In an ideal world…

Blair the Christian

It’s scary to see this story on ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s religious convictions. I contributed on the BBC site as follows:

“Since having faith means being prepared to believe things in the absence of evidence, and being a Christian means basing one’s principles on a book which recommends many practices which are morally objectionable in this day and age, it may indeed be both relevant and helpful to know of someone’s religious convictions before employing them, and Blair is probably right in calculating that had he been more open about his he would not have been able to hold onto office for so long.”

And now we have Gordon Brown instead, who very nearly went into the clergy. To think these people are running our country, it is truly quite a concern.

A short appraisal of “24″

I don’t watch the television because there is so much rubbish on, however, the one programme I do watch on DVD is Fox Television’s 24, which is extremely well acted and produced. Its storylines can be contrived, granted, but the programme nonetheless teaches a variety of very important lessons, including:

• The need to keep our own problems in perspective.
• The importance of integrity.
• That things are not always as they seem.
• The importance of decisiveness.
• The need to be confident, clear and concise.
• Utilitarianism.
• The need to guard against political naivity and idealism.

While plot mechanisms can become tired, these principles never do.

On Che Guevara and casual idolatry

Walking around London, you will sometimes see people wearing t-shirts saying things like “Make music not missiles” or bearing the iconic image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, from the famous photograph by fashion photographer Alberto Korda. These are extremely naïve statements, extreme simplifications of complex matters, which mainly serve to indicate that the wearer actually knows very little about the issues he or she claims to champion. They are intellectually lazy.

The first example is so grossly simplistic I shall not deal with it in detail. Suffice it to say that decommissioning of arms is an extremely difficult and delicate matter and we cannot all simply pick up guitars and sing songs around a fire without the slightest further care about national security. Especially not while Christianity harks for armaggeddon and Islam seeks to convert or eradicate “infidels”. All this said, international disarmament, as much as possible, obviously remains a priority of any right thinking person.

Let us move onto the issue of Che Guevara. Che Guevara was a socialist, some say communist, so it is ironic that his image should now be at the centre of a marketing machine, now be a fashion brand, and I dare say many who wear it know know little about their idol beyond some vague ideas that he “stood for freedom”. This kind of naivity and political ignorance, leading to unthinking idolatry, is not only embarrassing, it can also be dangerous.

It is wrong to idolise anyone, because they will always fail to live up to expectations. But let us review a few known facts about Che Guevara, in order to help these people back down to earth:

• He pawned his sister’s jewellery to make money for himself.
• He had the annoying habit of addressing people as “mate” - hence his nickname.
• He never worked for a living.
• He summarily executed many suspects without trial (as Cuban-American actor Andy Garcia has pointed out).
• He was an adulterer.
• He fully desired to fire nuclear weapons at the United States.
• He regarded North Korea as a model to which Cuba should aspire.
• He was extremely anti-American, urging people to “take up arms and create 100 Vietnams”.
• He was an aggressive individual since his youth - indeed even his protector Castro cited his “excessively aggressive quality”.
• His last words were supposedly “Shoot coward - you are only going to kill a man”. I’m sorry, “only”..?
• He was responsible for setting up forced labour camps.
• He displayed an inability to work with others, often patronising them.
• He staged terrifying mock executions of boy soldiers.
• He rarely washed (and was proud of this - earning him the nickname “The Pig”).
• He naively thought he could “go missing” for an extended period and evade the United States, when in fact they had him under constant surveillance.

Che Guevara was a contradictory character - more than anything a rebel looking for a cause, and his social outrage only gave him an outlet for an obvious love of violence. He also, incidentally, failed in his overall aims. The worship of him is naïve adolescent revolutionary romanticism, and we should take no notice of those who wear his image unless they have also an intimate knowledge of his politics, for by wearing his image they do nothing but mindlessly contribute to a commercial machine to which he was by all accounts overtly opposed.

Political position

We are often asked our political persuasion. I can no more define myself as “liberal” or “conservative” than I can define myself as liking rock or classical music. I am an aesthetic and moral realist and I like what is best. This forms a complex and politically eclectic web of values, liberal in some respects, conservative in others. Most people think likewise, and this helps explain the crisis of identity in political parties today.

Any Questions

I have just been listening to Any Questions on BBC Radio 4.

The demi-muslim Yasmin Alibhai-Brown really is the stereotypical woolly-minded liberal (and therefore cannot be following the Koran properly), while neo-Con Douglas Murray (though some of his views do seem rather extreme) was making some sound points, notably about the savage dictatorship in Iran - and was booed by the audience for doing so. (I remember Murray, by the way, as being the precocious author of the biography Bosie.)

Some people really seem to live in a world of their own, some kind of fantasy utopia where everyone is nice, it’s all our fault and nobody really means us any harm. They need to wake up and smell the coffee, and some of the female apoligists for theocracies should perhaps try living in those societies and then see how much they like them.

Guido Fawkes

This rather messy and advertising-ridden web site is run by a certain Paul Staines, and it revels in (by its own admission) “tittle tattle, gossip and rumours about Westminster”. Happy to dish it out, Mr Staines (who made his money in hedge funds and hides behind the name of an attempted murderer) is a little more shy when it comes to actually saying things openly under his own name. He was outraged when his identity was revealed.

I agree with the likes of Nick Robinson and Jeremy Paxman that his utterly irreverent and cynical musings are are on the whole not admirable or helpful and do not constitute serious journalism. They are just cheap pot-shots from a distance - in fact it is rather like a tabloid on the Internet.

Past versus present

Some British MPs are currently being criticised by the infantile tabloid media for admitting they sampled cannabis in the past. We should be worried if they hadn’t. Such a mild degree of experimentation is only to be expected from enquiring minds who were at university during the sixties, and in any case having tried this drug the MPs are in a better position to judge it.

In addition to this, what a person has said, done or believed in the past is irrelevant to what they say, do or believe now.

Amazon recommends…

An interesting book:
What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen.

To quote from a review on this page which in turn quotes a novel:

“By contrast, many on the left are “under the evil spell” (as Cohen sees it) of cultural relativism and are not prepared to make that judgment about the regime in Iraq, but are perfectly prepared to make it about the political elite in Britain and the United States. Cohen cites Ian McEwen’s recent novel, Saturday, which remarks about anti-war protesters: “… people are hugging themselves, it seems, as well as each other. If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.” (p. 69)”

Indeed… and I don’t think they are right: it’s just that the planning for post-”invasion” Iraq was, sadly, totally inadequate.

Here are some other books which might be an interesting read:

• The Death of Right and Wrong
• Why Truth Matters
• The Force of Reason
• Can We Trust the BBC?

Londonistan

Londonistan is the name muslim extremists have given to the safe haven of Britain, and also a book by Melanie Phillips, intended to be a wake-up call for Britain in the light of the threat from militant Islam. The book was published in 2006 and was a little over-due. The original release (there is an updated one now) tends to catalogue past events rather than present problems, as by the time the book was written the British government had been forced by media and public pressure to finally start taking some action against religious (specifically Islamic) extremists.

Melanie Phillips is also the author of The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, and from the book’s outline, I am inclined to agree with its message:

“The Sex-Change Society issues a devastating attack on androgynous public policy, arguing that feminism has distorted its own agenda of equality by replacing it with sameness.

The results are startling. Men have been demonised through a distorted view that they are intrinsically violent and feckless while all women are essentially “˜saint-like’. At the same time, women are being encouraged to work at all times, whether they want to or not.

In this timely critique Melanie Phillips tells the disturbing story of the attempt to feminise the state, to reverse the roles of men and women and to run masculinity out of town altogether. The result has been an anti-family policy in which everyone has become a potential loser.”

Londonistan is a book which I read several months ago, but I cannot fully recommend it, for reasons I will explain. Laudable passages from the book include the following:

On protests by London muslims in February 2006:

“Not only was such open incitement to murder and terrorism allowed to go on, but at the time the only action taken by police was actually directed against those passers by who objected to such displays. People who to tried to snatch away placards were held back. Several members of the public tackled senior police officers guarding the protestors, demanding to know why they allowed banners that praised the ‘magnificent 19′ - the 9/11 terrorists… and those who tried to photograph the man dressed as a suicide bomber were threatened with arrest.”

This well describes a society gone crazy, a society apparently complicit in its own destruction. Also:

“Instead of laying the blame firmly upon the Islamist ideology where it belongs, Britain has itself adopted some of the tropes of that very ideology - in particular hatred of America and Israel, whose policies it blames as the cause of Muslim rage.

The view is widely shared, for example, that the London bombings were caused by Britain’s support for the war in Iraq. Clearly this cannot be so, since Islamic terror not only preceded that war but has been directed against countries that either had nothing to do with it, such as Indonesia, or actively opposed it, such as France.”

But as you read the book you begin to realise that Phillips is merely another religious person with her own axe to grind:

“Britain has become a largely post-Christian society, where traditional morality has been systematically undermined and replaced by an anything goes culture in which autonomous decisions about codes of behaviour have become unchallengable rights.”

She goes on to speak in glowing terms of Judaism and Christianity - indeed throughout the book. With chapters like “Scapegoating the Jews” and an evident sympathy for Judaism throughout, Phillips explicitly fails to address the root cause of the problem, which Sam Harris and others have clearly spelt out for us, which is of course faith itself. She says:

“This book is an attempt to piece together this complex cultural jigsaw, and to show how the deadly fusion of an aggressive ideology and a society that has lost its way has led to the emergence of Londonistan. In doing so it is not drawing any conclusions about whether or not Islam is intrinsically a religion of violent conquest or whether it has been hijacked by a revisionist ideology…”

Yet then, apparently mixed up, Phillips later says (page 218):

“Muslims had failed to acknowledge that the problem lay in their religion… [Violence is] an expression of religious fanaticism rooted in Islamic theology… The theological issue is what drives fanatics.”

Phillips also has an aggressive style on The Moral Maze, and opposes equal partnership rights for homosexuals (presumably this is something condemned by the ancient morality of her religion), undermining her own credibility. Londonistan contains a lot of truth, but with its clear religious bias it cannot be fully recommended. (Neither, for that matter, can Michael Gove’s hard right-wing Celsius 7/7, which was not only blatantly biased but also somewhat boring and I had to put it down half-way through.)

Another reason to suspect Londonistan, by the way, is its endorsement by Rod Liddle, previously editor of The Today Programme, who destroyed his own intellectual and politically incorrect credentials by producing a third rate programme misrepresenting atheism for Channel 4.

If you want clear reasoned truth on these issues, with no ulterior motive, simply turn to Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.

The problem with Liberty

Liberty is an organisation of which urges caution in the placement of CCTV cameras, is (I understand) against a national DNA database and is against National Identity Cards.

I’m for all of these things.

I dread to think of the number of convictions that would not have been successful were it not for CCTV, and I think Ms Chakrabarti et al might change their position pretty swiftly if they or a member of their family were raped or otherwise assaulted and the police then said “Oh, sorry, we would have had footage but you asked us to take the camera down”. They can put a camera in my garden for all I care - in fact I would like them to do so.

Regarding the proposed National DNA Database, this could also be a benefical scheme. It seems rather Orwellian at first, but it is not such a big deal. Data should be recorded with adequate (very high) security measures, and this step would even further improve crime detection.

Regarding identity cards, I partcularly welcome this plan. I’d like to have one and hope it could include everything - my passport, driving licence, bank card - perhaps even the DNA sample too. It seems to me this would be extremely convenient, and again would go a serious distance to combatting many kinds of crime (not only illegal immigration).

If adequate security measures are in place, these steps would greatly improve society. People are simply afraid because they are new and seem draconian. But passports must have seemed a draconian, unnecessary measure when they were first introduced. Now we see their benefit.

Liberty plays a role - we need checks against government schemes. But when it is so extreme and paranoid it becomes part of the problem. With adequate security layers, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.