Question – Answer

What would anyone need to do, to ensure the Ebola infection spreads disastrously?

Answer: Nothing at all – Just leave the present totally inept quarantine arrangements as they are and the same people in charge.

The West in the Middle East

The terrible, (and let us hope, not to continue) irony, is that, while the West (i.e. the USA and Great Britain) were willing and in fact eager to wrongly, illegally and, ignoring significant protest, to invade Iraq and desolate it (to some extent also Libya) but now absurdly and disastrously refuse to go back now to help put things right.

Oppression

The focal point of all oppression and violence in the Middle East is a group of states which include Egypt, Israel, Palestine and in one case the parts of various places occupied by the ISIS. In these countries there are more victims than oppressors; the latter can, each one, make many victims. We have been misled by much that has been said about Hamas; the Palestinians have been wickedly oppressed by Israel and Egypt in nearly all aspects of their life even attacking farmers at their work.

For an informative article on the Israeli and Palestinian conflict and between Hama and Fatah and Israel read Nathan Thrall’s article in the London Review of Books of 21 August 2014.

ISIS

In London Review of Books Vol. 36, 16 of 21 August 2014 Patrick Cockburn’s ‘ISIS Consolidates’ article shows I would think certainly that ISIS can be seen to be as threatening and disastrous a social phenomenon as any to have hit any part of the world since Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun. Effectively it is more dangerous even (as Cameron has pointed out) threatening countries in Europe than any natural event such as tsunamis, earthquakes, disease or famine. The rest of the world needs to respond as quickly and decisively as ISIS itself does; today – tomorrow will not do. ISIS has shown that terror works in battle or attack even if it does not in ordinary urban circumstances. We don’t need to be as ruthless as them but we need to be even more effective.

21st Century

The present 21st century world is overall characterised by, apparently willing, piecemeal abandonment (at state or nation level) of, now nearly all, the restraints and considerations of morality, fairness, honour and national and international law. Led by the USA and followed by Britain (and understandably to a point) by whoever we are in conflict or disagreement with. A historian might label this period ‘The Return to Barbarity’.

Hague and Co. like to sanitise their comments and proposals with references to “Moderate Rebels”.

You can recognise a happy medium, they say, by their smiling face.

I wouldn’t advise appearance (or anything else, much, either) in the search for a “moderate rebel” in Syria. Like Bertrand Russell’s “present King of France” – you’re not likely to find one.

They don’t seem to exist. The same applies to moderate rebels in Syria. How long would they last if their heart-eating associates had anything to do with it!

It’s hard for non-Muslims to realise that all this merciless hatred and barbarity is directed by Muslims against other Muslims. Then you remember what they do to those they accuse of theft or sexual unorthodoxy.

Not much chance of an appeal court to put right mistakes later.

If there are any Moderate Rebels, it would be safer for them to do their rebelling in a non-Muslim country.

 

Julian Symons

“Boswell’s life of Johnson”? Yes, great and interesting. But Julian Symons’ “Thomas Carlyle, the life and ideas of a prophet”. Now you’re talking!

Absolutely fascinating – Opens up the 19th Century in ways you might otherwise have missed. Take my advice: Read it.

Hague calls it unity

Till about the end of the 20th century old ties of mutual familiarity, understanding and respect provided an effective problem-solving and conflict-limiting channel of communication between stable middle-eastern communities and western government and administration. This arrangement included (and on the western end presumed) a familial, school, and Civil Service, tradition and habit, which was adapted to this arrangement.

 

All this was rejected, discarded and destroyed over a fairly short time by bright new ideas of socialism, anti-colonialism and contempt for paternalism. As a result knowledge and understanding have been replaced by misunderstanding and almost total ignorance by the West of the culture of the East, most recently and most disastrously, by the present civil war in Syria which we could and should have helped pacify but which we virtually brought into being by our most inappropriate squeamishness about the character and past behaviour of the governing establishment in Syria and by a reprehensible failure to realise that sectarian, and not political motivations, were the key to the conflict. Thus, perhaps for the first time the Hobbesian thesis (showing the maintenance of power and control as the very first and main duty of any government) has been put to the test and proved itself in a large way.

 

We no longer have the opportunity to restore at will an acceptable state of peace in a straightforward way; the problem of a pied-piper religion of a barbarity unseen in the world for hundreds if not thousands of years is one that will tax both the intelligence and good will of all who would like to help.

 

“National unity is what is needed in Irak”, said William Hague.

How Supreme is his irony?!

Unity and (in practical term), is just what they had to the degree, that can be hoped for in political environment, is just what was to be found in Irak and Libya and Egypt and extensively within the Middle East.

Until, that is, applauded and promoted by the unctuously misleading and Satanically deceiving tones of the pseudo democratic but crypto-tyrannic voice of the western apologist for illegal and unjust attacks on sovereign countries, William Hague.

Now we all pay the price of the apprentice-sorcerer’s inability to put the Devil back in the bottle.