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| From: Irish Political Review: Articles |
| Date: August, 2018 |
| By: Editorial |
Nationalism Here And There |
| Nationalism Here And There On the eve of Brexit a Northern Ireland English policeman has been appointed Commissioner of the Garda SÃochána. Prior to this appointment Drew Harris OBE was Deputy Commissioner of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which is the Royal Ulster Constabulary as re-made by the English police after 1969 to be an instrument of the British State in the North, rather than an instrument of the devolved Unionist communal body. His duties were to liaise with British Intelligence. The appointing body of nine, chosen by Justice Minister Flanagan, included a former Chief Constable of the Hampshire Constabulary, Alan Marshall; and the Interim Chief Constable of the Scottish police, Ian Livingstone. There was nobody on it from a European state. And of the 76 applicants for the job, there was not one from any European state. Applications were solicited. So the Government, on the eve of Brexit, decided that there should be no European connection and that there should be a strong connection with the state that is on the way to becoming a foreign state, even by Martin Mansergh's reckoning. Freemasonry has a traditional relationship with British policing. At the time of the 1922 'Treaty', Britain insisted that Secret Societies should be curbed in Ireland—except for the Freemasons. The Secret Society of Freemasons was regarded as a pillar of British civilisation. The Free State was therefore required to allow it to operate freely and, when there were sings of backsliding in the late 1920s, the Irish Times issued an editorial warning to the State. We are not saying that Drew Harris OBE is a Freemason. In the nature of the thing, that is something we cannot know. But also, in the nature of the thing, the probability is that he is. And it is therefore worth noting that the question has not been raised at all in connection with his appointment. Freemasonry seems to be a useful part of the British system of government. But its usefulness is entirely British. In the Irish context, the association sets itself the task of unifying North and South within the British scheme of things. And just what is wrong with the Gardaà that a foreign policeman is needed to sort them out. Or is it part of a 'cunning plan' by Varadkar to get the North? * Ireland is lobbying to be elected as one of the minnows on the UN Security Council. It was on the Security Council in 2001, when the World Trade Centre was demolished. It distinguished itself by giving a moral lecture to the Palestinians for celebrating the event. They were told that they would not achieve their aims by behaving like that. But the Palestinians knew that they way they behaved had nothing whatever to do with the probability of achieving their aims. However badly or ingratiatingly they behaved, the Security Council would make certain that their aims were not achieved. And so they celebrated openly a resounding blow struck at the enemy. Their conduct was not irresponsible because there was no kind of responsible conduct that would achieve achieve anything for them. Their only duty in the eyes of the dominant Power on the Security Council is to die out, or go away, and let a 'better' people take over the space that they leave. Their death knell was rung by Britain, when it conquered the Middle East with the help of John Redmond and decided to colonise it with Jews. The Irish Times supports the Irish bid, even though the Security Council "is a flawed, unrepresentative institution too often rendered impotent by the vetoes of its five permanent members", because "When it is united it can be a force for immense good" (4.7.18). The Vetoes do not render it impotent. They are necessary to its existence. It could not exist without them The USA is an absolute sovereignty, prevented by its Constitution from joining any international body which infringes that sovereignty. The UN was formed in 1945 when the Soviet Union and the United States brought an end to the World War launched by Britain which Britain itself was incapable of ending. The UN was envisaged by Roosevelt as a power-structure of world dominance, to be operated jointly with Russia. He envisaged the two victorious states ensuring peace in the world by means of a monopoly of force. Britain was added as a third, out of charity. Britain wanted France as an ally against the US. And the US added China, which was then its client state. And so it remains. It was effectively a two-state system until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. It might conceivably have been changed then if the US had exerted insistent pressure on Britain and France, but for the fact that China had shrugged off American hegemony and become independent and powerful. It is now unalterable. (And we recall that the last time it was united, when Russia was in disarray, it launched the war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the first event in the modern destabilisation of the Middle East.) The Irish Times says that the Government "should state clearly that it will not enter into reciprocal deals with states that abuse their citizen's human rights or flout international law". International Law is law made my agreement between the Veto Powers. Everything else is mere opinion. Human Rights once had a kind of dependable meaning that lasted from decade to decade, but new ones are now being invented every year and the greater part of the world is in breach of the Human Rights that are currently in fashion in Western Europe. "Brexit has prompted a long overdue recognition that Ireland has neglected many of its foreign relationships. At a time when we need to be more present in the world, a stint on the security council would be well-timed. But there is no point in being there unless we have something to say." The Security Council is the last place in which states engage in relations with each other. That is not its purpose. And Ireland will enter a real world of foreign relationships if Brexit is completed, and it is left alone in the EU without Britain, and it is obliged by circumstances to relate to Britain as a foreign state. The ventriloquist's dummy, the Irish Times, is anxious to ward off that evil day. It wants the Irish Government to see things from the British viewpoint and inveigle the EU into becoming entangled in British problems and confusing relationships—as was done with Arthur Griffith in the 'Treaty' negotiations—instead of tending to its own affairs while Britain tries to follow its separate destiny. The Irish Government appeared all too willing to play that part a couple of years ago. But it now seems to have been caught by the will to existence of the European Commission, and there are moments when Simon Coveney might be mistaken for Charles Haughey. Meanwhile the Irish Times warns us that Europe is going fascist. It does this in the highly excited way that is usual in the ventriloquist's dummy. Fintan O'Toole (June 26) writes about "The trial runs for fascism" that are now under way: "Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable": "Fascism doesn't arise suddenly in an existing democracy… You have to do trial runs that get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. That is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it. "One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections—we've that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections". Which fascism arose in an existing democracy? And did Mussolini's rule rest on rigged elections? The only fascism we can think of that made a serious attempt to rise in a functional democracy is the Treatyite fascism of the early 1930s. It was stifled by the democracy. However, Professor Garvin—the pioneer revisionist—suggests that, as between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, it was the fascist Fine Gael (which said it was fascist and which raised the Blueshirts) that was democratic, while the real fascist party was Fianna Fail, which masqueraded as democratic. Anyhow, Fianna won a series of elections—rigging them by telling lies, no doubt!—and it wore down the Blueshirts without Concentration Camps or Martial Law. Another tool of preparatory Fascism is "the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities". Well, in the pioneering fascism, the Italian, the "generation of tribal identities" was done when Mussolini blended irredentist Nationalism with Socialism in 1914-15 and, against the opposition of the Socialist Party and the Catholic Church, brought Italy into the Great War as an ally of Britain on the British promise that Italy could annex large regions of the Austrian state. Fascism, in the sense of irredentist national socialism, was forged with British approval in the Great War. As to "the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities"—a system of party conflict, in other words—that was what existed in Italy after the War because of the spread of Bolshevik influence. A situation of class antagonism existed which neither side could resolve by becoming dominant. Democracy wasn't functional because the party-political differences were too deep. So Mussolini entered with his already-created nationalist socialism, drew elements from both sides into a workable combination, and established a regime that lasted into the next World War. Fascism was the means by which Capitalist civilisation was saved from Communist civilisation in Europe when the party conflict became too intense for the Parliamentary system to cope with. There was some discussion in English political circles around 1920 about the limits of Parliamentary democracy. This was caused by the crumbling of the Liberal Party and the rise of the Labour Party in its place. Winston Churchill was frankly of the opinion that, if the party system became the expression of the conflict of a Capitalist Party and a Socialist Party, the Parliamentary system could not cope with it. A few years later he went to Rome to praise Mussolini for finding the way to save European capitalist civilisation from Communism. He said that, if he lived in Italy, he would be a fascist. The way Britain coped with the stresses of the Depression was to suspend the operation of the party-system without suspending Parliament. This was done by the Labour and Tory Parties forming a National Government and taking turns at being Prime Minister. That system of National Government continued from 1931 to 1945. This sophisticated exercise was made possible by the continuing influence of that distinctive English institution, the ruling class—which was not a mere upper class. Churchill went on to become the hero of the Anti-Fascist War of post-1945 mythology. But he never subscribed to the notion that it was a crusade against Fascism. He praised Hitler for pulling Germany together again after the dreadful things that were done to it in 1919. In 1919 he had wanted to form an alliance with it to make war on Communist Russia. When he came to power in 1940, the war that Britain had declared on Germany was lost, and the only alternative to a settlement was to try to bring about a war between Germany and Russia. When that happened, he had to go into alliance with Russia, but he never wavered in his opinion that the basic enemy was Russia. And he never became an anti-fascist. He let fascist Spain and Portugal be. He would have let Mussolini be if he had not joined Germany in the War at the moment when Germany seemed to have won it. Fascism does not need a majority", the ventriloquist's dummy says. But it does, you know. It is only functional of decisive majorities. The doctrine continues: "it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power"—and maybe brings about full employment where thee was mass employment before? The impending Holocaust in Britain is not mentioned in the litany of awfulness set in motion by Trump and Putin. Is there a spark of sense in the dummy, after all? The three Jewish papers in Britain have declared that there is now "an existential threat to Jewish life in Britain". They exhort any Jews in the Labour Party to leave it, and advise Jews in general to make plans to leave Britain if Jeremy Corbyn, the new Hitler, becomes Prime Minister. The leading campaigner against Corbyn as a "fucking anti-Semite" is Margaret Hodge, MP, who was for many years his close ally on the way-out Left of the British Labour Party. Hodge—who is part of the Oppenheimer connection—has discovered after all these years that Corbyn has a fierce racial animosity against Jews. Corbyn is perhaps the most thorough anti-racist in British politics, but Hodge spied his cloven hoof in the form of refusal to denounce Hamas as anti-Semitic. The existential danger to Jewish life in Britain has sprung up in connection with the latest measures of Jewish racist legislation, enacted democratically by Israel, which is "the only democracy in the Middle East"—as ideologists of Zionism like to point out. The demand made on Corbyn is that he should put hostility to Jews by those who are suffering oppression by Jews on a par with the European hostility to Jews that led to the attempt to exterminate them—an attempt in which many more than Germans were involved, and most actively involved. (The great secret of European history is that anti-Semitism was unleashed, or perhaps stimulated would be a better word—by the break-up of Empires, a move that is usually presented as a progressive achievement of the Great War, and the hurried establishment in their place of national-democratic states with inadequate national development, whose nationalism lay ahead of them. Anti-Semitism was stimulated by democratisation. It was the expansion of the German state after the British declaration of war on it in 1939—after collaborating with it since 1933—that opened the way for drastic anti-Semitic action. But that German initiative would not have been so effective if it had not met with a friendly response around Eastern Europe.) Jewish colonisation in Palestine under British Imperial protection began in 1919. In 1936 Britain made war on attempted Palestinian resistance. After Britain suddenly, and unexpectedly, declared war on Germany—after six years of collaboration with Hitler—Palestinian leaders looked to the enemy's enemy as a friend. Zionist propaganda made much of this Palestinian response to oppression by colonial Jewish nationalism and merged it with the European oppression of Jews. British sponsorship of the Jewish colonisation of Palestine was intended to create a Jewish state within the British Empire, kept within bounds by the Empire, but after 1945 it broke loose and launched an unrestrained terrorist campaign against the British authorities. Britain meekly threw in the towel, and the Zionist terror turned on the Arab population. The United Nations—a handful of states then—decided that the world belonged to it to do what it pleased with. It awarded half of Palestine to the Jews to be their state. But, despite a quarter of a century of colonisation, half of the population of that half of Palestine was Arabic. The construction of a Jewish state within it was not a practical possibility. The first act of the new Jewish authority recognised by the UN was to reduce the Arab population by direct action. Hundreds of thousands were driven out. That act of ethnic cleansing in the foundation of the Jewish state has, imprudently, been made an issue of in the Zionist campaign to brand the British Labour Party as anti-Semitic. It has focussed attention on a past that was all but forgotten. But perhaps the Zionists reckon that their position is such that brazenness is the only prudence—that Danton's maxim is the only one for them: "L'audace, et encore l'audace". A Jewish "self-definition" of anti-Semitism has been drawn up. Most of it has been written in a newly-drafted Labour Party Code of Conduct. The sticking point is a Jewish insistence that it is anti-Semitic to describe the foundation of the Jewish State (Israel) as a "racial endeavour". If accepted, this would mean that a description of the foundation of the Jewish state, as experienced by Palestinians, would have to be disciplined by the Party as anti-Semitic. Jewish influence on the British media is sharply concentrated. Interviewers are are clearly intimidated by the Jewish question and are on edge whenever the case of the Palestinian side intrudes. It took months before the point at issue found any expression. But eventually a vigorous young man, interviewed along with a Jewish spokesman on Sky News, managed to get it out—despite efforts by the interviewer to distract him. As soon as he got it out, the interview was cut short. The Jewish spokesman was relieved of the necessity of replying. Here is an excerpt from Sky News on July 26th: "Interviewer: Do you understand why some people feel that the Labour leadership is dragging its heels? Because they can point to evidence. For example, Seamus Milne… saying that the creation of Israel was in and of itself a crime. Aaron Bastoni (Novara Media): Several hundred thousand people were forced to be removed from their homes. That was obviously not a good thing. Should Jewish people have a right to self-determination, a homeland of their own? Absolutely. But if we're looking at a historical event, 1944, 46, all the way through to today, clearly there are things that I think are unforgivable. Israel in that regard is not unique. The British State has done innumerable terrible things. Far more. The same with the United States. The same with France. The same with Italy. But the idea that we can just pretend that Israel was not guilty of crimes is, I think, not to be fair to them, is to treat them unequally as a nation state. Interviewer: I am terribly sorry, gentlemen. We are going to have to leave it there." But it does not meet the requirements of the Jewish Stte to say that its foundation was no worse than that of any other colonialism that rode rough-shod over an existing population in the territory that it desired. At this very moment, when its exclusive racist character is becoming plainly evident, it demands that everyone must sign a certificate of its immaculate conception. It demonstrates the demoralised condition of the British Labour Party that its leaders would not dare reply to Zionist slander with the moderate statement of fact made by Aaron Bastoni. We describe it as moderate because he did not mention that the Labour Party was in Government in 1945 and had responsibility for ensuring that the Jewish colonialism which Britain set in motion in 1917 should not wreak havoc on the lives of the Palestinian population, but reneged on its obligations in the face of Jewish terrorism. And the right of Jews to self-determination: a right which required the rooting-out of another people! Now it might be that human existence centres on the Jews, and that all others have meaning only in their relationship with the Jews, but that is something we cannot know until it is too late. We must proceed on other assumptions for the time being. In the 19th century the approved view of the Jews was that they were a religious body like any other, owing national allegiance—like any other—to the various states in which they lived. The suggestion that they were not a mere religion but were also a nation, and did not really participate in the life of the nations in which they lived, was condemned as anti-Semitic. The major book on the question, by the German Marxist, Karl Kautsky, asked Are The Jews A Race? And the right answer was that they were not. The right answer was changed in 1917 by the Balfour Declaration. The Jews were now to be regarded as a nation—perhaps the nation—though dispersed amongst other nations. The Balfour Declaration was introduced as a British war measure, designed to turn the Jews against Germany. It was opposed by many Jews who were at ease amongst the Gentiles and who protested that the establishment of a Jewish state would not be possible without a revival of fundamentalist Jewish Millenarianism. And the tendency of development within the Jewish state bears out that prediction. The journalist to the fore in branding Corbyn an anti-Semite, because he does not accept without question the Jewish self-definition of what anti-Semitism is, is Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian. Freedland says that the self-definition allows for the most vehement criticism of the Israeli state, and even the characterisation of its policies as racist, but it disallows description of its foundation as "a racial endeavour". But the Chief Rabbi has stated repeatedly that, while criticism of Israel is theoretically possible without being anti-Semitic, it is hardly possible at all in practice. There was until recently a strong element in religious Jewry that was not Zionist. It dressed in traditional Jewish style, observed Jewish customs, and lived a self-contained life, but did not recognise Israel as the authentic Jewish State because it pre-empted the coming of the Messiah. We gather that this element has recently become Zionist because the Messiah has come. And a letter condemning the Labour Party as anti-Semitic, signed by 68 rabbis was published in The Guardian of 16th July. In the BBC's coverage of the anti-Semitic charge made against the Labour Party, Newsnight interviewer Emily Maitlis took it that reference to Nazism had been cut out of the Party's Code of Conduct. It had to be explained to her that it was there, under its proper name of National Socialism. Was that a sign of elementary ignorance on her part, or was it an indication that accurate use of titles is now to be treated as a form of anti-Semitism, and perhaps even of Holocaust Denial? (The historian, David Irving, who described in detail the large-scale extermination of Jews, and the circumstances in which it was carried out, has been legally branded a Holocaust Denier.) Fascism was the National Socialist response to the Internationalist Socialism of the Bolshevik movement in the generation when it was a powerful force within European politics. In June 1941 the War that Britain had declared on Germany in 1939 became in substance a war between Fascism and Communism. Within the British ideology of that War, National Socialism was depicted as a force that had somehow arisen within the defeated and disarmed Germany of 1919 to become a threat to civilisation. Before the Second World War, Fascism and Communism had been characterised as forms of Totalitarianism in the Catholic circles which were equally opposed to both, and from which the post-1945 regimes of Christian Democracy developed. This concept of Totalitarianism came to be widely adopted in the West after 1945 in its Cold War antagonism with the Communist force that had destroyed National Socialism, and taken possession of Eastern Europe in the process. In Germany Christian Democracy quickly restored political viability in the zones occupied by Western Armies. It did so by minimising British influence, and largely incorporating the personnel of the National Socialist administration into the Christian Democratic regime. And it absolutely refused to recognise the legimitacy in the eastern part of Germany of the Communist force that had destroyed National Socialism—and without which it would probably have continued. There are certainly no grounds for thinking it would have been overthrown by internal forces. Germany was united after the Soviet system collapsed in 1990, and the East was subjected to political colonisation from West Germany. The various East European nationalities within the Soviet system, whose nationality had been cultivated by the system, quickly found their feet as Western nation-states. But, within Russia itself, there was political and economic disintegration. Property was 'privatised' and thrown onto a market that did not really exist. Privatisation took the form of giving large chunks of state property into the ownership of individuals close to President Yeltsin, who had done nothing whatever to build up these properties. Those were the Oligarchs. They were immensely wealthy owners of property, but they were not capitalists at all in the proper sense. The system developed by Putin out of the Oligarchic anarchy of the Yeltsin era is now denounced as "kleptocratic"—a regime of robbers. That might have been accurately applied to the Yeltsin regime, but it wasn't. Many of the Oligarchs created by Yeltsin still exist in Russia. Putin, in restoring national economy, has had to tack his way amongst them. The demolition of the Soviet regime by Yeltsin means that the State Power does not exist for brushing them aside and replacing them without major disruption. The construction of a capitalist system in Russia, and the reorientation of democracy to the functioning of capitalism—that is a work in progress. This is a propos a hysterical denunciation of Putin in the Irish Times (Weekend Supplement, July 21st), which takes a step backwards to denounce Yeltsin too—and, if it had taken further steps, would undoubtedly have denounced the Soviet system as well, and the Tsarist system before it: Russia, in short—except when it made war on Germany in alliance with John Redmond, of course. CONTENTS Nationalism Here And There. Editorial The No Hard Border Mantra. Jack Lane A Straight Narrative Of The Greek Crisis. Dave Alvey (Ireland, Brexit and the future of the EU, Part 6) Readers' Letters: Fenians And The IRB. Pat Muldowney Es Ahora. Julianne Herlihy : Clair Wills (2) The ICC Prosecutor Warns Israel About Gaza Killings. David Morrison Over To You, Judge Donnelly. Jack Lane (Poland and the Law) Eamon C. Kerney (1926-2018)—An Obituary. Manus O'Riordan Two Poems. Wilson John Haire (Fist On The Send-Button; Eating Crow) Casement And The 'Sleepwalking' Myth. Donal Kennedy (Review of England's Care For The Truth—By One Who Knows Both) Origin of the Handwriting in the Disputed Diaries. Tim O'Sullivan (Part 2) Two Westminster Events. Wilson John Haire The Russian Revolution. Brendan Clifford (100th Anniversary, Part 8) July Brexit Summary. Dave Alvey Biteback: Garda Chief Drew Harrison. Dave Alvey. Gay patriots? Tim O'Sullivan (Unpublished Letter) Does It Stack Up? Michael Stack (Irish Water; The Irish Crash 2008; Unmanned Electric Cars) Some Pandy For Prince Charles? John Morgan Labour Comment: A Land Value Tax! |