Antisemitic Leftist charity

Israel's ambassador to the UK has criticised Oxfam for selling antisemitic books on its website.

Mark Regev took to Twitter on Friday to post a screenshot of the Oxfam website to his 23,000 followers.

The screenshot showed books for sale including The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an international Jewish NGO, has described as "a classic in paranoid, racist literature".

Mr Regev, previously chief spokesman for the Prime Minister of Israel, tweeted it with the caption: "Why is @OxfamGB selling antisemitic literature?"

The post attracted hundreds of retweets and likes, prompting Oxfam to remove the books from sale and destroy them.

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German Party Wing Under Surveillance

BERLIN-Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said that it would put a group within the nativist AfD opposition party under surveillance as an extremist organization amid rising concern about growing far-right violence in the country.

The measure caps a yearlong investigation and means the agency can start covertly monitoring members of Der Flügel, or The Wing, a network within the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. The surveillance could include tapping phones, monitoring electronic communications, and inserting undercover agents into the network.

“This is a warning to all enemies of democracy,“ Thomas Haldenwang, head of the intelligence agency, told journalists on Thursday.

The decision is a setback for the AfD, the federal parliament’s largest opposition party, which had long criticized the probe. While nationalists have gradually increased their influence in the party over more moderate voices, the AfD still paints itself as a conservative yet reputable alternative to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union.

Some AfD leaders have stirred controversy with comments that appeared to play down Nazi-era crimes. At the same time, concern about farright extremism rose after a string of politically motivated attacks that have claimed 13 lives in less than a year

The party said that it would challenge the agency’s decision in court.

The agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, keeps a close eye in Germany on extremist groups it sees as posing a danger to democracy. Other groups under surveillance include Islamists, neo-Nazis and far-left extremists.

The Wing doesn’t have formal structures and doesn’t divulge the size of its membership, but the government agency estimates adherents make up about 20% of the AfD’s 35,000-strong membership ranks. The faction has been growing in influence after Björn Höcke, its public figurehead and the AfD chief in the eastern state of Thuringia, won a quarter of the votes at a state election in October.

Nationwide, the AfD scored just under 13% at the last general election, in 2017, and currently polls a few points above this level. It has appealed to voters disappointed by Ms. Merkel’s open-arms asylum policy after more than a million asylum seekers entered Germany in 2015 and 2016.

Other parties have ostracized the anti-Islam AfD and recently accused it of inspireing a series of far-right, racist and anti-Semitic terrorist attacks and foiled conspiracies. The AfD has denied links to the crimes.

But Mr. Haldenwang said pronouncements by Mr. Höcke and his allies-including speeches vilifying Islam, calling for the mass deportation of migrants, and portraying political opponents as enemies of the people-showed it qualified as an extremist group and a threat to the state.

“Right-wing extremism and terrorism are currently the biggest danger in Germany,” Mr. Haldenwang said. “We know now that democracies can fail if they are torn apart from the inside by their enemies.”

The agency estimates there are 32,000 far-right extremists in the country, 13,000 of whom it considers violent.

Mr. Höcke dismissed Mr. Haldenwang’s findings as erroneous and rejected all accusations of extremism.

“The tendentious and onesided interpretations of the agency do not capture what I actually meant to say with the cited quotes,” Mr. Höcke wrote in a statement posted online Thursday. He added: “Some formulations I would not use today and my rhetorical style has generally developed over the years.” Mr. Höcke referred specifically to his past remarks calling for the de-Islamization of Germany, labeling the religion a threat, and denouncing racial diversity.

Mr. Höcke is a deeply polarizing figure here. His supporters celebrate him as a refreshing antiestablishment figure and plain talker not afraid to challenge Ms. Merkel’s liberal views on immigration policy. Detractors see him as a provocateur harboring fascist views.

In a 2017 interviewwith The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Höcke dismissed the notion that Hitler was “absolutely evil.”

“The world has-man has- shades of gray,” Mr. Höcke said when asked about Hitler. “Even the worst severe criminal perhaps has something good, something worth loving, but he is still a severe criminal.”

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Cosmic catastrophe always there if you look for it

In one of his last works, written a decade after he had defined enlightenment as “daring to know”, Immanuel Kant identified what he regarded as one of the greatest threats to reason: the human tendency to seek, in ever-changing realitie­s, a sign of the End of Days.

Some people, he observed, “find those signs in the triumph of injustice, the insolence of the rich, the waning of public trust”; many others “see them in violent and unusua­l changes in nature, in tempests, floods and earthquakes”. Inferring from natural disasters that the world is coming to an end, they abandon their faith in progress and in society’s capacit­y to address the challenges it faces.

Today, apocalyptic thinking sur­rounds us. From bushfires to hail storms, climate change to the coronavirus, every crisis streng­thens the sense of dread and fuels the cry for immediate action to avert unimaginable consequences.

As yet more terrifying images flash on to our screens, panic has become the default response, bringing with it the perception that normality has succumbed to a permanent state of emergency. The only question is whether democracy, with its checks and balances, weighing competing interests and a reluct­ance to make drastic changes, can respond to the threats confronting mankind.

There is, of course, nothing new in the belief that time is running out. A cosmic catastrophe looming at the end of history, a violent struggle between good and evil, and the resolution of that struggle in the destruction of the Earth are recurring elements in the great relig­ions, particularly Christianity.

But in the classic religious model of eschatology, the climax is an adventus, “that which arrives”, and the apocalypse is, literally, the revealing of all things, the manifestation of their essence which lies latent before “that which arrives” opens the way to a new start.

There is, in that sense, an in­extricable connection between revelation and redemption, hope and doom, in which the one gives meaning to the other. And there is also, most starkly in the Pauline portrayal of the apocalypse, the powerful presence of the “katechon” (the being that restrains) who, in the words of Thessalon­ians, holds back “the opponent of the will of God” and prevents “the mystery of lawlessness” from destroyin­g life until the times are ripe for redemption.

In some ways, that model survived­ secularisation, with Marx transposing it into a narrative in which capitalism, as it headed to inevitable collapse, would set the foundations for the final transition from “the realm of necessity” to “the kingdom of freedom”.

But a distinctive aspect of secul­arisation was the emergence of a current of thought which retained all the terror of the apocalyptic ­vision while stripping it of any promise of redemption.

Indeed, Byron, writing in the midst of an unusually cold Swiss summer, gave that current one of its highest literary expressions, castigating man’s destruction of nature. The march towards doom began, his poem “Darkness” says, with people consuming all available resources — the meadows, the forests, the “habitations of all things which dwell”.

Then the symbols of human achievement disappeared, when “palaces” and “thrones” were, in desperation, used as combustibles. And once the institutions of social order had crumbled, humans lost their humanity, as “some lay down / And hid their eyes and wept” while “others fed / Their funeral piles with fuel”.

Finally, in a last horrific step, people were reduced to frantic, senseless beings who, deprived of every natural resource, breached the ultimate taboo and resorted to cannibalism, so that as “men died, their bones tombless as their flesh, / The meagre by the meagre were devour’d”.

Byron was entirely unaware of it, but the freezing days he had experienced­ — in which, at the peak of summer, “the fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles were lighted as at midnight” — were due to the volcano Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, whose eruption in 1815 had ejected immense residues of ash and sulphur into the upper atmosphere.

However, the bleak strain of apocalyptic thought he helped inaugurate­ hardly receded after those residues had subsided. On the contrary, just as socialism’s utopian fantasies flourished, so their dystopian twins experienced periodic renewals, most markedly after each world war.

But the fall of communism changed the picture. With the pros­pect of heaven on earth lost, all that was left of secular fut­urity was the fear of an ending which, from the 1960s on, circled back to Byron’s vision of an impen­ding environmental cataclysm.

That vision has now become an immense global movement. No doubt, its trappings are modern; but its features, particularly in their more extreme forms, are indistinguisha­ble from those the medievalist Norman Cohn identified in the apocalyptic cults of centuries ago.

Like its predecessors, it elevates into dogma deeper forces it claims to have proven for all time and whose manifestations it sees in every event. Like them too, its members believe every decis­ion, rather than requiring a ­balancing of costs and benefits, involves an absolute choice between life and death, perdition and salvation: each lump of coal is a step to the climate apocalypse, every new mine a lurch toward destruction.

And no less similar to earlier doomsday cults is the tendency, which Freud had already noted, for the movement’s leaders — when their strident prophecies go unheeded — to combine the paranoid’s conviction that opponents are not merely ignorant but evil with the narcissist’s acute sense of wounded pride.

Yet perhaps the most enduring feature of the apocalyptic mindset is the disdain for cautious deliberation, and for the democratic decisio­n-making which gives a voice even to those who fail to grasp its hunger for drastic action.

Magnified thousands of times over on social networks, as well as on many media outlets, that mindset, which raises all events into crises­ that demand a war footing, has defined the mood of the age and pervaded every sphere of life.

None of that implies that envir­onmental degradation or viral pandemics should be ignored. But as Kant intuited, when apocalyptic thinking replaces practical reason all that remains is fear itself, with the waves of collective hysteria it generates compounding the problems and making solutions harder and costlier to find.

Little wonder we stagger from panic to panic as if we were always teetering on the brink of extinction. And little wonder governments are under mounting pressure to join the stampede. It may not be the end of times, but it certainly makes one wish for it.

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Coronavirus: it’s fatalities that count, not the numbers infected

When the Japanese bombed Darwin­ in World War II, killing more than 240 people, the Curtin government kept the news quiet for as long as it could. How would panic in Sydney and Melbourne help the war effort?

Truth, they say, is the first casual­ty of war.

In the social-media age every new case of coronavirus, no matter how mild, is pored over with lurid fascination.

As the health and economic ­crisis precipitated by COVID-19 deepens, authorities need to tread a fine line between urging calm, remainin­g publicly optimistic and ensuring people comply with measures to contain the virus.

It might seem like it, but this isn’t the world’s first flu pandemic. In 2009 H1N1 — known as “swine flu” — infected 61 million people and killed about 590,000 globally, 80 per cent of whom were younger than 65.

In 1968, the H3N2 flu killed one million people, including 100,000 in the US, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

About a decade before that, the H2N2 flu pandemic killed 1.1 million people.

None of the previous pandemics caused a recession, let alone a near 30 per cent drop in global stock prices.

This is, however, the first flu ­epidemic where everyone has a digital megaphone.

There’s no reason why this corona­virus should be far more deadly than those previous flu pandemics, provided the death rate ends up lower than feared.

On Friday, there were more than 47,000 people who had contracted COVID-19 outside China, including 128 in Australia.

If the number of infections grows at 15 per cent a day, more than 3.4 million people, including more than 9300 in Australia, will have the virus by Easter. If it grows at 20 per cent, about the average so far, it’ll be 12.6 million and 34,800, respectively. That’s still far fewer than caught swine flu in 2009.

It’s the apparent death rate, espec­ially in Italy, which has struck fear in the community.

The World Health Organisation’s official death rate of just less than 4 per cent for COVID-19 has naturally drawn comparisons with the devastating Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, which killed between­ 50 million and 100 million people globally.

But 3.6 per cent must be an overestimate. Logic dictates many thousands more people have been infected with COVID-19 than the 125,000 official cases. The disease is highly contagious. International travel has only very recently been curtailed.

Most of all, the incentive for someone to volunteer him or herself for testing is very weak. Even in victims, such as Melbourne doctor­ Chris Higgins, in his 70s, who controversially kept working, symptoms can be very mild.

While it might not be in the interest­s of public health for an individu­al with cold or flu-like symptoms, discreet recuperation in ignorance seems a better option than seeking a test.

Quite aside from the hassle and costs of getting a test, a positive finding would cause significant disruption, including potentially forced quarantine or even loss of job.

Telling friends you have a cold, rather than coronavirus, goes down much better at social events.

The number of deaths from COVID-19, more than 4700 glob­ally as of Friday, is therefore a far more reliable and relevant statistic than the number of infections. And this death toll, while sure to surge, is a long way from the millions killed by virulent flu outbursts in the 1950s and 60s, when the economy was booming.

Finally, populations today are far healthier and more resilient than in the aftermath of World War I, before antibiotics existed to cauterise the secondary infections that flu can induce.

“Extrapolating from the mortality­ rates reported for the Spanish flu to 2004, 96 per cent of the projected 50 million to 80 million fatalities worldwide might occur in developing countries,” writes Walter Scheidel in his 2017 economic history of war and disease­, The Great Leveller.

Researchers are much more likely to find a vaccine quickly in 2020 than 1920 too. But what if develop­ed countries can’t control the virus, as China, where infection rates have tapered off, appears to have done?

Health experts have criticised the US and Australia for doing too little too late, failing to cancel large gatherings, close schools, and compel workers to stay at home. “The US response has just been appalling,” says economist Saul Eslake.

“If we can believe the Chinese data, at some point people will draw sharp contrasts between China’s response and how the US has dealt with it, in ways that won’t be helpful to those who believe in the superiority of US-style ­democracy.”

Democracies can’t so easily compel their citizens to quarantine; governments with an eye to re-election want to upset as few voters as possible.

Indeed, large private companies, perhaps fearful of potential lawsuits, have been far stricter in their quarantine and precautionary policies than state and federal governments.

German Chancellor Angel Merkel reckons up to 70 per cent of her country will contract the virus.

Even if the mooted death rate proves an overestimate, widespread contraction of the COVID-19 will cause major economic and social disruption.

How much is impossible to predict­. Economic forecasts, includin­g the effectiveness of the so-called stimulus, are based on what’s happened in the past.

We don’t know household and business spending and investment patterns in the grip of a deadly viral pandemic.

As toilet-paper hoarding illustrates, herd mentality can erupt in unexpected ways.

It remains to be seen whether house prices, which have a much bigger effect on household confid­ence than shares, slump in sympathy with shares.

Central banks, with official rates already practically zero everywhere, are rapidly running out of ammunition to keep proppin­g up asset prices.

The US government, heavily indebted and already borrowing about $US1 trillion ($1.56 trillion) a year, has little scope to introduce a major stimulus package.

If 70 per cent of the over-80s contracted the coronavirus, even with a 2 per cent death rate, almost 14,000 would perish in Australia alone — an extraordinary tragedy. Health workers, hospitals and aged-care homes would come under severe strain.

Severe pandemics, argues Scheidel, for all their horror, have tended to improve income inequalit­y by creating a shortage of workers, increasing wages, while reducing the value of assets, which mainly hurts the rich.

Whatever its ultimate spread, COVID-19, which attacks largely the elderly, appears poised to ­deliver all of the horror and loss of wealth, with no increase in wages.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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