ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE LEFT

One of the blind spots for the Left is that it is unable to accept it could be a source of bigotry or racism.  The Left is founded on the idea that it not only has different pragmatic and economic solutions, but that to subscribe to certain economic theories makes one morally superior.  The converse is also assumed, that however hard-working or diligent for the country a conservative is, he is morally bad perhaps even evil.  When coming into contact with decent conservatives, to keep their world-view of their moral superiority holding together, the Leftist will create some explanation, such as that this decent person has been fooled into being a conservative and is really Left wing under the surface.

Yet a perusal of history clearly shows that ideas put forward as progressive in every era have been responsible for more deaths, suffering, hatred and poverty than conservatism ever has been.  From 

Robespierre’s Terror to the Stalinist Gulags, to the economic catastrophe that is Socialist Venezuela (so admired by the current leader of the British Labour Party) it is the Left that has been the political movement most responsible for human suffering.  Nonetheless, when self-righteousness is the key foundation of one’s political involvement, it is an unthinkable thought that one’s beliefs might be the cause of suffering for the people you claim to help.  Thus begins the search for a scapegoat.  It is impossible for the average Leftist to take moral responsibility without his whole Weltanschauung and idea of himself as morally superior to his contemporaries being fatally undermined.

In the Twentieth Century anti-semitism was more associated with the Right and Jewish involvement in politics tended to be participation in Left wing Marxism.  If Nazism can be regarded as right wing, which is debatable given its anti-conservative, revolutionary and avante garde tendencies, that was of course the most egregious example of right-wing anti-semitism.  On the other hand, as Solzhenitsyn has pointed out, the high level of Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik movement was disproportionate in comparison to the number of Jewish Russians.  It is also worth mentioning that the involvement of White Russian emigres seeking revenge through the National Socialist movement in Germany is often overlooked.

Nonetheless, anti-semitism has a far more natural home with the Left.  Despite the terrible suffering of the Jewish people most have refused to give in to a victim status that would seem a natural default position given the extent of persecution.  They have not become passive clients of a Leftist narrative that feeds off resentment.  Of course many black people or other ethnic minorities refuse the resentment narrative fed to the them by White Leftists, but the Jewish refusal to give in to victimhood has been phenomenal and brave.  They have succeeded as a community in keeping their traditions alive (something intolerable to the anti-traditionalist Left) and individual Jews have often reached the very top of Western society, giving the lie to the Leftist narrative that our society is based on oppression, rather than the hierarchies of competence identified by Jordan Peterson.

Therefore there are twofold reasons to choose the Jews as scapegoats for the Left:  first they have refused to be compliant with the Marxist post-modern narrative of oppression by a white Anglo-Saxon protestant-establishment.  Secondly, by succeeding in a capitalist system they have become part of the oppressive conspiracy as set out in Left wing narrative.  The irony is of course that not only Karl Marx, but the founders of post-modernism or cultural Marxism were largely Jewish.  This Left wing involvement by some Jews says more about the experience of lacking roots in a society than it does about Western society itself.  This was of course a very important point for the Jewish Catholic writer and philosopher Simone Weil.

Western culture is fundamentally Christian and that means the Jewish religion and Scripture is a core part of our culture and values.  We are a Judaeo Christian culture and it is that culture that the cultural Marxists, post-moderns and Leftists seek to destroy. 

If Western culture is a conspiracy of the capitalist class against the proletariat, it is a very fine line between making that claim and stepping into a dark conspiracy theory about a certain race that is successful in capitalism being behind globalist neoliberal economics. 

Being anti-conservative, whether as an international or national socialist or a post-modern, is about attacking the fundamental values and the fabric of our Christian culture.  That is why Leftists can make common cause with those attacking traditional gender roles and hard-line Islamists who believe in traditional gender roles.  It is not that these different groups have a shared positive cause, they are simply enemies of the Western inheritance.  The Jews are different – their great sin is to succeed as an ethnic minority in this allegedly oppressive society.  The Left has not achieved a claim over their loyalty necessarily – they are not supplicants to the morally-virtuous Left-wing politicians.  Of course this is a gross generalisation, but we must understand that the Left thinks in gross generalisations.  All the way back to Marx, people are not individual persons, but members of a class.  They are reduced to being part of an oppressor or victim class with their personal attributes erased in the eyes of the ideologue.  That of course is very similar to racism.     

It is therefore a very thin line between accepting the Marxist narrative and slipping into anti-semitism.  In the United States the dominance of intersectional theories of oppression places Muslims as a group above Jews.  The problem of anti-semitism in political Islam is therefore being overlooked.  In the United Kingdom the main Left-of-centre parliamentary party has been taken over by Hard-Left anti-parliamentary economic Marxists.  If you believe capitalism is a conspiracy against the poor, it is a very small step to believing Jews are oppressing the people.  We are already seeing serious problems with anti-semitism in the British Labour Party.  The willingness of the American Democratic party to see and hear no evil with regard to political Islam means they too are starting to turn a blind eye to anti-semitism, despite the party’s strong connections with the Jewish community in the United States.

What all this tells us is that the Left cannot reform or be self-reflective or critical unless it accepts being Left wing is not an infallible sign of moral righteousness.  Most politics is just about the mechanics of achieving economic growth for as many people as possible and ensuring civil society survives.  There are different theories as to how this might be done – from wealth creation and trickle-down economics to redistributive taxation.  The moral choice is not whether one is Left or Right, but whether one participates at all.  As long as there is this blindness about its own moral fallibility, the Left will fail to confront its own festering demons of anti-semitism and bigotry.

The Curious Case of Western Foreign Policy

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been renowned for its expertise on foreign climes and cultures so it really is mysterious why British foreign policy seems currently to be focused on destabilising areas where its interests require stability.  Perhaps the more pertinent question is why American foreign policy is all about making the world more uncertain, when its interests seem to depend on a certain world.  That must be the more pertinent question because to a large extent British foreign policy is a shadowing of American policy.

Indeed the foreign policy of “Old Europe” when independent from the United States, can be best represented by the Congress of Vienna, where British statesman, Lord Castlereagh, was instrumental in ensuring an agreement that secured the existing political establishment and prevented a major European war for a century.  This was an anti-revolutionary and anti-nationalist treaty, which worked in its goal of achieving peace. 

Today the United States take the lead in Western foreign policy and have adopted policies in recent years that have destabilised the Middle East (particularly through the invasion of Iraq) and thereby allowed Islamist extremism to gain a foothold in the region and also given Iran the opportunity to fill the new vacuum.   It was apparent to the most naïve of foreign-policy observers that remove the strongman Saddam Hussein (hideous as he was) and a factional and internecine power struggle between religious groups would result. 

Despite the example of that consequent bloody civil-war, the United States have recently abandoned their ally Hosni Mubarak to a revolution.  This has sent two messages to the world – that the West does not object to revolution as a means of seizing political power and secondly, that it will not stand by those who take the political risk of allying themselves to the West.

This is not to defend the two dictators, Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mubarak; rather, it is to point out that being rid of brutal strongmen at all costs, even bloody revolution and civil war, is not always right or justifiable.  In Iraq and Egypt, not only were there all the usual risks of revolution – bloody civil war, persecution of minorities, a far worse dictator arising – but, there was also the looming threat of political Islam just waiting for an opportunity, with all its hostility to our interests.

The latest manifestation of the failure of the West to speak out against revolution was the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine.  No doubt the deposed government was especially corrupt and toadied to Russia, but it was elected for a term and there was a mechanism of a general election, when voters would have had the opportunity to throw out the crooks.  Even when there was a possibility of political compromise, the West seemed to pull the rug from under the negotiations.  On the face of it, supporting the Pro-Western revolutionaries seemed more coherent than Middle Eastern policy, but the unintended outcome – a more dominant Russia in the region – shows again that supporting destabilisation is always the high-risk strategy.

This strange foreign policy emanates from the United States and the only explanation (given Western interests have been harmed so much in the Middle East as a result) is a romantic attachment to the idea of revolution.  It is here argued that through a misunderstanding of its own history, perhaps even the “Hollywoodisation” of its own history, in the eyes of a section of America, the revolutionary’s cause is always just.  Well, one only needs to look at real history to see that real revolutions are bloody and destroy custom and morals.  They mean a nation state suffers a sort of ontological violence, because its genesis as a revolutionary state was through violence.  The French Revolution led to the Terror and then to Bonaparte.  The Russian Revolution led to the Bolsheviks and then the terror of Stalinism. Revolution is rarely the way to achieve stable government. 

Dominant American thought imagines their own creation as a state and concludes that throwing aside of custom, law and convention leads to a sort of secular freedom.  Well, there was not an “American Revolution”, there was only an American War of Independence.  That is why the United States emerged as stable and democratic.  The American, slave-owning establishment broke away from the rule of an island across an ocean, but it took with it a political and legal heritage – representative democracy (as opposed to direct democracy) and the common law.  It continued as a functioning state after a war of independence.  There was no one to terrorise as the remote oppressors were the other side of the ocean.  The American establishment continued with the reins of power, but independent of that remote, previous rule.

Indeed where American politics breaks down, such as in the gridlock between President and Congress, is down to those elements of the constitution based upon abstract, French theory of separation of powers, rather than reliance on inherited precedent.

Where the United States are weak is not through their relative newness as a state, but through the fact that they came into existence at just the time when Europe was smashing its table of values.  It therefore took on board the new enlightenment secularism, writing a constitution that set in stone a valueless or neutral society.  Perhaps it is these origins that explain why the United States continue with an apparently overly-optimistic and simplistic view of other cultures, despite the experience of their own bloody civil war. 

This is not to suggest American people (as opposed to the Washington establishment) are in any way naïve.  Many on the American Right recognise the danger of existing under a secular or neutral constitution.  That is why there are campaigns for the Ten Commandments to be placed in schools, despite the historic exclusion of religion from the public square.  Meanwhile in Europe, with our heritage of values that have shaped our own constitutions, we are far more complacent and arrogant than many Americans about the encroaching of secularism. 

It was an American, T S Eliot who warned of the dangers of a neutral society and made the positive case for a Christian society.  It is American Catholics today who are campaigning for one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest Christian apologists, G K Chesterton, to be canonised. 

It is of course difficult to fully understand the history of another state, but it is easier for us as British to understand the United States because they were once legally connected with this polity and they adapted this nation’s institutions and laws to a new continent.  If it is accepted that the United States have misunderstood their own genesis, this would explain its seemingly irrational belief that revolution will lead to pro-Western democracies, as opposed to extremist states bent on hostility to its and our interests.  One can only hope American schools start to teach their children about the War of Independence instead of the American Revolution and that we will see a different, more historically aware foreign policy from a future generation.   

Silence on the Christian Holocaust from the Heirs of Christendom?

This blog will begin with some honourable exceptions in the matter of Western silence on the deliberate persecution and removal from their religious and native homeland of Christians through murder and intimidation.  Our first exception to an otherwise failed political response is Fiona Bruce MP, who secured a Westminster Hall debate on the persecution of Christians and rightly drew an analogy with the Nazi mass extermination of Jews in the last century. 

Of course it is right that we should oppose persecution of all peoples, whatever their faith or race.  It was right that the West intervened to protect Bosnian Muslims, even if a consequence of Bosnian Serb defeat was relief not just for decent Bosnians but also a minority who went on to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan.  It is right that the West is bringing pressure to bear on President Assad, when he has allegedly used chemical weapons on his own people as well as using conventional weapons to slaughter his fellow citizens.  It is right to do that, even though many persecuted Christians depend on President Assad’s survival to protect them from the Al Qaeda-inspired rebels who benefit from Western policy.

It is not right however to ignore the persecution of those who are closest to us culturally and spiritually.  Surely when Christians are persecuted in the Middle East, Africa and Pakistan, there is a special onus on the inheritors of Christendom to speak out and take action?  Strangely it seems that the Western media is sadly lacking in interest in the persecution of a people whom HRH Prince Charles (our second exception to the general political failure) has described as “our brothers and sisters in Christ”.

When I refer to us as the inheritors of Christendom I mean all of us, whether or not we are faithful or practising Christians.  Even if we are not, we have inherited a culture and a history shaped by Christian faith.  We have a duty to uphold that culture, whatever our personal beliefs.  We cannot choose to have been born in a Caliphate or a Buddhist state, whether we are believers or not we have been born into and shaped by a Christian culture.  The Western atheist owes his values to the same inheritance as the Coptic Christians.  I believe that this not only behoves us to uphold our own values and customs, but to understand that special link it gives us with Christians in other parts of the world and particularly in the Middle East, where Christ lived, walked and taught.

It is worth quoting His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, bearing in mind how much the Prince has done to reach out to Muslims in our own country:

“I have for some time now been deeply troubled by the growing difficulties faced by various Christian communities in various parts of the Middle East.  It seems to me that we cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are increasingly being deliberately targeted by fundamentalist Islamist militants.  Christianity was literally born in the Middle East and we must not forget our Middle Eastern brothers and sisters in Christ.”

Prince Charles by dint of his role and upbringing is more aware of our cultural roots than those who run the twenty-four hour rolling media or the politicians more worried about climbing the greasy pole than standing up for principles.

Why should it be though that the media ignores this or pays it scant attention and politicians see no benefit in speaking out (apart from notable exceptions including Fiona Bruce MP and other MPs such as David Simpson MP (DUP)?  Perhaps part of the explanation can be revealed by another honourable exception:  Baroness Warsi.  The Baroness has spoken out about this issue and yet this begs the question as to why someone of Islamic faith of an immigrant family has spoken out more vocally than all those politicians whose roots are Christian and European?

I think the excuse our leaders would give is that for a White, ostensibly Christian Western politician to condemn the persecution of Christians would play into the hands of Islamists who for propaganda purposes would then be able to falsely portray Middle Eastern Christians as Western stooges.  One is reminded of President Obama’s behaviour over the abortive Green revolution in Iran.  Even when the protesters pleaded for American support he remained ambivalent.  The Green Revolution failed.

This attitude seems to be based on shame about and alienation from our own values and a misunderstanding that somehow speaking for the cause of what is Right and Just strengthens the arm of the wicked.  Speaking truth to power earns your cause credit not discredit and inspires rather than undermines.  Silence on the other hand can look like indifference or even tacit acceptance of the rightness of the oppressor’s action.  We know where the attitude of asking "What is truth?" leads.

It is the view of this blogger that the attitude Western leaders are portraying is not pragmatic politics but an exhibition of politically-correct guilt and alienation about our own values.  An aggressive secularisation and attack on our traditional values has left us with pusillanimous politicians who no longer speak with conviction or even know what convictions they should hold.  Rather than talk of our Christian values as Sir Winston Churchill did, politicians can only speak in value-neutral language.  To speak passionately about the persecution of Christians would not be value-neutral precisely because we have that special link with them.  So in our perverse modern world the very reason for speaking out becomes a reason not to speak out.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, another important and honourable exception, has referred to Christians murdered by suicide bombers in Pakistan as martyrs – a powerful way of highlighting how distorted the extreme Islamist view of martyrdom is and what a cruel parody of true martyrdom has developed in Islamist doctrine, as well as expressing the much-needed sympathy for Pakistani Christians. 

This blog recently touched on the Church of England’s embarrassment over the existence of the Devil.  Well, we live in a world where those who have inherited the legacy and duties of Christendom have monumentally failed to speak for and act for their spiritual and cultural brethren.  Not only have they failed, but they exist in a world where they are so alienated from the values of their culture that they are impotent to speak out precisely because of our special link with other Christians who are being murdered every day.  Surely that disabling impotence must be the work of the Devil in our culture and politics.

For those frustrated about our politicians' failure to act and wish to do something in however small a way for our spiritual brethren can I recommend the Barnabus Fund?  Their website can be found here and is self-explanatory:

http://barnabasfund.org/UK/

The Forces of Conservatism versus Relativism

Conservative is a misnomer for extremists

There is nothing more annoying than when commentators refer to radicals and militants as “conservative”.  By definition radicals are not conservative.  They throw away the lessons built up over centuries and go back to the root.  So the Islamic radical rejects the wisdom of ages in Muslim thinking, that has taken on board Aristotle, living amongst Christians and Jews and accommodated real human-nature.  In the same way the political radical, whether Bolshevist or Jacobin, rejects the institutions that have evolved over the centuries, in the hope of reverting to some ideal original state of nature.

Islamic extremism has been in the public eye recently with the trial of the two murderers of Drummer Rigby, in a brutal and barbarous attack.  It is the argument of this blog that what leads to extremist evil is a subjective approach to life that rejects the shared lessons of history.  In effect the radical attempts to shake off shared values accumulated over time and assert their own opinion in the place of common values.

Thus the young Islamist extremist living in Britain attempts to define himself against the more moderate and conservative Islam of his parents.  For the extremist the wisdom of the ancestors, the building up of knowledge and tradition, should be rejected in favour of the original, pure “truth”, which happens to be his own subjective view of the truth.  In Mali the Islamist extremists set about destroying traditional Islamic art and historical artefacts. 

Just because it's your opinion doesn’t mean you are right

The real danger to Western society is not dogmatism, but the rejection of shared dogma in favour of “my opinion”.  People talk about their opinions as though because they own them they somehow possess a special validity.  Actually it is only that person’s opinion and it cannot contain the experience of generations that exists in our traditions and inherited values.  It is inevitably a partial and limited view.

It also commands no intrinsic legitimacy.  For example, one of the late Drummer Rigby’s murderers claimed to be a soldier and justified his atrocious crime in this way. He did not really belong to an existing army it was just his own opinion that he was a soldier.  There is no existing army that I know of, with commissions, paid salaries and a duty to serve a head of state that gave him such an order.  I have not heard of such a State that would give this order, outside of the conventions of war, in violation of the Geneva Convention.  There was no call from the established institutions of the Islamic faith for a crusade; only some madman in a cave in Afghanistan had unilaterally created his own violent creed.  This so-called army has been set up without legitimacy and without authority.  The murderer’s view that he belonged to an army was nothing more than his subjective viewpoint – it was only his opinion, with no authority.  He is in fact a subject of Her Majesty protected by Her Majesty’s forces that he attacked and will now be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.  Whatever he thinks, that is what the case is in the real world.

Contrast this pretend “Islamist” soldier with Drummer Lee Rigby.  He belonged to a real army that serves an actual head of state and works to defend a physical nation state, with real boundaries and a rule of law and a Parliament.  This State is a signatory to international conventions on what its army will do and not do in war.  When individuals violate these rules, they are prosecuted by the State they serve.  Drummer Rigby’s real army is a vivid contrast to the imaginary army serving an imaginary nation that his murderer claimed to belong to.

The other extremists are just as subjective

This subjectivity and idolatry of one’s own opinion manifests itself in many other ways.  We see it in the animal-rights extremists, who have set up their own warped, subjective moral code and demand that others adhere to it – a code that justifies abuse of their fellow human beings in the name of their own idea of what rights animals possess.  We see it when traitors such as Edward Snowdon, who took the view that his own nation fell short in his own opinion and therefore acted in breach of the laws of his land to reveal secrets he was under a duty to keep.  A particularly dreadful example of this subjectivity and vainglorious philosophy is of course Julian Assange, who would rather see the West’s enemies benefit and her allies suffer than put aside his own ego.

Well, the common trap that ensnares all these people together is the sanctity to which they grant their own opinions, regardless of common values and shared traditions.  Whether in the name of religion, as with Drummer Rigby’s murderers or in pursuit of some skewed political ideology as with Juian Assange, these people share the same idolatry of their own opinions.

The danger of Liberalism leading to relativism

The danger is that the West, in attempting to remain true to its values of freedom and liberty is falling into the very same trap of accepting someone’s opinion is true simply because it is held – the danger of relativism and multiculturalism.  Tolerance is the sacred value of the West, which stems from its Christian heritage.  Tolerance means not persecuting that with which you disagree, it does not mean the values of society and our culture are neutral.  Replace tolerance with relativism and the moral authority is lost.

For example, how can you argue with the Islamic extremists without any grounding in faith yourself?  It is impossible to reject beliefs as false if you yourself do not believe in truth!  The greatest disrespect to all religions is to say that they are all equally valid, which means in effect they are all nonsense and invalid; rather the truly tolerant outlook is to remain true to our Christian values and to tolerate and speak to other faiths on that basis.  Not all beliefs are equally valid, many beliefs are wrong (as manifested on the Woolwich street)– but that cannot be said without we ourselves holding to a belief in something that is true.

Conservatism is the way to counter extremism

Conservatism is about accepting that our values are handed down to us and that we are shaped by that heritage.  We are not able to reinvent a whole set of universal values ourselves as we can only have a partial view.  Reject what is handed down to us and we lose the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors.

Now that does not mean accepting longstanding injustices, but continually comparing what is with what should be according to those inherited values.  Thus William Wilberforce in light of his Christian faith opposed slavery and Emily Hobhouse fought against Lord Kitchener’s camps for the Boers.  On the other hand, the Islamist extremist, the animal-rights extremist, the followers of Assange have all lost touch with their inherited values and turned their own, partial opinions into idols.  Only conservatism, by recognising civilization is based on shared, tried and tested values, can resist this subjective relativism and act as a force for moderation and piecemeal reform.     

Ring-fence Defence of the Realm

Of all areas of Government spending, defence is the one area that suffered during the years of Labour mismanagement.  Despite fighting two wars at once, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Government continued on a peacetime budget, stretched our armed forces to breaking point and failed to honour the military covenant.  This disastrous approach led to the defeat in Basra and the British public’s dramatic change in its view of foreign intervention – whereas once most of the public saw Britain as a force for good when it intervened militarily abroad, after Blair’s foreign adventures, the public no longer seems to believe that we will intervene for the right reasons or make things better when we do intervene.

Whether this failure by the Exchequer to fund our forces in the frontline had anything to do with the Chancellor’s hostility to a prime minister so keen on exercising the Royal Prerogative to send our troops abroad and as a means of spiting his political rival cannot be proved.  In all other areas of public expenditure Gordon Brown was profligate in his spending of taxpayers’ money and government debt.

With the election of the Coalition Government we have seen drastic defence cuts as part of an overall policy of reducing the large deficit incurred by Labour.  Sadly, as defence saw serious under-funding during the Labour years this means that in effect the defence budget is being hit harder than other budgets, particularly the NHS, which saw lavish spending under Labour.

Of course with our aging population there is a strong case that the NHS should be exempt from spending cuts.  On the other hand, with recent scandals in the NHS it is also clear that spending large amounts of money on the health service does not necessarily ensure a better service for the patient.  Of course, it does expand the number of people working in the public sector, who thereby need government expenditure to remain high to keep them in work.

There is something slightly difficult in trying to justify why departments that did very well out of Labour should receive special treatment when defence is in real terms being hardest hit.  While defence expenditure is not a means of creating or protecting employment, it is very troubling to see those who have risked their lives for us being made redundant.  With regard to the impact of cuts on dockyards such as Portsmouth, while it cannot be argued that money should simply be spent to keep the workforce in work, it can be argued that it is not in the national interest to lose skills that may be necessary in the future.

Meanwhile, the undoubtedly politically-courageous policy of ring-fencing international aid has been zealously adhered to.  It is a courageous policy because it would clearly be very unpopular in a recession to spend taxpayers’ money on poverty abroad rather than at home.

Of course the British public are rightly generous when emergencies such as the recent disaster in the Philippines occur.  Indeed it is right that in such an exigent situation Government money is spent as a means of relieving the suffering of our fellow humans.  That is not the sort of international aid that the British public distrust.  They rather distrust regular payments of their tax money to countries with expanding economies and corrupt governments.  One would have to move in very rarefied circles indeed to believe that such a policy would be popular.

Ring-fencing international aid was therefore no election gimmick.  It is rather a clear foreign policy, which aims to influence by so-called soft power and to head off problems such as anti-Western terrorism by paying money to countries that dislike us.

The British public has less reservation about defence expenditure and the reason is perhaps that
defence of the realm is the first duty of the State.  It is a public good, which cannot be provided by private companies for profit.  It works as a result of an altruistic concept of patriotism. 

It is unlike other public services in that it is not about delivering a service to each of us as individuals, but all of us as a nation.  It cannot therefore benefit from an internal market, whereas other public services can often learn from some aspects of the market.

Defence expenditure is paying for an insurance policy against unforeseen threats.  While the Government no doubt identified important new threats through its strategic defence review, when threats become manifest they have often been unforeseen.  Would we have necessarily forecast the invasion of the Falklands as a threat, when we were more worried about a nuclear Soviet Union?  Would we have foreseen the threat of Islamism?  Judging by the State’s tolerance of Islamic extremists who fomented discontent, hatred and sedition in the 1990s, probably not.

So while it is regrettable to see such a drastic reduction in our professional armed forces (with the Army shrinking by 20,000 men) and a planned reliance on the amateur (in the best sense of the word) element of the TA, it is also worrying.  With Ship-building ceasing at Portsmouth, no aircraft carriers until 2030 and the cutting back of regiments such as the Royal Fusiliers, Britain seems to have embarked on a change in its historic role that has even worried the United States.  This could be as serious a turning point as our withdrawal from the East of the Suez Canal.

The Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, is an honourable politician.  For example, unlike many politicians, he took a principled stand on the issue of same-sex marriage.  One of his greatest skills is his business acumen.  It is important that he remembers though, that the Armed Forces do not operate like a business, but according to older values.  Cost-cutting is necessary across departments, but defence is the department that should be cut least.  Changing Britain’s world role must be about our national interest and values, not just the bottom line.  

     

True religion versus diabolical doctrine

No one of faith, whatever faith that might be, can fail to be deeply appalled by the atrocities committed in the name of religion last week in Nairobi, Kenya and Peshawar, Pakistan.  In Kenya people of different faiths and none, women and children were brutally murdered by thugs claiming to act in the name of Islam.  In Peshawar eighty-five Christians, men, women and children, were martyred as they worshipped God.  Once again, this attack was carried out by people claiming to act in the name of Islam.

Many are now bereaved because of actions of those claiming to be Muslims.  Although this must be a very difficult time for true Muslims it does not mean Muslim leaders should avoid hard and searching questions as to why evil men are carrying out atrocities in the name of God and Islam.  There must be deep soul-searching and critical reflection as to how people can go so astray from true religion and a solution found as to how Islamic teachers can guide their adherents away from what can only be described as evil.

The blogger does not claim to be an expert on Islam, but as someone of Christian faith, sharing the Abrahamic heritage with Muslims, he is concerned that religion should not be hijacked by people who are doing the work of the Devil and claiming it to be the work of God!

Coming from a Christian heritage, where we are taught that true religion is to visit the widows and the fatherless, it is incomprehensible how murdering people, widowing women and turning children to orphans can be carried out in the name of religion.  Surely true religion is showing compassion and love to one’s neighbour whatever their faith.

The point of this blog is not to argue any theological points: As a Christian I have different beliefs, but I am not writing this blog to win any theological arguments.  I simply mean to argue about structure and governance.  Looking at Islam from the outside it seems one thing that is lacking is the guidance of an institution.  It seems that Sunni Islam is not really an institutional religion in the same way as Christianity.  Imams do not appear to be part of a hierarchy and teaching of the Khoran is apparently on individual interpretation.  That lack of structure means fanatics can claim an authority that an institution would deny them.  To put it bluntly it is not clear where authority resides for excommunication or who polices the fanatics.  It is often said that Muslim leaders do not speak out strongly enough to condemn evil carried out in the name of Islam.  This however begs the question: Who has the authority to speak out?

Perhaps the solution for Islam in policing extremism is to build a stronger institutional framework.  If the comparison is made with Christianity, one is only a Christian if he belongs to the family of the church.  The Church being the Body of Christ, to act separately from that, in contradiction to the Church, means one is not a Christian.  True there are schisms within Christianity, but new denominations have maintained an institutional structure in the form of the Church.

Of course it is not impossible for the institution to go astray, but it is made up of a great body of individuals, with a heritage of thought and tradition.  The Church has made its fair share of mistakes through history, but being an institution it has accumulated wisdom and learnt from its mistakes.  This great heritage and the authority residing in the hierarchy of the Church means that it is very difficult to claim some entirely invalid interpretation of Scripture and carry out atrocities in accordance with a very subjective and incorrect view of religion.

Roman Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox all adhere to the Nicene Creed (some accepting it with the Filioque) with its acceptance of the Holy, Catholick and Apostolic Church.  The maverick is therefore generally contained within the agreed values of the institution or simply finds he cannot establish himself and leaves religion to the faithful.

Many may be tempted to blame Islam as a whole in some way for the recent atrocities.  This blog is arguing that such an approach of general blame is wrong, there are many more moderate, mainstream Muslims and they must be given more authority, following the model of a more institutional structure, such as that of the Church. The blogger does not claim any theological understanding of Islam, rather it is argued Christians should put forward in a spirit of sharing something of Christian heritage and government that might in a practical way give true and moderate Muslims more authority and take away any claim to authority from the criminal thugs and murderers who claim perversely that committing the Cardinal Sin of murder leads to salvation.

Of course, with the concept of the Incarnation in Christianity, which is absent from Islam, it is easier to build the foundations of an institutional church, which can derive authority as the continuing Body of Christ on Earth.  That however is a matter of theology and this blog is not looking at such matters.  I cannot claim to know how a stronger institutional framework in Islam can be justified theologically, but I am sure it would help practically in ensuring only adherents to True Religion could claim to act in the name of Islam.

To the agnostic and the atheist, these recent attacks could be seen as religion generally (rather than a fanatical perversion of Islam) being a cause of division and violence.  People of all faiths must make clear that there is a distinction between True Religion and – to use an old fashioned concept – heresy. 

For the secularist, without a clear grasp of Truth being absolutely and objectively true, it is easy to slip into the view that because someone claims to be acting for a faith, they are in fact truly acting in the name of that faith.  Well that is wrong and once we accept objective Truth exists we can say that there is True Religion and False Religion.

Institutional religion is more able to police and control fanaticism.  It has the authority to promote and give legitimacy to valid understanding of True Religion.  To the atheist it is worth pointing out that just because someone acts in the name of faith does not mean they are doing so:  Christ was tortured and crucified at the instigation of religious leaders in the name of religion.  The murderers in Nairobi and Peshawar were not men of faith at all, but wicked nihilists.  These fanatics are the very people whose world view those with true faith must resist with sound doctrine.  Stronger institutional government would aid this goal. 

Immigration and the Chasm between Voters and Politicians

Nothing is more likely to turn the already sceptical British public towards outright hostility to the European Union than immigration from new accession states.  When it becomes clear that they no longer have any control over their borders in terms of immigrants from accession countries Rumania and Bulgaria, there will be real anger – is the political class ready?  If there is one power that indicates sovereignty it must be the right to control your borders.   Of course the power was ceded before this, but now the European Union is made up of countries with very different standards of living.  The incentive of freedom of movement to migrate in large numbers from poor to rich countries is therefore great.  Parliament cannot change the law easily as it no longer has the right to do so under European treaties.

What is even more worrying is that the political class does not really understand how deep a concern immigration is for voters.  When canvassing myself as a parliamentary candidate it was usually one of the first issues raised by residents on the doorstep.  Politicians must remember they are the public’s servants and much as they may be eager to see the nation transformed into a multicultural, confusing and sometimes threatening mixture of different nations, the British public does not want such a transformation to their home.  The polls are clear:  The politicians need to listen.

Before the blogger goes any further, let’s put to rest some insulting misconceptions.  Being concerned about mass immigration does not make someone a racist.  It is possible to have friends from different cultures and races, indeed to find that difference between you and what you have in common with your friend a matter of interest and a building block for friendship.  At the same time it is not a contradiction to have that deep instinctive need to feel at home in your own country where common norms of behaviour and values are silently understood.  This is human nature and when politics goes against the grain of human nature it will always lead to disaster.

For many of those voters I met when campaigning the problem is nothing to do with the individual immigrant; it is the sheer level of immigration and the way that it undermines common cultural understanding.  If immigrants are fewer then they can be better integrated and the differences can be a welcome matter of interest rather than feel a threat.

Often politicians talk of the economic benefits of immigration, by which they mean immigrants taking on jobs while natives remain on benefits - New Labour's false solution to welfare dependency. But Britain is not simply an economic polity of different cultures such as Singapore.  Rather, this nation owes its stability and freedom to a common understanding of its history and the legitimacy of its political institutions.  Small-scale immigration can be accommodated, but a large amount of immigration in a short space of time can threaten this united view of what the nation and its values amount to. 

The blogger himself confesses to feeling a stranger in some parts of London.  This cannot be good.  It is far easier to be a place of welcome to the immigrant, the stranger and the refugee if one’s home country is bound together by a common culture.

The most negative aspect of mass immigration has been the policy response of the political class.  That policy is summed up by the concept of “Multiculturalism” – the doctrine whereby every culture however new to these shores is equally valid with the indigenous culture.  This has made it all the more difficult for immigrant communities to integrate, to become accepted and to better themselves economically.  Multiculturalism was as much a failure to treat the immigrant with respect, as it was to uphold the traditions of the indigenous culture, because it disadvantaged the immigrant in trying to adapt to his new home.  It could only lead to a festering resentment on both sides of the multicultural divide. The problem of Political Islam growing amongst a second-generation community that has not fully integrated is a key example of the problems multiculturalism has led to.

Thankfully Anglo-Saxon tolerance and a determination on the part of many immigrants to be part of the nation has undermined the liberal elite’s aim to keep cultures separate in a new, relativist society.  Most immigrants adapted to and became very much part of the home culture.

There is a strong feeling however that with new waves of immigrants with no historical affection for this country, that the British public is being taken for a ride.  With Commonwealth immigration, different as many were in terms of appearance and tradition, they understood what Britain was and had a shared history through Empire.  The easy movement across the European Union on the other hand means those with a very different history and culture can come here for economic benefit alone.  It is not just about claiming welfare, it is about jobs too, especially in a recession.  It is argued that increased demand for public services from large numbers of immigrants means more jobs.  We all know in the real world it actually means creaking public services that cannot respond to increased demand.  Doctors’ surgeries, schools, housing, are all under far greater pressure than they were.

The political class must show that on the issue of immigration it has stopped sanctimoniously preaching and has started listening.  The question to politicians is simple:  On immigration are they listening to the British voter or the European Union? 

Does the British Public want to abandon its Nation’s Historic World Role? If so blame Tony Blair!

The British public no longer trusts its politicians on foreign wars since being led to war by Prime Minister Tony Blair.  Tony Blair staked the reputation of British politics, British intelligence services and the Special Relationship on his assertion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the British public has not forgotten.  When no weapons were discovered, he was left looking like a charlatan who had taken the country to war on false pretences.  Thousands died, the region was destabilised and the dark forces of Islamic extremism were able to manipulate events for propaganda purposes against the West and to influence the weak-minded.

There are many reasons why David Cameron should fear being regarded as the “Heir to Blair”, but no more so than in his need to gain public support for military action in Syria.    David Cameron is of course a very different man from Tony Blair, to start with he is a member of a different political party.  His reasons for wishing to launch air strikes in Syria are not because of uncertain intelligence about the existence of weapons of mass destruction that are alleged to be an imminent threat to the U.K.  No, his reasons are humanitarian and are because chemical weapons have already been used.

David Cameron is however faced with very similar problems to Tony Blair – a close vote in Parliament, unpopularity of military action in the country and Security Council members opposed to action (with poor human-rights records of their own).  The UK, the US and France are relying on the duty to protect that falls to the UN since the Rwandan genocide and the UK government has legal advice to the effect that to intervene for humanitarian reasons is legal even without a UN resolution.

It is not clear whether Assad’s regime at the highest level was responsible for using chemical weapons while UN weapons inspectors were in the country and near to the site of the attack.  It is of course possible a rogue commander on the ground acted unilaterally.  It has also been alleged that some rebel groups are trying to get hold of chemical weapons.  It is not at all predictable what the fallout would be of Western air strikes and whether retaliation would result in a strike on Israel and then a conflagration across the region (Lebanon is already being pulled into Syria’s War).

What is clear is that the British public has lost its faith in the political class when it comes to going to war.  Politically it is not feasible that David Cameron would act as he can legally in British law and simply launch strikes by use of the Royal Prerogative.  Since Blair held the vote on Iraq, Parliament will now always be consulted.  That may not be enough to reassure the British public. 

You do not have to be an expert in Middle Eastern politics to understand that removing that hideous tyrant Saddam Hussein destabilised Iraq and the region, giving a foothold to Sunni extremists such as Al Qaeda-in-Iraq in rebellion against the new pro-Iranian Shi’ite government.  Many voters will feel we are again heading down the same road.  It is clear even to the most casual observer that the removal of secular military tyrants in the Middle East does not mean an alternative of liberally-democratic parties taking power, rather political Islam is moving in, whether in Egypt or Tunisia. In Syria minorities, including Christians, depend upon the Ba’athist regime to protect them from Islamism.

Of course, there is a case to be made that the purpose of military action is to send a message that the use of chemical weapons is a moral Rubicon that should not be crossed.  The Government is proposing joining air-strikes as a punitive response to the chemical attack, not as the beginning of a process towards regime change. The British public though will be very hard to convince.  If air strikes lead to a worsening of the situation and a chain reaction, ending in the replacement of Bashar al-Assad’s regime with an Islamist government with control of chemical weapons, then the British public will not forgive the political class and the level of distance between the nation’s politicians and the nation will become even more of a chasm.

Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt

In this blog I am not going to be so presumptuous as to suggest solutions to the Gordian Knot of Egypt’s current political troubles.  Neither am I going to claim any in-depth knowledge about Egyptian politics.  All I intend to do is draw some general conclusions from looking at Egypt through the perspective of our own political system and find lessons that we can learn.

It is very striking that a key difference between our stable democracy and Egypt’s current turmoil, is longstanding institutions.  It is not democracy alone that leads to our stability, but the fact that our democracy has developed through institutions that have not been overturned.  Democracy, our history must teach us, is a gradual process and cannot be introduced overnight and expected to endure.

It seems that so much of our involvement in the Middle East has gone wrong because we have made the mistake of believing democracy can be achieved by overturning an existing system and replacing it with a new, democratic, Western society.

Perhaps the reason we act in this ideological and revolutionary way in our Middle Eastern and Asian interventions is that part of the United States’ understanding of itself is that it gained its freedom through a revolution.  I am going to be so bold as to say that is wrong.  I think that the United States was able to set up a political system based on freedom and stability because it emerged from an existing system, which to be blunt was our system.  The founding fathers were able to look to the common law developed for centuries, developed by Henry II and the Magna Carta signed by King John.  They also looked at an existing representative system across the ocean, to which they had paid for through taxation as subjects, although not being represented themselves.  The United States, I contend, did not achieve its nationhood through a revolution, it was rather through a war of independence to allow it to enjoy the same existing freedoms and rule of law as the home country.  It carried on its journey based on its Anglo-Saxon heritage, a millennium of political evolution.

Unfortunately, this belief that democracy can be achieved by revolutionary war has informed the foreign policy of the most powerful Western power.  Our intervention in Iraq was based on this mistaken premise and our hopes for Egypt when we turned against our erstwhile ally President Mubarak were likewise based on this revolutionary premise.

Unfortunately for Egypt its institutions are not of longstanding and the vacuum is filled either by the army or religious extremists.  It is a Hobson’s choice, but I am not going so far as to argue that the decadent King Farouk and the 150 years old Muhammad Ali dynasty was an admirable institution.  Rather, as disliking the extravagances of the Eighteenth Century French court does not imply support for Robespierre, so having strong reservations about King Farouk does not mean one favours the military coup d’etat of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Socialists. 

Once institutions are dissolved however, then there is little to restrain abuse of power or nurture progress.  Just as the French Revolution ended in the Terror, so the military revolution led to Nasser’s brutal oppression of the Muslim Brotherhood. Two examples of how power is inevitably abused when the rule of law and institutions have been cast aside.

The current situation in Egypt, with military government on the one hand and revolutionary religious zealots on the other is I believe a result of there being no institutions and tradition to contain power and curtail abuses.  No system is perfect, but gradualist reform and piecemeal change leads to more stable government than revolutionary overthrow.

The ousted government was elected, but it was also revolutionary.  The President was moving to claim absolutist powers and he represented radical and left wing religion, rather than conservative and institutional religion.

It is worth commenting that the Muslim Brotherhood, with its more radical approach to Islam should not be described as a conservative force.  Rather Political Islam is about a radical return to the original teachings and a rejection of the accumulated wisdom of generations of teachers.  Sayyid Qutb, one of the first leaders of the Brotherhood (imprisoned and executed under Colonel Nasser’s regime) looked to a radical form of Islam that returned to original teaching; this political Islam is about revolution, not a conservation of centuries of teaching.  It is therefore radical and extreme.

Institutional religion inevitably contains and restrains its more zealous adherents and counteracts the individual interpretation with an accumulation of wisdom and teaching.  Without the institution, religion can become radical. 

Looking then at our own system again, we can be grateful for our political stability and freedom, but the chaos of Egypt teaches us why our democracy is stable.  It is democracy within ancient but evolving institutions.  It is democracy in the context of rule of law – a rule of law based on precedent and the accumulation of case law.  Our religion is manifested in an established church that as an institution contains the radical, while, as a Protestant church, giving room to individual interpretation.

Thus we must value that which underpins our democracy and makes it stable and secure – precedent-based common law, an ancient representative Parliament, a constitutional monarchy and an established church.