Evilracistflaggate

It has been brought to my attention that the all powerful, many tentacled Doom Hydra of the Left has - rather than claiming complete eternal power - decided to make kids toys politically correct

Why the hive-minded hordes of left-wing attack drones (of which hordes I am a proud member in good standing) have decided to do this, rather than seizing the levers of power and sending our enemies to the guillotine is not made clear; but I am sure our leaders know what they are doing.  The battle for the future starts now, and it seems the battlefield will be the appearance of little toy cars.

Obviously, our opponents will not expect this and will swiftly be outflanked by this deft thrust, a daring assault comparable to Lee's march to Gettysburg.  And we all know how that ended.

An appropriate comparison, for I am thinking about what can only be called Evilracistflaggate, the huge fuss that has blown up around the use of the 'Confederate' flag, following the horrid events in South Carolina.  'Confederate' in inverted commas used because flag we commonly think of as the Confederate flag - the Starry Cross - was never the flag of the Confederacy.  It was used by General Lee's Army of North Virginia, but the design most of us recognise as the 'confederate flag' is just a detail from the second and third flags adopted by the Confederacy. The second one had a big white bit as well as the 'starry cross' and the third one had a red stripe.

(One wonders if things might have gone better for the Confederates if they had spent less time worrying about the best bit of cloth to die under, and more about winning wars.  Probably not.)

The Starry Cross, it seems, has suddenly become as socially unacceptable as anti-Semitism and owning people.  Totally reliable and unbiased sites like kotaku.com assure us that America is losing its mind in a rush to remove the flag from absolutely everything, ever, even things it might actually be appropriately displayed on:

Today, Apple decided to start yanking games that use the Confederate flag in any way (via TouchArcade). For example, you can now no longer buy the strategy iOS games Civil War: 1862, Civil War: 1863, Civil War: 1864, and Civil War: Gettysburg, which, as you might guess, use the Confederate flag because they’re video games about the Civil War.

Meanwhile. it seems, the evil liberals and PC leftists (is there any other kind?) are busy trying to take toys from children and re-write pop culture history by deleting the Starry Cross from General Lee - no, not the real general Lee, things haven't got that bad yet - but the car in The Dukes of Hazard:

Warner Bros, which owns the licensing rights to the 80s series, announced Wednesday it will no longer manufacture miniature replicas of the souped-up 1969 Dodge Charger, which featured a giant Confederate battle flag painted on the roof. ‘Warner Bros. 

Consumer Products has one licensee producing die-cast replicas and vehicle model kits featuring the General Lee with the confederate flag on its roof — as it was seen in the TV series,’ the company told Vulture. ‘We have elected to cease the licensing of these product categories.’

The snag here is that neither Apple nor Warner Bros are actually far left revolutionary communist-gay rights-environmentalist-PC-feminNAZI collectives that the howling madpots of the right seem to think.

They ARE capitalist enterprises intent on making a profit. If they decide to drop or change a product, its down to their desire to protect their brand and maximise their profits. The forces driving these decisions are profit related, and nothing to do with 'the left' or some supposed politically correct agenda. If you want to blame anything, blame market forces, which are all about shifting product and profit. I guess there is no profit to be made from sanity and accuracy.

Which tells you everything you need to know about capitalism.

(For what it is worth, I'd agree the Apple decision to remove the Confederate flag from civil war computer games IF it would have been correct to show it there (i.e. for Lee's army) is barmy. But I think it often gets used inaccurately, as a symbol many of us associate with the Confederacy.  I doubt many people would recognise the first flag of the Confederacy, the historical 'Stars and Bars' and the other two would only be recognisable because they contain the 'Starry Cross' as a element.  So changing it might actually just be making things a bit more accurate and correcting the assumption that the 'Starry Cross' was the flag of the Confederacy. Surely we're all in favour of historical accuracy?)

And it seems that the vile liberal-communists aren't just intent on banning cars and pixels, but films a well.  Truly, first they came for the General Lee, then they came for Scarlett and Rhett:

When it comes to the Left, it is always only a matter of time before they show their fascist colors. We’re seeing it all over the place in a media frenzy that began with a cause I agree with (removing Confederate Flags from state capitols) into what is now a full-blown mob waging a bullying witch hunt to completely memory-hole the flag. 

Wednesday, the thing that you believe could never happen, did happen: a New York film critic has called for the banning of The Greatest Movie Ever Made. 

In just three days, the left’s mob mentality took us from removing the Rebel Flag from a state capitol to banning “Gone with the Wind.”

Only, of course, it is not as simple as Breitbart would like to make out.

The critic in question, Lou Lumenick, is not actually calling for Gone With The Wind to be banned. He is simply wondering if audiences should pay more attention to the racism and slavery that underpins the movie, rather than venerating it as a quaint and charming piece of romantic melodrama.

Of course, the howling hate mob of the right - the true enemies of rationality, sanity and reason - deliberately misrepresent this, because truth is poison to them.  The tragedy of South Carolina has prompted some people to wake up to the hatefulness of some of the things too often taken for granted.  That's progress.  The right doesn't like progress and stirs up a vicious cauldron of lies about it, blaming everything on this cabal of leftist witches and demons; witches and demons who seem to be all-powerful, but mysteriously interested only in using this power to achieve petty ends.  No flags on cars - that'll teach the Right!

A part of me wonders if this is a deliberate ploy to move the debate away from where it really should be - the easy availability of guns - onto something (anything) else.  Because flags, sanity and honesty are far less important to the right than every racist lunatic being able to get his hands on a firearm.

That 70s show

In the 1970s, contrary to popular belief, trade unions saved Britain. Yeah, I know, you've been told about the 'Winter of Discontent' when 'Councils couldn't bury their dead', plans were being made for mass burials at sea, and rats the size of cats were running happily across the rubbish mountains building up in every city square.

What's usually excluded from this analysis is what happened before. Inflation was running at 26.9% in 1975. It was eventually brought under control through a series of negotiated sub-inflation pay deals, with unions accepting effective pay cuts over several years to bring the crisis to an end. The Winter of Discontent came about whern the government tried to bully the unions into accepting 5% - effectively continuing to cut wages when the crisis was over. Obduracy by the government, not the unions, brought about the crisis.

George Osbourne and David Cameron should be more sensitive to history before crowing about the protests and strikes being a 'damp squib'. By imposing a 1% pay ceiling on long sufferring public servants, they may be repeating the mistakes of the Callaghan government. The paralells are intruiging - a minority government propped up by the Liberals, the Scots getting restive, an international depression, turmoil in the Middle East jeopardising oil supply, a 'socialist' in the White House ...

On the polical utility of debt and deficit

Debt and austerity seem to be the flavour of the month, at least among those getting to giving the cuts, thought it remains to be seen how long the enthusiasm will last among those receiving them.

i've just finished reading Martin Walker's biography of Bill Clinton, The President We Deserve. Early on, Walker notes that the fiscally constrained nature of the Clinton presidency was due to a deliberate - and breathtakingly cynical - strategy originating in the 1980s, when Reagan and his supply side wreckers went on their spree.

their economic decisions weren't driven by ‘positive’ ideological vision, that is a genuine – but deluded – conviction that supply side economics worked. Foisting a massive peace time debt on the public was a cynical, ‘negative’ ploy to stymie any plans the Democrats had:

Clinton came to office in 1993 to be caught by two deep fiscal traps, which made it almost impossible to finance the reform measures on which he had campaigned. The first, and underlying cause of his difficulties, had been set twelve years earlier, in the first year of the Reagan administration. Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, set out deliberately to destroy the welfare state by plunging the budget into fiscal crisis. The strategy was for the White House to cut taxes, and if the Democratic Congress would not then cut spending, the result would be a mounting deficit that would in the long run constrain any more growth in public spending and eventually force spending cuts. Stockman was extraordinarily frank about this: “The success of the Reagan revolution depended upon the willingness of the politicians to turn against their own handiwork – the bloated budget of the American welfare state. Why would they have to do this? because they had to! In the final analysis, I had made fiscal necessity the mother of political invention.

“It worked. In 1980, when Reagan was elected, the national debt was just over $1000 billion. Twelve years later, when Clinton entered the White House, it had ballooned to over $4000 billion, a debt on which interest had to be paid. In Clinton’s 1996 budget, $257 billion was allocated for interest, rather more than the entire U.S. defence budget of $247 billion for the year. The debt burden and the annual deficit had become precisely the fiscal restraint Stockman had planned, a straitjacket into which Clinton’s reform ambitions had to fit. (1)

Sorry if I’m teaching y’all to suck eggs here, but this was news to me. Before, I’d thought that the Reagan administration were just financial imbeciles who genuinely believed that cutting taxes while spunking money on Tanks In Space would somehow lead to everyone becoming billionaires. I didn’t realize it was actually a brilliant act of political castration, effectively neutering any future government’s reform agenda and forcing every president thereafter to become an administration, scraping up money to service Reagan’s debt, rather than actually using the power of the state to actually help people.

Compared to this sort of long sighted cunning, the current moves to hack up the institutions of social democracy in the name of austerity, seem almost naive.

1 - The President We Deserve, by Martin Walker. Published by Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1996.

When I see a slave, I call it a slave ...

But in Texas, it seems that all this talk of slaves and slave rades and slavery and so on has been judged a bit too strong for school children.

Tempers are flaring in Texas over controversial proposed changes to the US state's public school curriculum.

The changes, put forward by the Board of Education's conservative members, include referring to the slave trade as the "Atlantic triangular trade".

Critics say the changes are ideological and distort history, but proponents argue they are correcting a long-standing liberal bias in education.

The conservatives are expected to prevail in Friday's final vote. (1)

"Atlantic triangular trade" - is this some weird new racial epithet? Can you refer to people of colour as 'triangles' at dinner parties without identifying yourself as an execrable racist? Or is it more street than that. Does it contrast with 'square' white people? Are Asians hexagonal?

Inverted political correctness is the new tool of the conservatives.

And yes, I'm quite away of the 'logic' behind the term 'triangular.' The ships went from Britain to Africa and then to America and then back to London. But that ships sailed these routes is not at all remarkable. Ships have always sailed in all sorts of directions and usually end up where they started. That the ships set out seeking slaves, transported slaves, and then carried the commodities produced by slaves back to Europe was.

Which is why we called it the slave trade.

1 - "Texas schoolbook fight heats up," unattributed article. Published by the BBC, 19th of May, 2010. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8693397.stm)

Hari versus Roberts - the role of historians

Johan Hari investigates the fascist, racist and imperialist delusions of historian Andrew Roberts (1).

I find decadent historians quite fascinating. By decadent, I mean the sort of people who write glibly (and I'm holding up my own hand wright now) about stuff that they have little or no experience or direct knowledge of, and deliberately take outrageous positions to make themselves a name.

Roberts, according to Hari, is an obnoxious little cock, much given to being seen at fashionable events and generally living it up, on the back of his reputation as a iconoclastic historian.

Nothing, of course, could be less iconoclastic than a British historian taking a pro-Empire stance. They've been doing it for centuries and it's only recently that a few of them have had the courage to admit, that, golly, it really was a rather nasty thing, and more about money and power than taking up the white man's burden, and didn't we make a nasty bloody mess of it all?

A true iconoclast would be pushing the wet liberal consensus further back, and actually putting those unpleasant truths firmly where they belong - in the mainstream, confronting the public with not only the racism and bigotry of their forebears, but the ugly truth about how that bigotry has run, in an unbroken thread, through the centuries to the present day. How the feudal system has been extended to the point that we can all imagine ourselfs petty Earls, living a fine life on the sweat of our yellow skinned serfs, and a generous helping of credit.

A historian who doesn't voice a challenge to orthodoxy is basically a cheerleader. Less subtle oligarchs such as Stalin and Mao had plenty of these. But someone like Roberts is little different from one of Stalin's stodges, re-writing history on command to reflect the changes in the leader's mood. His history is the narrative desired by the stong and powerful.

So Roberts is really a reactionary. He provides a reassuring voice to the small minded chauvanists of the British establishment that they're the heirs of a great nation. Because unless you can say that your past is a glorious thing to be respected, you can't really live in a present buit on that past, without being a hypocrite on a monstrous scale. And the great and good of the British establishment abhor hypocrisy, or at least the public or privately acknowledged manifestation of it.

It's revolting to read about the blithe manner in which he writes off atrocities such as the Amritsar massacre as having been justified, in the long run by terrifying the population into submission.

But there's the heart of the problem - Roberts doesn't have the foggiest idea about what he's writing about. You can talk glibly about how it was a good thing, overall, that a mentally incompetent Blimp slaughter 379 peaceful demonstrators, as long as you say it quickly enough and don't stop for a moment to think about the true import of your words, or the reality of the events they describe.

Roberts's function isn't to provide new insight or knowledge, but an intellectual framework, through which both the past and the future can be understood in terms acceptable to the oligarchy of reactionaries and capitalists who think the Empire was a pretty fine thing, as it put them where they are today, and would like to mantain their privileged position.

Jackson's smug effrontry provides an intellectual - though not moral - justification for new imperialist atrocites. Every murder, rape or simple blunder in Iraq or Afghanistan can be justified - "well, if we didn't rape that girl, we'd have had to kill more further down the line." Essentially, Roberts is playing the role of a medieval priest, selling intellectual indulgences for the crimes of the past and the present, and the crimes to be committed in the future. Yes, we might be doing horrible things, but it is all for the best in the long run, ignore the screaming and the blood.

It's a sick mentality esposued by a vacuous self-promoter, blessed with a bit of flair, but who is only distingushed from David Irving by the fact that he actually carries a professional qualification as a historian (2).

1 - "The dark side of Andrew Roberts," by Johan Hari, published in The Independent, 31st of July, 2009. (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-dark-side-of-andrew-roberts-1765229.html)
2 - This post was originally put up under a different title, rather insulting to Mr Roberts. I changed it because its vituperative nature would have distracted from what developed - unintentiaonally - into a rather lengthy musing on the role of historians. So it gets a nice, bland title.

Respect is due: Harry Patch, 1898-2009

How many people live in three centuries?

Harry Patch, aged 111, and Britain's oldest World War One soldier, died today (1).

Unlike a lot of people, Patch didn't want to fight. He didn't enlist, but was conscripted, in 1917:

Harry didn't want to join up and waited until military conscription was enforced before enrolling.

"I didn't want to go and fight anyone, but it was a case of having to.

"When it came, army life didn't appeal to me at all and when I found out how rough and tumble it could be, I liked it even less.

"I mean, why should I go out and kill somebody I never knew and for what reason? I wasn't at all patriotic. I went and did what was asked of me and no more." (2)

An old man has died. Let's not get dewy-eyed about the fact he was a war veteran. He didn't want to be. He fought - reluctantantly - in a war that was, even by the standards of war, particularly stupid, unnecessary and bloody. I do not think we should dishonour the dead with faux sentimentality over their 'sacrifice' as they didn't sacrifice themselves for anything worthwhile - two german monarchs squaring off against each other, two semi-democratic empires trying to decide - in the bloodiest way possible - which got to be the biggest and most powerful of all. And both lost.

I'd say Patch's achievement was putting the horrible things he saw behind him. So respect to him for living a humble but worthwhile life, after damn well near having it torn away from him by the psychopathic imbeciles who drove their countries into World War One.

1 - "Harry Patch, Britain's last surviving soldier of the Great War, dies at 111," by Tracey McVeigh and Mark Townsend, published in The Guardian, 26th of July, 2009. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/26/world-war-one-veteran-harry-patch-dies-aged-111)
2 - "In Profile: Harry Patch," unattributed BBC article, published 25th of July, 2009. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/somerset/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8168000/8168179.stm)

ANZAC day

When I was groweing up back in Scotland, I recall being set a school assignment where we had to write a ballad on a topic of our choice. Most of the other students wrote about a birthday part or Christmas, but, being me, I wrote about the Gallipoli landings.

I don't think I actually knew what ANZAC stood for, or why they were fighting in Turkey. For historical detail, I relied on a big compendium called 'The World's Greatest Mistakes,' though I would emphasize that the Churchill quote in the first stanza is nearly authentic - he really did plot how to "slit the Turk's soft underbelly."

Most of the ballad is lost to the world. I can remember three verses of about a dozen. The whole botched invasion was recounted from beginning to end, and I even managed to include death tolls in the final stanza.

Here's what I remember:

On the 25th of April it happened,
Churchill gave out the command:
"Slit the Turk's soft underbelly,
And sweep them from the sand!

"We must get through to Russia!
We'll take the Black Sea way.
The Germans won't expect it,
And we'll free France in a day."

Of the subsequent verses, I can only remember this:

So the ANZAC boys dug trenches,
With holes the beach was filled,
And in these pits they cowered,
And waited to be killed.

A 'traditional enemy' and proud of it!

I'm delighted to learn that my little blog has been judged a 'traditional enemy' by no lesser person that David Irving, who obviously found my comments on his mental health unhelpful (1).

The way Irving tells it

Johann Hari's article gets under a lot of skins - traditional enemies hint that Mr Irving invented the famous quote from Hitler's doctor's diary. (2)

The links provided are to a short notification about the Hari profile, by Daniel Finkelstein, and to my response to it, posted here back in January. Finkelstein's piece is just a recommendation to read the Hari's article. Obviously, I must be the scurrilous dropper of hints Irving refers to.

(Actually Mr Irving, you are wrong, s youso ofte are. I don't hint that you invented Dr Giesing's diary entry. I have no evidence to suggest that such a fabrication took place. I'm willing to accept your claim as to its contents until contrary evidence emerges. Frankly, I thin it is too ludicrous for you - even you - to have invented it.)

A 'traditional enemy.' To be thus described, by a Holocaust denier with a shaky grasp on the real world, is praise indeed.

1 - As described previously on lefthandpalm: http://lefthandpalm.blogspot.com/2009/01/david-irving-absolutely-stark-staring.html
2 - From David Irving's Focal Point website, an index of miscellaneous items, listing such essential things as higgh resolution pictures of Mr Irving going about his business. The references to Finkelstein and lefthandpalm are included in a list detailig "David Irving in person': http://fpp.co.uk/Irving/index.html. Viewed on 12th of April, 2009

Truth is the first casualty ...

The other day, The Daily Mail ran a story about how the British government was allegedly insulting World War Two veterans by refusing to contribute to their appeal to raise funds to attend the 65th commemorations of D-Day.

Shrilled the Mail:

The Ministry of Defence has rejected requests for financial aid to survivors and says there will be no further official commemoration of D-Day until its centenary - when all those involved will be dead.

To compound the farce, the American and Canadian governments are sending top-level delegations to mark the momentous date.

Even the Germans will join the commemorations and remember the fallen on both sides.

Today, the Mail launches a campaign to honour and support the 500 remaining veterans' cause. (1)

The indignation was rather phoney, however. The supposed disrespect was a long held policy, of both Labour and Tory governments, that only set anniversary dates were commemorated - the last one being the 60th anniversary in 2004. Which, you'll recall, was under a Labour government.

The Mail does admit this, far down the article and after much of the huffing and puffing and "Hell in a handcart" bollocks typical of the rag:

This is on the bureaucratic grounds that the MoD supports official events only for 25th, 50th, 60th and 100th anniversaries. (2)

So, manufactured indigantion, really. This is not a dastardly plot by New Labour to disprespect our war heroes. For all the Mail's talk of giving them one last officially sanctioned hurrah, that was what the 60th aanniversay commemorations in 2004 were all about. But there was political capital to be gained by the fiercely natonalistic Mail, and the Mail is a paper that has never let something as trifling as the truth stand in the way of a chance to spew rightwing propoganda.

Then today, another twist, to the Mail's furth discredit. The British government - demonstrating the lack of spine to which we have become accustomed - has decided to cave in and, after all the commemorations will receive lottery funding and the will be attended my government figures - even though the veterans don't want them there (3).

What was really interesting, however, was the revelation that the money is not needed - the cash needed to send the 500 British veterans to the ceremony has already been raised. How so? Through a campaign launched by The Independent:

Survivors of D-Day reacted angrily yesterday to what they claimed was a belated attempt to politicise and hijack a nine-month campaign to take British veterans to mark the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landings.

A public appeal for funds to take 500 ex-service personnel to the commemorations in France, launched in The Independent on 6 June last year, has been assured of success for weeks. The Government had been criticised for not paying the travel costs, and for not planning to send Gordon Brown to the event – but yesterday it said there would be "appropriate British attendance" and that it would "provide support so veterans can participate".

So the 'patriotic' Daily Mail is in fact just seizing the Independent's coat tails, making a fuss about an issue that has already been resolved. Their interest in the issue is political, without any sincerity. Meanwhile, the Indie, the organ of the supposedly unpatriotic and revisionist left, has been quietly working for months to get the old soldiers over to France.

Laughable. God, I hate the Daily Mail.

1 - 'Obama set to shame Brown by attending D-Day anniversary... as Labour refuses to pay for veterans' return to Normandy,' by Matthew Hinckley, Ryan Kisiel and Peter Allen, published in The Daily Mail, 19th of March, 2009. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1163083/Obama-set-shame-Brown-attending-D-Day-anniversary.html)
2 - ibid.
3 - ' We'll fight Brown on the beaches,' by John Lichfield, published in The Independent, 21st of March, 2009. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/well-fight-brown-on-the-beaches-1650589.html)
4 - ibid.

Hoover / Brown

Reading Geoffrey Perrett's America in the 1920s, one of the similarities that caught my attention was the plight of the luckless Herbert Hoover and that of the equally ill-starred Gordon Brown.

Here is Perrett's description of Hoover accepting the Republican nomination in 1928:

... [Hoover] reviewed the country's achievements since 1920: a 45 per cent increase in national income, while population rose by 8 per cent; 2.3 million new families, and 3.5 million new houses; a 66 per cent rise in high school enrollment, a 75 per cent rise in in college enrollemnt. After spraying his audience with more figures than they could expect to comprehend as they sat sweating under a broiling sun, he summarized what the figures meant; "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but, given the change to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty shall be banished from this nation." (1)

Change the proper nouns, and it could be Brown accepting the leadership of the Labour Party in 2007. It is fair to note that both men demonstrated a genuine desire to ease suffering and reduce poverty. Brown can - justly - claim to have done some good things as chancellor to improve the lot of people at the bottom of the heap in Britain.

The personal similarities between the two men are striking. Both are decent - by their lights, at any rate - and hard working, with first rate minds:

Hoover was described by Henry Stimson as being "capable of more prolonged and intense intellectual effort" than any president he knew, and Stimson served under every president from Teddy Rooseveldt to Harry Truman. (2)

Both Hoover and Brown are numbers men, fixated with measuring and quantifying things. This - coupled with a minimal endowment of charisma - makes them seem technocratic and aloof. Again, from Perrett:

Hoover's entire campaign was to consist of seven such speeches. He delivered them head bent, as if in rapt contemplation of his navel, left hand in left trouser pocket, nervously jiggling his keys, right shoulder working up and down. His eyes never left the page as he read in his midwestern monotone a thousand words sweated out over many hours by Hoover alone. They invariably sounded more like official reports than emotional perorations. (3)

Brown, of course, isn't quite as wooden or dry, because the spin doctors got to him. You can sense, however, that this is the style he would naturally adopt, if the image men would leave him alone to do it the way he wanted. And Brown's gauchness and social awkwardness is - to me - quite endearing. Their statistical obssession and poor presentation, however, makes makes it difficult for the electorate to warm to them. Post Thatcher, we're too accustomed to spin and image manipulation. We get uncomfortable with anything more than illusion.

Both had the ill-luck to be at the helm when the economy foundered. Neither man was responsible for what happened, but both were/are held to be culpable by their electorate. Perhaps more versatile performers would have managed to pass the blame to others, but neither Brown of Hoover would have been able to do so, even if they had been tempramentally capable of pasing the buck. Both set themselves up by claiming they were responsible for the good times that preceded the distasters of 1928 and 2008:

The Republicans ... had taken all the credit for the prosperity of the Twenties. They had thereby saddled themsleves with all the blame for the Depression when it came. (4)

Again, the parallels with Brown are obvious. Further, when the American economy collapsed int he late 20s, Hoover elected to identify himself with the economic crisis, which lead to his undoing:

Hoover assumed complete responsibility for overcoming the Depression. Alas, there was no solution to it. The banks were shakey, business paralyzed, farmers impoverished, charities inadequate, unions demoralized, cities and states broke, intellectuals misled, and all were looking to the Federal government ... (5)

Brown, whether he wants it or not, is the man who will be expected to sort out the mess of the British economy, or face the consequences. He was, after all, the man who was supposed to be in control of it, for years, before he became Prime Minister.

He will fail, like Hoover failed. The likelihood is that this will turn into a new Depression, moping around the globe for a decade, immune to any attempt to lift it. Freidman has been abandoned in favour of Keynes but it will probably prove to be a Phyrric victory. The billions and trillions of dollars and pounds and yen are thrown at the problem will fail to resolve it, just as in the 20s and 30s:

... no twitching of the reins of power could ever conquer the Depression, and for one overriding reason: to resote demmand on the scale required by government action would have first destroyed money and then destroyed the government. It would have had to borrow at least $20 billion a year for several years, at a time when the entire nation's income had fallen t $39 billion a year. Unable to borrow so much from so little, it would have had to run the printing presses until the money turned out was worth less than the paper used. (6)

None-the-less, Hoover's insistence on identifying himself with the the solution to the Depression, his failure to realise this goal, and his lack of charisma doomed him:

The animus that Hoover's name can not be exaggerated. So much more had been expected of him than almost anyone ever elected to the presidency, and the country had never fallen so low. He was derided with a hatred that went beyond hate. (7)

The Republicans were routed in 1932. It is likely the same fate will befall the British Labour party in 2010, and Brown will suffer a similar - and probably just as unfair - corrosion of reputation.

And the unseating of Hoover provides a model for the unseating of Brown. In the 1932,

Roosevelt's campaign consisted mainly of blaming Hoover for the Depression ... Roosevelt presented himself as the safe, solid, middle of the road amateur in politics who would take good care of the taxpayer's money and make sure bureaucracy was kept in check. (8)

Once more, if you change the names, it could be Cameron versus Brown in 2010, or Key versus Clark in 2008.

So much for Brown and Hoover. The next - and more interesting - question is whether the new kids on the block - Obama, Key, very probably David Cameron - have come in too soon? Hoover wrestled with the Depression for almost four years, and thus became associated with it. The New Great Depression is still in its early days, and any bright and bushy-eyed "safe, solid, middle of the road amateur in politics" runs a real risk of being too closely identified with its opening scenes, not the Grand Guignol of the main act. Will Obama, Key and Cameron be more Hoovers, mauled by a Depression they are incapable of lifting?

1 - From America in the 1920s, by Geoffrey Perrett, published by Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982, pages 311-2.
2 - ibid, page 490.
3 - ibid, page 312.
4 - ibid, page 483.
5 - ibid, page 490.
6 - ibid, page 490. THe quotation actually refers to Roosevelt's adminstration, from 1933 onwards. The impracticality of a Keynesian solution was as real for Hoover as it was for Roosevelt, however.
7 - ibid, page 484.
8 - ibid, page 484.

Immigration: then, there, here, now, nothing much changes

The book I am currently reading is America in the Twenties by Geoffrey Perrett (1). I bought it last year at the Palmerston North library book sale, along with a pile of other tiltes. This was before the Credit Crunch. As the world banking system fell apart in the final months of 2008, I was decided to look back on the Great Depression of the 20s and 30s, so I could knowledgeably hold forth on the similarities and differences between then and now, even if becoming wise after the even is rather futile.

So far, what has struck me most is not the economic culture, but the social side of the twenties. Perrett suggests, in his introduction, that the twenties seem familiar to us because they are, essentially, the first decade of the Twentieth century (the book was written in 1982) and the years up to 1918 had been a long - and very literal , given the Great War and the 1918 influenza epidemic - death rattle for the Nineteenth century.

The USA, after the war, was a nation absorbing a million immigrants a year, many of which were looked on as alien and dangerous by the 'native born' Americans - that is to say, of course, the White, Anglo-Saxons. These immigrants were racially different, being central Europeans and Slavs, practiced different religions and held to sinister political beliefs. This generated xenophobia and hostility in the host communitiy - the twenties saw the re-birth of the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership peaked at 4 million in the first half of the decade. It also resulted in a clannish, isolationist attitude in the immigrant communities, which in turn fed the suspicions of the 'native' population. Perret is worth quoting at length here:

Soem immigrant leaders began to resist, telling the Americanizers what they could do with their unsolicited and parochial opinions. There were immigrant communities that became more, not less, chauvanistic. They boldly flaunted their native costumes, food, dress and speech. The Americanization drive at this juncture turned ugly. It merged with the deportations delirium and the Red Scare.

The hatred of all things foreign reached a pitch of viciousness hard at this distance to credit. But in the coalfields of "Egypt" [the coal mining area of Southern Illinois, Missouri and Kentucky], on the night of August 5, 1920, and all the next day, "hundreds of people laden with clothing and household goods filled the roads leading out of West Frankfort ... Back in town their homes were burning. Mobs bent on driving out every foreigner surged through the streets ... The Italian population was the chief objective." Italians were dragged from their homes, beaten with fists and clubs, stoned and kicked, while their homes were set on fire. The mob raged for three days. Two children were missing and were later found dead. A rumour went around that the Italians had kidnapped them for some sinister, foreign purpose. (2)

Several things are striking about this. First of all,fast forward a few years and transpose the action to Germany and substitute Jews for Italians, and you have Kristalnacht. And, as an aside isn't it startling to see the old anti-Semetic myths about children being sacrificed in hideous rituals being repeated, aimed at Italians, in the 1920s? Viciousness and xenophobia are everywhere. The British novellist, William Golding, remarked:

I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country. It could happen here ... these elements, some horrible, some merely funny, but all significant ... they are a failure of human sympathy, ignorance of facts, the objectivizing of our own inadequacies to make a scapegoat. (3)

America in the 1920s, like Britain in the 1920s and every other country in the 1920s, wasn't very different from Germany in the 1920s. Perhaps we were a little luckier than the Germans, in that we hadn't the misery of a humiliating defeat to add to the dislocation and unemployment that defined the decade, and that no demagogue arose to direct the disatisfaction and resentment. But, as Golding said, it could easily have been different.

The other point is somewhat more hopeful. Perrett remarks that the xenophobia "reached a pitch of viciousness hard at this distance to credit." Well, perhaps in the 1980s, but after the 11th of September, 2001, it isn't hard to see other similarities, particularly in Britain, where Muslim enclaves and non-integration are an increasing obssession. Perhaps things will get worse, but perhaps the American example offers some grounds for hope.

In the 1920s, the Italian immigrants were hated and feared, representatives of an alien culture, a threat to stability, American values and (perhaps most importantly) American jobs. Now Italians are simply another distinctive sub-culture in the USA, having given their new home pizza, Joe DiMaggio, Rudi Gulliani and Martin Scorcese. The paranoia of the 1920s is forgotten and Perrett is right when he says it is hard to imagine it being levelled against Italians, only a few decades ago. It was, however, virulent and real. Perrett describes it thus:

There was, for example, another rumour that went back to the Know Nothings of the 1850s, according to which the the birth of a Catholic baby was celebrated by burying a gun and fifty rounds of ammunition beneath the local Catholic Church. When the time was ripe and all the little Catholics had grown up and learned to shoot straight, the guns would be dug up. Catholic revolutionaries would seize power and give the United States up to the Pope.

Robert Coughlan, a Catholic teenager growning up in Kokomo, Indiana, took an interest in the Klan propoganda circulating around town. "The Borgias were an endless mine of material, and their exploits came to be as familiar to readers of the Klan press as the lives of soap opera characters are to modern housewives. Constant readers must have begun to think of them as the Typical Catholic Family of the Renaissance." Half of Kokomo seemed convinced that at any moment the Pope would arrive to claim the United States. And then it happened. Word suddenly spread that "the Pope was finally pulling into town on the south-bound from Chicago to take over. A mob formed and stoned the train." (4)

That's one of Golding's "merely funny" elements, but it pathetic stupidity arise out of nothing. people have to be made that dumb, suspicious and hate-filled.

We don't need to look far to see this sort of thinking manifesting itself, with Muslims substituted for Italians. The paranoid and xenophobic are worried about the high birth rate of Muslims. They are breeding, it seems, ten times faster than the British population (5). There is, supposedly, a Muslim population timebomb about to go off, with This has lead to feverish speculation about Britain being taken over by a '21st Century Moor invasion' (6). While Perrett does not mention it, it seems likely that the Catholic propensity for large families caused similar concerns in America in the 1920s. According to the report described in The Times, "the biggest Christian population is among over-70s bracket, for Muslims it is the under-4s" (7). The implication being that in a few years time, these little Mohammeds and Iqbals will be working and voting, where-as the Matthrew, Marks, Lukes and Johns will be long gone.

Perhaps, but to me the fact that so many of the Muslim immigrants are so young is a cause for optimism. As they grow up, western practices and mores will form a part of their character. Their birth rate will be lower than that of their parents, as they perceive the advantages of delaying having children, just as westerners have. Yes, their presence will change British and EUropean culture, just as the presence of Italian immigrants changed American culture, and the presence of Asian immigrants is changing New Zealand's culture, but it doesn't follow that this change has to be dramatic or destructive.

1 - America in the Twenties by Geoffrey Perrett, published by Simon & Schuster, New York, 1982. Unless otherwise stated, statistics and points of fact are drawn from this book.
2 - ibid, page 81.
3 - From the essay "Fable," which can be found in the collection of Golding's writing called The Hot Gates, published by Faber& Faber, 1965.
4 - Perrett, op. cit., page 77. The embedded quotations are from The Aspirin Age, edited by Ishbel Leighton, published by Garden City, New York, 1949, pages 113-114.
5 - "Muslim population 'rising 10 times faster than rest of society'," by Richard Kerbaj, published in The Times, 30th of January, 2009. (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article5621482.ece)
6 - "Report: UK Muslim population grows 10 TIMES FASTER," discussion topic started on the 2nd of February, 2009, by a poster calling himself Charles Martel, on the News General discussion forum. (http://newsgeneral.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=news&action=display&thread=684)
7 - Kerbaj, op. cit.

Interesting

David Irving, well known Holocaust revisionist, failed libel plaintiff, law breaker and convict's publishing imprint is called Focal Point Publications (1). It's a short and memorable name for a brand.

it's also a phrase used by Hitler in a speech he gave in Berlin in 1943, speaking to the leadership of the Nazi party. In his diary entry for the 8th of May, 1943, Goebbels recorded that

The Fuehrer argued that the anti-Semitism which formerly animated the Party and was advocated by it must again become the focal point of our spiritual struggle (2).

Which might just be a coincidence, but I can't help but think there are few coincidences when Irving is concerned. Particularly as Irving himself declared in 1988, at the trail of fellow denier revisionist Ernst Zundel, that he is "very familiar with the Goebbels diaries" (3).

If this hunch is correct, what does it mean?

Is it possible that his obssessive interest in the career of Hitler and his queer belief (4) that a strange bond exists between them, and his possible mental illness (5), have combined. Perhaps, he imagines himself and his work as the new 'focal point' for a 'spiritual struggle' for modern day Hitlerites and efforts to deny revise the Holocaust and the reputation of the man who has fascinated Irving since he was a schoolboy (6).

1 - The website of Irvings publishing imprint, Focal Point Publications: http://www.fpp.co.uk/homepage.html
2 - My original source for this quotation was Alan Bullock's 1962 biography of Hilter, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, where the Goebbel's diary is quoted on page 703. The quotation, and the precise wording, is confirmed on the Nizkor Project website: http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/g/goebbels-joseph/goebbels-1948-excerpts-02.html. Bullock's version is drawn from the translation of the diaries by Bernd Gisevius, published in 1949, and the Nizkor version from Lochner's 1948 translation. Given both confirm the precise wording, this suggests the original German was a specifi term directly translated as 'focal point,' and in turn, in my mind, reduces the chances of it being a coincidence, somewhat.
3 - Transcript of Mr Irving's testimony at the trial of Ernst Zundel, April 1988, kindly provided by Mr Irving on (oh, the irony!) the website of Focal Point Publications: http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/ZundelTrial.html
4 - As described previously on lefthandpalm: http://lefthandpalm.blogspot.com/2009/01/david-irving-absolutely-stark-staring.html
5 - ibid.
6 - "David Irving: 'I'm Hitler's biographer,'" by Johann Hari, published in The Independent, 15th of January, 2008. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/david-irving-im-hitlers-biographer-1366464.html)

National unveil a truly conservative policy

Because a great part of the people ... will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages, and some rather willing to beg in idleness, than by labor to get their living; we, considering ... have upon deliberation and treaty with the prelates and the nobles, and learned men assisting us, of their mutual counsel ordained ... (1)

This is not the preamble to National's freshly announced welfare policy, but it might as well be. It is, infact, the Ordinance of Labourers passed into English Law in 1349, to compel the truculent peasantry to do their divinely ordained duty and labour for the benefit of their lords. Such as it was under the reign of Edward III of England in the 14th century. So, it seems, it will be in the reign of John I of New Zealand.

With truly immaculate comic timing, National have released details of their welfare policy at the same time as Jeremy Seabrook penned a glum commentary (2) in the Guardian. He describes how conservative parties seem to echo complaints from the medieval period onwards about how the peasants are too pampered and soft and unwilling to work, and - if they can be cajoled to work at all - will only do so for unreasonable wages. This morning, I read his article and wrote a breid entry on this blog. A few minutes later, on Morning Report, I heard that National were announcing policy that might have derived from the 14th century.

(While I can't confirm that National's policy was composed by a committee of prelates, nobles and 'learned men,' I suspect the composition of the ruling class hasn't changed greatly in 700 hundred years.)

National's policy is aimed at targeting the long term unemployed and (you can almost hear the pantomime hisses from stage right) single mothers:

National leader John Key said today a government formed by him would have "an unrelenting focus" on getting beneficiaries into work.

Announcing core elements of National's welfare policy, he pledged there would be no cuts to benefits and National would not introduce a work-for-the-dole or a community wage scheme.

"Instead we will be going one better and will focus on long-term unemployed by requiring them to get paid work and get off the benefit," he said.

"Within 12 months of taking office, National will require everyone who has been on the dole for more than a year to re-apply for their benefit and undergo a comprehensive work assessment."

Under the benefit policy, solo parents will have to seek part-time work once their youngest child is six. (3)

And this is from NICE National, remember. It begs the question, what will they be like when they don't feel the need to whisper sweet nothings in our ears any more?

Seabrook traces this tendency from the 1300s to the present, not only citing the various acts and statutes by which the rich and powerful have used their privilege to calumnate the poor and powerless, but identifying the cause of this - apparently incurable tendency to bemoan the bloodyminded laziness of the serfs and proles:

This debate continues to deny the agency of economic, technological and social determinants in producing able-bodied poor, idlers and spongers, welfare cheats, the drug destroyed and the outcast; but sees the individual as responsible for his or her particular form of dereliction. That the cyclical expansion and contraction of the economy influence levels of poverty or worklessness is played down: whenever there is an economic "downturn", the first reaction is to turn vengefully upon its victims. (3)

When times are good, the credit belongs to the Kking, the priesthood, politicians and captains of industry. When things turn rotten, it is due to the scurrilous serfs and pushy proles demanding more than was due to them. And the idea that the mechanics of industrialised society might actually produce the perenial hobgoblin of the 'idle poor' can not of course, be entertained. Paupers are paupers because they they are incurably, wickedly indolent. The rich and powerful are rich and powerful because they are honest, hardworking and willing to seize every opportunity.

That they usually have benefited from some massive social advantage, and the opportunities seized are generally only available to the few blessed with the afore-said massive social advantage, is once again, inadmissable. We just don't say such things in polite society.

SO the 'long term unemployed' must be put to work. Nevermind that they are, by and large, already looking for work. Never mind that for many the issue isn't lack of motivation, or even lack of jobs, but lack of essentials such as adequate child care. Heaven forbid, that some luckless ingle mother fulfill National's latest stricture by taking up a job that means her child becomes a latchkey kid - appart from the risks to the child, suddenly the hapless mother is transformed intot hat other rightwing hobgoblin, the Neglectful Mother, source of almost all social ills from violence, drug use and teenage pregnancy.

When that happens, of course, it will be considered extremely impolite to mention that the mother was forced to take up a job because of National's 'Tough-on-poverty, tough-on-those-too-feckless-and-stupid-to-be-in-poverty' rhetoric.

(One has to wonder how National can square the circle of being pro-family and at the same time anti-family, by threatening families - often the most vulnerable - with loss of benefits if they don't get out there and accept a minimum wage job at the chicken disembowelling factory, even though the recipient is a pharmacist).

And also, it will be very, very impolite to mention that for the tiny minority of genuinely dishonest spongers, the truly workshy and feckless, slashing benefits will make little difference. They will find away around it - the only people who will be affected will be those trying to get back into the workforce, who will end up being pushed into whatever jobs are available.

1 - From the Ordinance of Labourers 1349. (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/seth/ordinance-labourers.html)
2 - 'The Poor: A Future Foretold' by Jeremy Seabrook, published in The Guardian, 10th of August, 2008. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/10/labour.socialcare)
3 - "National's welfare policy a return to the 90s says Govt," unattributed NZPA article, published in The National Business Review, 11th of AUgust, 2008. (http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/nationals-welfare-policy-a-return-90s-says-govt-33891)
4 - Seabrook, op. cit.

Places worse than Easterhouse

For those of you who don't know it (most of the population of the planet), Easterhouse is a council estate in Glasgow, Scotland. Usually, it is ignored by everyone who doesn't have the misfortune to live there, because it isn't a nice place to live, rife with drugs, violence, unemployment, poverty and everything else that you can think of that you might call a negative social indicator.

It has been in the news of late, because there is gointg to be a by-election there. Though Glasgow East has been traditional Labour territory for millenia, there is a real chance now that the Scottish National Party might defeat the Labour candidate, such is the epic upopularity of PM Gordon Brown.

The Independent listed (1) some of the grisly statistics of life in Glasgow's East End, to give their (largely middle class and English) readership a frission of horror at the lot of the lumpen proletariat, inbetween gulps of cappuchino, Volvo driving and flirting with the idea of voting for the Conservatives:

• 30 per cent of the working-age population is on unemployment or incapacity benefit,
• Almost 40 per cent of children grow up in homes where there is no adult in paid employment,
• 60 per cent of people have no access to a car,
• Nearly 40 per cent of adults smoke,
• there are 25 drug-related deaths a year on average,
• In part of the constituency, male life expectancy is just 54, lower than Gaza, or North Korea. (2)

The last statistic is, of course, the shocker (my own little frission of middle class horror). Women get to live an extra ten years, probably because they are less likely to stab each other to death or dabble in hard drugs (though the Independent, with clumsy irony, attributes this to their tendency to "keep themselves busy and optimistic by juggling household budgets and battling to keep their children off drugs").

Here are a list (3) of countries where the average male life expectancy is LESS than 54:

Afghanistan, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Camaroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d'Ivorie, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Laos, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanada, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

There are, apparently, 195 countries in the world, and only 40 rate worse than the East End of Glasgow. For the record, the average male life expectancy for Britain as a whole is given as 75.94 years (4).

The other noteable trend is that almost all these countries are ex-colonial and in Africa. The former European colonial powers ravaged these countries for decades and when they finally surrendered their hold on them, surrendered the long-sufferring people Africa the the misrule of a cabal of incompetents, tryrants and thugs. The glories of Europe - and the reasonably high standard of living and life expectancy of Europeans lucky enough not to live in Glasgow's east end - were based on colonial pillaging, racism, slavery and genocide. The reparations owed by Europe are incaluculable, but must be paid, anyhow.

1 - 'Struggle for survival in Labour heartland' by Andy McSmith in The Independent, 12th of July, 2008. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/struggle-for-survival-in-labour-heartland-865816.html)
2 - ibid.
3- Statistics courtesy of Yahoo! Education. Obviously, the comparison is not accurate, as it is comparing the nadir of Scottish life expectancy to average figures of nations containing massive gulfs between top and bottom life expectancy - it is probably much worse being poor in a many more countries than it is in Scotland, but this is disguised by the average. Data retreived 12th of July, 2008. (http://education.yahoo.com/reference/factbook/countrycompare/le/1a.html)
4 - ibid.

Britain 1979 – Parallels, Part Two

The similarities between the victory of Margret Thatcher in 1979 and the situation in New Zealand in 2008 don't end with the fact that both Thatcher and Key mouthed centrist platitudes in their pursuit of power – remember, "being in government is worth everything" (1).

John Campbell's description of the election campaign that saw Thatcher oust Jim Callaghan's Labour government is also instructive (2). Politicians, after all, have always been liars. They haven't all gone on to win, however. Thatcher did, Key probably will. If Labour are to stop him, someone should examine where Callaghan went wrong, to see if any useful lessons can be drawn from it.

This is not such an analysis. It is just a loose collection of thoughts based upon my reading of the closing chapter of Simpson's book.

First of all, the general position of the parties in 1979 is similar to the current situation in New Zealand in 2008. Labour are in power. While Labour in New Zealand have been in power for a lot longer than the Callaghan administration (or the lacklustre Wilson administration that immediately succeeded it), both Labour and the Conservatives of the 1970s had pursued broadly similar policies, particularly in the key area of industrial relations. Following the Winter of Discontent , it was easy for Thatcher to take advantage of the popular frustration with the 'old way' and suggest – without ever getting very specific – that she offered a new solution to the problem that had been left to fester. National have the opportunity to present themselves in a similar light, as an alternative to a longstanding, traditional way of doing things. Rather like Lange's Labour Party in the 1980s, in fact. And we all know how that ended up.

Further, the election is National's to lose, just as it was Thatcher's to lose in '79. The National Party, like the Labour Party, has enjoyed a big lead in the polls for a long time. Realistically, Labour will struggle to overturn this, even six months out from the election. It will require some sort of monumental cock-up on National's part, or Labour revealing something truly remarkable, to turn it around. So it is likely that National will imitate the Tory strategy in 1979, which was to fight as boring a campaign as possible. Campbell describes the Conservative strategy to "Keep the campaign as low key as possible, avoiding any risks that might jeopardise their commanding lead" (3):

The electoral strategy set by Reece and Thorneycroft had three strands – neutral, negative and positive. The first priority was to protect the Tory lead by keeping the campaign as dull as possible and allowing Mrs Thatcher to say nothing that might frighten the voters. The negative strand was to keep the heat on Labour, reminding the electors in simple language of the government's record ... inflation ('prices'), unemployment ('jobs), cuts in public services (schools, homes and hospitals) and above all the strikes and picket line violence of the winter ... From this the positive appeal followed naturally – the simple electoral cry of all, "Time for a change!" (4)

This reluctance to fight Labour on issues led them to refuse an offer for Thatcher to debate Callaghan on television. It was feared that even if she won, the sight of her "Laying into Uncle Jim" would alienate voters. Key, at least, will not have that option. He will have to debate Clark. While he will probably find it a rather trying experience, he can take comfort in the fact that Clark won't be able to overturn a twenty point deficit, no matter how thoroughly she mauls him. If Labour are relying on that, they are doomed, and deserve their fate.

The negative strand of the campaign was most famously demonstrated by the Saatchi & Saatchi 'Labour isn't working' posters, which summarised perfectly what the Tories were about – attack the other party, no matter how crudely or disingenuously. Buzz words. Slogans. Powerful images. Say nothing about your own policies, because that will only give the enemy something to use against you. There was no positive reason to vote Conservative in that poster. They didn't need to give one. It was enough to remind people that they felt Labour government had let them down.

This feeling of disillusion was far more important to the Tories in 1979 than any policy they could muster of their own, which is another similarity between Then/There and the Here/Now. Or, rather, the Here/Soon. Campbell's describes how Thatcher overturned traditional voting patterns in 1979:

Academic analysis of the 1979 result suggests that the Tories did do exceptionally well among their target groups, gaining an 11 per cent swing among the skilled working class (the C2s) and 9 per cent among the unskilled. Many of these converts continued to vote Conservative throughout the 1980s. But there is also plentiful anecdotal evidence of lifelong Labour voters who were persuaded to vote Conservative for the first time, and spent the next ten years bitterly regretting it.

On who recorded his reasons at the time was the Director of the strike-ravaged National Theatre, Peter Hall. 'We had a society of greed and anarchy,' he wrote in his diary at the height of the winter chaos in terms which Mrs Thatcher herself could not have bettered. 'No honour, no responsibility, no pride. I sound like an old reactionary, which I'm not, but what we have now isn't socialism, it's fascism with those who have the power injuring those who do not.' Three months later, he shocked himself by deciding to vote Tory, having come to the conclusion that Labour was no longer the party of social justice. 'It's now the party of sectional interest; the party that protects pressure groups and bully boys.' 'It wasn't all that difficult this morning to vote Tory,' he wrote on 3 May. 'In fact it positively felt good .. we have to have change.' Hall wanted Mrs Thatcher to 'sort out' the unions. Fourteen years later he could not deny her credit for having done so, though he loathed practically everything else she did, particularly the commercialisation of the arts. 'I can understand now why I voted Tory,' he reflected in 1993. 'I very much wish I hadn't had to.' (5)

The final swig to the Tories was 5.1 per cent, lower than the swing in the traditional Labour vote – so the above average defections in the targeted working class vote were crucial to the Tory victory (6). Labour needs to watch out for its core vote – assuming it has any left come polling day – and defend it against the sick feeling of disillusion and disappointment that the Tories exploited so well in 1979.

Ultimately, it may be impossible. The British Labour party is credited with having fought a good campaign in 1979, generally out-performing the Tories. They reduced a Tory lead of between 9 and 13 per cent st the start of the campaign to between 3 and 5 percent (7). Further, they Britain's Labour party enjoyed one asset that New Zealand's does not - a popular leader who was seen as a symbol of unity, rather than division. Callaghan always beat Thatcher in the Preferred Prime Minister stakes (8), but still they lost the election.

Here in New Zealand in 2008, things are different and yet eerily the same. The government has been in power a long time, long enough to make the "Time for a change" slogans have a superficial validity regardless of any other considerations. The impetus is for change. Campbell describes Callaghan in fatalistic mood, and the wily old fixer's thoughts make grim reading for any Labour strategists:

Jim Callaghan told his senior policy adviser, Bernie Donaghue, that every thirty years or so there occurred 'a sea change in politics'.

It then does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves. I suspect there is now such a sea change – and it s for Mrs Thatcher. (9)

Turning the clock back thirty years in New Zealand takes us back – more or less – to the fall of Muldoon. There was a sea change then, alright. Since the mid-nineties, however, the tide has been running the other way, and New Zealand has been better for it. It would be strange indeed if the New Zealand electorate rejected Clarkite social democracy (you can't call it socialism with a straight face, unless you are Lindsay Perigo) in favour of the same medicine that made so many gag (with no noticeable benefits) in the 80s.

1 – Attributed to Ruth Richardson, quoted by Nicky Hager in The Hollow Men, Craig Potton Publishing, 2006. The comment occurs in an email to Brian Sincliar, and is quoted on page 68 of my edition of The Hollow Men.
2 – Margret Thatcher: The Grocer's Daughter, by John Campbell, published by Jonathan Cape in 2000.
3 – ibid, page 427.
4 – ibid,
page 429.
5 – ibid, pages 433-4.
6 – I am not suggesting that directors of theatre companies are blue collar heroes. It is a shame that Campbell didn't back up his 'anecdotal evidence' by talking to someone a bit more proletarian than Peter Hall.
7- Campbell, op. cit. Pages 427 and 444 respectively.
8 - ibid, page 427.
9 – ibid, page 443.

More Marxist musings on history

The Netherlands, by all accounts, is a tolerant place - if you is so inclined, you can get stoned and indulge in a little bit of commercial sex without having to go through the messy business of breaking the law. Historically, given its position between mostly-protestant Germany and mostly-Catholic-but-with-Potestant-bits France, and the country's own historical, ethnic and religious bifircation, it has been a tolerant place.

Even in times of repression, it has been less interested persecution than in finding ways that everyone can live together. In the sixteenth century, Holland experienced one of its occasional fits of religious prejudice and proscribed Catholicism. The ban was only a façade and adherents of the Roman faith could worship in private, as long as they did not make any public advertisement of the fact. The most significant of these semi-clandestine chapels is now the museum called the Amstelkring (1), also known as ‘Ons Lieve Heer Op Solder’ which translates literally as ‘Our Dear Lord in the Attic’ which is situated on Oudezijds Voorburgwal.

Here Catholics could meet discretely to worship. The similarities with the story of Anne Frank, and her family’s doomed attempt to elude the Nazi butchers are immediately striking, a grim parallel with the older tale. Here, Marx's observation that history reoccurs first as tragedy, then as farce seems inverted: farce is reworked as tragedy. The token proscription of Catholicism was farcical, but the story of the Jews of Amsterdam, represented by the annihilation of the Frank family, was tragic.

But Marx's commentary is more subtle than that. The element of farce derives from bourgeois society seeking to clothe itself in the old rags left over from previous revolutions and present itself in the guise of the past:

Once the new social formation was established, the antediluvian colossi disappeared and with them also the resurrected Romanism – the Brutuses, the Gracchi, the publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality bred its own true interpreters and spokesmen in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants, and Guizots; its real military leaders sat behind the office desk and the hog-headed Louis XVIII was its political chief. Entirely absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer remembered that the ghosts of the Roman period had watched over its cradle.

But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. (2)

The Dutch, blessed or cursed with a situation that made merchantilism a virtual necessity, were bourgeouis long before the rest of the world. The proscription of Catholics in the 17th century - at a time when Catholics in Britain might expect execution - was a farcical, "bourgeois-limited" imitation of what was going on around them in Europe. It was the farce that followed the tragedy. Then, in May, 1940, the tragedy followed farce, when the German Army swarmed over Holland, conquering the country in six days. From 1942 onwards, Jews and various other . By 1946, about 30,000 Jews (3) - 20 per cent of the pre-war population - remained.

What happened in the 1940s was not a tragic re-enectment of the farcical religious bigotry of 300 years before, but a grim recrudescence of the chauvanistic nationalism that Willaim Golding identified, "ugly nationalism raising its Gorgon head." (4):

it is a dead thing handed on,, but dead though it is, it will not lie down. It is a monstrous creature descending to us from our ancestors, producing nothing but disunity, chaos. Disorder and war prolong in it the ghastly and ironic semblance of life. All the marching and counter marching, the flags, the heroism and cruelty, are mere galvanic twitches induced in its slaves and subjects by that hideous parody thing. (5)

The second world war and the Holocaust were such galvanic twitches, an outpouring of vicious bigotry resulting from the struggle in Germany between the rising bourgeois and the old feudal-imperialists. Given modern means of inflicting misery on a much wider scale than before, it was inevitable that all those around would suffer as Germany's internal tensions manifested themselves in the reactionary forms of cultural nostalgia, militarsm, anti-Semitism, paranoia and wilful ignorance in the face of evil.

1 - The Amstelkring Museum website can be visited at http://www.museumamstelkring.nl/onslieveheeropsolder/eng/home.php, as at the 5th of March, 2008.
2 - From the first chapter of 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,'by Karl Marx, 1852. Reproduced on marxists.org (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm)\
3 - 'The Virtual Jewish History Tour - Netherlands,' by David Shyovitz, published on the Jewish Virtual Library website. (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/netherlands.html#modern)
4 - Golding, discussing Lord of The Flies, in an essay called 'Fable,' contained in the collection The Hot Gates.
5 - ibid.