Tag: History

Only by unthinking obedience to our leaders can we remain free?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Moments of crisis tend to expose unthinking mantras that have held up conventional wisdom for decades with the assurance of Doric columns on a bank; but which only look solid because they are unexamined.

The recent article – ‘Andy Burnham is right: Social cohesion is key to national security’– on Labour List by Sara Khan and Matthew Godwin (not Goodwin – a different character altogether) is a collection of such mantras. In previous times these may have locked together like an impervious Lego wall of unexamined presumptions, but now stand exposed as flimsy stage furniture for a play that has exceeded its run.

They start with a quote from Burnham. “I see strength at home and our strength in the world as indivisible”. This sounds similar to, but is a long way from, Clive Lewis MP’s argument that national security will be undermined if the transfer of spending from improving people’s lives onto war preparation impoverishes people and neglects social and physical infrastructure that is already crumbling. A modern version of a line an old Labour Party member in Bermondsey came out with at the start of the Thatcher Prime Ministership; “a few more years of this government, and we’ll all be living in tents surrounded by cruise missiles”.

Instead, they pose the sense that 61% of people in the UK have that “the social contract is broken” not on the feelings people get when they smash their suspension or bike wheels on pot holes, have to wait for 8 hours in A&E (and have to get a cab there because it will be quicker than an ambulance) struggle to cope in a heat wave, have to pay through the nose for heating because their house is badly insulated, see their rivers filling with toxic waste while the water companies falsify tests and bank their dividends: none of that. For them its the result primarily of ideological interventions by “our international adversaries – particularly Russia and Iran” who are seeking “the destabilisation of Western democracies” and to “disable the Western Alliance”.

They go on to outline a series of far right propositions that now have mass support, with 40% of people thinking of “Tommy Robinson’s” marches as “patriotic”, 33 per cent supporting calls for “remigration”, 31 per cent supporting the view that non-white people will never be as English/Scottish/Welsh as white people and 29 percent believing in the ‘Great Replacement’ theory. At no point do they join the obvious dots that these views reflect those we are being bombarded with from the world’s leading bully pulpit – the Presidency of the United States. They mention a meeting between “Tommy Robinson” and Elon Musk’s Nazi father without noting that “Robinson” is being funded by Musk; who is also promoting Rupert Lowe and Restore; who split from Reform because Farage was wary of linking up with him. Nor do they make any mention of the overlap between the US and UK Right and Far Right, seen recently in the ARC conference in London (an “anti elite” event that cost its participants £1500 for a ticket) denouncing everything from the reality of climate change to any notion of equality, nor the wholesale capitulation to them by the Conservative Party, nor the ongoing flow of funding, ideas and media, with US shock jock radio and Fox News the model for loss making but potent platforms like GB News, nor US tech bro platforms prioritising far Right content. This supplements the deep penetration of US influence at every level of the British state, particularly its military and Intelligence services. To misquote LBJs observation about J Edgar Hoover, in the case of British society, the USA is both in the tent and pissing in.

And this poses a big question about “Western Democracy” (with or without capital letters). Do the authors consider the United States to be democratic? They talk of the need to emphasise the differences between “Western Democracies” and “authoritarians”. Leaving aside Peter Theil and Alex Karp’s opposition to “democracy” (for the masses) as antithetical to “freedom” for the billionaires who run the show, and Marco Rubio’s racialised notion of “European civilisation” battling against the developing world, that should be kept in its place – and the people who live there, who should be kept out – that’s in the context of the Trump government unleashing ICE on communities across the country, levels of gerrymandering and voter suppression that are verging on the surreal, attempts to define social democratic opposition as “far Left Terrorism” by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. So, supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America, like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, AOC, and broadcasters like Amy Goodman, along with “anti-fascists” in general are now defined as “terrorists” by the administration. And that’s just domestically. Internationally they have sanctioned the International Criminal Court and its judges – international rule of law anyone? They have funded and backed Israel’s genocide in Gaza and invasion of Lebanon, backed and funded Far Right candidates across Latin America, put Cuba under siege in a way that is causing terrible suffering, launched a globally destabilising war on Iran which includes attacks on civilian infrastructure like hospitals, energy and water treatment plants that can only be described as war crimes, have bombed Nigeria and are lining up an intervention in Mali. And that’s leaving aside its trade wars and attempts to assert “Global Energy Dominance” by doubling down on the fossil fuels that are making the planet less and less habitable the more we burn them Its no wonder that a majority of people in a majority of countries across the world see the United States as the most destabilising country in the world. That includes majorities in the UK and…the United States.

It is this drive for a New American Century that underpins the rise of the Far Right in every country where the US has influence. In a country like Britain, where the US Embassy is a positively Viceregal building, this leads to “mainstream” parties bending the knee and repeating the lines they are fed from across the Atlantic to keep in line and out of the firing range. Hence Starmer’s “Island of Strangers” speech. That struck a bum note for most of us here, but its audience was in the White House. Its effect, along with the performative cruelty of immigration control measures modelled on the US, was to help legitimise “extremist views” so they are now indeed “polluting the mainstream”.

That is where “the root of hate” is.

For the authors, all this seems to have come from nowhere. There is no active agency involved. By omission, the US still stands as the core of the “Western democracies” that they want to defend – not what it actually is. For good measure, we should note that only a minority of people in the US think that their country is a democracy in Harvard’s surveys of opinion; because it is not run in the interests of the majority. The sense of broken social contract, particularly among young people, comes from “deep economic insecurity, eroding trust in democratic institutions, and growing social fragmentation”.

To put that another way, fail to improve people’s lives and that erosion will continue, handing people over on a plate to the far Right. Such a failure is baked in to the plans to increase war expenditure to a level that will suck the life out of any meaningful attempt to invest in improvements in anything else. In that situation, the house will indeed be divided against itself. Demands are arising for social justice, for proper levels of investment; something Andy Burnham is acknowledging with the real, albeit small, gestures in that direction in his first week, like the £2 bus fare cap. However, paying for that not by taxing the wealthy and reducing inequality but by seeking to squeeze money back from international climate finance is a wrong road and a short one. Similarly, more agency at local level in Burnham’s devolution agenda, while welcome, can only go so far without the investment needed to solve the problems that people identify. Once a renewed squeeze for arms spending kicks in, the pressure will be felt in all those unrealised aspirations. Can’t help but be. In that context, it becomes imperative for the ruling class to deflect any resistance downwards away from them and ruthlessly drive divisions among the majority, so the mainstreaming of racism isn’t something to be avoided for them, but a necessary tactic.

Khan and Godwin are, possibly despite their intentions, playing a soft part in this drift. In drawing a veil over the actual role of the United States, a veil with “Western Democracies” written on it, pointing to “international adversaries” (of the United States) as the culprits – and, inevitably, lazily and mendaciously smearing the movement against war and genocide in West Asia as “coopted” by “Islamic extremists” – they fail to deal with real contradictions that tear holes in their worn out world view; and become complicit in the suppression of democratic dissent that, again following US models, has banned Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation, gagged defendants, suppressed the rights of juries and threatened barristers with jail for reminding them that they have them.

Their solutions to “heal the wounds that divide us” do not involve any reassessment of the UK’s auxiliary role for the US; which at the moment is taking the form of aiding and abetting bombing runs into Iran from RAF Fairford that are primarily hitting civilian infrastructure. A big majority opposes this complicity. We are being ignored.

Instead they argue for a “Total Defence” strategy that requires ideological conformity at home as part of military credibility abroad. That in turn requires an even stricter policing of dissent on traditional and social media. The paradox of their argument is that they are right that far Right arguments have for the most part been capitulated to and promoted not tackled, but because they don’t identify where these arguments come from, nor in whose interests they are being put, they end up (start out) aligned with the very forces that are pushing them; and the “anti extremist” agenda, in being directed against US targets, boils down to policing internal dissent from the Left “like we did in the Cold War”. So much easier for the UK’s traditional alliances if no news from Gaza is allowed to filter through unmediated by “reliable sources”.

So, we end up with a “democratic” society in which deviation from standing to attention and saluting the right shibboleths – which will increasingly be the Right shibboleths – will be treated as treason and terror. Be prepared.

One is not supposed to weep at the Radetsky March

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

I have, nevertheless, been doing so since the Vienna New Years Day Concert in 2014. Barenboim was conducting, and, as he marched on stage for the traditional final encore with an imperious flick of his baton, rather than crashing straight into the opening chords, a snare drummer tapped out a call to arms – tappity tappity tappity tap – trrr rrrr – RAT TAT TAT!

A whole set of emotions welled up. That sort of rhythm is designed to do that, meant to rouse the listener into a heightened emotional state and carry them away to take the Emperor’s Schilling; and visions of drumhread recruitment in towns and villages all across the Austro Hungarian Empire – and the rest of Europe – invaded my mind, along with a historical memory of what happened next that none of those swept up in war euphoria, or war fatalism, a hundred years before could possibly have had.

Painting of a soldier undergoing surgery by surgeon and painter Henry Tonks circa 2015 from Faces of Britain by Simon Schama.

A quote from the same book. The nature of trench warfare, punctuated as it was by futile forays over the top, had exposed the heads of soldiers, nothwithstanding their helmets, to taking fire in the face. Exit wounds were gaping. Some shells had been designed to spray schrapnel, to devastating effect. Magnesium fuses were encased within, expressly intended to catch fire when lodged in tissue, resulting in the burning away of noses, eyes and cheeks.

More than 20 million dead at the end of it. And a comparable number wounded or mutilated. And World War 2 was worse. World War 3 has been unthinkable because there would be no one left at the end of it, brief though it would be.

Yet now we have the uncrowned heads of Europe and their media shils single mindedly trying to make it thinkable. Preparing us for a war with Russia by the end of the decade. Mark Rutte thinking he can succeed where Charles XII, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler failed.

Posing a war of choice as “defence”, as they always do, as every power did in 1914, avoiding any mention of the nuclear risks, avoiding any mention that they already outspend the Russians 3.5 to 1, avoiding any mention that Russia has neither the intention nor the capacity to invade the rest of Europe, avoiding mention of any alternative course, as if “war, war” is better than “jaw, jaw”.

This is part of a “whole society” approach aiming to make us stand to attention and salute without question. The most dangerous aspect of this sort of war fatalism, linked to escalation in arms build ups and suppression of dissent as treason, is that it poses war as inevitable – and when all sides accept that that is the case, war is what you get.

None of us has any interest in that. Not least because we’d all be dead at the end of it.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin did it again in this year’s concert. He made the usual speech before the encores – “music can unite all of us because we live on the same planet” – which felt peculiarly hollow this year, given the way the drums are beating all over Europe. Then off into Blue Danube and Radetsky, with the drum call to start and the well heeled Viennese spiessburger audience clapping enthusiastically along in a joyful romp towards Armageddon, just like so many of their ancestors did in 1914.

In an ironic counterpart, the final song in Jules Holland’s New Year Hootananny the previous evening was a singalong version of “Enjoy yourself (its later than you think)”.

New Year resolution for 2026, to beat a different rhythm and break up the march to war.

Remembrance 1: “We’re going to need a bigger moat”.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Its October and, as the clocks go back in more ways than one, scarlet paper poppies begin to bloom on the lapels of MPs and TV presenters. So begins the annual ritual of Remembrance; using the blood of its victims to turn a warning about the human costs of war into a sanctification of preparing for another.

One of the most striking memorials to the outbreak of the First World War in 2014 was the “Blood swept lands and seas of red” installation at the Tower of London; which planted one ceramic poppy for every British and Empire fatality in the war. Estimates for how many of these there were vary. The installation used 888,246 poppies. The figure in Wikipedia is 887, 858. All the same, a lot of deaths. And the installation couldn’t help but numb and sorrow. Such an accumulation of individual losses made collective. Each individual poppy the colour of blood, and an echo of the scarlet of the state, as seen on phone and post boxes, London buses, the Brigade of Guards outside Buckingham Palace, and lost in it. Theirs had not been to reason why. And they had died.

On the Cenotaph in Whitehall, with an “unknown soldier” buried beneath, they are commemorated as “The Glorious Dead”; regardless of how they died or how inglorious it may have been.

Photo by Richard Croft. Creative Commons.

It is perhaps characteristic of a certain kind of British national narcissism that the only deaths commemorated were “ours”. Which underlines the limits of this sort of “Remembrance”. It becomes acelebration of victory sanctified by “sacrifice”. It tries to make it impossible to think past that sea of poppies to the losses suffered by other countries.

A commemoration of all the service personnel killed in the First World War would require a moat more than twenty times bigger, to register the 20 million or more of them killed. If you were to separate it out into national contingents, the French and Austrian sections would each be one and a half times the size of the British; that of Germany and Russia each more than twice as big. Having them all mixed up, in different colours perhaps, might underline their common humanity and the horrifying waste of it.

Civilian deaths in the First World War were a fraction of the military deaths, unlike the Second World War and most wars since. These are now running at about 67% of the total. Significantly more in Gaza. Commemorations that focus on WW1 tend to obscure that.

Civilian deaths from World War 3 would, of course, be total.

We are now in a period in which people who should know better are agitating for European NATO countries to prepare for a war with Russia by the end of the decade by doubling military expenditure (even though they already outspend them by 3.5 to 1) – a war that could not help but go nuclear – and it is a commonplace of US Foreign Policy thinking to envisage a war with China in the South China Sea – another war that could not help but go nuclear.

And, as Tom Lehrer once remarked, “if there are going to be any songs about World War 3, we’d better start writing them now”.

If we are foolish enough to allow our light headed and light minded leaders to make us collectively “pay undaunted the final sacrifice” in such insane adventures, age shall not weary us, nor the years condemn and at the going down of the sun and in the morning no one will be left to remember us.

Blue Labour Blueshirt Blues

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‘Every day, we should drag a sacred cow of our party to the town market place and slaughter it until we are up to our knees in blood.’ Wes Streeting MP

O Rose thou art sick. 

The invisible worm, 

That flies in the night 

In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

William Blake

Last week, after a 44 year membership, I cancelled my standing order to the Labour Party. This morning I had a standard letter “will you hear us out” inviting me to rejoin.

I thought that it required the courtesy of a reply, so here it is.

Dear Gail

After many years in the Party, including being a ward and constituency officer, I now find that so much of “staying in the fight”, as you put it, requires opposition to what this government is doing.

In the 1970s, when I was scraping National Front stickers with the slogan “send them back” off lamp posts, I never thought that the Party I have voted for all my life would be boasting about how many people it is deporting. I fear that next May’s local elections will be a complete debacle because the attempt to cosplay Reform emboldens them while making Labour voters stay at home, or vote Green, or Lib Dem, or Your Party.

I could go on. Gaza. The gesture of recognising a Palestinian state while taking no measures to put real pressure on Israel to stop the genocide is unconscionable.

Signing up to an annual £77 billion black hole of increased military spending that will suck the life out of the investments we need in infrastructure and green transition. 

The abject attempts to talk up “the special relationship” at a time that the USA is going full rogue state on climate, trade, diplomacy, as its hegemony wanes, and threatens the world with war shackling us to a suicidal course for humanity.

And, because it knows that it is on thin ice on all these issues, the response of the Labour leadership is to close down debate, silence dissent; rule out motions that are awkward, decree entire areas out of bounds, deselect local councillors who do things they don’t like (like twinning with Palestinian towns). Peter Kyle MP responded to the “Unite the Kingdom” march by saying that it shows that “free speech is alive and well in the UK”. Free speech for who? There were 1500 police on duty at that march, which included violent attacks on police officers and counter demonstrators. There were 3000 on duty for the silent, peaceful sit in in protest at the bizarre categorisation of Palestine Action as terrorist (when most people can tell the difference between an Improvised Explosive Device and a tin of paint). Politics is indeed the language of priorities. 

There are still good people in Labour, who want it to remain Labour and not adopt “muscular Conservatism”, as I understand the new buzz phrase goes in leading circles, but I believe at this point that what might be called “Blue Labour Blueshirtism” will work its way through until Labour has shrunk to the depths of the French SP or PASOK in Greece.

The fight continues, and I will be part of it. I hope that many remaining Labour members will be part of it too. We are in unprecedented times, and the old road no longer leads onwards. Bob Dylan wrote a song about that…

Paul Atkin 

Blue Labour, whose organiser Maurice Glasman was the only person from the European Social Democratic tradition to be invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration. They organise on the slogan “Faith, Flag, Family”.

The Blueshirt reference in this is to Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney’s political origins in Fine Gael, the more right wing of the two traditional parties in Ireland, the one that grew from the Free State forces in the Irish Civil War and sent fighters to support Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Recalled bitterly in Christie Moore’s Viva La Quinta Brigada

When the bishops blessed the blueshirts in Dun Laoghaire, As they sailed beneath the swastika to Spain.

Once again, a song for our time.

Chagos : picking up the tab for the USA.

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The headline in Monday’s Daily Telegraph was Starmer hid costs of Chagos surrender, with the strapline Official figures reveal total cost is ten times higher than the Prime Minister claimed.

Even in the Telegraph, which could have most of its headlines summarised in an emotional digested read as HRUMPH! this is almost poetic. A veritable broadside of misdirected kneekjerk reactions.

Lets start with Chagos surrender. What they mean by this is the return of the Indian Island archipeligo of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. For Telegraph readers it is a no brainer that an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean is more appropriately administered by the remnants of the Colonial Office in London than another island nearby, let alone, perish the thought, the people who actually live there; because where once a British colonist has stood, the Union Jack should fly forever.

Surrender implies some shame, as the emotional freight of all those retreats from direct imperial control all through the 20th century gets concentrated on this tiny island far, far away; of which their readers know very little.

The notion of the cost of handing back the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is suspicious. Why would it cost anything to relinquish control? It sounds like reparations – the horrifying notion that countries that got rich from exploiting the resources of countries they conquered, keeping them in poverty for the duration, might actually owe them something. Hrumph, indeed! Can’t have THAT!

But as there is no cost to let go of Chagos, what is the cost actually for? Read the article and it admits that the cost is not for giving bup the island, but for leasing back the airbase that Britain expelled the Chagos islanders to build in the 1960s. This base, formally British, is actually used by the United States as a strategic centre for B2 bombers to range across Africa, West, Central and South and South East Asia, China and the Pacific.

Like the agreement to a 5% target for “defence” spending and the meek acceptance of Trump’s tariffs, any contribution to the costs to Britain of keeping this base going – this “terrible deal with huge costs to hard pressed British tax payers”, as Dame Priti Patel put it – is a financial tribute to the United States, so they can bomb half the world with impunity.

Any resentment at this should therefore be directed across the Atlantic, not at Mauritius. But that would involve 1. being honest and 2. punching up.

Their argument that these costs have been misleadingly reported is itself misleading. They argue that methods often used by the Treasury on long term costs to take account of inflation and the “Social Time Preference rate” is an “accountancy trick”. Not an argument they deploy in other contexts.

They then go on to say that the “nominal” cost £34.7 billion over 99 years would be equivalent “half the annual schools budget”. So, a salutory comparison of wasteful military costs with costs of schooling, unusual in the Telegraph, and only made because they have painted the price of subsiding as US air base as an act of reparation, but still comparing an annual cost (in the case of schools) with a cost spread over 99 years – so, not a strictly reasonable comparison.

They are operating more to type when they say that the cost of leaing the base is also equivalent to building “10 Elizabeth class aircraft carriers”; conjuring up a real wet dream of military nostalgia for all those retired Commodores who write them letters; for the days when the Royal Navy had mighty ships of the line and Scapa Flow was full of battleships; instead of being, as it is, a tiny, niche auxiliary force for the US Navy. Oddly enough, playing the same sort of subordinate role as the Air Force does for the Chagos Island base (and other bases here too).

The Wingco at “RAF” Burtonwood.

I had direct experience of the fiction involved in this in the mid 1980s, when a delegation from Greater Manchester CND travelled down to the Burtonwood Air Base to hand in a letter to the base commander pointing out that any nuclear weapons stored there would put the population of Manchester, and the whole North West, at serious risk.

When we asked to see the base commander, a Royal Air Force Wingco came out. He looked a bit like Kenneth Moore, which I don’t suppose damaged his job application any. Everyone else in view was in US uniforms. When we said we wanted to see the actual base commander, he said “I’m the base commander. Its an RAF base”.

So we said, “Really, whats THAT?” pointing to the enormous stars and stripes fluttering on the flag pole behind him.

Previous

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This morning, instead of the Guardian flopping onto the doormat at 4 in the morning, the great, grey, grim, gruesome masthead of the Daily Telegraph was visible poking through the letterbox like an ultimatum in Gothic.

The Telegraph is a gloriously reactionary paper, whose columnists barrage its readers with nerve edgy variations on the theme of “we’ll all be murdered in our beds” to keep them scared and angry, and its news sections are barely calmer. It was ever thus. When I worked permanent nights in a choclate factory many years ago, I used to read the Telegraph to keep me awake; because a mind that is boggling finds it hard to drift off.

A characteristic article this morning headlined Hunter gored to death by buffalo he was stalking explains how “a millionaire trophy hunter…was killed almost instantly by ‘a sudden and unprovoked attack’ by the animal”.

They write this with no sense of irony; after all, all he was doing was stalking it to shoot it. The natural order of things. No provocation at all. There’s a whole world view in that.

Doing its bit to calm down tensions over “migrant hotels”, their lead article on p4 is headed Migrants in hotels linked to hundreds of crimes, with the strapline, in case anyone misses the point, Residents have been charged with violence, child abuse,domestic assault and shoplifting and a little highlighted indent gives the figure 425 for the “number of offences people living in hotels the Home Office use to house migrants have been charged with”.

Many of their readers, happy to have their prejudices confirmed, that “they” are a threat to “us”; and that this is a characteristic that can be freely atributed to all “migrants”, will read no further. But the tortuous use of language in the headlines, for anyone paying attention, is explained by sentences buried deep in the story, but which explode it from the inside out, again, for anyone paying attention.

First, these are figures for people charged, not people convicted. So, this will be the highest possible number.

Second, “Not every defendent who lists one of these hotels as their place of residence is necessarily an asylum seeker. It has not been possible to establish how many of the offenders identified by the Telegraph are currently applying for asylum in the UK”. So the highlighted number is bollocks. They know it. But they print it anyway.

Third, “The court records show that a significant proportion of these offences are alleged to have been perpetrated against other apparent asylum seekers”. Its notable that they don’t specify a figure, or proportion for this, though doubtless they could. Possibly because it draws the sting from the implication that “they” are a threat to “us”.

Showing the same inversion of reality that they deploy in the Big Game Hunter vs Buffalo story, they state “…police are under pressure to routinely disclose the nationality and migration status of suspects to protect community cohesion and to address a perception among some groups that asylum seekers are carrying out a disproportionate number of offences”. Note the unspecified character of “some groups”. Who might they be, I wonder?

Perish the thought that papers like the Telegraph, in its own revealing words, offering “a sense of the numbers involved”, and doing so by playing them up, could be promoting that “perception among certain groups” the better to whip them up, while retaining implausible deniability with weasel words.

On this issue, as on so many others, like so many of those arrested in the racist riots last summer, the Telegraph definitely has previous.

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Kaiser Franz solves a problem.

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Emperor Franz Josef V, sighed, pulled on his weaved mutton chop whiskers – now Imperial regalia – and twisted the dial on his wireless to shift the channel from Das Lichtprogramm – playing its usual diet of whirling Waltzes by Johan Strauss the very, very, very much younger, as if to prove that music, like History, had nowhere to go but interminable circles – over to Der Heimat- Service for the latest reports from Today in Parliament.

There was something oddly comforting about these reports. Like all the Sturm and Drang of the Shipping Forecast: all those rising squalls and Force Ten Gales, that menacing low visibility in Sea areas with comfortingly obscure and poetic names – Varangian, Black, Dogged, Austrian Bight, Trieste, Italian Sea, Palermo automatic lighthouse weather station – full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, to him, more than how much more comfortable it was to be sitting by the fire with a cup of tea and a crumpet.

Reports from the Diet were always incomprehensible. All the way across the Greater Austro-Hungarian – Balkan Empire, from Bavaria in the West to the Caspian Sea in the East and Naples in the South, members of the diet were allowed to make speeches in their own languages; on the proviso that no translations were allowed. This meant that members could sound off in full fury, to be approvingly written up in the local papers at home, blaming everyone else for local problems, securing their continuous re election as local champions – safe in the knowledge that no one else in the Empire, unless they understood Slovak, or Azeri, or Sicilian dialect, would have a clue what they were saying, so everyone could remain friends. All the broadcasts were also in the original languages, so everyone could tune into their own bit and be reassured that their worries were being expressed, if not heard. Thus, peace and harmony could be assured, as a grievance carefully nurtured, with no hope of resolution, is a soothing balm for everyone who enjoys suffering from it and being able to complain about it. If these problems were to be resolved, people would be lost. They wouldn’t know who they were any more.

Kaiser Franz scratched idly at his paunch, feeling a bit sleepy, when the newsflash he had been waiting for came up right on time. A solemn burst of Bruckner – titanic, overwhelming, monumental and oddly static, like the Empire itself – was followed by an announcer sounding even more po faced than usual. The troublesome, playboy heir apparent, Archduke Ferdy, had met with an unfortunate accident while trying to act out the bow flight scene from Titanic on the 3:30 Zeppelin from Zagreb to Odesa while drunk (and drugged too, though he knew it not) to be followed by an Inquiry and four days of official mourning – because there was no point in overdoing it – announced by the Prime Minister, in his familiar flat nasal tone; the one that sounds a bit like he’s been chewing cardboard most of his life. Satisfied that Plan B, with its aerodrome arson squad and threat of high profile collateral damage (and all the awkward questions that go with it) had not been necessary, the Kaiser chuckled to himself and put Zadok the Priest on his record player.

May the King live, may the king live, may the king live FOREVER, Alleluhia, Alleluhia, Alleluhia, Amen…

This England (and Wales) – Summer 2025

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In the 1960s the New Statesman used to have a short column of clips from right wing papers that illustrated the absurdity of their view of the world called “This England” (from John of Gaunt’s dying speech in Richard II; you know “This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars…This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”, the sort of pompous pontification that cued his nephew the King to remark, on hearing that he was dying, “Come, gentlemen, let’s all go visit him: Pray God we may make haste, and come too late!”

I was reminded of that in recent weeks by several parts of articles in the Guardian that I had to read twice to make sure that the point that I was reading really did say what it did; usually dropped in and passed on without comment; as though it were perfectly sensible, nothing to be bothered about.

Housing

The extra money (for affordable housing in the Spending Review) will help housing associations to buy up thousands of new units which have already been built by private developers as part of their affordable housing commitments, but which are sitting empty because they cannot afford them. My emphasis.

Housing projects that protect natural habitats, include public transport and divert wastewater from running ino local watercourses are deemed too expensive (by the government, as Labour’s message in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is that the developer knows best and other considerations can take a back seat).

Prevent

Asked about the government’s counter extremism programme, Prevent, Cooper said she was “very concerned” by evidence of increasing extremism among young people. “We are seeing the counter terrorism caseload trebling in three years involving teenagers”, she said. She said there had also been a doubling of the numbers of young people being referred to Prevent since last summer. And yet…“I continue to be concerned about the threshold ending up being too high and not enough Islamist extremist cases being referred to Prevent and the need to make sure more of those cases were being referred…”

Trubble at pit

These are not a quotes, simply retelling of comments from Any Answers on Radio 4 on 14/6/25. Any Answers can usually be relied upon for a rich vein of emotionally charged comments, more often than not unhinged from any knowledge of the subject being discussed. Nigel Farage’s proposal to reopen coal mines in South Wales that have been long flooded, and Blast Furnaces that have cooled solid, sparked several of these. One person thought it was a good idea in principle, but because no one local would want to do it they’d “have to import immigrants” to work in them – and that would never do. Another, in response to the same problem, argued that prisoners should be sent down the mines “like they do in America”. That’d learn ’em because, as we know, the problem with prisons is that they are “too soft”. Salt mines, unfortunately, are not available.

Legally illegal

“Britain’s decision to allow the export of F-35 fighter jet components to Israel, despite accepting they could be used in breach on international law in Gaza, was lawful, London’s High Court has ruled.”

Nazis in everyday life

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

A standard schtick of films and children’s TV dramas in the sixties was the moment that a previously anonymous villain was revealed to be a former middle ranking Nazi official, seeking to act as a seed for the regeneration of the movement; and thenceforth filmed looking Aryan while standing on yachts in front of mountains with a 1,000 Year Reich stare accompanied almost invariably by the crescendo from Wagner’s Tanhauser overture. (1)

This coincided with a lot of Nazi hunting stories sparked by the Eichmann trial in 1961, and the fact that no one had caught up with the Auschwitz “Angel of Death” Dr Josef Mengele, which gave the impression that the only surviving fragments of the old order – with the exception of Werner Von Braun, who was leading the US moon mission at the time and was therefore given a free pass – were leading lives of exiled obscurity in Argentina or Paraguay which, to be fair, some were. Mengele himself died when he drowned after suffering a stroke while swimming in Sao Paulo in 1979; having been given a passport in his own name by the West German Embassy in 1956 and actually visiting Europe using it in the late fifties.

This is a fairly extreme example of the way that former Nazis were reabsorbed into West German society in a wave of amnesia and omerta as the Cold War dug in. Von Braun, it turns out, was more the norm than Mengele or Eichemann. Though the Nuremburg Trials in 1945 -6 pronounced death sentences against 12 leading Nazis including Herman Goering and Joachim Von Ribbentrop, the number of former Nazis convicted of war crimes in the post war years up to 1958 was just 6,093. In the same period 729,176 had been amnestied. That looks like this.

Total Nazi Party membership in 1945 was 8 million, so most of them had no process at all.

Many others, not members of the Party, who committed war crimes were never held to account and simply melted back into their pre war roles. The unit of Hamburg policemen who formed an Einsatzgruppen execution squad (2) following on behind the Wehrmacht to march Jews, and sometimes Poles, out into the woods and shoot them in the back of the head, simply went back to Hamburg to direct traffic, follow up on petty crime and do all the usual things the police do. Only their commanding officer was held to account, executed after being extradited to Poland because of a massacre of Polish villagers. Their interviews in the early sixties were for historical purposes, and they were never held to account. Similarly, lower level former army, and even SS, officers provided the backbone of the Bundeswehr when it was reformed in 1955.

1 A belting piece of music which is well worth a listen if you’ve never heard it.

2 Documented in Ordinary Men. As grim a piece of reading as you’ll ever do. Its front cover illustration is of a squad of these men looking relaxed and grinning with local Jewish civilians kneeling in front of them with their hands up, was so abhorent that I couldn’t leave the book face up while I was reading it. It is chillingly echoed by some of the gloating social media posts by IDF soldiers in Gaza that show that fascism can infect anyone in the wrong circumstances.

A flying visit to the ruins of the “thousand year Reich” in 1947

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

My Dad in ATC uniform in 1947.

My Dad was in the Air Training Corps towards the end of WW2 and for several years afterwards. It used to meet in the Main Hall at Grays Tech (now the Hathaway Academy) – where I was to stand through many an Assembly 20 years after.

The high point of being in the ATC, literally, was to get flight experience, usually in a Lancaster (painted white). The best of these was a trip in the ball turrent on the spine of the plane at the top. Some of these flights involved dogfight simulation, where a Spitfire or Mustang fighter would suddenly appear and act out an attack, so the bomber pilot would have to take evasive action, involving yawing, rolling and corkscrewing in a manner guaranteed to give everyone on board acute airsickness. My Dad felt he was very lucky to have avoided one of those.

In 1947, someone higher up in the RAF thought it would be a good idea to send keen cadets from the ATC to have a look at some of the places the RAF was based overseas. A brasshat came down and interviewed my dad and his cousin Len and, a little later sent a message through that they’d decided to send my Dad to Germany and Len to Egypt. Len’s Dad put a veto on that for him, but my Grandad didn’t. So, my Dad got a warrant to go to Northolt for the flight to Germany.

What’s weird about this is that they were sending 17 year old cadets off on their own, with no apparent plan or purpose beyond the trip as an end in itself. The aircrew Dad was flying with in their DC3 didn’t know he was coming, weren’t keen to have him aboard, and had no idea what to do with him. After a bit of discussion they decided to give him the title “Air Quartermaster”; and got him to dish out the sandwiches (dainty things from BOAC on the way out) coffee, and pass on messages – “we’re now over the Hague” etc. Air Safety demonstrations were not part of the job description, and he got to sit in the co-pilot’s seat which had an exellent view of the impenetrable cloud cover they were flying over.

When they arrived at Bucheburg (Bookyburg to them) the cloud cover was still solid and the pilot had to confer with the navigator to make sure they were in the right place – as the airfield was surrounded by hills on three sides; which at that time presented an obvious risk if he couldn’t see where he was. The Navigator being confident enough, they descended through the cloud flying in a spiral until they broke through to clear air beneath and landed.

On landing, no one knew what to do with my Dad, the crew had places to go and Frauleins to see and didn’t want a 17 year old cadet cramping their style, no one from the base was expecting him, nor had he been given any guidance on what he might do. One of the crew grudgingly took him to the bar on the base where the German barman protectively refused to serve Schapps when the crewman ordered it, possibly for the entertainment value – “not for the boy”. After a while the crew member went off leaving Dad to his own devices and to finish his beer. On a visit to the toilet he was approached by a German civilian who asked him for cigarettes – “Zigaretten?” – so he gave him three. In the late 1940s in Germany these were not usually to smoke, but use as currency.

He then walked a little way into the town, which was lively in a “Bachanalian orgy” sort of way. There were “no fraternisation” bans on relations with German civilians, but the RAF crews and the local women did not seem to be paying much attention to them. Leaning on a lampost at the corner of the street, taking some of this in, he was shouted at by a Military Policeman sitting in a jeep on the other side of the road. “Airman! Over here!” Standing in front of him the MP noticed the ATC patch on the shoulder of his uniform and asked what it was. The other MP in the back of the jeep said “He’s just a boy”, so the first one contented himself with telling Dad off for standing with his hands in his pockets. “It creates a bad impression”. Wouldn’t want that with a Bachanalian orgy going on.

The following morning at breakfast, the crew were sitting around regaling each other with tales of exploits and conquests from the previous night, some of which might have been true. Before the trip back Dad went for a walk to the hanger where the DC3 was waiting. The doors to the hold were open, giving off an overpowering smell of coffee – which implied a certain amount of off the books trading.

On the trip back – in which one of the passengers was a former German soldier in handcuffs heading for a war crimes trial – the “Air Quartermaster” had to dish out the sandwiches again – thick RAF doorsteps filled with Corned Beef this time – and, having landed was, as with every other step of this trip, left to his own devices to get home.

Other cadets must have had these trips, but there seems to have been no debriefing beyond the local ATC CO asking if it was a good trip. The expected (opaque) response “Yes Sir!” may not have been universal, because this particular experiment was never repeated. Unless it simply petered out in the same aimless way that it seems to have been set up.

So endeth my Dad’s first trip overseas.