| Europe—the European Union—imagined that, together with the United States, it had made a Treaty with Iran, establishing trade relations with it on the condition that Iran undertook to restrict its development of nuclear technology. A short while later the United States broke the Treaty, and warned the EU that it must not stand by it. The EU did not even pretend that Iran had given the USA grounds for breaking it. But, though regretting that the USA had broken it without sufficient ground, it did not seriously attempt to stand by it.rnrnThe idea that there is a part of the world which is free, and that it stands in necessary antagonism with the part of it that is not free, fell into abeyance for a while when the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. It has now been revived in full force.rnrnEssential to it, in the days when the world was openly organised into two competing and incompatible modes of life, was the freedom of money-capital in the West and the directing of the economy by political power in the East. The accumulation of money was meritorious in the West and the individual with large quantities of money could do as he pleased with it and gain control over the lives of thousands of others. In the East it was not possible to accumulate vast sums of money, and in any case there was little to do with it beyond using it for living.rnrnThe United States was the source, and the master, of the post-1945 Free World. The consequences of the World War launched by Britain in 1939 were such that a functioning capitalism in Europe had to be set-up by the United States in what had been reduced to a vast battlefield. The only major state that had come through the war with its pre-war system intact was Fascist Spain. Everywhere else, revival depended on US industry and US money. Post-1945 Europe, leaving aside the Fascism that continued in Spain for a further thirty years, is an American creation. And, insofar as it had an internal dynamic under American overlordship, it was the Christian Democracy of Germany.rnrnAmerican overlordship was not problematic for the new governing authorities in Europe. They recognised it as a necessary condition of their existence. They were in that sense free participants in the American Free World.rnrnThey are now slightly discontented subjects of American hegemony. They have become discontented with the terms of their existence set by the fact that they are creations of American power. But they do not have the will to act otherwise than as creatures of American power.rnrnPart of their difficulty is what might be called “moralâ€. They lack historical integrity. They were one thing before 1914, another thing after 1918, a third thing in the 1930s, and a fourth thing after 1945. There was no evolutionary development from one of these things to the next. And, in their post-1945 phase, they dare not think coherently about what they were in the preceding phase. They may condemn it, but condemnation is not thought.rnrnThe material difficulty lies in the radically changed nature of money.rnrnIn olden days money was a physical thing. It was gold and silver. It had its own value, which attached to its physical substance, and was not subject to evaporation. In the generation between the World Wars, physical money was found to be too restrictive of market growth and the expansion of money beyond the physical by means of credit was experimented with. And post-1945 credit became the predominant form of money.rnrnThe operation of credit money is a tricky business. It was the USA that mastered it. Only the USA could have mastered it because it was the only free capitalist economy in the world. And the money on which Free Europe was built was American credit-money.rnrnBritain, with great ingenuity, maintained the illusion of freedom. But it was actually in pawn to the United States. It had run its War with American materials and American money, and its unprecedented post-War boom was fuelled by the United States. And, when it tried to rehabilitate its Imperial power by making war on Egypt in 1956, against the interests of the Unite States, Washington stopped it by threatening to wreck its economy—which it could have done with little ore than the stroke of a pen.rnrnToday it is impossible to say what money is. If you have gold you can certainly get money for it. But the gold is not the money, and there is not enough gold in the world to buy all the money. What is written on the English pound note is a piece of nostalgia. It is notionally a bank-note certifying that you have a pound in the Bank and that the Bank of England will give it to you if you hand in the note. But all you could get in the way of money for a pound note is another pound note. And if you did get a piece of gold, you would have to get credit-money for it before it was usable.rnrnAnd that’s why the EU cannot stand by the Iranian Treaty after the USA has broken it. If it breaks the trading sanctions which the USA has re-imposed, Washington will sanction it in the way that it sanctioned Britain in 1956. It operates in the American credit-money system and is at the mercy of American sanctions.rnrnThis is not some new device sprung on the world by President Trump. It was used by President Eisenhower. And it was stated as a principle by President Obama that American sovereignty follows the dollar and its derivatives.rnrnThe different parts of the Free World are not free with relation to each other. The Free World is a body created by the United States and operated by it in its own interest.rnrnA German Foreign Minister, Genscher, said in the 1980s “We cannot become wanderers between worldsâ€. But that is what it must be when it becomes discontented with thernrn2 overlordship of its creator while lacking the will to free itself from dependency on ‘American freedom’.rnrnThe United States has now murdered senior members of the Iranian and Iraqi administrations. What will the EU do about it? Let’s make a wild guess and predict that it will do nothing.rnrnThirty years ago the functional Iraqi State, under the Baath regime of Saddam Hussain, made war on the Iranian Revolution, which for a moment threatened to spread like wildfire in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia—the main base of the Free World in the Middle East—felt threatened.rnrnAt one moment there was panic, when it seemed that the Iranian forces were breaking through towards Baghdad. But the Iraqi Front held, and the revolution was confined to Iran.rnrnThe Iraqi State at war proved to be effectively national. Shia and Sunni merged in the military effort even though it was directed against a Shea state.rnrnThe United States was then poised to make war on Iran, which it considered itself to have been humiliated by—and Washington is now threatening extensive bombing in retaliation for that humiliation three decades ago. But in 1991 it decided to make war on Iraq instead—an entirely irrational decision, as far as the balance of power in the Middle East was concerned. However, a clue here is that Saddam was intent on selling Iraqi oil outside the American money system. Similarly, when Libya’s General Gaddafi started talking of dropping the dollar for Libyan oil sales, his regime was smashed, illegally insofar as ‘International Law’ is concerned.rnrnIn the Iraq case, Kuwait provided the pretext. That country, a British Imperial concoction with a population consisting largely of immigrant servants and labourers, had been stealing Iraqi oil while Iraq was at war with Iran. The Iraqi Government decided to take strong measures against Kuwait, consulted the United States, and was given to understand that its projected action had American approval. And it was not subsequently denied that the American Ambassador had given the green light for the action.rnrnBut, when Iraq acted against Kuwait, Washington declared that a breach of international law had been committed, and launched a war to destroy the Iraqi regime, with Thatcher’s Britain as an enthusiastic ally. (The former British Prime Minister, Ted Heath, who had taken part in the concocting of Kuwait, was horrified.)rnrnThe US could easily have prevented the Iraqi invasion into Kuwait, but it encouraged it instead, and then used the Iraqi action as a reason for destroying the Iraqi State.rnrnThe Ameranglian war on Iraq involved no actual battle. Its only memorable incident was the Turkey Shoot of the retreating Iraqi Army by the American and British Air Forces.rnrnThen the advance into Iraq was called off without explanation, and the invading armies withdrew, after the Kurds had been incited to rebel, leaving the Baath regime in place, but with a badly damaged infrastructure and suffering from a UN-authorised regime of sanctions aimed at the civilian population, which was even denied access to cancer drugs.rnrnThe Kurdish rebellion was suppressed by Saddam. The State did not collapse through Sunni/Shia antagonism. But the country was subjected to ten years of Ameranglian bombing designed to destroy the necessary infrastructure of urban living.rnrnTo page 4rnrnContentsrnrnPagernrnIRAN: Reflections On Money And Power Editorial 2 The ‘Apartheid Made Me’ Rabbi And Jews Who Actually Fought Racism: Considerations about Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism, as alleged by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis Manus O'Riordan 6 Orwell, Ireland and the War. The View from Airstrip Two. Part 2 Martin Tyrrell 12 Vox Pat: Gay Byrne; Marian Finucane; Babies in Boxes? FF Reverts To Its Roots? Irish Cardinal? Round And About; Education Trends? Hedge Schools; In Church; The Headlines; Idealistic, Generous, Selfless . . .rnrnPenal Laws Once More; Magic 17,40 Commemmorating The RIC?rnrnEditorial 19 Casement: Concerning The Black Diaries Jack Lane 20 Converts? Some Reminiscences Wilson John Haire 21 Named And Blamed.rnrnWilson John Haire (Poem) 22 Ulster Protestants And False Memory Brendan Clifford 23 Reliquiae Baxteriana: From Baxter To Boston Stephen Richards 29 More On The Pogroms: Solzhenitsyn's Two Centuries Together, Part 12 Peter Brooke 33 BBC Anti-Semitism? Editorial 39rnrnAthol Books: The Heresiarch:rnrnhttp://www.atholbooks.org http://heresiarch.orgrnrnThere is a great deal of interesting reading. Go surf and see!rnrnSales:rnrnhttps://www.atholbooks-sales.orgrnrnChurch & State Editor: Pat MaloneyrnrnISSN: 0332-3625rnrnAll Correspondence should be sent to:rnrnP. Maloney, 26 Church Avenue, Roman Street, Cork City. TEL: 021-4676029rnrnSUBSCRIPTIONS: €20 (Sterling £16) for 4 issues ELECTRONIC SUBSCRIPTIONS: €8 (Sterling £6)rnrnCheques/postal orders payable to ATHOL BOOKS please from athol-st@atholbooks.orgrnrn3 The Baath despotism was continuously active in those ten years, repairing the damage done by democratic bombing.rnrnThen, after ten years, the leading democracies decided to destroy the Iraqi State—which had refused to lie down and die, despite everything thrown at it. US/UK invaded, with an opening display of “shock and aweâ€, and boasted that it was the greatest manifestation of military power ever seen in the world. And they called on the Shia population to come out in rebellion against the Sunni population on which the regime was chiefly founded. The Christian population, which was well represented in the Baath regime, was taken no account of by the West. Years of mayhem fuelled by Ameranglianincited religious conflict followed, in the name of Democracy. And out of it came the strong movement for the restoration of a general Islamic State, organised as a Caliphate, and founded on Sharia Law. It was an outcome that was consistent with the destruction of the Baath State, insisted upon by the leading democracies.rnrnThe Irish Government facilitated the assault on Iraq, and Martin Mansergh, a Junior Minister, apologised for the fact that the Irish had sold beef to the Saddam regime.rnrnSome years later Mansergh seemed to acknowledge that Democracy was not exportable, and was not something that one State could successfully impose on another. In practical politics it follows from that concession that Democracy should recognise the legitimacy of functional States which the idealists of Democracy see as Despotisms.rnrnBut such a recognition is not possible in the political ideology of the West, as produced under American hegemony since 1945, which is best described as democratist authoritarianism, in which the advocacy of Democracy in the form of party-political antagonism is usually an instrument of political destruction.rnrnIraq had not yet recovered from the destructive Democratic invasion or the caricature of Democracy that it brought with it. And, insofar as it has been made functional to a degree, it is through the involvement of Iran in its affairs on a basis of Shia affinity.rnrnThat Iranian involvement in a neighbouring state, which had been reduced to a shambles by foreign democratic invasion, is seen as terrorism by American eyes, and eyesrnrnthat see what America sees. There is some international concern about the American murder of its General Suleimani while he was on a peace mission in Iraq, but only on utilitarian grounds: it may provoke a reaction that will wipe out British interests in the Middle East. On moral grounds it is seen as entirely the right thing to have done.rnrnSuleimani was scarcely heard of in the West until he was murdered, but the murder triggered off an immediate campaign of demonization of a ‘monster’ who had “left a trail of blood across the Middle Eastâ€, as Channel 4 put it.rnrnTony Blair collaborated actively with George Bush in the destruction of the functional Iraqi State for no good reason. A million people in Britain demonstrated against making war on Iraq when it was seen to be on the cards. But, after the appalling consequences of the invasion were there plainly in view or all to see, Blair won a General Election.rnrnWhen he was obliged to give up the Prime Ministership under a prior agreement with Gordon Brown, he made a number of retirement speeches, to his Constituency Party and in interviews on BBC. In these speeches he was anxious that certain truths about the British State should not be forgotten by his party. The most important of them was that “Britain is a war-fighting stateâ€. There was no record of any disagreement expressed by his hearers.rnrnA big issue for Jeremy Corbyn, pressed on him, by media interviewers and commentators more than by Tory politicians, was whether he would push the Button. And it is a vital question now being put to candidates to succeed him.rnrnThe question as put is incoherent. Circumstances are never specified.rnrnThe pertinent form of the question is whether a candidate for the Prime Ministership would launch nuclear bombs against an enemy which was pressing hard against Britain with an army fighting with conventional weapons—would Britain be the first to use nuclear weapons.rnrnThe Soviet Union won its defensive war against Nazi Germany with conventional weapons. It was therefore a very powerful force in central Europe at the end of the War. (And, if Russia had not held out against the German attack and pushed it back, Germanyrnrnwould certainly not have been defeated by Britain.)rnrnThe United States won its war against Japan with nuclear weapons.rnrnRussia had no sooner defeated Germany in the Summer of 1945 than its nominal allies since 1941 treated it as an enemy, and a new war was budding in Anglo-American relations with Russia.rnrnAs a consequence of defeating Germany, Russia had the strongest land army in the world. But there was a period when the democratic West (the USA) possessed the weapon of indiscriminate mass destruction. And there were influential advocates of a liberaldemocratic war of mass destruction against the Soviet Union. The famous liberal-democratic philosopher Bertrand Russell was a public advocate of it: The West should use its monopoly of nuclear weapons to overcome the conventional Soviet Army, and destroy the evil that had sprouted in Russia in 1917 and that had been brought into central Europe by the Second World War. If that was done the world could then settle down in Peace and Harmony!rnrnOthers were probing possibilities behind the scenes.rnrnBut, before anything was done, the Soviet Union made its own nuclear weapon in 1948. The utilitarian moral calculus then indicated a very different policy. Russell became a franticrnrnpacifist.rnrnIn the long run the stand-off position of MAD was established—Mutually Assured Destruction. Each side would be capable of annihilating the other and would be well-informed about what the other was doing, and in the looming shadow of the general destruction of civilisation there would be peace.rnrnBut the NATO position, as far as we recall, was based on the First –Strike option, which in practice assumed that a conventionally-armed enemy was on the point of winning. Is such a position imaginable with regard to Britain today? Where is such an enemy to be found?rnrnBut the sovereign power in the West is America. All else is derivative from American Power. And in America the popular slogan at one time was Better Dead Than Red.rnrnAmerica was the salt of the Earth. The Earth would be tasteless without it. If the American mission in the worldinherited from the English Puritanism in which it originated—was in seriousrnrn4 danger of failing, it would be better that civilisation in general should be destroyed.rnrnThat is in the spirit of absolute Millenarian sovereignty brought into world affairs by the fundamentalist English breakaway five hundred years ago from the pragmatic European consensus of a thousand years.rnrnEurope existed in a long-term dynamic of conflict between Church and State—Papacy and Empire. England withdrew and formed itself into an Empire in which Church and State were one, and Good and Evil were determined exclusively by the interests of the State. A Protestant Archbishop of Dublin three hundred years ago, William King, gave lucid expression to this view of the world in his Problem Of Evil. Evil, he said, was whatever obstructed the Will. And that is exactly how America sees it today. And Europe, which is a product of American will, and has no will of its own, dare not see it differently.rnrnP.S.rnrnIran responded to the murder of its senior Government Minister by firing missiles close to American bases in Iraq, apparently taking care to avoid causing American casualties. It called this “a slap in the face†for the murder. America declared a No-Fly Zone over Iran, indicating that it was planning an attack. Shortly afterwards a Ukrainian air-liner was shot down after taking off from Teheran Airport. The Iranian Government put this down to some sort of malfunction in the plane. The US said it had been shot down by Iranian forces. Iran denied this—as the US always does on such occasions. A couple of days later it admitted that such was the case.rnrnThe explanation seems to be that the Iranian defences forces were on hairtrigger alert because of the American threat of obliteration, and that the airliner veered off course for some reason, was approaching the Headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard, was taken to be an enemy object and destroyed.rnrnIranian Professor Seyed Mohammed Marandi appeared on Newsnight the day before Iran admitted the defence error. The BBC interviewer (Mark Urban) was greatly irritated by his insistence on giving intelligible answers to the questions put to him. He said it seemed possible that the plane could have been shot down by mistake, and explained the condition of a state under threat of obliteration by the US, which had thernrnpower to do what it threatened. Things came to a head in this way:rnrn“Professor Marandi: In the Iran/Iraq war the US downed an Iranian airliner and weaponised it against Iran. Admission the US did it only came years later… Urban: They did eventually pay full compensation. Marandi: Yes, but it was way too late. And they never apologised. And the compensation was almost nothing compared to the compensation they paid to Westerners. Back then Iran was blamed. And in this case the United States threatens to obliterate Iraq. And so the country is on a high state of alert. They assassinate. They murder. They carry out an act of war. And no one in Europe condemns it. Everyone condones it.â€rnrnUrban cut across his interviewer at this point, making his sentence unintelligible except for the last few words:rnrn“Professor Marandi: …says that the person deserves death.rnrnUrban: He didn’t say that. But look,rnrnProfessor, thank you—Professor Marandi: He did.rnrnUrban: He did not say he deservedrnrnStates in the part of Europe that did not come under the Power that defeated Nazi Germany, but that durability depends on actual subordination to the United States under a general veneer of national sovereignty in the United Nations.rnrnWhen the UN was formed the USA and Russia were exempted from the system of international law it established. Without that exemption it could not have been formed. The exemption was also extended to three other states for diplomatic reasons at the time. It was quite unnecessarily awarded to China, which was then an American client-state.rnrnA system of International Law, which is operated by these states through the Security Council, and from which they are exempt, is an absurdity, and the United States treats it as such. (US Secretary for Defence John Bolton has in the past been eloquent in his ridicule of the UN.)rnrndeath.â€rnrnProfessor Marandi: He did. It’s true.â€rnrnMarandi was not asked to substantiate this assertion, What Urban said next, apparently in response, turned out to be in an interview with somebody else.rnrnThe “he†who was the subject of this exchange was blotted out by Urban’s interjection. It was certainly not the President who did not say that Suleimani deserved death. And is it conceivable that there was any eminent person in the Free World who contradicted its President?rnrnIsrael pioneered the practice of killing Palestinian leaders when they were living in other states, but that is not on a par with what the US has just done. The people Israel murdered were not members of a Government recognised as legitimate by the United Nations.rnrnThere is no precedent for what the United States did—but it sets a precedent. And Democracy is what Democracy does. It was discussed as an abstract ideal by philosophers for about 2,000 years but was generally regarded as not being practicable. It was given actual existence as a mode of government a hundred years ago, but it soon failed in most European states. After the 2 nd World War it was given a more durable existence by the UnitedrnrnInternational Law is a game of make-believe. There is no legal constraint on American action in the world. It regards the world as belonging to it, and is deterred from action only by the existence of effective power of defence by a couple of maverick states out there in the world: Russia, which retains something of the status it gained by destroying Nazi Germany, and China, which slipped out of American clientship by an internal movement that was too vast for America to cope with.rnrnThe only actual defensive power today is nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them to the other side of the world. Voltaire’s joke is no longer a joke: “This animal is dangerous; if attacked it defends itselfâ€. The only effective power of defence is the power to obliterate the enemy who is obliterating you.rnrnThe only state which has used nuclear weapons is the leading democracy, on which the other democracies depend. It used them in 1945, when Japan had been beaten but was delaying acceptance of unconditional surrender. The US saved the lives of some American soldiers by the mass killing of Japanese civilians.rnrnFantasists of International Law say that the killing of civilians in an enemy country to save the military cost of conquest is a war-crime. But Geoffrey Robertson QC, the great enthusiast of International Law, givesrnrn5 some recognition to the pragmatics of the situation:rnrn“The nuclear bomb has been unlawful ever since its drop in 1945 proved massively, indiscriminately and environmentally damaging. The first use at Hiroshima was certainly justifiable on the grounds of military necessity, since nothing less than a demonstration of the annihilating power would move Emperor Hirohito to even contemplate surrender. It incinerated thousands, but it saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Allied forces, as well as Japanese soldiers and civilians who would otherwise have been killed. The second bomb on Nagasaki three days later may not strictly have been necessary and should have been dropped elsewhere than on a city, but it does seem to have been a crunch for Japanese capitulation, which came five days afterwards†(Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle For Global Justice, 2006 edition, p219).rnrnThe mass killing of civilians to hasten surrender by the enemy was justifiable! Not a word was said about it at the Nuremberg Trials, which Robertson sees as having established functional International Law. Irish opinion at the time was sceptical of the Nuremberg pretensions. So was a senior American Judge who refused to take part in them, describing them as Lynch Law.rnrnIt is undoubtedly the case that many people killed by Lynch Law can be seen as having deserved killing. The case against is that it is not law. And the case for law is certainly not that it never kills people who do not deserve killing. But where one State passes judgement on the leaders of another State which it has destroyed by war, judgement by law is not a practical possibility.rnrnThe Americans at Nuremberg did not find the Germans guilty by establishing a system of law to which it was itself also subject. It just killed the leaders of a vanquished enemy.rnrnThe defendants were not tried under a previously-established law, and thy were not allowed to plead in their defence the precedents set by the conduct of the States for which the Judges were acting.rnrnOver forty years later, when the US and UK decided to destroy the Iraqi State, they did not act even under the make-believe law of the United Nations. France would not let them, So they raised what President Bush called a Posse Of The Willing (in which Irelandrnrnwas reluctantly willing) and went about the business in disregard of the UN.rnrnIn the 1930s De Valera took the League of Nations in earnest, only to find that it had been reduced to a sham—by the Super State of the period, on which the League’s reality depended, which was Britain. And he warned that it was a dangerous sham because of the illusions it generated. That is the case with the UN today—as American politicians sometimes explain when itrnrnserves their purpose.rnrnAs we go to print the British Ambassador to Iran has been called to account in Teheran for taking part in an anti-Government demonstration. Whitehall immediately condemned that admonition as a breach of International Law. It never described the murder of senior Iraqi and Iranian Government Ministers in Iraq as a breach of International Law!rnrnrnContentsrnrnrnIRAN: Reflections On Money And Power. Editorial rnThe ‘Apartheid Made Me’ Rabbi And Jews Who Actually Fought Racism: Considerations about Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism, as alleged by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis. Manus O'Riordan rnOrwell, Ireland and the War. The View from Airstrip Two. Part 2 Martin Tyrrell rnVox Pat: Gay Byrne; Marian Finucane; Babies in Boxes? FF Reverts To Its Roots? Irish Cardinal? Round And About; Education Trends? Hedge Schools; In Church; The Headlines; Idealistic, Generous, Selfless . . . Penal Laws Once More; Magic 17,40 Commemmorating The RIC? Editorial rnCasement: Concerning The Black Diaries Jack Lane rnConverts? Some Reminiscences Wilson John Haire rnNamed And Blamed. Wilson John Haire (Poem) rnUlster Protestants And False Memory Brendan Clifford rnReliquiae Baxteriana: From Baxter To Boston Stephen Richards rnMore On The Pogroms: Solzhenitsyn's Two Centuries Together, Part 12 Peter Brooke rnBBC Anti-Semitism? Editorial rnrnrnSales:rnrnhttps://www.atholbooks-sales.orgrnrnChurch & State Editor: Pat MaloneyrnrnISSN: 0332-3625rnrnAll Correspondence should be sent to:rnrnP. Maloney, 26 Church Avenue, Roman Street, Cork City. TEL: 021-4676029rnrnSUBSCRIPTIONS: €20 (Sterling £16) for 4 issues ELECTRONIC SUBSCRIPTIONS: €8 (Sterling £6)rnrnCheques/postal orders payable to ATHOL BOOKS please from athol-st@atholbooks.orgrnrn |
