a long list of books and plays behind him. In every way, intellectually and physically, he’s very big. There is tremendous humour in his face. He’s not afraid to say what he thinks, being an outspoken critic of Islamism and an active campaigner for a real peace with Israel. In 1994 he first visited Israel, and the book he wrote about it was a runaway best-seller. Since then, he’s been to Israel many times, and has received an honorary doctorate there. He keeps saying that Arabs have nothing to fear from Jews, that there’s no place for hate, and that peace is better than war. Back home in Cairo, the elite boycott him and his writings, and those on the street can kill anyone who talks and acts as he does. Yesterday he was awarded the Civil Courage Prize which comes with a handsome check. This is given annually by a foundation set up by John Train of New York, a financier and a genuine all-round intellectual as well. The ceremony took place in the residence of the American ambassador in London, a magnificent house once built by Barbara Hutton and sold by her to the U.S. government for just one dollar. What an occasion! Ali Salem’s humour came out the moment he started his acceptance speech. He quoted the scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when a citizen attacks Cinna the poet, shouting, “Tear him for his bad verses.” He also gave a great and apposite example of an Egyptian joke, told about a man going home one evening, only to find himself surrounded by an armed mob who demand “Are you with Us or The Others?” With Us, he replies, whereupon they shoot him dead declaring that they are The Others. I for one went home thinking that the right man had been recognised, and that hope really does spring eternal. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTFkNjQyMGQ1MGM5NTczZDFiNDRhY2Y1YTMwNDFlNmM= Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:32:30 -0400 Aging Idiot -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmQ4MWQ1YjFmY2MzMzFmMGNiYzY4OTdkOGNkNDZjNDI= Nobody seems to have known that a woman called Cynthia Roberts was a Soviet agent in the Cold War, and she herself must have thought she’d got away with it. In 1985 she and her husband defected to Prague, where they are living in an apartment (provided by the Communist authorities of those days, one supposes) in one of those estates whose grimness tells you all you need to know about the Soviet view of people. And there a popular newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, traced her and put the scoop on its front page, without revealing its sources or how it had access to her files in the Czech security services. Apparently quite a few of these files have been destroyed but those remaining have a story to tell. A veteran Scottish Labour Member of Parliament called William McKelvey is thought to have set her up with a pass and an office in the House of Commons. There she was the secretary of Labour Action for Peace, a rather prominent Soviet front for attacking the nuclear weapons of the West on the pretence of opposing all nuclear weapons (as it continues to do to this day). Through this group, Mrs Roberts came to know influential socialist politicians including future cabinet ministers. In the 1970s she stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate, and in 1983 she accompanied Robin Cook, Mr Blair’s future foreign secretary, on a trip to Moscow. Her codename in the Czech security files is Agent Hammer, and her handlers recorded that her self-proclaimed role was “to contribute towards the downfall of capitalism.” After defection, she provided them with character sketches of Mrs Thatcher and other Conservative politicians. She also targeted visiting Westerners, such as diplomats or NATO officials. “I have nothing to say,” was how Mrs Roberts spoke to the Mail reporter who confronted her. In all probability she was just a useful idiot who never had much to say, and was of little or no real value to the Communists. She would have been really dangerous only in the unlikely event of a Soviet take-over. But what made her do it? Self-importance, venality, credulousness, groupthink, aspiration to power, utopian illusion? She should be brought to account for herself in court, but that will not happen in today’s climate of anything-goes and never-mind. And perhaps it’s some sort of just deserts that she’s 72 now and has to live out her old age in a monstrous Soviet-era block among people whose language seemingly she struggles to speak. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmQ4MWQ1YjFmY2MzMzFmMGNiYzY4OTdkOGNkNDZjNDI= Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:18:00 -0400 From Russia, with Love -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWQ0NTAyZDE3OWM0ZDMyNzljZDJiMjgyMDI2ZmJkNGU= You thought that Russia must be on its way to becoming a normal country, did you? Well, that was to reckon without Vladimir Putin. Once a KGB officer, always a KGB officer. He’s making sure that the old ways of obtaining and holding power are as applicable as ever they were. He sees to it that stooges are given the important posts. He invades neighbours, and absorbs their territory. It just happens that critics, especially in the media, and even if they are in exile, are murdered. It is commonly said that he is also the richest man in the country, perhaps even in Europe. The constitution specifies that the President of Russia may serve only two terms of four years. That’s why Putin gave way to a clone, Dmitri Medvedev, and made himself titular Prime Minister while actually keeping control of everything. Only a matter of hours after Barack Obama’s election this team was threatening to place missiles to counter defence plans of the United States. And the wheeze of the moment would make Stalin proud of his successors. Medvedev has submitted a constitutional amendment to the Duma, the Russian parliament, to extend the four-year term of the presidency to six, and further manipulate things so that Putin returns as soon as possible as President for another twelve years. The Duma is rushing the amendment through by voting on all the readings of it in a single day instead of the usual weeks required for legislation. So Putin looks like being in the Kremlin till 2021, well after Obama is otherwise engaged. I am reminded that when Hafez Assad, the Syrian dictator, died, his son Bashar couldn’t succeed him because he was 34 and according to the constitution the President had to be 40. Easy -- it was less than a day’s work to change that constitution. But does Russia really want to be Syria with missiles? <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWQ0NTAyZDE3OWM0ZDMyNzljZDJiMjgyMDI2ZmJkNGU= Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:52:32 -0400 Tears, Idle Tears -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODNhZjAyNmZjNDc1ZGMzNmY4NjZlOGE5YzVjOTE4ODA= The victory of President-Elect Obama has generated public weeping. Lots of people captured on television have had tears running down their cheeks, and sometimes their voices have broken as they try to respond to an interviewer. It is a very disturbing phenomenon. The rational choice of the individual voter is essential to the working of democracy. Tearfulness signifies instead the emotionalization of politics. Rather than calculate, the weepers have surrendered to feelings. And feelings are catching. A huge literature is devoted to analysing how individuals turn into crowds, and how beliefs and values change in the process, so that the crowd comes to behave collectively in ways that each individual member of it might not. This is not to imply that the tears on this occasion are the prelude to some nasty kind of mob ideology - on the contrary, it is a very human reaction. The weepers had listened to Obama’s promises of change and hope, and their wish to believe in what he was saying overcame any doubts and reservations they might have had, and so the tears flowed as they will do whenever emotions get the better of reason. The trouble is that reality reasserts itself pretty soon in this world, and emotion is not the tool to deal with it. The return of reason comes at a cost, however. Those who couldn’t help weeping at Obama’s election displayed expectations of a very high order, and if in future they are ever disappointed with him they will also be disappointed with themselves. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODNhZjAyNmZjNDc1ZGMzNmY4NjZlOGE5YzVjOTE4ODA= Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:42:34 -0400 Protecting Rashana -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTI5MzI2NWUzMTA5MjQzYzljZWZlMjFjMWI5OGUyZjE= The story of Rashana offers a glimpse into the rather invisible depths of Muslim immigration in the West. Of Pakistani origin, she grew up in Oldham, a rough place in the north of England. Something was wrong in the family, the newspaper reports don’t specify exactly what, but as a child Rashana was ceaselessly hit and injured badly enough to need being taken to hospital regularly. “My aunties, uncles and grandparents knew what my mum was doing to me,” Rashana says. Teachers at school and other English adults reported the girl’s bruises, her unhappiness, her suicide attempt. Social workers came to the house -- and here’s the extra horror -- the social workers were themselves Muslim, and as Rashana explains, “because of the culture they were always going to side with my parents.” In that culture, she adds, “the family closes ranks when there is a problem and outsiders are kept out.” At one point in her childhood, she told her teacher that her older brother had raped her. The police and the social services were called in again, but Rashana was forced by them to go back home. Eventually she was placed with a foster family. Rashana managed to go to university, and graduated with a degree in business. She’s 32 now, and seven years ago she started a legal process to sue Oldham Council for negligence because they had full knowledge of the way she’d been abused. At last, in an out-of-court settlement, she has been awarded about $200,000 compensation, though whether the Council will be able to claim the money from the family is an open question. The Oldham authorities evidently believed that the cruelty going on before their eyes should not be prevented on the grounds that Muslim culture is like that. That’s a form of racism, as well as a shameful denial of our own culture, indeed of simple human empathy for other people. “All my life I have longed to belong somewhere and I cannot see any kind of future for myself,” is Rashana’s summary of where she is now. Britain has just accepted officially the institution of sharia courts, where the inequality of women will find Islamic sanction. How are the Rashanas in our midst to be protected from wilful and legal perpetuation of a culture that discriminates against them and must obstruct their hopes of belonging and having a future like other British women? <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTI5MzI2NWUzMTA5MjQzYzljZWZlMjFjMWI5OGUyZjE= Sat, 01 Nov 2008 16:24:16 -0400 MV Iran Deyant -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGYyMjE2ZjUyMmZjMWZiYjdkZDVlMjNkY2RkYmY0ZDc= Anyone who googles MV Iran Deyant will find hundreds of entries, all more or less identical, and all from hardened bloggers, as far as I can see. They tell the story of a ship purportedly owned by the Iranian government, and sailing with a cargo of radioactive sand that was to be released off the coast of Israel to kill many people. In August, the Deyant is supposed to have left Nanjing in China, with falsified shipping documents and its containers locked. Rounding the Horn of Africa, the ship was boarded by Somali pirates and escorted to a Somali harbour. When the pirates broke open a container, they found "gritty sand-like contents." Health complications followed and within two weeks sixteen pirates died. Negotiations for a ransom with the Iranian authorities came to nothing. American, French and Russian naval units are alleged to have the Deyant under supervision, and from the Russians comes the idea that she is "an enormous dirty floating bomb." Here in short is the "long-anticipated Iranian attack on Israel." The details related are so identical, as well as so very circumstantial, that they suggest that there may indeed be a single source. Only a few years back, of course, the Iranians did send on this route a ship, the Karine B, with a load of arms to be used against Israel by Yasser Arafat's PLO. The Deyant embroiders that theme. However, a scientifically minded friend informs me that radioactive sand is not likely in fact to kill a lot of victims, because an inbuilt process of vitrification dispels the toxicity rather fast. The whole story sounds as if it emerged from the imagination of a thriller writer with the plotting skills of a Frederick Forsyth, and who has an interest in depicting the Iranian regime as inhuman and monstrous. No mainstream media have picked the story up, again as far as I know. If it's all invention put about for the credulous, as I suspect, it is fascinating that the modern technology of the internet should be the perfect medium for spreading conspiracy theories all over the world, and creating devilish fears that might have come straight out of the Dark Ages. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MGYyMjE2ZjUyMmZjMWZiYjdkZDVlMjNkY2RkYmY0ZDc= Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:10:47 -0400 Europe Embraces Obama -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmFlMDA3MWI1YjA2ZmUwNDliNzZiZDBhMWRlZjIwYWY= Boris Johnson is the mayor of London, a former Conservative Member of Parliament, a most intelligent, open-minded and genial man, and incidentally a friend of mine. He writes a very well-received column in the conservative Daily Telegraph, and he is endorsing Barack Obama with enthusiasm. Nor is he alone among Conservatives to be doing so. His colleague Charles Moore, one of the most thoughtful of commentators, is another who wants Obama to win. The Times, the self-styled paper of record, endorses Obama as well. One of its star columnists, William Rees-Mogg, (another highly intelligent man, also a friend of mine), has been an Obamaist since the start of the campaign. The Left, and pretty well all the Europeans, hope that the United States elects a president who will be something of a socialist, and this might mean thrillingly that the country falls flat on its face, no longer a super-power but wracked with thoroughly European doubts and confusions. But the Right surely does not want anything like that to happen. Why, then, are the most informed and influential Conservatives with regular media outlets taking a position that contradicts their basic political convictions? Boris Johnson’s latest article goes over this ground. He thinks that President Bush rocked democracy and capitalism, “the two great pillars of the American idea.” He himself supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but now in spite of growing evidence of success condemns it as “catastrophic.” In subjective mode, he then praises Obama for seeming talented, compassionate and offering hope. And the final kicker for voting for him - “the glaring reason” - is race. If Obama wins, we could see the end of race-based politics, the grievance culture and political correctness. And this is pretty much the main point Charles Moore, William Rees-Mogg and others come up with. No doubt this is well-meant, but Obama has to win or lose for being the man and the candidate he is, and anything else would be no good. If color were really to play a part in Obama’s election, then it would also influence how people come to judge him in office. Suppose that he were a failure, that he made some domestic or foreign policy choices of the kind he proposes but they proved divisive and indeed made the country fall on its face. Then anyone and everyone who’d supported Obama on grounds of color would be caught in the wake of real and unwelcome race-based politics. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmFlMDA3MWI1YjA2ZmUwNDliNzZiZDBhMWRlZjIwYWY= Wed, 22 Oct 2008 07:29:03 -0400 Who's Isn't for Sale? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmNiOWJiNjRlYWMxMTQ3M2YwMGM5NWRhY2FmYzVlZjI= What part does bribery play in politics? The buying and selling of opinions and decisions is almost entirely invisible, and the glimpses we obtain into this murkiness are usually not to be trusted. But it happens. When I was writing about the German occupation of France in the world war, a collaborating editor from that time explained to me how the Germans had secretly subsidised the French press. In France, he said, free speech was always for sale. The Soviets were to pay similar subsidies in the Cold War. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB defector, revealed for instance that Moscow had given money to the left-wing paper Tribune, (which has just closed after a long and misguided ideological run). An excellent French investigative journalist, Jean Montaldo, one day came across heaps of bank documents that were being discarded in Paris, showing the secret payments that Moscow was making to all sorts of Frenchmen whose Communist affiliations were otherwise unknown. A former member of MI6, the British intelligence service, once told me how his wartime job had been to suborn the government of an important country to keep it from joining the German Axis -- I had better not say which country. In detail, he described transporting boxes of gold sovereigns packed in straw, and how he had handed them out. By the end of the war, he said, he had every single member of that government on the take. A persistent rumour from the world war is that Winston Churchill was bribing the Spanish to stay out and not become allies of Nazi Germany. It makes sense. Had General Franco, the Spanish dictator, allowed the German army into the country, and then to capture Gibraltar, the British could have been shut out of the Mediterranean, losing Egypt and the oil coming through the Suez Canal, and might well have lost the war. In October 1940 Hitler met Franco at Hendaye on the frontier with France in order to pursue this strategy. Franco haggled, and Hitler afterwards said he would rather have teeth pulled out than go through that negotiation again. All Franco would eventually allow was landing rights to Axis aircraft, access to ports for submarines, and spying look-outs near Gibraltar. Most oddly, in the middle of the war Churchill caused a rumpus by telling parliament that Franco was “a gallant Christian gentleman.” In 2005 the British writer Richard Bassett published a life of Admiral Canaris, Hitler’s spy master, saying that Churchill was paying Franco. Now Pere Ferrer, a Spanish historian, goes further in a biography of a shady Spanish buccaneer by the name of Juan March. It seems that a British officer called Alan Hillgarth advised Churchill that the Spanish generals were so poorly paid that they could be bribed. Among the evidence is a letter from a U.S. agent, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Solberg, to his boss Wild Bill Donovan then in charge of a proto-CIA intelligence outfit, telling him that March had been chosen as the conduit for payment. Ten million dollars were paid into a New York bank, and as many as 30 Spanish generals were approached and received up to half that sum. Just to add to the confusion, Ferrer thinks that March may also have been in the pay of the Germans. The facts may have been invented to fit the conspiracy, of course, or the conspiracy invented to fit the facts. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmNiOWJiNjRlYWMxMTQ3M2YwMGM5NWRhY2FmYzVlZjI= Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:01:41 -0400 Visa Lessons -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Nzg4ZDQzMDNjMTBiMGNlNzgxYzNjZTAxYzJkMWJhY2E= We learn from our mistakes, do we not? We -- that is my wife and I -- have just had the chance to do so. Due to what Hillary Clinton might call a “misstatement,” we concluded that as from next January British visitors to the United States would no longer enjoy a visa waiver, but would need to have a proper visa in their passports. An embassy official explained that the pressure of applicants was so great that we could have an appointment to see a consul only in four weeks time. And the cost, payable in advance, was $131 per person. We booked a time and paid. The day duly arrived. We took a cab as parking a car is out of the question in central London. Another $25 (and the same again leaving.) Approach roads to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square have been narrowed, and fortified with bollards, concrete barriers and wire fences reminiscent of Baghdad’s Green Zone. British policemen were cradling sub-machine guns -- not long ago the British were specially proud that their police were unarmed. We queued for almost an hour until reaching the metal detector. Car keys with locking devices were not permitted, but had to be deposited in a pharmacy some hundreds of yards away (and for a fee.) Eventually we reached the embassy itself, received a number and sat in a vast room with the other visa applicants -- they do seven hundred a day, every day. Around me were people speaking Russian, Greek and French, also people from India and Africa speaking languages I couldn’t identify, the old and the young and babies in arms. Several hours later, our number was called, and we received a visa valid for ten years, plus the information -- gently delivered -- that it was unnecessary. (And we’d have to pay a courier service another $40 to deliver our passports next week.) And the lessons of this experience, in addition to mortification and the costs of it? That terrorists have contrived to add a new level of ugliness to the surroundings, and much bureaucratic inconvenience, which is a success of sorts for them. And also that no matter what critics may say, and no matter any crisis, ordinary people from everywhere continue in untold numbers to set their hopes on entering the United States. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Nzg4ZDQzMDNjMTBiMGNlNzgxYzNjZTAxYzJkMWJhY2E= Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:26:17 -0400 Meet Yasmin -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDVlY2QyMzEzYzIzNzQ2NzQ4Y2RkYmFjOTAxMGU0MTg= A rather delicious story is surfacing in the British press, and as is so often the case with delicious stories there’s no means of knowing if it is true. At its core is one Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, a very typical Islamist fanatic, the usual figure in robe and sporting a big beard. It’s impossible to tell if he’s a real menace or a clown. In the past he’s been expelled from his native Syria, left Saudi Arabia in murky circumstances, and settled in London. There he founded the usual sort of gang, called Al Muhajiroun, threatening to kill us all and to plant the flag of Islam over the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street. He seems to have been in touch with Osama bin Laden, but this may have been boasting. His activities were financed naturally by the benefits he could claim from the welfare state, so he lived and flourished at British expense. Lately, in a hurry and seemingly with the law after him, he left London, to move to Beirut, where he has been threatening to kill Beatle Paul McCartney for giving a concert in Tel Aviv. His daughter Yasmin remains in London, however. She’s 26, a single mother, and in the words of the Daily Mail, “The busty blonde has been revealed as a topless, tattooed pole dancer…. Hundreds of youngsters go wild over the daughter of the preacher of hate who rants against Western depravity.” She is quoted saying, “I’m willing to go topless if the venue is right,” and a photograph reveals what this would look like. Sheikh Bakri at first reacted with horror, saying, “If this is true I am deeply shocked.” As far as he knew, she has a husband, and he should control her. Later he apparently had the better idea that all his children are practicing Muslims, and his daughter has told him the story is all lies. Perhaps some bright spark did indeed invent the pole dancing to discredit the ineffable Sheikh Bakri. It’s long been clear that one very successful line of defense against Islamism is to laugh at it. But Muslims are always being asked to assimilate, and maybe that’s what Yasmin has done. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDVlY2QyMzEzYzIzNzQ2NzQ4Y2RkYmFjOTAxMGU0MTg= Sat, 04 Oct 2008 12:35:02 -0400 Rowan in the Wrong Direction -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjMyYjMyMmE3ZGUwZGY0ZTIxMjQ5OTc0YjUxYjhhMzQ= “Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that.” This sentence appears in an article criticizing capitalism in the current issue of the Spectator, the British weekly magazine, and several readers have rung me up to ask if we all have the same words before our eyes. Because who is coming to the defense of Marxism like this so long after every aspect of it has been tested to destruction? Some professor on the West Coast perhaps? Not a bit of it. It is nobody else but the Archbishop of Canterbury, a fellow by the name of Rowan Williams. When appointed, he thought to ingratiate himself by confiding to the public that he was a “hairy leftie.” His prose style certainly suits his self-presentation. Take that sentence quoted above. What is a kind of mythology? How is mythology something other than itself? What are these things said to have no life in themselves but nonetheless with power and agency? Agency is too vague a term to carry meaning here, and how do unspecified things have a life? In any case Marx observed nothing of the kind, and Williams is only giving his own reduction of what he thinks that other hairy leftie was trying to say. Once an Archbishop of Canterbury was prepared to go to the stake for his Christian belief. Subsequent Archbishops have tried to live up to the position as head of the Anglican community world-wide. In living memory, great Christian churchmen like Cardinal Wyszynski in Poland, Cardinal Josif Slipyi in Ukraine, the saintly Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek in Czechoslovakia, criticised Marxist doctrine and practice, and went to prison for it. And rather than calling Marx in aid, might an Archbishop today not have a duty rather to confront Marx’s famous jibe that religion is the opium of the people? Just recently, and incredibly, Rowan Williams was advocating the introduction of sharia law into England as “unavoidable” and “desirable.” In the Spectator he takes a different swipe at society, seeming to think that the market is idolatry, though his critique of capitalism is actually so poorly and opaquely expressed that it is close to burble. But it is surely a novelty, indeed unique to this age, that an Archbishop of Canterbury can assault and diminish the institutions without which he would have no function at all. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjMyYjMyMmE3ZGUwZGY0ZTIxMjQ5OTc0YjUxYjhhMzQ= Sat, 27 Sep 2008 13:03:56 -0400 A Chilling Art Review -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzkzOTkzN2NkZTI5MWI5NDcyZjBlNzdjZDUwNmViYzM= The writings of art and architectural critics, indeed pretty well anyone connected with aesthetics, are almost always such a laboratory of pretence and bogusness that sensible people will never read the stuff. A friend has just given me a master example. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has been trying for some years to abandon any claims to seriousness in order to be politically correct, and it is currently mounting an exhibition about design in the Cold War. The purpose is to show that everything manufactured in the West, no matter how domestic or trivial, was designed to prove the superiority of capitalism to Communism. And here is how the Times critic (by the way someone hitherto unknown to me) raved about what he saw and heard:<blockquote>Wisps of spooky music emanate from the back of the room in the kind of pre-Kraftwerk analogue electronica that would accompany sci-fi B movies or TV documentaries in those days to denote the future. It comes from a recreation of the Poème Electronique, a son-et-lumière and architectural “immersive experience” created for the electronic company Philips at the Brussels World Expo in 1958 by Le Corbusier, the Greek architect Iannis Xenakis and the French composer Edgard Varèse, which bombarded visitors with a visual essay….</blockquote>Etc etc etc. Could anything be worse? Well, yes, it could. The Times critic concludes with a reflection on the Cold War. “And who won? Neither side, of course. Both were morally bankrupt. But, by God, we had the prettier table lamps.” Now there’s real moral bankruptcy for you. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzkzOTkzN2NkZTI5MWI5NDcyZjBlNzdjZDUwNmViYzM= Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:12:04 -0400 Sharia in Britain -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTY5YzI5NmQzZWYyNThiMzgyZDA1YWQzMGQ3YmJiNmE= A few months ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury, nominal head of the Anglican Church, astonished the faithful and the unfaithful alike by announcing that in Britain the introduction of Islamic law, or sharia, was not only "unavoidable" but "desirable." In his wake the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Philips, titular representative of British law and legal procedure, also recommended sharia law. Instead of exclaiming at the strangeness of these pronouncements, we should have smelled a rat. They were actually preparing us in advance for what those on the inner circle must have been aware of, namely that sharia law is already operating. The deed has been done in secret, carried out quite typically by an establishment that does not bother with tiresome things that might get in the way, like public debate or consultation. Never mind the general good, they act by the divine right of their positions. As so often, everything turns on a clause that those with a mind for it have been able to exploit. The Arbitration Act of 1996 classified sharia courts as arbitration tribunals, whose ruling is binding by law if both parties agree to it. Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi controls a body called the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, and according to a report in the Sunday Times, he said that he had taken advantage of the Arbitration Act to classify sharia courts as arbitration tribunals. Sharp man to spot the opening! Courts have been set up already in the major cities, and apparently have been operating this past year and have dealt with more than 100 cases. Most Muslim countries have long since found sharia law to be retrograde, and have abandoned it. Believe it or not, it doesn't even apply in Iran, so Amir Taheri informs me. In British instances so far, husbands committing domestic violence have only been sentenced to classes in management of anger. Abused women in each case have withdrawn their complaints. In cases of inheritance, women have also been discriminated against because sharia law favours men. The only protests seem to have come from Muslims themselves, one or two of whom say that they came to Britain to escape sharia and all that goes with it. Not a peep from the feminists or the civil rights gang or the socialists (if there are any left). Equality for all citizens under the law was once a proud boast in Britain. No longer. Sharia law sets Muslims apart, sanctioning judgements that would never be upheld in British courts, and its introduction is a significant step in the Islamization of Britain. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTY5YzI5NmQzZWYyNThiMzgyZDA1YWQzMGQ3YmJiNmE= Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:36:23 -0400 Military Refusal -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzUzZDhmOGI2MzA5ODE5ZTYyMTI1NTc4YmJlNWFhYzA= Corporal Tomas Stringer is a Welshman (hence the spelling of his Christian name). A paratrooper, he’s serving in Afghanistan, and he has one arm in plaster because he’d broken his wrist jumping from a truck when a roadside bomb went off. Back in Britain to recuperate, he was helping organize the funeral of a friend killed in action. He’s made a reservation at the Metro Hotel in Woking, a quiet and somewhat suburban town in Surrey, where incidentally in the nineteenth century the first mosque in Britain was built. Corporal Stringer arrived at the Metro in civilian clothes, but when he checked in the reception desk turned him away because company policy did not allow Armed Forces personnel to stay at the hotel. It was already late and Stringer therefore spent the night in his car. The hotel is owned by American Amusements Limited, a company based in Woking but, it seems, under British management. Obituaries in the newspapers still reveal almost every day what sort of men fought in the last world war. Here is Ian Fraser, awarded the Victoria Cross for piloting a two-man submarine and attaching a limpet bomb under a Japanese cruiser, to sink it. Here is Lieutenant Colonel Mike Tomkin, wounded at the battle of El Alamein but nevertheless continuing in action and destroying six German tanks. Here is Colonel Charlie McHardy of the Seaforth Highlanders, first decorated in the field in Tunisia, and then severely wounded after D-Day. Before today, would any hotel in Britain ever have had a policy of refusing a room to such men? It’s inconceivable. The treatment meted out to Corporal Stringer - and the failure of the media to raise the roof about it - reveals a very profound shift in public attitudes, and it is an ominous portent for the future that in the heart of England people can be so contemptuously dismissive of those defending them. I wish I had some explanation for it. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzUzZDhmOGI2MzA5ODE5ZTYyMTI1NTc4YmJlNWFhYzA= Thu, 11 Sep 2008 10:15:29 -0400 Granny Melita -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzgzNTlhNGYwZWMxYTMxMzg4ODRiYzUzYzI4NTQ1MjU= Remember Melita Norwood, known as the “granny spy” ? She was of Latvian origins, ostensibly a nice and well assimilated lady living in the comfortable London suburbs and holding down a good job. That was cover. She was secretary to the director of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, the body responsible in the 1940s for the development of Britain’s secret atom bomb. Granny Melita was in fact a Communist, recruited to spy, and passing on to Moscow information that speeded up by several years the Soviet nuclear bomb program. Though aware that she was a Communist, and suspecting her of spying, officials did nothing. Their dereliction remains mind-boggling. She was unmasked only in 1999, and again nothing at all was done to bring her to account in any way. No legal proceedings, no financial deprivations, just a huge shrug of indifference. A historian, David Burke, was in touch with her at the time, and he has just written a book about the case. Simpering with the joy of it, she told him that she had been “rather a naughty girl,” but “I thought I’d gotten away with it.” She had, she had. Compare and contrast now the reaction to Putin and Saddam Hussein. The latter invaded and annexed an independent country recognised by the United Nation, and the former has similarly invaded another UN member, and is in the process of annexing it. If it had been left to the Europeans, Saddam would still be in Kuwait. Today European Union leaders are discussing the invasion of Georgia. It’s a foregone conclusion that they will behave like the officials who condoned Granny Melita. The French want no talk of punishing Russia. “The important thing is that Europe should talk in one voice, firmly and calmly,” says the French foreign minister, naturally not specifying the purpose of firmness and calm, or what good it will do to talk to those who refuse to listen. His German counterpart says: “We need a strong and sensible European role to return to reason and responsibility.” It would be impossible to find a more inflected euphemism for complete and instant surrender. The British Foreign Office outdoes them all in passivity and impotence, bleating, “Russia does not like it when people get together and talk about them.” Not even the shadow of a policy there. When the Kremlin perceives weakness, it moves in to take advantage, sometimes with spies and sometimes with tanks. Granny Melita once contributed to the construction of the nuclear bomb, and Putin is now threatening to target Poland and Ukraine with it. No measures of defense, nothing in the arena of international law, no financial deprivations, hardly even a complaint, just another huge shrug of indifference. The continuity of the Russian advance against everyone else is impressive. Putin is entitled to think that he too is getting away with it. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzgzNTlhNGYwZWMxYTMxMzg4ODRiYzUzYzI4NTQ1MjU= Mon, 01 Sep 2008 08:32:01 -0400 Could It Be a Hoax? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzAyZGIxNGNjZDVlMmE4YmExZDBiZTkxN2MyMDIzN2M= Some photographs are beginning to circulate more or less covertly of an astonishing air crash. This took place in France, at Toulouse, where a European consortium is building the Airbus 340-600, the largest passenger airliner ever designed or built. All sorts of criticisms have been made of this gigantic project, but the aircraft is in production regardless. Etihad Airways (ultimately Iranian-owned, I believe, but am not in a position to confirm) is interested in purchasing the Airbus, and an Arab flight crew of seven men from Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT) arrived in Toulouse for pre-delivery testing. In a brand new aircraft with no previous airtime, the crew taxied to the run-up area. They couldn't handle it, they made one mistake after another, losing control and finally wrecking the aircraft against a blast barrier. The photographs show impressive heaps of scrap, with the Etihad logo legible on the fusillage. And that's $200 million down the drain. The fate of the ADAT crew is unknown. I have the story from a source I think is reliable, but a news blackout in the media in France and elsewhere means that it cannot be checked. The reason for the secrecy, according to my informant, is that the story is deemed insulting to Muslims. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzAyZGIxNGNjZDVlMmE4YmExZDBiZTkxN2MyMDIzN2M= Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:38:57 -0400 The Empire Strikes Back? -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGNjZTBkNDVhMTQ4MTE2Nzk4OWM0MTU2MmY2YTE0OTI= Russia has invaded and now occupies the part of Georgia known as South Ossetia, and looks poised to occupy Abkhazia, another part of Georgia. Russian troops are reliably reported to be moving deeper into Georgia, and its air force is continuing to bomb targets in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi as well as the Black Sea ports. The likelihood of a Russian retreat is nil. The question is where they will stop. Voices in the West have been quick to assert that comparisons between the old Soviet Union and contemporary Russia should not be drawn. This is the usual comforting self-deception practiced when the West comes under threat. Russia is determining its boundaries by force of arms. It has manufactured a crisis that serves its imperial expansion. In pure Stalinist style, its leaders accuse Georgia of genocide, when they themselves are responsible for ethnic cleansing and the death of civilians. Russian spokesmen have made it plain that the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili must resign, and Georgia will have to do as it is told or suffer the consequences. That is a repeat of 1940 when Stalin swallowed the Baltic republics and parts of Romania. Last April, at a summit in Bucharest, President Bush in an eloquent speech proposed that Georgia and Ukraine be admitted to NATO. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel persuaded those attending that this would offend Russia, and the proposal was turned down. Her policy was presented as a far-sighted way of steering clear of trouble, but actually it has been an open invitation to Russia to do as it pleased with Georgia and Ukraine, in the certainty that nobody was committed to coming to their aid. German prevarication and fear of anything and everything that might lead to confrontation has once more handed the initiative to a Russia that for centuries has built itself precisely on confrontation. Mrs. Merkel and the other pitiful Europeans have placed the United States in a very awkward spot. Bleatings about a truce, negotiations, the intervention of the United Nations, international peace-keepers, are merely habitual, and it is anyhow ineffective to run for cover like that. When I was writing The Strange Death of the Soviet Union, an account of the collapse of Communism, I interviewed General Leonid Shebarshin, head of the First Directorate of the KGB, in charge of international affairs. Calmly he told me that the disintegration of the Soviet empire was only a temporary matter. Russia has such weight geographically and materially that the day would arise when it would reconstruct its empire over all the nearby peoples of lesser weight simply through circumstance. Events in Georgia are proving the validity of this KGB viewpoint. It is too late to defend Georgia militarily. The logic of the situation now is that the West will duly let Georgia be dismembered and have as its next president someone ready to accommodate the Kremlin. In which case, Russian tanks will once again have determined the boundaries and the governments of other countries. Russian minorities live in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldavia and they too can be used in the future to manufacture some mendacity about genocide, leading to invasion and their re-incorporation into the Russian empire. Russian protection of Iranian nuclear development certainly adds another dimension of difficulty and danger. But without the necessary resolve and imagination to devise a policy in defence of democracy and its allies, a Soviet Union Mark Two will have emerged with the potential to leave the West demoralized and defeated. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGNjZTBkNDVhMTQ4MTE2Nzk4OWM0MTU2MmY2YTE0OTI= Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:12:46 -0400 Not Foresaken -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjE4NmVlYWEwYTRhMzZkMWU5NzBlNWJjMjkyNzk3N2E= In his column in the Sunday Telegraph Christopher Booker specializes in reporting the idiocies and horrors that are flooding over us from Europe. The latest comes from a German-owned energy company called npower -- all in fashionable lower-case letters. This company invites children to “save the planet” by becoming “climate cops.” Children are supposed to spy on their parents, relations and neighbors, and catch them out for such “crimes” as leaving the TV on standby, putting hot food in the fridge or failing to use low-energy light bulbs. As so often, George Orwell got there first. In 1984, that masterwork of our times, children are enrolled in the Spies, whose model was evidently the Soviet youth organization, the Komsomol. They are taught to denounce and to brutalise, so that in the eyes of Winston Smith, the novel's protagonist, “Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.” In Soviet Russia, the young Pavel Morozov was held up as a most praiseworthy example for the young. At the age of thirteen, this boy had denounced his father for reading the forbidden Trotsky, and the father was duly shot. Family members then murdered Pavel in retribution. Even Stalin is supposed to have called Pavel “a little swine” for having his father executed. Orwell made use of this monstrosity too. Winston writes about Comrade Ogilvy who joins the Spies at the age of six, and “At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies.” By chance, I am reading a new and very fine book, The Forsaken, which tells the story of the thousands of Americans who emigrated to the Soviet Union, men and women who mostly were to pay for their naivety by losing their lives in Gulag. The author, Tim Tzouliadis, only just manages to restrain his rightful indignation at the murderous behaviour of the Soviets and the abject way that the American authorities did nothing to save their own citizens. In this book, a teacher is recorded praising Vasiliev, a boy in his class. With vigilance worthy of a real Bolshevik, the teacher is quoted saying, this Vasiliev “has acted like a real hero. He conquered family prejudices and denounced his own father.” Vasiliev was wearing a new suit in class, his reward for having reported seeing his father reading the banned works of Trotsky. The totalitarian mind-set dies hard, and it has evidently found a fruitful new incarnation in npower and its “climate cops.” <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjE4NmVlYWEwYTRhMzZkMWU5NzBlNWJjMjkyNzk3N2E= Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:06:15 -0400 The Legacy of Solzhenitsyn -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTNkNjgwODM3MzI2Nzk1NWIyNjY1ZTc1MDVlOWMzODI= 'Perhaps I shall die forgotten in Siberia,' says one of the characters in that astonishing novel The First Circle, 'But if you die knowing that you are not a swine, that's something, isn't it?' The Soviet authorities did their best to make sure that Alexander Solzhenitsyn died forgotten in Siberia along with the millions of the lost. They failed. The Germans had also failed to kill him as a wartime artillery officer. Unexpectedly, he even survived cancer, to die rightly celebrated in Moscow in the fullness of age. Solzhenitsyn is far and away the most influential writer to have emerged in my lifetime. You have to search history very thoroughly to think of any one man who changed the intellectual climate as dramatically as he did. By and large, people really believed the propaganda that the Soviet Union represented peace, and Communism was progress. A.J.P. Taylor, my Oxford tutor, to give a personal example, had the widest reputation as a historian, but he insisted that the Soviet Union did not have concentration camps and Gulag was a fiction put about by White Russian exiles in Riga. I doubt he knew that he was in danger of dying as a swine, and pretty well the entire academic and journalistic and social elite were equally perverse. To give the Soviet Union approval, or at least the benefit of doubt, was far, far more acceptable than to criticize it. The few who were openly anti-communist, why, my dear chap, we can't possibly invite them even to a drink, we don't want to know them. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich broke through to the truth. One who had had first-hand experience of the Soviet secret police state was conveying the horror of it. But of course, it was The Gulag Archipelago that really rocked the world. Here was the evidence of hundreds and maybe thousands of fates, their stories painstakingly collected, the material marvelously organized, the author's moral judgment clear without the least shadow. Dostoevsky's masterpiece, The House of the Dead, had recorded Czarist injustice, but the scale of Soviet inhumanity, and the wantonness of it, gave Solzhenitsyn the opening to document something new and worse than anything a Czar had ever done: Communism was state-controlled murder machinery, and its progressive image a lie from top to bottom. To give another personal example, at the time when Gulag Archipelago was rocking the world's conscience, I was taken to a smart literary party in Paris. And there I heard Agnès Varda, a filmmaker with a fashionable reputation, declare, 'No, I don't read Solzhenitsyn, he's a writer on the Right.' Ah, and didn't Solzhenitsyn become a Russian Orthodox believer, and wasn't he also a Russian nationalist, and didn't he accuse the West of becoming a feckless moral slum? Swarms of like-minded idiots tried to write him off in this style. It doesn't work. The pen really has proved mightier than the sword. Solzhenitsyn's writings will inform posterity's view of the twentieth century. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTNkNjgwODM3MzI2Nzk1NWIyNjY1ZTc1MDVlOWMzODI= Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:03:40 -0400 Muslim-World No-Confidence Votes -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmYwMjRjMGEzNWQwYjYyNDhlNWUwYmVmNWIxNzJmNmM= In the last few days, the Muslim world has revealed its political working in the most tragic way. Bombs in Turkey killed scores. Bombs in India, placed by Muslims, killed scores more. Bombs in Iraq, exploded by women who killed themselves in the process, killed over 50, and wounded many more. Bombs have been set off in Algeria, probably by al-Qaeda now building a base in that country. Palestinians in Fatah exploded bombs in Gaza City, killing members of Hamas, its Palestinian rivals. Five bomb outrages within the space of a week, and the huge majority of the victims were Muslim, like the perpetrators. Also in the same week the Iranian authorities executed no less than 30 people, most of them young, and charged with crimes that cannot be verified. It is tempting to say that this is all the doing of savage brutes, and that in the end everyone will turn on them. Undoubtedly those responsible for the killings are savage brutes, but they are also calculating, devious, secretive, long-term planners, excellent at recruiting simple people to run risks for them. These are no mean skills. In their way, then, these killers have a dreadful sort of intelligence. Their goal is power and they pursue it single-mindedly. In civil societies, power is diffused through the checks and balances of institutions, and these Muslim killers would be seen as mere psychopaths. In Islamic society so far, institutions instead concentrate power in the hands of whoever can seize and hold it. So those in power kill to maintain their position, and those in opposition kill to take their place. These bombs and executions, then, are the equivalent in the Muslim world of no-confidence votes in a parliament. And just as a parliamentary vote determines the direction a society will move in, so does all this killing. Except that in the former case, the direction is onwards, in the latter case backwards, further and further backwards to degradation. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmYwMjRjMGEzNWQwYjYyNDhlNWUwYmVmNWIxNzJmNmM= Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:33:57 -0400 Obama "or something" -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDg2YTc2ZTY2ODIzNDJkMzUyOWY1MWEyYmY3N2ViOTY= Every so often, whole populations appear to suspend their powers of judgment and swamp themselves in emotion. It was impossible, for example, to say at the time that the Beatles were mediocre musicians and rather childish in their opinions, or that the late Princess Diana was a seriously troubled young woman causing havoc around her. Senator Barack Obama is similarly whipping up European levels of irrationality. What a phenomenon his tour of the main continental capitals has been! As my friend Josef Joffe, the editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit and a highly rational man, put it, “He’s being celebrated like a victorious Roman general who comes back from the conquest of Gaul or something.” 200,000 people gathered in the open air in Berlin to listen to him. They applauded, they cheered, especially when he told them that America was less than perfect, and had failed to live up to its ideals - a fault that Change We Can Believe In would instantly remedy. Only some 25 years ago, crowds like this had assembled and marched in protest against the stationing in Germany of Cruise missiles to protect the country against the Soviet Union. In Paris, President Nicolas Sarkozy fawned over him. They’d met before, he said, and “One of us became president, the other just has to do the same thing.” He was virtually endorsing him. It was the same in London, where Prime Minister Brown and leader of the opposition David Cameron fought for time and photo-ops. Tony Blair flew in from the Middle East, to resolve its disputes over a breakfast publicized with special smarminess. Now the BBC correspondent in Washington is someone called Matt Frei. His hall-mark has long been a high-minded contempt for all things American. They brought him over for Obama’s trip, and his reports and body-language suddenly pointed the way to a rational explanation for the flood-tide of emotion. All this Obama mania is only the flip side of anti-Americanism. They’re all hoping for a president who will dismantle everything the United States stands for, and so prove them to be the intellectual and moral superiors they think they are. That may be what Jo Joffe meant when he tagged that enigmatic “or something” on to the end of his great remark. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDg2YTc2ZTY2ODIzNDJkMzUyOWY1MWEyYmY3N2ViOTY= Sat, 26 Jul 2008 09:55:58 -0400 Karadzic Trial -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjIxYzFmMTk5OWU0ZWRjNWFkZTA0Yjk0MWZmNzFjZTA= The arrest of Radovan Karadzic by the Serb authorities is something we can all applaud. He is undoubtedly a war criminal. As self-proclaimed President of Serbian Bosnia and in the name of Greater Serb nationalism, he was responsible for the attempted ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian Muslims and Croats. He allowed concentration camps to be built, he encouraged Ratko Mladic, his military commander, to shell Sarajevo, and gravest of all, to massacre about 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica. These past thirteen years he’s been in hiding. The United Nations forces, the world’s intelligence services, and certainly the Serbs in Belgrade, knew where he was, but hesitated to pick him up for fear of stirring up the Serb nationalism he claimed to represent. When arrested, he was found to have disguised his trademark quiff as a hippy pony-tail, grown the sort of luxuriant beard that Orthodox clergy have, and was making a living as a health guru. At which point, moral clarity starts to blur. Serbia has a new government, one most anxious to join the European Union. The EU, however, has made the arrest of Karadzic and Mladic a pre-condition of joining, and the Serbs evidently decided to pick him up out of political expediency, and not for his crimes. Even that might be all right, if they were going to try him in Belgrade, and use his trial to put the record straight, and give the Serb population the opportunity to come to terms with crimes committed in their names. As a precedent, the fact that an Iraqi court tried Saddam Hussein helped to evolve Iraqi identity and solidarity. But no, Karadzic is likely to be extradited to the U.N-backed Special Court in The Hague. Judges of other nationalities would then try him. That court changes the rules of procedure as it goes along, it admits hearsay as evidence, and its politicized purpose means that it is “little more than a kangaroo court,” as Anthony Daniels once described it. That is the court in which the Serb President Slobodan Milosevic, once Karadzic’s mentor but later rival, was tried. The Milosevic case lasted four years and cost $200 million, ending only because Milosevic and the presiding judge were both dead. This is justice? Besides, the powers that be - whether Serb or others -- have jumped on Karadzic only because they are able to do so, and in order to cut the EU deal into the bargain. The sinister Mladic is likely to be arrested pretty soon too. Karadzic is of course a wicked man for whom it is more or less impossible to feel anything like pity. But the world is full of men equally or even more wicked, such as Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-Il, General Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, and they’ve made sure that nobody is in a position really to jump on them or to cut political deals at their expense. Those who end up in international courts are victims of power politics, to put it plainly, and they cannot expect a fair trial. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjIxYzFmMTk5OWU0ZWRjNWFkZTA0Yjk0MWZmNzFjZTA= Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:16:14 -0400 Samir Kuntar: Vile By Any Human Standard -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWFlZjBmMzA3NTRhNjkwMjYxMjEwYzU2NWM3MTNiOGQ= Samir Kuntar is the Lebanese who infiltrated Israel twenty-nine years ago in order to kill. Entering a family house, he murdered the father in front of that man's four-year-old daughter, and then beat the little girl's head in with his rifle butt. Meanwhile the mother, trying to hide with a two year old daughter, accidentally smothered her to death trying to stop her screaming. Israel does not have the death penalty (though it made an exception in the case of Adolf Eichmann). Those who object to the death penalty will have very little grounds for their argument in Kuntar's case. What he did was as inhuman as any crime in the sad annals of mankind. Many, perhaps most, countries would have found a way to take Kuntar's life, if only in a shoot-out during his capture following the murders. In Israel. there was never any question of that. In a court of law, Kuntar was sentenced to life imprisonment. Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy now in the process of taking over Lebanon, has long hoped to have Kuntar released. To that end, Hezbollah two years ago once more infiltrated Israel, killed some soldiers and kidnapped two more, by name Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Hezbollah then refused to say in what condition these two were, did not allow Red Cross visits, ignoring every international convention about the treatment of prisoners. For reasons of its own, which may be wise or unwise, moral or immoral, Israel agreed to exchange Kuntar for the corpses of its two soldiers. Those who opened their coffins have been too appalled to speak openly of the mutilations they observed. In contrast to the treatment Kuntar had received in his captivity, the two had evidently been tortured to death. And that is all anyone needs to know about Hezbollah. Now every human being is responsive to the inborn taboo against killing. To overcome that taboo is difficult, and requires at the minimum the kind of primitive hate that societies usually make their best efforts to overcome. Hate, prejudice, and ignorance are necessary, and even quite simple levels of civilization keep these irrational sentiments under some sort of control. There must be Arabs who feel the normal human revulsion at what Kuntar did, and there may well be some with the courage to speak out against his infamy (though none that I know of have done so). But the very opposite happened. A reception committee of the high and mighty of his native Lebanon greeted Kuntar on his release. Dressed in military fatigues, he boasted to the world that he would do his crimes all over again. On behalf of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas sent his blessings, and his spokesman could talk about the return of “the heroes and Martyrs headed by the great Samir Kuntar.” In a rare public speech in Beirut, Sheikh Nasrallah of Hezbollah had similar praise for Kuntar. Rationalizations or excuses of course can be found to cover this glorification of murder. Arabs feel shame at their impotence and failure, for instance, so pretend that their defeats are victories. Or these Lebanese and Palestinian dignitaries know that they have to whip up hate in order to stay in power. Or that lack of education makes it possible to mobilize Muslims to believe they have a duty to kill those of other faiths. All of that is specious. The Nazi S.S. killed Jewish children with a brutality similar to Kuntar's, but they did not then appear on public platforms to boast to the world of what they had done; on the contrary they kept their crimes as secret as they could, thereby acknowledging the survival somewhere in them of a guilty conscience. But here are important and supposedly responsible men who find it in themselves to embrace, encourage, and hold up as a model a man as vile as any, as though there was no such thing as conscience, and never has been. By every human standard, this is degradation, this is depravity. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWFlZjBmMzA3NTRhNjkwMjYxMjEwYzU2NWM3MTNiOGQ= Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:27:01 -0400 A Place for Sharia Law in Britain -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmIxNGZiOTFmYWE1ZDUxODU5MzFjMjQ0OTMyODA3Yzk= In Britain, the Lord Chief Justice has just told an audience in one of the largest mosques in London that there is a place in Britain for sharia law. The Archbishop of Canterbury not long ago was of the same opinion. The pillars of the Establishment, in other words, are willing to collapse what they were supposed to be upholding. Amazingly, the feminists have not uttered a squeak of protest about what would happen to women in the event that sharia law was applicable alongside or within British law. The Swiss are not taking so easily to creeping Islamization. In the past, the King of Saudi Arabia felt free to break building regulations at a palace he owned on the shore of Lake Geneva, and the City Fathers forced him to demolish what had been put up without permission. A mosque already existed in Geneva, but when the Muslim community sought to have a second mosque, the City Fathers replied that this would be possible when the Christians were allowed a church in Saudi Arabia. There is no record that outraged Arabs consequently withdrew their petro-dollar millions held in the local banks. There are just over seven million Swiss, and they are Europe's premier example of multi-culturalism, a centuries-old fusion of French, German, and Italian cultures and languages. Muslims, almost all immigrants, are said to number some 300,000. The Swiss Peoples' Party (SVP) has raised a storm by collecting more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for a ban on minarets in the country. Minarets, according to the SVP, are 'symbols of political-religious imperialism.' A spokesman for the party pointed out that, 'Many women, even socialists, signed this petition because not one Swiss woman can tolerate the way that Muslim men treat their wives.' By law, a national referendum is now obligatory. Favouring this form of direct democracy, the Swiss constantly hold referendums on every kind of issue. The Swiss authorities, including the country's President, recommend the rejection of the ban on minarets. They are openly and explicitly terrified of provoking Muslim anger, thus bringing a security risk on themselves. That's also the sum total of the argument put forward in Britain by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice. All these great persons on the one hand openly hold themselves and their societies in disdain, and on the other hand show an even greater degree of contempt for Muslims by treating them as creatures of a fanaticism so furious that it can only be propitiated and never reasoned with or moderated. <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmIxNGZiOTFmYWE1ZDUxODU5MzFjMjQ0OTMyODA3Yzk= Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:46:22 -0400 Hope Has Not Necessarily Died -- By: David Pryce-Jones webmaster@nationalreview.com (David Pryce-Jones) http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTIzMTA5ZGY3YjFlYWYyMjRjYzMxMTU0NDkwNWVkYzQ= This is a time when a foul murderer by the name of Samir Kuntar is being exchanged for the bodies of two Israelis kidnapped and killed by Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is a time when the Iranian leadership regularly promotes genocide by boasting that Israel is about to be wiped off the face of the earth. But it is also a time when an Algerian intellectual by the name of Boualem Sansal can give an interview in the prestigious French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur and reveal that hope has not necessarily died. I had never previously heard of Boualem Sansal. He is described in the interview as a former Algerian civil servant, and author of four earlier novels, and now a fifth with the title of Le Village de l’Allemand, or The Village of the German. He says he took his subject from a real-life discovery that there was a Nazi, a former S.S. man who had more or less colonized a village in Algeria, converted to Islam and was regarded as a hero locally. “The Hitler salute,” Sansal says, “has always had its partisans in Algeria.” For a couple of decades now, Algeria has been in the throes of a brutish and murky civil war, costing an estimated 200,000 lives, most of them simple villagers caught and massacred either by Islamists or the military regime. Al-Qaeda in North Africa is presently establishing a base there, trying to colonize the country. The more he researched his novel, Sansal tells us, the more he saw “a substantial similarity between Nazism and the political order that prevails in Algeria.” Both are one-party states, with militarization, brainwashing, the falsification of history, the exaltation of the race, the tendency to claim victimhood and to assert that there is a conspiracy against the nation. There is glorification of the leader, an omnipresent police, mass organizations, religious indoctrination. Xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism, he adds, have been elevated to the status of dogmas. We all know, he sums up, that “the line separating Nazism from Islamism is a thin one.” September 11 was “a terrible shock to all of us.” Then he understood that Islamism was far more radical than anyone had imagined. Islamism is the matrix of terrorism, and only Muslims and their theologians can engage with it, to recover the Enlightenment that long ago was theirs. His books are banned in Algeria, he thinks of packing his bags, but decides to stay because one day the country will rediscover its way, and he would like to be there to see it happen. Which is more impressive, the truth and clarity of this man’s vision or his courage in expressing it so openly? And who knows what a free spirit like this may achieve? <hr width=100% size=2> http://pryce-jones.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTIzMTA5ZGY3YjFlYWYyMjRjYzMxMTU0NDkwNWVkYzQ= Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:07:42 -0400