It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What every body echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people and new deeds for new...The greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of any thing, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?
Henry David Thoreau
Thursday, 21 June 2012
Tuesday, 19 June 2012
Greece resents loss of independence
Divided Greece risks social explosion
Reuters report
18 June, 2012
ATHENS: Pro-bailout party New Democracy may have come first in Sunday's Greek election but the radical left anti-austerity SYRIZA bloc was celebrating like the real winner well into the warm Athens night.
The election exposed a struggling nation deeply divided over whether to implement a harsh austerity package, the price for receiving a total of 240 billion Euros in bailout money from the European Union and IMF to save its near-bankrupt economy.
"My biggest fear is of a social explosion," said a senior adviser to the country's likely next prime minister, New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras.
"If there is no change in the policy mix, we're going to have a social explosion even if you bring Jesus Christ to govern this country."
According to official figures with 99.9 per cent of the votes counted, Samaras' conservative New Democracy party won just 29.7 per cent of the vote, only 2.7 per centage points more than SYRIZA, which almost doubled its support from the previous election held on 6 May.
When the votes for Greece's other anti-bailout parties, ranging from the 'neo-nazi' Golden Dawn to the Marxist-Leninist KKE, are added to SYRIZA's tally, up to 52 per cent of Greeks cast ballots against the terms of the international deal.
New Democracy supporters had initially slumped despairing in their seats at the party's plush new headquarters as exit polls showed less than half a per centage point separating them from SYRIZA, only to cheer up as official results showing a better performance trickled in.
Even then, celebrations were muted. "What is there for us to celebrate?" a member of Samaras' inner circle said. "Our country is in such a deep crisis."
The streets of central Athens are scarred with repeated waves of protests, some hospitals are running short of vital medicines, thousands of businesses have closed, beggars and rough sleepers are multiplying and suicides are rising.
New Democracy's Samaras now faces the awkward task of convincing the centre-left PASOK movement to join a coalition charged with implementing highly unpopular spending cuts and privatisations, while the economy nosedives.
Under the terms of the international bailout, the new government must fire up to 150,000 civil servants, slash spending by 11 billion euros this month, sell off a swathe of state-owned companies, improve tax collection and open closed professions to competition.
Once Greece's ruling party, PASOK's support collapsed to just 12.3 per cent in Sunday's vote, giving the two pro-bailout parties just 40 per cent of the popular vote, not a strong mandate for austerity.
PASOK-New Democracy coalition is guaranteed a parliamentary majority thanks to a quirk of Greek electoral law which gives the winning party a bonus of 50 extra seats. But that will not win it the argument on Greece's streets.
The Greek economy is expected to shrink by 5 per cent this year after contracting 7 per cent last year and unemployment is running at almost 23 per cent. Many economists believe that the harsh austerity measures will only make matters worse in the short term.
Ominously, PASOK's first reaction to the results was to say it would support a new Samaras administration but not formally join it, hardly a recipe for stable government in a country which has had two elections in less than two months.
PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos has previously said he would only formally join a coalition if SYRIZA did so as well, something which is politically impossible, given the radical left bloc's unstinting opposition to the austerity measures.
Greek analysts noted that SYRIZA's charismatic 37-year-old leader, former student communist Alexis Tsipras, conceded defeat quickly in a phone call to Samaras, apparently relieved he was free of the pressure to form a government and make compromises.
"From Monday we will continue the fight," Tsipras told cheering supporters in an open-air square outside Athens university. "...the next government after this one will be a left government."
"We will fight to topple these policies," the youthful crowd chanted back as loudspeakers played World War Two Greek Communist resistance songs.
Filippos Nikolopoulos, a sociology professor at Crete University and SYRIZA supporter, said that Tsipras' fans were jubilant because they had won new force and authority by increasing their share of the vote so much on Sunday.
"We want Europe, we want to cooperate," he said. "But we do not want to be subjugated by (German Chancellor) Mrs Merkel."
Stathis Stavropoulos, a newspaper cartoonist famous for his drawings depicting German officials preaching austerity at Greece as Nazi taskmasters, said the new conservative government would have the people of Greece against it from the outset.
"Our dream of European union was very different," he told Reuters. "It was a union of countries and peoples, not a union to serve banks and not a Fourth German Reich."
Using the term for a Nazi regional leader under Hitler's Reich, Stavropoulos added: "Our country is under occupation. How would you feel if they sent a Gauleiter to run your country and tell you what to do ?"
The cartoonist said he had nothing against the German people or other European nations. Indeed, he had never visited Berlin, Paris or London -- but was familiar with Moscow, Beijing and Nicaragua from his Communist activities. "The Soviet Union may have ended but not the dream of democratic communism," he sighed wistfully.
Economic Times
Reuters report
18 June, 2012
ATHENS: Pro-bailout party New Democracy may have come first in Sunday's Greek election but the radical left anti-austerity SYRIZA bloc was celebrating like the real winner well into the warm Athens night.
The election exposed a struggling nation deeply divided over whether to implement a harsh austerity package, the price for receiving a total of 240 billion Euros in bailout money from the European Union and IMF to save its near-bankrupt economy.
"My biggest fear is of a social explosion," said a senior adviser to the country's likely next prime minister, New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras.
"If there is no change in the policy mix, we're going to have a social explosion even if you bring Jesus Christ to govern this country."
According to official figures with 99.9 per cent of the votes counted, Samaras' conservative New Democracy party won just 29.7 per cent of the vote, only 2.7 per centage points more than SYRIZA, which almost doubled its support from the previous election held on 6 May.
When the votes for Greece's other anti-bailout parties, ranging from the 'neo-nazi' Golden Dawn to the Marxist-Leninist KKE, are added to SYRIZA's tally, up to 52 per cent of Greeks cast ballots against the terms of the international deal.
New Democracy supporters had initially slumped despairing in their seats at the party's plush new headquarters as exit polls showed less than half a per centage point separating them from SYRIZA, only to cheer up as official results showing a better performance trickled in.
Even then, celebrations were muted. "What is there for us to celebrate?" a member of Samaras' inner circle said. "Our country is in such a deep crisis."
The streets of central Athens are scarred with repeated waves of protests, some hospitals are running short of vital medicines, thousands of businesses have closed, beggars and rough sleepers are multiplying and suicides are rising.
New Democracy's Samaras now faces the awkward task of convincing the centre-left PASOK movement to join a coalition charged with implementing highly unpopular spending cuts and privatisations, while the economy nosedives.
Under the terms of the international bailout, the new government must fire up to 150,000 civil servants, slash spending by 11 billion euros this month, sell off a swathe of state-owned companies, improve tax collection and open closed professions to competition.
Once Greece's ruling party, PASOK's support collapsed to just 12.3 per cent in Sunday's vote, giving the two pro-bailout parties just 40 per cent of the popular vote, not a strong mandate for austerity.
PASOK-New Democracy coalition is guaranteed a parliamentary majority thanks to a quirk of Greek electoral law which gives the winning party a bonus of 50 extra seats. But that will not win it the argument on Greece's streets.
The Greek economy is expected to shrink by 5 per cent this year after contracting 7 per cent last year and unemployment is running at almost 23 per cent. Many economists believe that the harsh austerity measures will only make matters worse in the short term.
Ominously, PASOK's first reaction to the results was to say it would support a new Samaras administration but not formally join it, hardly a recipe for stable government in a country which has had two elections in less than two months.
PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos has previously said he would only formally join a coalition if SYRIZA did so as well, something which is politically impossible, given the radical left bloc's unstinting opposition to the austerity measures.
Greek analysts noted that SYRIZA's charismatic 37-year-old leader, former student communist Alexis Tsipras, conceded defeat quickly in a phone call to Samaras, apparently relieved he was free of the pressure to form a government and make compromises.
"From Monday we will continue the fight," Tsipras told cheering supporters in an open-air square outside Athens university. "...the next government after this one will be a left government."
"We will fight to topple these policies," the youthful crowd chanted back as loudspeakers played World War Two Greek Communist resistance songs.
Filippos Nikolopoulos, a sociology professor at Crete University and SYRIZA supporter, said that Tsipras' fans were jubilant because they had won new force and authority by increasing their share of the vote so much on Sunday.
"We want Europe, we want to cooperate," he said. "But we do not want to be subjugated by (German Chancellor) Mrs Merkel."
Stathis Stavropoulos, a newspaper cartoonist famous for his drawings depicting German officials preaching austerity at Greece as Nazi taskmasters, said the new conservative government would have the people of Greece against it from the outset.
"Our dream of European union was very different," he told Reuters. "It was a union of countries and peoples, not a union to serve banks and not a Fourth German Reich."
Using the term for a Nazi regional leader under Hitler's Reich, Stavropoulos added: "Our country is under occupation. How would you feel if they sent a Gauleiter to run your country and tell you what to do ?"
The cartoonist said he had nothing against the German people or other European nations. Indeed, he had never visited Berlin, Paris or London -- but was familiar with Moscow, Beijing and Nicaragua from his Communist activities. "The Soviet Union may have ended but not the dream of democratic communism," he sighed wistfully.
Economic Times
Monday, 18 June 2012
Sunday, 17 June 2012
Over the Hills and Far Away (Traditional)
Hark now the drums beat up again
For all true soldier gentlemen
Then let us list and march I say
Over the hills and far away
Chorus:
Over the hills and o'er the main
To Flanders, Portugal and Spain
Queen Anne commands and we obey
Over the hills and far away
All gentlemen that have a mind
To serve a queen that's good and kind
Come list and enter into pay
Over the hills and far away
Here's forty shillings on the drum
For those who volunteer to come
With shirts and clothes and present pay
When o'er the hills and far away
Hear that brave boys, and let us go
Or else we shall be pressed you know
Then list and enter into pay
And o'er the hills and far away
The constables they search about
To find such brisk young fellows out
Then let's be volunteers I say
Over the hills and far away
Since now the French so low are brought
And wealth and honour's to be got
Who then behind would skulking stay?
Let's o'er the hills and far away
No more from sound of drum retreat
When Marlborough and Galway beat
The French and Spaniards every day
Over the hills and far away
He that is forced to go and fight
Will never get true honour by't
Whilst volunteers shall win the day
When o'er the hills and far away
What tho' our friends our absence mourn?
We all with honours shall return
And then we'll sing both night and day
Over the hills and far away
Prentice Tom may well refuse
To clean his angry master's shoes
For now he's free to sing and play
Over the hills and far away
Over rivers, bogs and springs
We all shall live as great as kings
And plunder get both night and day
Over the hills and far away
For if we go 'tis one to ten
That we return all gentlemen
Our fortune made but not from pay
Over the hills and far away
Friday, 15 June 2012
The individual dies but the folk lives on for ever
One of the great mistakes made by some people in the stagnant situation that I have described is to vent their frustration at the slowness of progress by blaming the common multitude, saying of that multitude that because it is not prepared, so far, to listen to the message of its salvation it is in fact "not worth saving". The assumption here is that all we have been doing is merely for the benefit of that multitude - seen as an aggregate of individuals. This is a fundamental error. The great majority of people, of any nation and in any era, are not especially good or bad, not especially heroic or unheroic. That they may not be moved by the vision of a great ideal is something we must attribute essentially to the fact that there are not mobilized, in the presentation of that ideal, the great resources of propaganda that are necessary to promote it. When we say that what we are doing is "for the British people", what we mean is that we are working for the British people as a national entity, as a strictly impersonal concept - and one which is timeless; that is to say we are working for the British people of the past and of the future as much as of the present: we are working for an ethnic group rather than just for so many millions of individuals who happen to be living in the same country at the present moment. Here the English language is a little deficient; whereas in German there are two distinct words, in one case the word volk - meaning an ethnic, racial and national group, and in the other case leute - meaning people as in any collection of individuals, in English we talk of 'people' in both contexts, which can be confusing. Perhaps we should revive the old English word folk, as a term synonymous with nation.
But, more than this, we are working for an ideal and a vision which far transcend 'people', taken at the level of the average individual. That ideal and vision, because of their greatness, are always worthy of our highest dedication and sacrifice, quite regardless of how 'people', at any one juncture of time or place, may measure up to them. Such ideals and visions are, in this world, only ever truly understood by a few. It is for those few to acquire the machinery whereby an ideal and vision can be communicated down to the ordinary masses in language by which they can understand them in terms of those things that affect their own ordinary lives. Before this task is accomplished, it is futile to expect the masses to respond to any great message.
As long as we begin our mission by taking the ordinary man or woman in the street exactly for what they are, not expecting from them any more than they are able to give, and recognizing that they will only ever be moved by the mighty currents of affairs set in motion by active minorities, we will not be despondent when they fail to heed our call, and we will not take this as a signal to give up the struggle.
Tyndall J, The Eleventh Hour, Third Edition 1998, Welling: Albion Press, pp 489-90
But, more than this, we are working for an ideal and a vision which far transcend 'people', taken at the level of the average individual. That ideal and vision, because of their greatness, are always worthy of our highest dedication and sacrifice, quite regardless of how 'people', at any one juncture of time or place, may measure up to them. Such ideals and visions are, in this world, only ever truly understood by a few. It is for those few to acquire the machinery whereby an ideal and vision can be communicated down to the ordinary masses in language by which they can understand them in terms of those things that affect their own ordinary lives. Before this task is accomplished, it is futile to expect the masses to respond to any great message.
As long as we begin our mission by taking the ordinary man or woman in the street exactly for what they are, not expecting from them any more than they are able to give, and recognizing that they will only ever be moved by the mighty currents of affairs set in motion by active minorities, we will not be despondent when they fail to heed our call, and we will not take this as a signal to give up the struggle.
Tyndall J, The Eleventh Hour, Third Edition 1998, Welling: Albion Press, pp 489-90
Wednesday, 13 June 2012
Only the brand name remains, gone is the winning product
Our first task after forming the new movement in 1982 was to establish its name. Up till then the name of the National Front had been the one synonymous with our politics nationwide. There were some who believed that because of these factors the surviving remnant of the NF would be bound to emerge again as the dominant force in British Nationalism. These people mistook shadow for substance: they imagined that it was the Front's well-known name that had created its former strength, and that therefore that name would for ever remain a source of such strength. In fact they had got things entirely the wrong way round. The fame attached to the name of the National Front in the 1970s was wholly the result of the public impact made at the time by its growth and success, and that growth and success were above all the work of certain people, that is to say a team of capable and energetic individuals who had put the party on the map. The name had been made by the party's progress, not the reverse.
Now that the people who had been the architects of the Front's success in the 1970s had, for the most part, severed their connections with it, the idea that its impetus could be revived and then sustained just by its name was a sad illusion. Only the brand name remained; the winning product had gone.
Gradually, we started to succeed in winning recognition for the name of the British National Party by forcing our way into the public eye by a series of bold activities. Our first chance to do this came with the general election of 1983.
When this election was called, the BNP was barely more than a year old, and considerably smaller in membership and resources than the National Front had been when it took on the (up till then) unprecedented challenge of fighting 50-plus seats in the election of February 1974. We decided nevertheless that this somehow had to be done. Our reward would be to qualify for broadcasting time, and this, more than anything else, would help to make the name of the new party known to the British public. It was done - by a miracle of determination, effort and sacrifice. As expected, our votes in the election were not high, but we had made the first important move towards putting the British National Party on the map.
Tyndall J, The Eleventh Hour, Third Edition, 1998, Albion Press: Welling, p 490
Now that the people who had been the architects of the Front's success in the 1970s had, for the most part, severed their connections with it, the idea that its impetus could be revived and then sustained just by its name was a sad illusion. Only the brand name remained; the winning product had gone.
Gradually, we started to succeed in winning recognition for the name of the British National Party by forcing our way into the public eye by a series of bold activities. Our first chance to do this came with the general election of 1983.
When this election was called, the BNP was barely more than a year old, and considerably smaller in membership and resources than the National Front had been when it took on the (up till then) unprecedented challenge of fighting 50-plus seats in the election of February 1974. We decided nevertheless that this somehow had to be done. Our reward would be to qualify for broadcasting time, and this, more than anything else, would help to make the name of the new party known to the British public. It was done - by a miracle of determination, effort and sacrifice. As expected, our votes in the election were not high, but we had made the first important move towards putting the British National Party on the map.
Tyndall J, The Eleventh Hour, Third Edition, 1998, Albion Press: Welling, p 490
Sixty seconds to save Marriage
Dear Marriage Supporter
There are just four days left to tell the Government that you oppose the redefinition of marriage. At midnight on Thursday (June 14) the public consultation on rewriting the meaning of marriage will close.
Please act now.
Tell the Government not to redefine marriage.
Use our quick, simple response form.
Don’t let time run out. Sending a response only takes 60 seconds using our fast and easy web form. Your response could save marriage for generations to come.
What will marriage mean when your children or grandchildren walk down the aisle? Will it mean what it means today, or will it mean something different?
Tell the Government not to meddle with marriage.
Yours sincerely
Colin Hart
Campaign Director
Coalition for Marriage
There are just four days left to tell the Government that you oppose the redefinition of marriage. At midnight on Thursday (June 14) the public consultation on rewriting the meaning of marriage will close.
Please act now.
Tell the Government not to redefine marriage.
Use our quick, simple response form.
Don’t let time run out. Sending a response only takes 60 seconds using our fast and easy web form. Your response could save marriage for generations to come.
What will marriage mean when your children or grandchildren walk down the aisle? Will it mean what it means today, or will it mean something different?
Tell the Government not to meddle with marriage.
Yours sincerely
Colin Hart
Campaign Director
Coalition for Marriage
Saturday, 9 June 2012
Elizabeth addresses her troops at Tilbury
My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes for fear of treachery; but I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear! I have always so behaved myself, that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects; and, therefore, I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all, to lay down for my God, for my kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too; and think it foul scorn that Parma, or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the meantime, my lieutenant-general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject, not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.
Sir ES Creasy, Fifteen Decisive Battles Of The World, Forty-Fourth Edition, London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, pp 249-50
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