How convenient

This morning I was wondering why the Remainiacs have not come up with the great theory that it was really Mr Putin wot won the Brexit vote through some nefarious intervention. Right on cue, we have Ben Bradshaw MP coming up with that particular theory for which he admits having no evidence at all but it stands to reason, innit.

Mr Bradshaw seems to think that it has somehow been proven that Donald Trump won the election (through the electoral college, let it be noted, not the popular vote) because of some complicated behaviour on the part of the Russians in revealing e-mails that had probably been leaked. Nothing much has been proved yet though it might be in future. Incidentally, I can recall a time when journalists would have been asking why the CIA or, at least, some unknown and unnamed operatives of it were intervening in the electoral process and, apparently, trying to force a re-run. As to Brexit, this is what Mr Bradshaw said [scroll down in Hansard as the Huffpo quotations are wrong and semi-literate];

We have not even begun to wake up to Russia’s cyber-warfare. Its interference in the American presidential elections is now proven. It probably interfered in our own referendum—we do not have the evidence for that yet, but it is highly probable. It will certainly be involved in the French presidential election. There are already serious concerns in the German secret service that Russia is already interfering in the upcoming elections. We have to wake up to this, but when?

Hmm. Convenient. Even the American intervention is not actually fully proven and it is not clear what was achieved by any of the Russian actions, assuming they had taken place and the information had not simply been leaked. To say that it is highly probable that Russia interfered in the referendum though there is no evidence is, to put it mildly, irresponsible. And it will "certainly be involved in the French presidential election"? How does Mr Bradshaw know? Has Mr Putin consulted him?

Still, now we have a great story: when the people decide that they do not want to vote the way they are told by their betters, such as Labour MPs, they are not simply displaying signs of populism (my smelling salts, please); it is all arranged by the Russians because people would never act this way themselves. What it really echoes is Putin's own accusations against all the coloured revolutions on the Russian borders: none of them could have been carried out by the people, they were all organized, funded and carried out by the evil Americans. Mr Bradshaw and his ilk are merely echoing Vlad and his propagandists. Should we be listening to them?

Flag-waving in the worst possible taste

Yes, the Last Night of the Proms is upon us and the usual rows have emerged in the newspapers: is it a nasty chauvinistic flag-waving event or is it just a jolly party for people who have attended many if not most of the Proms concerts?

The only time I went to the Last Night was in the summer after my A levels when I had a season ticket for the second half of the series and, whoever was in the seats, the Arena and the Gallery was filled with people like me. That is, the second half really was just a party for people who loved music, went to the concerts and were celebrating the end of another successful series.

Since then, the Proms have gone from strength to strength but, in my opinion, unfortunately, the Last Night has become an institution on its own. There are people all over the world who are a little hazy what the Proms are but know for certain that there is a Last Night and it is wonderful or quite wonderful or whatever. The Proms in the Park all over the country is not a phenomenon I welcome - it erodes the quality of the music and makes it impossible to watch or listen to the Last Night in the Albert Hall. Still, many other people like the whole development and it is only one night of the year. I can ignore it all and usually do though I do listen and even go to some of the concerts. (Not the Arena any more but the Gallery sees my presence.)

This year another ingredient has been added to the brew of insane discussions: the anti-Brexiteers who are still fighting a lost battle. Various groups have raised money to buy lots of EU flags (because the Common Fisheries Policy and the European Arrest Warrant and the Common Agricultural Policy and legislation that can be initiated only by the Commission are essential to good music) to hand out to Promenaders. They can then wave them to their heart's content while everyone sings Rule Britannia to prove how much they hate nationalism and flag-waving.

The Guardian reports today that the plan seems to have gone ahead though how many of those blue flags with gold stars will be waved in a few hours' time is unknown. The comments made by the organizers (who do not care to give their names) are priceless in their stupidity:

In a statement, the organisers, who want to remain anonymous, said: “Music doesn’t recognise borders, religion, gender, age, status or creed and most orchestras, shows and music schools rely heavily on talented musicians from inside and outside the EU.”

They added: “Accordionist Romano Viazzani summed it up perfectly when he said: ‘Music is the universal language. It builds bridges and tears down walls’.”

On Saturday morning the team tweeted a picture of concertgoers with EU flags gathered outside the venue. They captioned the image: “First prom-goers arrive with EU flags in solidarity with musicians and music.”

Um yes. Musicians inside and outside the EU. So why do we need to wave EU flags and set up those walls and boundaries that the blue and gold flag signifies. And how does the Common Fisheries Policy fit in with music being international?

Circling round the subject

There seems to be far too much ink (metaphorically speaking) spilled on matters to do with the Brexit referendum but occasionally there might be something to add even by this blog. For example, there is the question of what is to be done (as both Chernyshevsky and Lenin asked in their day) with the leaflet so thoughtfully sent out by HMG to every household in which the said households were being chided to do the right thing and vote to remain in the European Union.

It so happens that I was discussing that very point with a friend on the phone when the postman hove into view and delivered my copy of it. I suppose before I do anything I ought to have a look at it but, somehow, the mood is not upon me. 

Is this actually legal I ask. After all, MPs and Councillors are not allowed to use official facilities to conduct election campaigns and HMG is not allowed to send out leaflets telling the benighted voters to vote for them because they are so wonderful though, clearly, a government in place has certain advantages over the opposition in matters electoral. Why are they allowed to use official facilities and, thus, taxpayers' money to tell us which way to vote in a referendum? 

Anyway, everything has been said on that subject as well so the only question that remains is what is one to do with this document. I am afraid the paper is a little too shiny for my cats' litter tray (they don't like it); Nigel Farage's advice, as usual, is of no use as it is not in an envelope and, therefore, cannot simply be returned to sender; I have no desire to spend money on the postage. 

I could put it in an envelope, address it the Rt Hon. David Cameron, 10, Downing Street etc and put no stamps on it or stamps that add up to some minimal tiny amount, thus forcing the flunkeys to pay for the postage. If a few hundred thousand of us did it, there would be a great deal of dissatisfaction in Number 10. Or, perhaps, one of the organizations, say Vote Leave or Grassroots Out (GO), could issue a call to collect as many of these leaflets as possible and then deliver them to the gates of Downing Street in a van or lorry. I have not heard of such an initiative so I have to make some kind of a decision myself. 

Meanwhile, we have had a great deal of excitement about the Dutch Referendum that rejected the Ukraine-European Union treaty and the highly predictable fact that the EU is going to ignore it. To be fair, it is hard to see what the EU can do about this. Even as far as the Dutch government is concerned a referendum in that country is advisory but it would be a foolish Dutch politician who ignored it. As far as the EU is concerned 32 per cent of the Dutch electorate is not of any real importance. Nor is it of importance from a democratic point of view. They are a tiny minority of the EU's population and even 64 per cent of that tiny minority does not amount to much. Exactly whom do they represent? Slightly more people than the Eurocrats do but not by much. One cannot have a referendum about something those who are asked are not in control of.

All this shows the dangers of direct as opposed to representative democracy. Those who whine about "not being represented" by our elected representatives had better consider the possibilities of major decisions being taken in the wake of completely unrepresentative direct plebiscites. 

Of course, it is unpleasant to have any section of the people saying NO to whatever they are told is good for them. Does this show growing euroscepticism in Holland or a general fed-upness with yet more migrants from Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, the figures tell you nothing. But it is worth noting that 68 per cent may not have turned out to vote against the agreement but neither did they turn out to vote for it. So, perhaps, dissatisfaction is genuinely growing. 

Oh that sense of déjà vu

There will be many arguments for staying in the EU but you can bet your bottom dollar that we shall see this one over and over again: The UK has a vital role to play in shaping the future of Europe. Now is not the time to turn our backs.

I can only surmise that Ian Baxter, Chairman and Founder of Baxter Freight and guest author on Open Europe has lived in a yurt in Outer Mongolia for the last twenty years and has not bothered to catch on the voluminous literature on the subject of Britain being able to shape "Europe" according to its ideas and how much "Europe" needs it.

We must stay in the EEC, we were told officially and unofficially in 1975 because that is the only way it can be turned into a democratic structure. How did that turn out, I wonder.

We must stay in the post-Maastricht EU and, indeed, support that treaty because that is the only way serious changes can be implemented and the structure made more open, more manageable, more democratic. Calling John Major.

We must go into the euro because otherwise the structure will not work (that is true but it would not have worked anyway) and, in any case, if we don't, we shall be the losers. Ahem, yes.

So here we are again. Britain has once again a great opportunity to shape the future of the European project, having not managed to do it in the past. Oh, I lie. There is one definite development in the whole history of the project that was put together by our own civil servants: the Single Market that imposes all the rules on all firms and organizations whether they trade with the other member states. Is that what these people had in mind?

What exactly does the Foreign Secretary mean?

This blog rejoiced in the passing of William Hague, as he was a seriously inept Foreign Secretary and Angelina Jolie could always find someone else to be photographed with, someone more like the beautiful people she is used to.

That does not mean, we need to welcome his successor, Philip Hammond, unreservedly and reservations are being made already. In the wake of the disgraceful episode when a perfectly ordinary supermarket where people were going about their business had to close because of anti-Israeli demonstrations that made that business impossible with the police apparently doing nothing, we have the Foreign Secretary making some very curious statements.

I am quoting from JTA, who are in turn quoting from an interview in the Sunday Telegraph:

Much of the British public is “deeply disturbed” by the impact of Israel’s operation in Gaza, the new foreign secretary of England said, and the response could be more widespread anti-Semitic attacks.

“Of course it’s a concern,” Philip Hammond told the Sunday Telegraph, speaking of the hate crimes on Jewish communities in Britain, “and we have already seen certainly an upturn in anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

Anti-Semitic incidents have doubled since Israel began its operation in Gaza nearly a month ago, according to the Community Security Trust, the security apparatus for the British Jewish community.

Hammond, who assumed his post less than a month ago, said the British government shares the “widespread public horror” of a “wide swath” of the British public at the suffering of the people of Gaza.

“The British public has a strong sense that the situation of the civilian population in Gaza is simply intolerable and must be addressed – and we agree with them,” he told the Independent. “There must be a humanitarian cease-fire that is without conditions. We have to get the killing to stop.”

As a matter of fact, I think he is wrong about most of the British public. They have long ago stopped being interested in what is happening in what they consider to be a hell-hole, the Middle East, though it is unquestionably true that there is a large and vociferous minority that is campaigning against Israel and the old hatred as I have said before has morphed into a new shape. It is that old hatred, nonetheless.

Mr Hammond's comments about the cease-fire show that he is either ignorant or prefers to lie about what has been happening. Does he not know that each cease-fire was broken by Hamas if they even agreed to it which they did not every time? Does he not know that Hamas is refusing to have a proper cease-fire unless a number of its conditions are fulfilled? And if he does know this, why does he not appeal to them?

More serious is the implication that somehow Mr Hammond thinks that anti-Semitic attacks in Britain are justified by what is happening in Gaza and that they are likely to increase with the authorities not in a position to do anything about it. In other words, he is threatening Israel with increased anti-Semitism (as if they didn't know) if they do not do what they are told and surrender their military advantage.

Is that not virtual incitement to violence and hate crime? Should the Home Secretary, she of the kitten heels, not look into the matter. Imagine if any Minister had said that attacks on Arabs were understandable in the light of behaviour by the Syrian government, various Syrian groups and ISIS? How long would his career survive a statement like that?

As we witness an orgy of commemoration of the beginning of the First World War with candles, poppies and lots of memos about "we will remember them"; as we listen to the uncertainty as to whether that terrible war was fought for British self-interest or to preserve freedom (both rather questionable but the first at least debatable) there is one thing missing from all these tear-jerking accounts: the attacks on people and businesses with German names because Germany was now the enemy (here and here though this dates to 1915). That, in itself was wrong and obviously something rather shameful, not to be discussed. Nevertheless, according to the Foreign Secretary it is not altogether wrong or, at least, completely understandable, that there should be attacks on Jews because Israel, a mostly Jewish state is fighting a tough war and is not giving any quarter. The fact that Israel is not fighting Britain seems to be irrelevant. Anti-Semitism, apparently, cannot be stopped even in its violent form.

Holier than thou

We have all had to experience this: the people who strut in their ethical superiority because they disapprove of those of us who make rather black jokes about some ghastly event in the world. Just recently I found myself admonished by one of these holier-than-thou characters for making some comment about MH17 that was not simply a string of meaningless words that express horror and sorrow and yet more horror. The same person made it quite clear that in arguing Israel's case I was showing myself to be lacking in sensibility as people and, especially, children were being killed. To be fair, this person thought that those arguing the anti-Israeli case were equally lacking in sensibility. Clearly hadn't read the memo on how to be holier than thou.

As we know it is only those who are against Israel and, allegedly, support the Palestinians (see here and here) can be said to be sensitive to human suffering and children's deaths. (Well, no, since you mention it, not Israeli children being under attack.) In the same way I recall being told that my support for a nuclear deterrent showed my hatred for peace, love of war and carelessness about potential deaths. It could not possibly have shown that I did not think appeasement of a militant totalitarian system was unlikely to create peace or prevent deaths.

The holier than thou attitude over the Middle East or, to be quite precise, the bit of the Middle East that concerns Israel is fed by Hamas propaganda and, above all, those pictures. Those terrible pictures of people being shot, bombed, killed, their homes destroyed, their children killed, over and over again.

James Delingpole, never the most patient of men, has definitely lost his temper over the whole question, telling people to "spare him the sick manipulative dead baby propaganda photos". I know how he feels.

The boy - no older than five - was on a hospital bed. It must have happened very recently because there was still colour in his face. His eyes were closed and his expression - he can't have seen it coming, thank God - was serene. You might almost have imagined him asleep, if it weren't for the fact that his body was in bits: head and severed torso; an arm; legs and lower body; entrails.

Whoever did this, I thought, is really, really sick.

But I didn't mean the Israelis - who, I imagine, were the people I was expected to blame. Rather, I meant the sicko who scooped up the boy's remains while they were still fresh and insisted on laying them out, like some grotesque jigsaw, in order to snap them artfully for a propaganda shot. And also, all the sickos out there who have been reposting photos like these all over the internet in order to make what they seem to imagine is an unarguable point about Israel's war on Hamas.

The point they are trying to make goes like this: here is a dead child; killing children is evil; Israel killed this child; therefore Israel is evil.

Are you buying this argument? I'm not. I don't even think it qualifies as an argument. In fact, I think it has about as much insight and depth as one of those posters with kittens on it saying: "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."

Yet, that is precisely the way the argument runs, just as it ran back in the days of the old Cold War: if there is a war people might get killed so if you do not think we should disarm thus making it impossible for us to defend ourselves, you are in favour of people being killed.

Delingpole goes on:

What I loathe about it is its mixture of hectoring presumption and manipulative dishonesty.

Presumption: "If you support Israel, then you clearly don't care about dead children," it says. (Is there anyone in the world who isn't moved by the sight of a dead child? I don't think so. The people who are implying otherwise are beneath contempt).

Dishonesty: other than the truism that war is hell, the photograph actually tells us nothing.

We have no idea whether this boy was actually a victim of the fighting in Gaza - or of the far bloodier and uglier civil wars in Syria and Iraq.

If he was indeed a Palestinian, we have no idea whether he was killed by Israeli fire or by Hamas ordinance.

Nor, even if he was killed by Israeli fire, do we know the circumstances. Maybe it was a tragic mistake; maybe, he was one of those innocents that Hamas likes to use as human shields in its rocket launching sites; maybe he was being used as a "tunnel rat"; maybe he'd tried to flee with his family to a shelter only to be driven back to his apartment by Hamas who recognise the propaganda value of dead children.

Read the whole piece. It is not long and he does not think killing children is a good idea. Trust me.

Much noise about victims but very limited sympathy

Yesterday's Prom concert was Bach's St John Passion, a very fine work and a very fine performance, though I have to admit to listening to it on the radio. In the interval there was a discussion with a couple of the performers about the work and about the Gospel on which it was based. In the course of that discussion there was talk about the fact that of the four Gospels, St John's is the one that makes the Jews as a whole the guilty party. This was not the main point of the discussion but it is worth noting that, in many ways, the Mediaeval anti-Semitism grew out of that extraordinarily beautiful work, the Gospel according to St John.

We have moved on from there and over the ages anti-Semitism has changed shape and turned up in many forms. I do not think it is particularly controversial to point out that its most recent manifestation is not connected with the Christian Church or the more traditional right-wing groups: it is now almost entirely on the Left and is "justified" by horror at Israel's actions against the Palestinians who are clearly everybody's favourite victims in one way or another.

The day saw yet more anti-Israeli demonstrations, including one that brought the centre of London to a halt, though, it fell far short of the projected march of a million.

As ever we saw and heard a mixture of slogans and chants. Many carried the usual mass-produced Socialist Workers' Party posters that called for an end to the siege of Gaza. Clearly these people had not considered the possibility that if Hamas stopped spending the money it gathers from the world in the form of huge international aid on rockets that are fired into Israel day after day or tunnels through which they try to smuggle terrorists into that country, the "siege" might be lifted.

Nor do they consider that, possibly, if Hamas abandoned parts of its Charter, acknowledged Israel's right to exist, stopped using the Palestinians in Gaza as gun and propaganda fodder but started negotiating, concentrating on economic development (by which I don't mean luxurious existence for the Hamas leaders), there might be some change in the situation.

In fact, there would be some change if Hamas agreed to the various cease-fire proposals. We did have a few hours of it earlier today but Hamas has, apparently, not agreed to its extension and so fighting will resume.

Well, one cannot expect people who turn out to demonstrate for the currently most fashionable cause to do much thinking.

The other slogans, as ever, were a curious mixture: on the one hand, Israel was compared to Nazi Germany (the comparison, regardless of what one thinks about events in Gaza, is not in the slightest valid but is likely to be particularly hurtful to Jews), on the other there were, as usual, threats or promises to finish what Hitler started (an unlikely scenario). In a number of cities, Paris being one, there were attacks on Jewish premises and businesses. As in the past, what may have started as support for the people of Gaza has gone well beyond criticism of a particular country's policy and has morphed into anti-Semitism. There really is no other way of describing what is happening in this picture, taken in Paris yesterday.

This description on Breitbart gives a fair account of what was going on.

The activists were keen to avoid discussing the thorny issue of the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel. Instead they chanted things like: "1,2,3,4, Occupation No More" and "5,6,7,8 Israel is the terrorist state." Then they went on to a familiar classic: "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"; a reference to wiping out the State of Israel, and relates to the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan - better known as the Jewish state.

In the meantime, the Middle East is, indeed, burning and far worse things are happening in other countries. The media has more or less given up on events in Syria but the activities of ISIS in Iraq still merit some mention though not exactly any great horror. One wonders whether the feminist organizations that, for some reason, have ranged themselves against the only Middle Eastern country where women have equal rights think about the news that

Islamic State (Isis), the al-Qaida offshoot that seized large swathes of northern Iraq last month, has warned women in the city of Mosul to wear full-face veils or risk severe punishment.

The Sunni insurgents, who have declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria and have threatened to march on Baghdad, also listed guidelines on how veils and clothes should be worn, part of a campaign to violently impose their radical brand of Islam.

Mosul, let us not forget is the place where one of the world's oldest Christian communities is being destroyed through murder, rapine and what might be called religious cleansing. We hear little from the world about it.

We hear little about the fact that in Libya there is now a full scale civil war going on and the United States has evacuated its embassy (a wise precaution, given certain events in that not too distant past).

We hear little about the daily figures of dead, wounded and displaced in a number of Middle Eastern countries. If Israel is not involved, the media and the loud-mouthed "supporters of the Palestinians" don't want to know. Muslims who try to raise the issue of the far greater number of victims in other countries on various sites, get barracked.

In fact, those "supporters" do not want to know that even UNWRA, an organization that exists, against all the supposed rules on which the UN and its off-shoots are based, to aid and abet the Palestinians and their leaders, are saying that it might well have been Hamas rockets that hit the UN school in Gaza, killing several children and wounding more.

Neither they nor organizations that are supposed to be fighting for children's rights are interested in the story that Hamas used children to build the network of tunnels (though not terror tunnels as the author of the piece explains in the comments section) during which 160 of them were killed.

The conclusion one has to draw from all this is that not only do these people not care about other problems and other violence in the Middle East, they do not even care all that much about the Palestinians, unless they are under Israeli attack. Here is an excellent piece by Cranmer, written on Thursday but nothing much has changed since then.

Curiously, there is no mention of Assad's persecution of Palestinian communities or the fact that he has "starved and murdered" thousands of them.

No mention of the Palestinians in Iraq who are subject to "discrimination, sectarian violence and ruthless killing by the Iraqi government".

No mention of the mass expulsion of Palestinians by Arab Muslim countries, like Saudi Arabia, Libya and Kuwait, of which Yasser Arafat declared that "what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories".

Israel has killed some 700 Palestinians in its latest offensive in Gaza. Every death is a tragedy, especially those of children. Some of the pictures coming out of the war zone are brutal, distressing and heartbreaking. God weeps at the suffering. If He has meaning and purpose in the pain, it is lost to the world's baffled intellects.

But it is a curious that Israel should be constantly singled out for special treatment.
After all, the Palestinians have suffered far greater atrocities at the hands of their Arab brothers and co-religionists. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced; tens of thousands terrorised, persecuted and ethnically cleansed; and many hundreds summarily slaughtered.

It is, indeed, curious. One is driven to the conclusion that what motivates all these "activists" of whatever nationality is not so much sympathy for the Palestinians, which is obviously very limited, as something very different: a much older and much uglier emotion.

This time even the BBC noticed

There is a reasonable argument that this time round Hamas has overplayed its hand. Not that we don't see the usual fanatical and usually quite ignorant anti-Israeli comments but, as this piece on Bloomberg points out, the voices that usually pressurize that country have been mooted somewhat. It also places the blame for this round of fighting firmly on the Hamas leadership, who have stirred up Israeli reprisals without endangering themselves very much. Well, perhaps, the day will come when the Palestinians will finally realize who their real enemy is and go after the leaders.

It seems that Hamas is being blamed by the Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas, as well. Then there is this curious clip that indicates a certain dissatisfaction with Hamas on the part of Arab states and, above all, leaders. The speaker is the Egyptian journalist, Abdel Bari Atwan. More on the Egyptian media here. There have been other similar pronouncements and a certain lack of enthusiasm for Hamas and its fight.

That has not prevented a number of very violent demonstrations in the West, which degenerated into torchings and riots (a picture from Paris but there are many more) and were accompanied by vicious anti-Semitic and Judaeophobic slogans that invoked positively Hitler and the Holocaust, expressing the wish that it will now be completed by Islamists. (One can't help laughing at the thought of these losers, for what else have the Palestinians been all this time, completing what Hitler did not manage but the intentions and slogans are nasty enough.)

Naturally enough, we have seen many pictures of dead Palestinian children, something that we are used to though some of us have been asking questions about those pictures for some time. Remember Green Helmet Guy? Similar stories were uncovered by other bloggers but these were left severely alone by the MSM though little by little some acknowledged the word Pallywood. Come to think of it, remember the whole saga of Mohammed Al-Dura?

So what of the various pictures of the children and the "innocent civilians" of Gaza? Well, something odd has been happening. As the Blaze points out, no less than the BBC found that a number of them have been recycled from previous wars in Gaza, from Iraq and from another war of which we hear next to nothing from these angry twitters and Facebook posters, and that is the far more ferocious one in Syria.

Here is the BBC's report on the subject. If these people have lost the BBC they are in a bad state.

So let me end this posting with a picture of a singularly unfortunate lady who seems to have been wounded in Syria and in Gaza in precisely the same way, in the company of the same old lady. Some people have no luck. (Ignore the comment on the green strip, which is superfluous in my opinion.)

We who have CWM

CWM? I hear you ask. Just what on earth is CWM? Well, I'll tell you as I learned that acronym today from Diplomad 2. It is, dear readers, Cold War Mentality and one that we must not on any account have, because it is boring, out of date, completely wrong in the new world etc etc. Come to think of it, I have been accused of that myself at various times, including once at St Antony's College, Oxford when I expressed the view after the first Afghan revolution in 1978 that the Russians have finally made it to Kabul. You are obsessed with the Soviet Union, I was told by other members of the college, all students of political science and theory. Six weeks later the Soviet troops poured into the country. Did I get an apology? Did I, heck.

Since then this accusation has cropped up in my life as it has in Diplomad's life. As he says:

Well! What an insult! How is it bad to have a "cold war" mentality (CWM)? Would it be an insult to tell somebody, "Sorry, you can't make it here because you can't let go of your anti-fascist mentality." This CWM accusation seems to be a meme (may we still use that word?) of the left.

Indeed. Apparently, he also gets accused of watching FOX News. I am not guilty of that as I live on this side of the Pond and, anyway, I do not own a TV set (something to do with the programmes being rubbish and me not wanting to pay tax to the BBC). But I do sympathize with this outburst:

I watch FOX off and on, as I do the other TV news outlets, and have not found FOX wrong about the major events of the past few years. FOX called it right, for example, on Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Solyndra, the IRS scandals, and, of course, the horrendous disaster known as Obamacare. The FOX pundits, in other words, people who come on expressly to opine, seem to range all over the place, with, admittedly the largest bunch gathering somewhere in the range from establishment GOP to Tea Party. I, however, see lots of "progressives" on FOX who express their leftist opinions and keep coming back on. I have not heard the slime-ball language, gutter-level insults, and race-baiting on FOX that come out on MSNBC from "progressives" such as Bashir, Baldwin, Sharpton, Maddow, and Harris-Perry. I think we owe a debt of gratitude to Rupert Murdoch, who similar to another Australian, General Sir John Monash, nearly 100 years ago saved the day for the West.

Familiar, is it not? We of the CWM were right about the Soviet Union and Communism, we were right about Russia under a gang of KGB men, we were right about terrorists who were trained by the KGB and the GRU. Then, of course, there are other matters. Many of us (I have to be careful here) were right about the intentions of the European Union and about the euro both in its political and practical aspects, we were right about widening not being the opposite of deepening but actually two aspects of the same process and I together with Bill Jamieson and the gang at CRCE, who are also possessors of CWM, in particular, were right about membership of the EU being a bad idea for Eastern Europe.

Anyway, there we are. I remain a proud possessor of CWM.

Shock: the CBI is wrong again

Because I find everything to do with the EU and, especially, the discussions conducted on various sites and threads unutterably tedious I tend to fall behind in my coverage of it. So, yes, I know this is yesterday's news but I think I have something to add.

Monday's Evening Standard had one or two articles that I sort of read. Doesn't  happen every day. Except for Fay Maschler's articles on most Wednesdays, Brian Sewell's on many Thursdays or the film reviews on all Fridays, I tend to flip through that paper, maybe do the word games and take it home to line the cat litter tray. That sort of attitude in readers does not inspire the advertisers and, unsurprisingly, the Standard works hard to overcome it.

The front page was full of dire warnings from Thames Water about how we should use less water or pay more for it. I noticed that there was no mention of the amount of water that is lost because Thames Water's ability to keep the pipes in reasonable condition is negligible. The Standard's editorial chipped in, saying, ha-ha-ha, how unfortunate it was that the rain started as soon as the newspaper with that story came out but, really, we live in a fairly dry climate that is getting drier all the time. No figures were given, of course, and to nobody's surprise there followed about 12 hours of steady rain with interruptions of downpour.

Nobody knows how this happens but everybody has noticed that whenever there are comments or predictions about heat, drought or just a drier climate, the skies open and people gloomily start thinking about arks. The whole thing is as hard to explain as it is to answer the obvious question as to what is the outcome of the Standard's worthy but endless campaigns.

Do more children leave primary schools being able to read and write? Has (relative) poverty been abolished in London? Are gangs a things of the past? Who can tell? Since most of these campaigns approach the same problems from different angles, the suspicion remains that apart from a few isolated cases of success (and one cheers for them, of course) they get absolutely nowhere. In which case, we ought to know what happens to the very large sums raised by the newspaper.

Enough of these digressions. The other article that caught my eye was by John Cridland, Director-General of the CBI, whose pronouncement ahead of that organization's conference, much touted everywhere, was that the UK has to stay in the EU but that the EU must reform. I could find no mention of airborne pigs.

It is quite extraordinary that the arguments organizations like the CBI trotted out to prove that Britain had  to join the euro and which have been proved to be absolute nonsense are now trotted out to prove that Britain has to stay in the EU. Why are we even listening to these people? By no stretch of the imagination can the CBI be said to represent British business in its majority, let alone its entirety.

At this point I think I should remind my readers of the posting about that doughty fighter against the CBI and its economical attitude to the truth, Brigadier Anthony Cowgill.

Have the Ralph Milibands won?

The  Miliband saga rolls on. Yesterday's Evening Standard carried a heartfelt plea from the Leader of the Opposition and potential Prime Minister, Ed Miliband not to drag the next election into the gutter, that being where it is now thanks to the nasty attacks on him by the Daily Mail and their persistent assertions that Ed's father, Ralph Miliband, was a highly influential left-wing Marxists who had little time for British democracy or, indeed, democracy of any kind, considering that to be a bourgeois construct.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ed Miliband the sensitive and honourable politician who sees nothing wrong in having his photograph taken in the company of a young supporter whose t-shirt is ... ahem ... not very nice about a previous Prime Minister. An odd companion to take to the moral high ground, which little Ed seems to want to occupy at the moment.

It is more than possible that non-British readers of this blog do not know what all the fuss is about though British ones may well feel that they have heard more than they ever wanted to about the Miliband family. So here is a brief summary of the whole brouhaha.

Ed Miliband, the Leader of the Opposition and a potential Prime Minister who seems to be reinventing himself as a firebrand socialist is the younger son of the highly influential, extreme left-wing Marxist thinker and writer, Ralph Miliband, who came to Britain as a refugee from the Nazis in his teens. Before we go any further, let me remind everyone that neither being a refugee from the Nazis nor serving in Her Majesty's forces is a guarantee of a person's loyalty to the country or to the political regime of (relative) freedom, democracy and constitutionalism. The history of the second half of the twentieth century bears me out.

The row of the father of the Leader of the Opposition started on Saturday when Geoffrey Levy wrote an article about him and his possible influence on his son, whom the Daily Mail does not like, being on the other side politically speaking. The article was not about the personal life of any Miliband and dealt exclusively with political matters, which, one would think was entirely reasonable when you are writing about a leading politicians and a leading political theorist who happens to be his father. Not so but far from it.

Ed Miliband reacted furiously at the aspersions cast at his father and demanded apologies, withdrawals, resignations, for all I know, sentences in the Gulag. How dare the Daily Mail sink so low as to write the truth about smear his father? This, despite the fact, that, as the Labour supporter and son of Labour MP Dan Hodges has pointed out, little Ed tends to drag his father and his mother into his speeches rather a lot.

What little Ed and in his wake the Labour Party, left-wing journalists and twitterati, even the right-wing commentariat objected to was the Daily Mail expressing the view (and refusing to apologize for it) that Ralph Miliband, to whom this country gave shelter, responded by hating it and every institution in it, particularly those that prove so attractive to refugees. Untrue, sobbed little Ed; untrue shouted his Labour Party chums; untrue shrieked the left-wing commentariat; really not nice muttered the right-wing commentariat. Time was a real socialist would have been proud if he were described as someone who hates his country in the name of international socialism but socialists ain't what they used to be.

Ralph Miliband wrote at length of the need to adopt Marxist ideas; he chastised the Labour Party for not being radical enough; and while he expressed some reservation about Stalin and the Soviet system in general, he supported and advocated the destruction of capitalism and western bourgeois democracy. Does this mean he was not a patriot? One could argue so and argue successfully. One could say as Tim Montgomerie, an impeccably right-wing columnist, does [no link as the Times is behind a pay wall] that wanting to change a country is no proof that you hate it. To which one can reply that surely it depends on how much one wants to change and how deep those changes are intended. In the case of Miliband senior the changes he advocated were wholesale. He did not like anything about this country's political and cultural set-up.

But he served in the Royal Navy during the war, comes the plaintive response. How can anyone who does that be unpatriotic? Quite easily, as it happens. A good many people served in the forces during the war, among them, I dare say a number of the maligned Daily Mail journalists of the day. Many Communists served in the armed forces though usually after June 22, 1941. Before that they and their rag, the Daily Worker, called on members of the armed forces to desert and decried the capitalist war waged on their great leader's buddy, Hitler. Unlike the British Union of Fascists, the CPGB was not made illegal despite clearly expressed treason and their rag not shut down because Churchill did not want to antagonize the unions.

Even after the German invasion of the Soviet Union it was often not patriotism  or love of freedom that motivated the Communists who were serving but a desire to use the situation to forward their own cause, which just happened to be that of the other vile regime of the mid-century, the Soviet Union. Anyone who is interested in the subject could do worse than read Evelyn Waugh's magnificent trilogy Sword of Honour, especially the last novel, Unconditional Surrender (or listen to its dramatization on Radio 4 on Sundays at 3 pm).

Ralph Miliband would have been too young to join the forces before Barbarossa, so we do not know whether he would have done but his subsequent pronouncements show quite conclusively that he was on the enemy's side in the Cold War, as Benedict Brogan points out. His views were well known and something that in the past the left accepted with some pride.

In 2004 the Guardian wrote:

Ralph Miliband died in 1994 as arguably Britain's most charismatic and influential leftwing intellectual. His books about the unequal relationship between business and politicians, and in particular about the tendency of the Labour party, and parties like it, to overcompromise with capitalism have been taught in universities in Britain and far beyond since the 1960s. His teaching is vividly remembered by former students. Outside academia, he also spent countless dogged hours as an activist, trying to establish more genuinely socialist alternatives to the Labour way of doing things. He did not soften with age. "The last conversation I had with Ralph," says a close friend, "he was savage about Blair."

Being savage about Blair is not, I suppose, particularly controversial until one realizes that the savagery is caused by Blair's failure to implement extreme socialist policies and, probably, by his getting rid of that infamous Clause 4. It would appear that Miliband senior's allegiance to the cause predates his service with the Royal Navy:

One boiling afternoon during his first summer in London, he [Ralph Miliband] went to Highgate cemetery, found Karl Marx's grave and, standing with his fist clenched, swore "my own private oath that I would be faithful to the workers' cause". Not that he intended to remain a worker himself: he found clearing bombsites "an arduous business" and felt a distance from his fellow labourers that was partly a matter of nationality but also a matter of aspirations. He wanted to be an intellectual. In 1941, he applied to study politics at the London School of Economics. He was accepted.

The rest of the article gives an interesting and cogent account of Miliband senior's activity in the name of Marxist socialism though it gives no thought to the question of whether he was patriotic or not. Each reader can decide for himself or herself.

All this is straightforward and ought to be the usual coin of political rows and discussions. Yet the whirlwind raised by that article among the commentariat and twitterati has been astonishing and to the Daily Mail gratifying. Day after day they have maintained that they would not apologize (having withdrawn one rather tasteless photograph which was not quite as tasteless as the one of little Ed above) and that they would continue to proclaim the evil legacy of people like Ralph Miliband. If that ensures that his son never becomes Prime Minister, well, the Daily Mail is not going to shed any tears over that.

Yesterday they gave space to Michael Burleigh, a highly respected historian of Nazi Germany and of terrorism. This time round he wrote about Stalin's left-wing apologists who saw nothing terribly wrong with the Gulag or the numbers murdered, tortured and imprisoned as long as it was done in the name of social justice. After describing the horrific camps and their extent as well as some other aspects of the Soviet rule and the terror which was the essential core of it, he adds:

Such a system — whose goal was ‘social justice’ — relied on any number of Western apologists to deny what others had witnessed first-hand.

Many of these were British academics, intellectuals and journalists. Among them were the founders of the London School of Economics, Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

They merely said of Stalin’s terror famine: ‘Strong must have been the faith and resolute the will of the men who, in the interest of what seemed to them the public good, could take so momentous a decision.’

When Stalin decided to purge entire swathes of the Communist party in the mid-1930s — resulting in 600,000 or so people being tortured and shot — Western apologists lined up to excuse actions that had been motivated by his envy, paranoia, hatred and spite. The fact that the vengeance extended to the families and children of the Soviet butcher’s victims, and blighted the lives of others down the generations, was no hindrance to putting a rosy gloss on mass murder.

For Stalin established a few model prisons especially to show visiting Western dupes such as Professor Harold Laski, the mentor of Ralph Miliband at the LSE and chairman of the Labour Party.

Laski, who was seemingly not shocked by prisoners having their teeth smashed out with iron bars, reported back: ‘Basically, I did not observe much of a difference between the general character of a trial in Russia and in this country.’

Ralph Miliband may be tangential to the story but his views fit in well though, to be fair, he occasionally disapproved of his friend Eric Hobsbawm's slavish admiration for Stalin.

So why should there be such a fuss at the Daily Mail's possibly slightly intemperate but not wholly inaccurate and politically understandable attack on the two Milibands (David having left the British political scene)? Ed's slightly ridiculous self-righteousness is understandable, given the mood of present-day politics. Those nasty journalists are attacking is just the sort of plaintive cry one would expect from him with lots of references to smear tactics and gutter journalism. The same goes for the left in general, and the Labour Party in particular. While their own methods of throwing muck at everyone they disagree with and going on at length about David Cameron's education are not perhaps of the highest order, they are quick to take offence when the "extreme right-wing nutcases" point out obvious truths about them.

That still does not explain why the Conservatives are tut-tutting and the right-wing commentariat is calling for smelling salts at the vulgarity of it all. It could be, as Benedict Brogan says, that we have forgotten the Cold War, which ended technically 25 years ago. I think the reason is a little more profound and has something to do with the phenomenon described by Michael Burleigh. The truth is that the Ralph Milibands of this world have won this battle and to reverse that victory we need to fight hard. They have made it unacceptable across the political spectrum to criticize anyone with a left-wing tendency even if that tendency involves supporting some of the worst tyrannies, some of the most savage political systems of world history.

Allow me to remind my readers of something that happened in 2008 when Max Mosley, younger son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the one-time member of practically every political party and the one-time leader of various fascist organizations in Britain. Mr Mosley who was not a politician but a man deeply involved with Formula 1 racing and thus unknown to most of us was caught out in some unsavoury sexual behaviour. If memory serves me right, the girls in question were blackmailed by the late unlamented News of the World newspaper to give them stories about Mr Mosley. When he won his court case on the grounds that his privacy had been invaded, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the dreadfulness of controlling the press when it was merely doing its duty of purveying smut about a little known individual, which was of no public value at all.

The other thing I recall is that there were numerous articles about Mr Mosley's father and mother, all describing at great length and with no reference to the case in question their political activity. That, apparently, was acceptable, yet describing the political activity of the father of the Leader of the Opposition and his possible influence on the son is "beyond the pale".

Would anyone care to dispute my assertion that the Ralph Milibands have won?

No, I don't think the controversy will end

Naturally, I am delighted for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the whole family; I am a little miffed it was not a girl but even if it had been there would have been no constitutional crisis until the second one if that was a boy. Two girls would have been the same situation as that in George VI's family and that resolved itself satisfactorily. However, it was a boy, as I heard proclaimed happily in Old Compton Street while I was heading for coffee and cake at Maison Bertaux. So that is that. Let us turn to less happy matters.

Historian at large is a new blog for me. It is run by Roger Moorhouse, an historian with a very impressive list of publications. In his latest posting he turns to the subject of particular interest to me and that is the Reichstag fire of 1933 and the historical myths that have surrounded it ever since. Mr Moorhouse goes through the evidence, with especial reference to a recent book by a German historian, Sven Felix Kellerhoff, Der Reichstagsbrand (The Reichstag Fire). The book, Mr Moorhouse tells us, will lay all the mythology to rest: it examines all the evidence in detail and comes to the obvious conclusion that Marinus van der Lubbe acted alone and The Brown Book that "proved" Nazi guilt was a farrago of lies and nonsense.

Alas for good hopes. I really do not think it is that simple. After all, this has been known for some time and was proved conclusively on several occasions by different authors. That the myth has not died shows the enormous strength of the little lies of the Comintern and its propagandists as against the big lie referred to by Goebbels, who turned out to have been considerably less efficient at propaganda than Willi Münzenberg.

I can only refer my readers back to a piece I wrote about this back in 2007 and hope that by some miracle Roger Moorhouse reads it as well. 

Absolutely hilarious

And now for the true socialist view of Margaret Thatcher's career: no, not Glenda Jackson or the ridiculous UK Uncut or some idiotic drama teacher from south-west London but the real McCoy, the Chinese view though it is not clear how official this is.

Here is a sample:

Thatcher grew up in a classical English petty-bourgeois family. Her father owned two grocery shops in Grantham. He preached the word of God, was staunchly patriotic, and became the town’s Mayor from 1945-6. His self-confidence derived from selecting food that commanded a good price and turned a good profit. His daughter, Margaret, also formed her intellectual outlook around the petty proprietor’s fetish for the magical qualities of prices.

Read the whole piece. It will cheer you up.

And in other news

Estimates for attendance of yesterday's Thatcher hate party in Trafalgar Square vary from "as many as 1,700" from a photographer who was there to "about 3,000" in the Grauniad, whose hack may or may not have been there. Either way, these are not numbers that deserve any kind of consideration though the flying of the Argentinian flag shows a crassness and stupidity beyond the usual left-wingery.

It seems various other groups have decided to protest against ... well, what exactly? They can't be protesting against Thatcher's death, surely. Apparently, they are protesting against her legacy, which they seem unable to define. Then they are surprised that nobody takes them seriously.

According to Sky News there were former miners from various parts of the country (or, given the time that has gone, presumably off-springs of former miners), UK Uncut, Liverpool fans who think she personally murdered all the people at Hillsborough and many people who, as has been pointed out before, were not even born when she was Prime Minister. One can't help wondering whether these political geniuses have even noticed that she has not been that for over twenty years and that much of her supposed legacy has actually been overturned by her successors.

Just to give one an inkling of what passes for thought among these people we get this straight-faced reporting on Sky:

Among the crowds in Trafalgar Square was four-year-old Jack, who was stomping around shouting "Thatcher's dead, Thatcher's dead."

His father Howard Garrick, from Islington, north London, said he was determined his son should come to the party.

"This is about his future as well, not just the past," he said.

"He needs a grounding in life and to understand how we are not going to be made into wage slaves."

Well, how nice. So the future, according to this moron (the father not the unfortunate little boy) is to consist of his son growing up to be a lay-about. He must be the little boy spotted by Robert Hardman of the Daily Mail. His account is hilarious. Read it here.

Enough of this obsession with events of several decades ago (and yes, I am going to write about the late great Prime Minister any minute now). Let us turn to the future.

The anti-euro Alternative for Germany party (here is the official website in German)  is being launched officially today, as reported by Der Spiegel and on their site.

The Alternative for Germany party wants to shake up the traditional party landscape in the country during federal elections this September with its message of "putting an end to the euro." The party is calling for the "orderly dissolution of the euro currency zone." So what do they want to do, return to the deutsche mark? Lucke describes that path as "one option." The party still hasn't defined much in terms of its party platform, but its founders have argued for the right to hold national referenda as well as streamlining tax laws. More than anything, they aim to attract voters with their "no" to the common currency.

The accepted wisdom is that the party is not likely to win any seats in the federal parliament but there is some uncertainty behind Der Spiegel's somewhat dismissive coverage. What if they do attract support, is the clear message behind this and other articles. Well, what, indeed. It has always been my conviction that no other country can destroy the European Union. The whole box of tricks requires endless feelings of guilt from Germans, none of whom can be said any longer to be responsible for the horrors of Nazism and the war. The people of Germany have, on all evidence, understood that but not the political class. Not yet.

The Reichstag fire

History Today reminds us that today is the anniversary of the Reichstag fire: February 27, 1933. For some reason the video starts with a note in Hungarian. It says:

The Destruction of the Reichstag

The seat of the German national assembly and one of Berlin's most beautiful Italianate renaissance palaces has become the victim of Communist arson. 

The blog continues:

Coming less than a month after Hitler became Chancellor, the attack was used as evidence of a growing Communist plot against the German government. van der Lubbe was tried, found guilty and executed the next year. Several other Communist leaders were also tried, and acquitted. But the fire was the precursor to a total seizure of power by the Nazis, who began to systematically dismantle Germany's democratic institutions and victimise their political opponents. The real identity of those responsible for the fire remains topic of much discussion amongst historians.

It's an odd way of putting it, the implication being that van der Lubbe was a Communist leader as well, which he most definitely was not. But it definitely was used by Hitler to seize total control and to suppress the Communist party (not that it had put up much of a fight).

It was also used by the Communists to promote their own propaganda, a far more successful enterprise in the end. As I wrote in a long piece a while ago, entitled The big lie or many small lies:

Here is an interesting question for all our readers? Who burnt down the Reichstag in 1933? Can you recall the name of Marinus van der Lubbe, the somewhat crazed Dutchman, who actually set it on fire? And even if you can, do you not think that there was somebody behind it all? After all, it could not be just a lone lunatic?

It would be interesting to know how many of those who read the above paragraph nodded and said: “Of course, Hitler ordered and manipulated van der Lubbe (assuming you can recall the name) and then used the fire to get rid of the opposition and to blame the Communists.”

I am willing to bet that nobody said: “Oh yes, it was the Communists and they managed to get away with it because Dimitrov’s trial (assuming you can recall that name) was unsuccessful. Hitler merely took advantage of the event.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between good and bad propaganda.

I am rather proud of that piece and, quite shamelessly, recommend that people read it.

What a great way of spending money

As the Sunday Times is behind a pay wall, I cannot link directly to an article by Bocan Pancevski's article this Sunday on the amount of money the EU is spending in a PR exercise in Croatia, hoping that the referendum on membership will go their way. Though why it should be their way seems mysterious: Croatia is poor and its economy is not terribly active while its political system is dysfunctional.

However, the author is a Senior Fellow in the Adriatic Institute for Public Policy and placed part of the article on its website.

The European Commission is planning to spend £16m on a public relations campaign to promote European enlargement ahead of the entry next year of Croatia, a country with such serious economic problems that it could be forced to seek a bailout.

Croatia’s credit rating was downgraded to junk status last week after a deterioration in its economy attributed to a lack of reforms.

This prompted fears that the Balkan country might require a bailout even before it joins the EU next July. Youth unemployment is about 40% and foreign investment is deterred by rampant corruption, organised crime and weak rule of law.

What better way there is of spending our money?

Aren't the media wonderful?

Kevin Myers has an excellent article in the Irish Independent that takes apart an interview with Robert Fisk. Mostly he takes apart Fisk himself but the interviewer, Pat Kenny gets it in the neck, too.

You could argue that taking Robert Fisk apart (or fisking as it is popularly known) is akin to shooting fish in a barrel but, for some incomprehensible reason, the man is still being taken seriously by large swathes of the media.

The whole article is worth reading as there are far too many goodies in it to quote but here is one that made me laugh out loud:

It was typical of the adolescent level of this self-loathing that Robert Fisk referred to Mitt Romney's recent address in Jerusalem, in which, said Fisk, the US republican candidate "made the extraordinary racist comment that the Israelis were ahead of the Palestinians, i.e, the Palestinians were an uncivilised people, presumably because they had brown eyes and weren't Christian".

Curiously enough I can think of a large number of Israelis who have brown eyes and are not Christian. (I can also think of some who are Christian and who are not subjected to the sort of horrors Palestinian Christians are, but let that pass.)

While we are on the subject of the media and its curious coverage of events, let us have a quick look at what is going on in the Presidential elections on the other side of the Pond where an extraordinary amount of attention has been paid to a tape of Romney speaking at a private fund-raising event and making some comments about people who live off the state probably not voting for him. To be fair, our media has been going dulalee over that story as well and ignoring various unappetizing matters to do with the sitting President.

Well, you know, it seems that the "unedited" tape has one or two minutes missing. Here is Legal Insurrection pursuing the story. An awful lot can be said in one or two minutes, as I know all too well, having been an interpreter at various times.

Curioser and curioser

This blog has mentioned before the curious occurrences in Finland where criminal charges are being pressed against a university professor who wanted to imitate the Pussy Riot punk prayer. Well, to be quite precise, he and his associates wanted to stage a protest rally outside the Cathedral of Assumption in Helsinki. Let us be fair minded about this and say that this was probably not a good idea. Staging a protest against a corrupt and authoritarian political system in which the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church gleefully participates in Russia is one thing. A protest in Helsinki would be more appropriate outside the Russian Embassy or Consulate.
Criminal charges that might result in extensive imprisonment, however, seem a little excessive and unexpected in a democratic country.

As I pointed out in my posting,

What is particularly interesting about the criminal charges is that they were laid by, among others, human right activist Johan Baeckman, who represents the Anti-Fascist Committee of Finland.

A number of people became interested enough to follow up the career of Johan Baeckman and one reader of this blog from across the Pond directed my attention to the man's Wikipedia entry and quite interesting it is, too. There is too much to quote but it is fair to say that Johan Baekman's main political preoccupation is to support Russia in every way, to try to prove that Finland was the real aggressor in 1941 (Continuation War) whereas the original conflict (Winter War) did not really happen, that Finland has planned ethnic cleansing of Karelia and, possibly, other parts of Russia and other interesting historical counter-factuals.

More recently, he has written about a "conspiracy" to smear Vladimir Putin through the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, carried out by those conspirators.

He has also denied that there was any Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940 - 41 (and, for all I know, at any time at all) and has, as part of his "anti-fascist" activity staged joint demonstrations and anti-Estonian protests with the thuggish Nashi, the Putinite youth movement.

The story has now been taken up by the St Petersburg Times. [The English is not mine but the website's]

Several Russian news outlets reported that Teivo Teivainen, a professor of world politics at the University of Helsinki, faces up to five years in prison for trying to break into a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in the Finnish capital with a canister full of urine. 

Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, Finnish YLE radio and the University of Helsinki have all exposed the accusations as false, but Russian media seem to be in no hurry to publish corrections of their earlier reports.

The “canister of urine” fiction became a national story in Russia when it was reported by Interfax, the major news agency, and picked up by other news agencies, websites, newspapers and major television channels on August 15, two days ahead of the verdict in the Pussy Riot trial.

Unsurprisingly, the source for this and various other factual inaccuracies is our friend, the anti-fascist (how that title takes one back) Johan Baeckman, "Finland's best-known supporter of the Putin regime".

Many of Bäckman’s previous statements have been readily and uncritically reprinted in the Russian press, leading Helsingin Sanomat to dub Bäckman “the Russian media’s favorite Finn.”

In an article titled “Criminal proceedings launched against organizer of attempt to repeat the Pussy Riot performance in Helsinki,” Interfax reported on Aug. 15 that Bäckman and several other people had signed a complaint to the police.

“Criminal proceedings have been initiated under two Finnish Criminal Code articles concerning the violation of rules on religious tolerance,” Bäckman was quoted as saying.

A paragraph containing a reference to the “canister full of urine,” although technically unattributed, was inserted between quotations from Bäckman.

It seems that the reality was slightly different:

The University of Helsinki published a statement the following day in which it asked the media to correct the information and denied the accusations against Teivainen, who had spoken in support of Pussy Riot during one in a series of walking tours organized by the university and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art.

During these tours, Teivainen stops at different sites and discusses international political issues with his audience. During the walk on August 3, he stopped near the Bank of Finland, where he spoke about the global economic crisis. During the stop near Uspenski Cathedral, he spoke about the human rights situation in Russia.

“The walking tours included several vivifying pieces of performance art, one of which was held in front of the cathedral,” the University of Helsinki’s statement said.

“In it, two masked women expressed their support for the group Pussy Riot. The performance did not constitute a crime.”

It seems that other signatories of the criminal charges have now realized that they have been somewhat misled and have "retracted their signatures from Bäckman’s petition to the University of Helsinki, in which he demanded that the university fire Teivainen" though their signatures are still there on Bäckman’s site.

Meanwhile, the leading Finnish supporter of Putin's regime anti-fascist is having some trouble explaining where some of the stories have originated and whether there are, indeed, criminal charges being pressed against Professor Teivainen.

Clearly the Hungarians are unhappy

Otherwise why would the Commission need to be spending 125,000 euros ($154,000) on very special propaganda in that country that is targeted at households, whatever that might mean. (Could there be propaganda targeted at gardens or gnomes therein?)

The Wall Street Journal article is not terribly coherent on the subject and, much more to the point, has abandoned all notion of fair-mindedness.

Hungary, a member of the European Union since 2004, has profited enormously from the bloc membership, having received 15.5 billion euros of subsidies for the EU’s less affluent members by 2010, latest EU data shows, while paying just 5.2 billion euros into the EU’s budget. Hungary, a small economy, is heavily dependent on exports to fellow EU members in the western part of the continent, mainly Germany.

It seems unlikely that the pros and cons of membership would be discussed in those terms about a country, like Britain or Germany, who are net contributors, for instance, as on this basis they would be better off out.

The question of exports, as we know, is irrelevant though it is true that back in those interim years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the East Europeans' membership of the EU, the latter, in the interests of freedom and democracy no doubt, put as many obstacles in the way of trade with the countries in question as it could and made it quite clear that it was membership with all the rules or nothing.
Certainly, the Hungarians are unhappy and have been so for a little while:

Despite receiving from the EU more than the nation paid in, the majority of Hungarians think the EU has been bad for them, a July poll by Szonda Ipsos shows. In the poll, 56% of Hungarians said the European Union membership brought more disadvantages, and some 34% said they considered the membership advantageous. This is somewhat worse than the 61%-26% ratio in April but is an improvement versus 60%-30% in January, the pollster said.

Will they change their minds as the result of the propaganda that is aimed at all the households? It's possible but only a very foolhardy person will make definite predictions.

Worth a re-read ...

... even though I say so myself. A friend on another thread reminded me of Captain Euro. Ah the memories. So I went back to my two postings on the subject, first in 2007 on my erstwhile blogging home, EUReferendum, then on this blog in 2010. I have just re-read them and found that they are still relevant. Holy Smoke!