Mystery Solved
Last month I reported the delivery of an empty package. It turns out that it contained a book until it came open during sorting. It was simply a postal malfunction.
Looking Ahead
The UK is afflicted with a viral pandemic and we are about to exit the EU Customs Union and the Single Market. We will eventually recover but we face a challenging future.
Post-pandemic children will need a health and welfare system to look after them for a lifetime. They will need an educational system from nursery school to university. They will need jobs with pensions, and they will need homes that they can afford. To provide these services we will need a government committed to social equality. Boris Johnson has promised 95% mortgages but the banks will not offer mortgages to the unemployed.
In Britain today nursery care is patchy and expensive. Less than half of school pupils go to university and those that do have to pay for it. Jobs worth having are hard to find, pensions are inadequate, and housing is far too expensive.
The Tories are spending money like water during the current pandemic but when we get back to normal they will revert to scrimping on health and education in order to spend more on defence. They are deliberately provoking Russia by sending British troops on exercises to Ukraine. And they take great pride in our new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth. Defence experts doubt the value of 'Big Lizzie' without a full compliment of aircraft or the necessary back up ships. But she shows the flag in foreign parts and that's all the Tories are worried about.
They would like to return to the 'good old days' when Britannia ruled the waves and the workers doffed their caps to their lords and masters.
Years ago we had a run of working class Tory prime ministers. Ted Heath went to his local grammar school, Margaret Thatcher was a grocers daughter, and John Major was a Brixton boy who made good. But those days have gone, Britain is now ruled by Boris Johnson, a multi-millionaire who presides over a wealthy Cabinet. Their slogan "we are all in this together" is a hollow mockery, and those disgruntled Labour Party supporters who voted for them have only themselves to blame.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are due a general election in 2024. By then we should be over the Coronavirus pandemic and our economy should have adjusted to life outside the European Union. The great British public will have another chance to choose a government and we can only hope that they give the matter a little more thought than they did in 2019.
George Orwell's 1940 Review of Hitler's Mein Kampf
(Amazon have banned Mein Kampf but it continues to sell well all over the world).
It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurd and Blackett's unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious intention of the translator's preface and notes is to tone down the book's ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had c rushed the German labour movement and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both Left and Right concurred in the very shallow notion that National Socialism was merely a version of Conservatism.
Then suddenly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all. As one result of this, Hurst and Blackett's edition was reissued in a new jacket explaining that all profits would be devoted to the Red Cross. Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change had taken place in Hitler's aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his worldview doesn't develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics. Probably, in Hitler's own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia's turn will come when England is out of the picture - that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it . Whether it will turn out that way is of course a different question.
Suppose that Hitler's programme could be put into effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of "living room" (ie stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts ) a horrible brainless empire in which essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder. How was it that he was able to put this monstrous vision across? It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. Again, the situation in Germany with its seven million unemployed was obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches... The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs - and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett's edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at: but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim. Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films one sees turn upon some such theme.
Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won't do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth-control and in general common sense, they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin's militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to the people "I offer you a good time." Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation "Greatest happiness of the greatest number" is a good slogan, but at this moment "Better an end with horror than a horror without end" is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
Telling Lies and Acting The Fool
Frankie Howerd used to remind us that "it's wicked to mock the afflicted," but they are so numerous and vocal that one can hardly help it. We are beset by flat-earthers, climate change deniers, multiple conspiracy theorists, historical revisionists, separatists, vaccination refusers and poor demented souls who think that Bill Gates is responsible for the current pandemic.
These paranoid campaigners are not just people with alternative opinions. They are, in the words of Dave Cameron, "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists." There is absolutely no point in arguing with people who believe that the Royal family are lizards. Or that it's a good idea to break away from a successful trading bloc on our doorstep. It would be like arguing with a drunk.
Education might help them. They wouldn't cling to the flat earth theory if they were taught geography; they wouldn't preach 'economic nationalism' in a country like Britain which imports half of its fuel and food, if they were taught basic economics. And they wouldn't think that Elizabeth Windsor is a lizard if they were taught biology. But, unfortunately, their brains are damaged beyond repair.
None of this applies to Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. He is a clever man who had an expensive education. He only jumped on the Brexit bandwagon to be prime minister of a country brainwashed by the Tory press. His cunning plan worked but he didn't know that a viral pandemic was waiting in the wings. We don't know how much damage the pandemic will do to our economy but it has already taken its toll. Whatever plans Boris had for us will have to be abandoned. His vision of a 'global Britain' striking trade deals with the rest of the world is now a remote possibility.
But whatever happens 'good old Boris' will not get the blame. His devoted followers will blame all our troubles on a revengeful EU. And Boris himself will carry on telling lies and acting the fool.
Max Hastings said of him:
"I have known Johnson since the 1980s when I was editor of the Daily Telegraph and he was our flamboyant Brussels correspondent. I have argued for a decade that, while he is a brilliant entertainer who made a popular maitre d' for London as its mayor, he is unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification."
The Truth About Israel
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are major oil producers with plenty of money available to help the Palestinians. They give to the Red Crescent and other charities but they have done little or nothing diplomatically or militarily to alleviate the suffering of the occupied Palestinians.
In the West the parties of the far-right pay lip service to the Palestinian cause but some of them actually support Israel, and others worry about what would happen to six million Jewish refugees if Israel was destroyed. America would get most of them but the UK would be next in line.
The truth is that Zionists are so powerful that most people are frightened to condemn Israel's cruel occupation of Palestine. Resolutions are passed at the United Nations and statements are made by world leaders, but the IDF continues to shoot children on the orders of 'Bibi' Netanyahu (pictured) who faces charges of fraud, bribery and breach of faith.
Adolf Hitler predicted in Mein Kampf:
"The Jews domination in the state seems so assured that now not only can he call himself a Jew again, but he ruthlessly admits his ultimate national and political designs. A section of his race openly owns itself to be a foreign people, yet even here they lie. For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks."
But nothing lasts forever. China is set to become the biggest economy in the world, and the Chinese don't suffer from guilt about the Holocaust like the Christian nations. When the European Jews were being rounded up and killed by the Nazis the Chinese were being slaughtered by the Japanese.
Also, many Jews around the world are speaking out against Israeli atrocities.
When I lived in South Africa in the late 1960s it was unthinkable that the country would ever be ruled by the majority, but that's exactly what happened. The same thing will happen to Israel. Eventually there will be one state for Jews and Arabs with equal rights for all. There will be no Carthaginian settlement in the Middle East. Israel will not be driven into the sea and the Palestinians will not be expelled. The non-Jewish population of Israel now stands at twenty percent and the country is dependent on them for labour. Israel's future will be decided by economics and demographics, not by rhetoric.
Friendly Websites
www.candour.org.uk
www.hertiageanddestiny.com
www.europeanaction.com
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