Stop this trashing of monuments - and of our past

The Cenotaph, Britain’s memorial in Whitehall to her dead of the two world wars, has been boarded up to protect it from desecration during the demonstrations this weekend. The statues of Winston Churchill, Sir Robert Peel, Henry Dundas, Earl Haig and others have been defaced.

A mob threw a statue into Bristol Harbour. William Gladstone has been expunged from Liverpool University. Captain Cook, Sir Francis Drake, Clive of India: all and many more are under threat. The Mayor of London – never one to miss a chance to grandstand – is setting up a commission to remove more memorials, as are 130 Labour-led councils.

Robert Baden-Powell, the hero of the Siege of Mafeking and founder of the Scouting movement, is under threat in Poole. Maps of the statues of other imperial heroes are being published on Leftist websites to encourage attacks, and the museum curator Madeline Odent – yes, a museum curator – has posted advice on the best acids for destroying bronze statues.

The culture war that many of us have been predicting ever since our imperial past started to be routinely trashed in our schools has now begun in earnest. (One of the ringleaders of the Bristol mob was a teacher, unsurprisingly.)

For decades now, the Left-dominated educational establishment have been intent on trying to make us ashamed of the British Empire, and to despise our forefathers for building and defending it.

People who think this latest campaign is primarily about either statues or the slave trade, and will therefore end once slavers’ statues are removed, are deluding themselves.

King George III signed the legislation into law that abolished the slave trade more than two centuries ago in 1807, yet there have still been calls to remove his bust from a churchyard in Lincoln.

Cecil Rhodes – contrary to what one ignoramus on a Radio 4 vox pop recently asserted – never bought or sold a slave in his life, yet we have been given orders that he ‘must fall’. This is thus not principally about slavery – it is about a much wider issue than that.

Of course black lives matter greatly, but so does our national identity, and they do not need to be in conflict. Nobody alive today knows anyone who knew anyone who knew anyone who was a slave of the British Empire, so this ought to be a discussion that can be conducted with rationality and evidence, not by anarchy and mob rule. The discussion about Churchill’s attitude to the native peoples of the British Empire, for example, is a nuanced one that cannot be summed up by three words spray-painted on his statue.

He undoubtedly made remarks and the occasional joke about non-white people that today we would find completely unacceptable, although it is worth pointing out that he also made equally or more disparaging remarks about Europeans too. Unlike Karl Marx, Churchill never used the N-word, which dyed-in-the-wool racists tended to in those days.

When Churchill was at school, Charles Darwin was still alive, and people believed that a hierarchy of races was scientific fact, however obscene and ludicrous we know that to be today. Yet throughout his life, Churchill fought to protect the non-white peoples of the Empire, and was proud of the way that Indians’ life expectancy doubled and their population massively increased under British rule.

He considered it his lifelong duty to try to improve the lives of the Empire’s native peoples. Black lives mattered to Winston Churchill. For Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu to denounce ‘the way he used his privilege, power and influence to cause untold misery and atrocities on non-white nations’ betrays an utter lack of understanding of the altruism that underpinned much of the imperial story.

To wrench historical figures out of their historical contexts and expect them to hold modern views on issues such as race is anyhow absurd. People’s reputations are being trashed for holding opinions that a large majority of people held at the time – essentially for being insufficiently woke. Even Mahatma Gandhi held what to us today are extremely offensive views about black Africans.

How to reconcile all this? By using our common sense. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ writes L. P. Hartley in The Go-Between. ‘They do things differently there.’ If we allow our statues and memorials and place names to be torn down because of our present-day views – and because some people claim to be offended by parts of our built environment that have been around for decades and sometimes centuries – it speaks to a pathetic lack of confidence in ourselves as a nation.

We are on the way to a society of competing victimhoods, atomised and balkanised into ever smaller communities, which, ironically enough, is something that racists want, too. The inescapable truth is that throughout history, nations have aspired to build empires, and that is not just true of white Europeans. The Hittites, Mongols, Aztecs, Zulus, Ottomans, and so many more throughout history – all built great empires and were not white Europeans. Many lasted much longer than the British Empire, although none was larger. Yet where is the Zulu who is ashamed of Shaka? The Mongolian who bemoans Genghis? The Uzbek who apologises for Tamerlane? The virus of self-hatred seems to be almost solely reserved for the English-speaking peoples. Where are the Italians who feel no pride in the Roman Empire?

Very often the facts used to justify tearing down statues are faulty, and the reasoning against natural justice. William Gladstone did not own or trade slaves, even if his father did. The activist Afua Hirsch wants Nelson taken down from Trafalgar Square because, although he didn’t buy or sell slaves either, he supported the trade when it was perfectly legal to do so.

Even though it was an unimportant part of his life – Nelson was put on the column because he saved the nation at Trafalgar – his memorialising has to be seen solely through the prism of race.

For the British Left, the Chinese Cultural Revolution is not so much a warning as a template. The Left cannot believe its luck that Tories seem so unwilling to denounce this lunacy, and to fight back. So we must put up with the destruction, driven in large part by ignorant, angry, woke under-30s who hate Britain’s past because they were never taught it objectively, snowflakes who can’t stand the fact that they live in a country full of history, some of it bad, most of it glorious.

Not to mention the Left’s mirror image on the extreme Right, who also hate Churchill because he defeated their fascist ideology.

Nobody in modern British society is valued or respected any the less because of a statue that was put up 100 years ago. We do not have to agree with everything done by those who came before us, but we should try to understand them, just as we hope that those who come after will try to understand us.

Fortunately, most British people are shocked and repulsed by this assault on the nation’s statues. Only 13 per cent supported the destruction in Bristol. So bring on the culture war. Even with the Left-wing media, academia, teaching unions and yobs with spray-paint against them, the British people will win, so long as the debate is conducted in a rational way rather than by the mob rule seen in recent days. We demand an end to this trashing of our monuments and of our past.

SOURCE 






PETER HITCHENS: As the Left now controls every lever of power, we face nothing less than regime change

What we now face is regime change. That is why these strange crowds have begun to gather round ancient and forgotten monuments, demanding their removal and destruction.

They do not know what they want, or understand what they are destroying. But that no longer matters. They think their moment has come, and they may well be right.

This is why the memorial to Winston Churchill, and the Cenotaph itself, were shamefully boarded up on Thursday night – an act of appeasement if ever there truly was one.

That is why police chiefs kneel like conquered slaves to the new gods of woke, and the leaders of the Labour Party do likewise. I have seen it happen before, but only when things were moving in the opposite direction.

Then, as the Soviet Empire fell and an evil thing was swept from the world, it was a matter for rejoicing. The bloody mass murderer Vladimir Lenin, and his equally gory secret police enforcer Felix Dzerzhinsky, were pulled from their pedestals by a people sick of being ruled by their heirs.

This time, as ignorant armies seek the final abolition of Britain, it is very frightening. I would not like to say where it will end. I cannot claim to have known this would happen but I will say that I had an instinctive fear of very bad things to come when the country began its mad, wild shutdown in March.

I have learned over many years to trust my instincts, to take that train, to make that phone call, to turn that corner. When I have heeded them I have either benefited or been saved from bad things. When I have ignored them I have been hurt. It may be inherited from our forebears, or learned by decades of experience. It may be a mixture of the two.

But on crucial occasions we know more than we think we do. And as the cities began to darken and empty, and the world as we knew it started to close, I feared that we should never again see the lights lit again as they had been before. It was like the start of a great war without limit, made more perplexing because there was no obvious end to it, ever.

This was not just about a disease and a wholly overdone response to it. It was like the death of Princess Diana and the fall of the Twin Towers gathered together into a single great mass of unreason and panic.

The Diana episode had been a Dictatorship of Grief, in which even the most revered parts of the establishment had bowed to the mob. ‘Show us you care!’ shouted the headlines. And woe betide those who did not.

Then came September 11, 2001, and a Dictatorship of Security. No argument could withstand the claim that safety was paramount, and we willingly made a bonfire of our freedoms, wrongly persuaded that we could trust our governments not to take advantage.

And now we have the Dictatorship of Fear. It is not the largely fictional ‘R’ number which governs the behaviour of our feeble Government, which is only just beginning to grasp how much damage it has done and how hard it will be to repair. It is the ‘F’ number, the number of people scared into pathetic timidity by the slick but false claim we were all at risk from a terrible and devastating disease.

The numbers of dead are grossly inflated by an incredibly lax recording system, which does not distinguish between those who died of Covid-19 and those who died of other things but may have been infected by it. Many who have died of Covid-19 are almost certainly victims of the Government’s failure to protect those who were in fact most vulnerable – the residents of care homes.

The sad but unavoidable fact, that the disease is little danger to most young and healthy people but is especially deadly to the old and ill, is also now beyond dispute.

The initial claims of Imperial College London, that half a million might die if strict shutdown measures were not taken, have been devastatingly dismantled by other experts, who believe its methods and codes are, to put it mildly, hopelessly wrong.

Yet Imperial’s chief spokesman, Professor Neil Ferguson (caught ignoring his own advice with a girlfriend), has the double nerve to claim the rules he flouted should have been introduced even earlier. By contrast, Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, says that the shutdown should be lifted immediately.

Thanks to the barefaced dishonesty and unlawful bias of the BBC, and also the pitifully bad coverage of several newspapers, millions are unaware the whole basis of Government policy is now completely exploded by scientific experts. Even the truth about Sweden, which did not shut down, is obscured by incessant hostile reporting.

Sweden followed Britain in one thing – failing to protect care homes, and so it has had a higher death toll than it should have done. But even so, its experience – along with Japan – shows clearly that there is no link between shutdown and the number of deaths suffered.

The ceaseless assumption of the Government and the BBC that the shutdown ‘protected’ the NHS is simply not borne out by any facts. The NHS was never going to be overwhelmed. Covid deaths in this country peaked on April 8 – an event far too soon to have been caused by the shutdown announced on March 23 and begun the following day.

In fact, the country with the highest number of deaths per head is Belgium (843 per million). Yet Belgium introduced one of the tightest and most severe shutdowns on the planet. Sweden, without a shutdown at all, has suffered 472 deaths per million.

The UK figure of 620 per million may be inflated by our lax recording methods but hardly suggests that we did better than Sweden by throttling our economy and grossly interfering in personal liberty. Japan, which also did not shut down, suffered just over seven (yes, seven) deaths per million.

It is as if some establishments, including our own, wanted a crisis and used their control of information to achieve one. And still it continues. As of tomorrow, in a symbolic moment never to be forgotten, users of trains and buses will be compelled to wear muzzles or forbidden to travel.

The legal basis for this is highly doubtful. The medical basis for it is more doubtful still. These muzzles have been described as being as much use against a microscopic virus as a chain-link fence would be against mosquitoes.

As the distinguished pathologist Dr John Lee asked, after examining the evidence for and against, ‘does any of what is out there add up to a watertight case for compelling people to wear masks in public or at work (outside a healthcare setting)? The threshold for compulsion must surely be higher than “maybe” and “perhaps.’”

I am fairly sure these measures, like the house arrest and sunbathing bans which came before, have another purpose. They accustom us to being told what to do. Stand there. Wait there. Don’t use cash. Don’t cross that line. They permanently change the relationship bet­ween the individual and the state.

Not only can the Government now tell us where we must live and when or if we can go out. Not only can it tell us who we can sleep with (apart from Professor Ferguson, who is still allowed to pontificate after brazenly breaking these rules). It can now even tell us what to wear.

This is something I have not had to endure since my schooldays. What is even more startling is that it can tell me what to wear on my head and on my face, which is somehow even more personal and more intrusive.

I well remember the moment of liberation on the day I left my Devon preparatory school for the last time, and hurled my annoying cap from a high viaduct (it was a school tradition) as the train took me towards the grown-up world I longed to join.

All subsequent efforts to get me to wear such a thing failed. As soon as this lockdown began I could see most of this coming. It was clearly a revolution. And as the long weeks dragged by, something else became clear. The actual time it was taking was important.

During these long dreamy weeks we have bit by bit forgotten who we were before, how we lived, what we thought, what we expected of life. I believe that forces hostile to our country, its history and nature, have seen this as an opportunity. Probably incredulous to begin with, they realised the British people really had gone soft, accepting absurd and humiliating diktats, believing the most ridiculous claims.

They also noticed that formerly great institutions and forces – the church, Parliament, the police, the armed services, much of Fleet Street, the universities – submitted to it without so much as a sigh. So did what remained of our great industrial and commercial companies.

There was, on top of this, an increasingly feverish atmosphere. Deprived of normal routines and circles of friendship, many people became strained and suggestible.

They were discontented but not allowed to protest against the thing which was oppressing them, the shutdown, since from every quarter they were told it was justified. Almost any spark could have ignited this rich mixture.

As it happens, it was the death in Minneapolis, a city most British people will never even see, of George Floyd. Seeing the surging crowds, the rioting and the looting in the USA, the British radical Left grew jealous.

They imported the protest, converted it into outrage against some mouldering statues, and set the streets alight. Last week I attended one of these demonstrations, against the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford. I have lived in Oxford for more than 50 years and I went out of interest, not because I care especially about this mediocre sculpture of a questionable man.

The event was utterly incoherent, moving from vague rage against the long-dead Rhodes to concerns about the oppression of West Papua to shouts against colonialism. As far as I know, China is the only major colonial power left. Peking is certainly raping Africa on a scale Cecil Rhodes never dreamed of.

But such people can’t quite bring themselves to attack that particular regime. Sometimes I think the radical Left are more nostalgic for the British Empire than any retired Indian Army colonel ever was.

They need it, to hate it. Its utter deadness is a nuisance to them. I became briefly famous because, when the crowd were invited to sit down for eight minutes and 46 seconds, with fists clenched, to commemorate Mr Floyd, I did not join in. One of the protesters accused me of refusing to ‘take the knee’.

It is true I would have refused to do so if asked, but in fact they were ‘taking the buttock’, a slightly different thing. The important thing about these protesters, lauded by the Labour Party and deferred to by police chiefs, is that they help to strengthen the new establishment and destroy the old one.

They have already helped to make it very hard for traditional, normal, Christian conservative and patriotic opinions to be expressed at all. By using social media as a form of discipline, they have made everyone – including the Left-wing multimillionaire author J.K. Rowling – fear them.

Anyone, as she learned last week, can now be ‘cancelled’ – the new radicals’ chilling word for the obliteration they like to visit on their victims. She has been pursued for saying the wrong thing about the transgender issue. In fact, there is no right thing. I have known for years it was futile to try to respond with fairness and reason to the new orthodoxy.

However carefully and generously I might argue, I would still be denounced for thought crime. You cannot be right, nor can you know if you are right. That is a large part of the trick.

No actual debate can take place in these conditions. And where there is no debate there is no freedom. I have also pointed out for years – without effect – that the police were long ago infiltrated with radical Left-wing thought.

I warned of Cressida Dick in 2004, noticing her early experiments in ‘negotiating’ with demonstrators rather than reclaiming the streets from them, and predicting that she would be the first female Metropolitan Police Commissioner.

I pointed out that Labour’s smoothie Mandelsonian and Blairite Eurocommunists were far more dangerous than Jeremy Corbyn’s crude and obvious Marxism.

Now, when Sir Keir Starmer (another one of those who dallied with a Trotskyist sect in the 1980s) kneels in supplication to the new orthodoxy, who wants to tell me he is a ‘moderate’?

People thought this frothing, intolerant Leftism did not matter or was a minor issue on the edge of our society. But in fact it was the first wave of a new orthodoxy which will shortly be dominating all our lives. And it is the Covid frenzy which has made its final triumph much closer.

For the Tory Party – in office but not in power – has over the past few months done the militant Left a huge favour. It has destroyed itself – voters will not forgive the mess it has made of their lives and of the economy, especially when they get the bill and the inevitable public inquiry reveals just how wrong they were.

The Johnson Government is now just keeping Downing Street warm for Sir Keir and his Blairite legions. But this will be far worse than 1997, when the Blairites moved softly and cautiously, nervous that they might rouse the Forces of Conservatism.

For the past few weeks have also demonstrated that all the pillars of British freedom and civilisation are hollow and rotten, and that we are ripe for a sweeping cultural revolution as devastating as the one Lenin and Dzerzhinsky launched in Petrograd in 1917.

Except that this time there will be no need to storm the Winter Palace, seize the railway station or the telephone exchange or the barracks. The Left are already in control of every lever of power and influence, from the schools the Tories are too weak to reopen to the police, the Civil Service, the courts and the BBC.

It is regime change. Do not worry too much about the statues which are now coming down. They mean surprisingly little. Worry more about the ones they are soon going to be putting up, and what they will represent. Perhaps our grandchildren will find the courage to pull them down.

SOURCE 





I did not kill George Floyd

The attempt to hold all whites responsible for the death of Floyd shows what a dead-end woke politics is.

There’s a new sin. Forget gluttony. Forget sloth. The great moral error today is whiteness. To be white is to be fallen. Whiteness has become a kind of original sin, an inherited moral defect one must atone for throughout one’s life. In the wake of the brutal execution of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, this almost religious treatment of whiteness as an existential flaw has gone uber-mainstream.

Listen to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yesterday he called on ‘white Christians’ to ‘repent of our own prejudices’. Repent, ye sinners! Or if you prefer your leaders to be secular, how about the high priestess of middle-class decency, Nigella Lawson, who instructs her fellow white people to ‘acknowledge [that] systematic racism exists’ and that we are ‘complicit in it’. That brutal killing in Minneapolis – it’s your doing, white people.

Or read Time, the most mainstream magazine in existence. ‘White people’, says one of its contributors, ‘have inherited this house of white supremacy, built by their forebears and willed to them’. Inherited. The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son. The Time writer says white racism is a spectrum, stretching from those white people who tell a black woman ‘how pretty our hair looks when we wear it straight’ to ‘the more extreme end of the spectrum… cops literally suffocating black people like George Floyd as they beg for their lives’.

To compare a compliment about a woman’s hair to the merciless killing of Floyd is deeply disturbing. It sanitises the crime committed against Floyd and debases his suffering by putting it on a par with a mere uninvited compliment. It also confirms how thoroughly whiteness has been pathologised in mainstream ideology. What was once said about black men – that it is problematic when they compliment women of another race and that their racial make-up drives them towards murderous behaviour – is now said about white men. Perhaps someone can explain how replacing one form of racial fatalism with another is progressive.

Whiteness-as-sin is everywhere. ‘White America, if you want to know who’s responsible for racism, look in the mirror’, cries the Chicago Tribune. ‘White people, you are the problem’, it continues, in case you didn’t get its message that this sinful race, these fallen people, are the scourge of our time.

‘I’m talking about white people’, said James Corden in his monologue on The Late Late Show on Monday. ‘This is our problem to solve’, he said of the murder of Floyd and the problem of racism. White people, all of you, you did this. This is how mainstream the pathologisation of whiteness has become: it is now beamed into suburban living rooms across the US by famously inoffensive TV hosts. A white man telling white people about the sins of white complicity – this is, at the very least, an extremely odd state of affairs.

Let’s be clear about what is happening here: this is an effort to establish racial collective guilt for the murderous suffocation of George Floyd. There are two problems with this approach. The first is that collective guilt on the basis of racial origin is always a wicked ideology to pursue. Whether it’s Jews being held collectively guilty of the alleged excesses of ‘rich Jews’ or blacks being collectively punished for the offences of individual black people, such racial extrapolation always leads to prejudice and suffering. There is a twisted irony in the fact that so many commentators and activists who pose as anti-racist are promoting the ideology of collective racial guilt in response to the killing of George Floyd.

The second problem with this sweeping anti-white reaction to Floyd’s death, and with the pathologisation of whiteness more broadly, is that it acts as a distraction from the real problems facing the US and other societies. Collectivising the crime committed by four police officers in Minneapolis turns attention away from the specificity of police brutality and of structural disarray in modern America, in favour of pursuing a blanket suspicion of all whites. The problem is dissipated, then obscured. We are implicitly discouraged from seriously analysing specific residual political problems in the United States in favour of joining in the thrill-inducing project of bashing all whites.

It is important to understand where this distracting moral project comes from. It is an outlook of the privileged elites, very often white elites. It comes from academia, from the media class, from the younger members of the political establishment. For years now, these privileged elites have promoted hostility to whiteness.

They have projected the sins of the past on to whites living today, claiming that white people are the beneficiaries of slavery and colonialism. They have pushed the ideology of ‘white complicity’ (that is, all whites bear responsibility for racial crimes) and ‘white fragility’ (that is, any white who pushes back against this idea of collective racial guilt is showing his moral weakness). They have encouraged the checking of one’s white privilege, which is really a modern form of penance.

Anyone who thought the cranky woke idea of privilege-checking was confined to PC campuses will have had a rude awakening over the past few days. We’ve had the Archbishop of Canterbury promoting a Christian version of white self-correction. And anyone who has seen the incredibly creepy videos showing groups of white people begging black people for forgiveness for the historic crimes of racism or chanting in a massive crowd about how they will do better in future will know that privilege-checking has become the new religion. Original sin, repentance, public self-flagellation – it has it all.

Anti-whiteness comes from the top. It is most pronounced among privileged whites. It has nothing in common with the noble struggles for racial equality in the past. Rather, it expresses the nihilism and fatalism of the contemporary liberal elites and intellectual classes. It is self-loathing disguised as radicalism. It is not the friend, by any stretch of the imagination, of black people or white people. On the contrary, it condemns both to an interminable status quo in which the former must perform the role of perennial victim and the latter must engage in penitence, publicly and noisily, forever. Elite fatalism sees no way out of inequality or injustice, precisely because it has reimagined these things as ‘traits’, as the Chicago Tribune puts it, of racial behaviour. All it can envisage is a technocratic system of racial management in which black victims are encouraged to speak and weep and whites are encouraged to listen and repent. Like a forever truth and reconciliation commission.

It is striking that where past black campaigners for racial equality spoke in terms of visions, dreams, better futures in which things would be different, today’s self-styled correctors of white privilege can only obsess over the past. History is their stomping ground. Slavery and colonialism are their obsessions. A writer for Slate says these things are America’s ‘original sin’ and George Floyd’s murder shows that they infect us still. This sums up the fatalism of the new racial guardians. In describing racism as America’s ‘original sin’, they utterly demean the agency of the black people, and white people, who fought for rights and equality over the centuries and who tangibly changed America for the better. Worse, they lock America into racial permanence, into round after round of racial accusation and racial repentance, into a never-ending self-whipping for the inherited sins of the past. It is an entirely dispiriting ideology that offers nothing whatsoever to blacks and whites fighting for freer, better futures.

This is why corporate America and the new political elites have no problem at all with the woke ideology of pathologised whiteness. In fact they embrace it. In recent days some of the most powerful corporations in the US have commented on the problem of ‘white supremacy’. Leaders and officials in Minneapolis and elsewhere initially refused to condemn rioting on the basis that, as white people, it wasn’t their place to do so. The academia-born new racialism can be easily internalised by the capitalist and political elites because it poses no threat whatsoever to their influence over society. On the contrary, in dissipating the problems of racism and social inequality, in personalising these things and reducing them to ‘traits’ that exist across the whole of society, the woke ideology takes the heat off the powers-that-be and even creates a space for them to perform their penitence and advertise their awareness and in the process become part of the ‘saved’ people. It empowers them.

This is the great tragedy in the US right now. People are on the streets marching and arguing for some kind of change, but the dominant political ideology and language of our time utterly fails to meet their expectations or even to allow that meaningful change is possible. In accepting today’s ruling-class ideology – the ideology of wokeness and of forever racialism – the leaders of these protests have defeated themselves already. They have embraced an ideology that makes solidarity virtually impossible, by constantly flagging the differential ‘traits’ between blacks and whites, and which elevates backward-looking historic repentance over moving towards a better, wealthier future.

George Floyd’s death has exposed how dominant, destructive and futile the woke worldview has become. Rejecting the new racialism, spurning the woke creed, turning one’s back on elite fatalism that today comes in the garb of caring about black people – these are the preconditions for proper solidarity and real change.

SOURCE 

********************************

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. 
`
************************************