France helps to extend the Caliphate to Mali

So France’s new Socialist government is now actively intervening militarily in Mali.

Of course, it may be a ruse to deflect attention from Francois Holland’s humiliation over the tax on the rich issue, with Gerald Depardieu proudly displaying his newly-issued Russian passport, and the French courts declaring the proposed 75% rate unlawful.

But France is also pursuing geopolitical aims which would have fitted well with the policy of  Little Sarko.

The military intervention is against Malian Islamists, whom France is said to be particularly worried about since they are French-speaking and have said they intend to target French persons and interests.

The situation is, however, confused, by the fact that the Algerians, to the north of Mali, are concerned about Al-qaeda in the Magreb (AQIM) and by the fact that Libya has become a nation-sized safe haven for the militantly Islamist Libyan Islamist Fighting Group (LIFG). This latter point is correct, because France, along with its NATO allies installed the Islamists extremists in Libya in 2012.

So France and its allies are supposedly fighting Islamists in Mali when in Libya and elsewhere they have been actively helping them!

It sounds bizarre, and in some ways it is, but we must remember that the British helped create the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood as far back as 1928, and the West has been using these religious extremists to keep secular leftists in check. Heaven forbid that there be some sort of fair economic settlement in these currently impoverished countries.

The money for these bloody operations is provided by the reactionary monarchies of the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and Quatar above all. Already, the Islamists are penetrating Mali, but let’s not forget the Al-qaeda fighters in Syria, gathered from all around the Middle East, from Tunisia, from the Sunni regions of Iraq, and elsewhere.

A Conspiracy Treatise from Academia: Tragedy and Hope

Professor Carrol Quigley of Georgetown University was a consummate insider of the American foreign policy establishment, rooted as it is in organisations like the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Quigley, who died in 1977 at the relatively young age of 66, was the subject of a tribute by one of his former students, Bill Clinton, at the 1992 Democratic Convention. Indeed, some have attributed Clinton’s political success to the grounding in foreign affairs that he received under his mentor at Georgetown.

Quigley claims that in the early 1960s he was invited by the foreign policy establishment to look through the various secret archives and come up with a history of the world in his time. Quigley bought into all the stuff about the Anglo-American partnership, the roundtable groups set up by Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner, and believed that these secret organisations should be more open about the good work that they were doing.

The trouble was that when Quigley published his book, Tragedy and Hope, in 1966, it revealed a little too much, to the horror of the foreign policy establishment. On page 324 of the book we find  this extraordinary claim regarding the intentions of the global financial elite.

The powers of financial capitalism had [a] far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.

This is not a quotation taken out of context. It appears bang in the middle of a discussion about the activities of banks and financial institutions during the inter-war years. Quiqley’s book began to sell, slowly at first, then with increasing rapidity. It attracted not  only the unwelcome attentions of the foreign policy and financial elite. Conspiracy researchers, such as Gary Allen, author of None Dare Call it Conspiracy, sat up and took note. Readers are encouraged to read this well-written account of recent history, either by purchasing a copy of their own, or by encouraging their local public library to get hold of one. There is also an online version, and there is a 40-page summary.

Quigley charged some of the conspiracy writers of attributing views to him which he did not in fact hold. Other writers, such as Antony C. Sutton and F. William Engdahl, accused Quigley of downplaying the role of the Wall Street bankers in financing both Hitler and also the Bolsheviks.

The sales of the book, which was originally published in 1966, started off slowly, but gained in pace and topped 8, 000. Quigley’s publishers, Macmillan, told the author that they would publish a reprint, but they never did, and Quigley subsequently found out that the plates for the book had been destroyed. The professor’s conclusion was that someone was attempting to suppress his work.

Gary North, a friend of Gary Allen, subsequently claimed that Gary Allen had been told by an associate of Quigley’s that the professor had, during the latter days of his life, radically changed his mind about the benevolence of the elites he had once supported.

Tory/Lib Dem benefit onslaught continues, targeting shirkers like soldiers, nurses and teachers: Teather pushes back

The Government’s proposals to put a cap of 1% on benefit and tax credit upratings is going to hit three particular groups of “shirkers” particularly  hard.

According to an analysis by the Childrens’ Society, almost half a million soldiers, teachers and nurses will lose hundreds of pounds in the latest round of cuts by the Coalition.

A second lieutenant in the army earning £470 per week, and whose wife is not in paid employment, will lose £552 per annum.

Around 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will lose out, some by as much as £442, but the biggest group of losers will be nurses. Around 300,000 will lose out to the tune of £442 per year.

A full discussion of the changes can be found here.

Meanwhile, former education minister Sarah Teather, who is normally so enamoured of Nick Clegg that she is physically unable to criticise him, is reported to be planning to vote against the government on Thursday.

A former minister has accused the government of indulging in “playground politics” over its welfare policy.

Sarah Teather said using terms such as strivers and scroungers to justify cuts to benefits was “unworthy” of the coalition and risked creating “envy and division” between different groups.

The government’s justification for this outrage is that certain public sector employees have had their wages capped, and you can’t have a benefit cap that’s more generous than the wage cap. I disagree, but whatever the arguments, working people are going to suffer more while the highly paid heads of boardrooms and banks are going to get even more.

It’s worth bearing in mind too that while the cap allows a 1% increase, this is way below the levels recorded for the official rates (s) of inflation, and far below the level of food price inflation.

Finally, on an entirely self-interested note, one has to wonder how the Lib Dems think they can win seats in 2015 after alienating such a crucial demographic.

Putin Digs In

The last couple of weeks, we’ve been subjected to all sorts of stories from the MSM on the question of Syria. The upshot of all these propaganda pieces, especially those from the Beelzebub Broadcasting Coven, is that Moscow has finally decided to cut its ties to the Assad regime. Ergo, stories of Russian naval deployments with the aim of evacuating Russian citizens from that beleagered country.

This line of argument never made any sense to me. The dispute between NATO and Syria is not about human rights violations. If it was, NATO would not be employing Al-qeda fighters from Iraq, Afganistan and Libya. The only remotely rational approach to the NATO aggression is to see it as part of an attempt to undermine the defence of Iran. Syria plays a key part in that defence. In the event of an attack on the Islamic Republic, Syria would be a key conduit for arms supplies to Hezbollah forces on Israel’s borders.

And far from evacuating, Russia is clearly deploying troops and forces, as can be seen here.

Five landing ships containing marines and military equipment are in the area, surrounded by a fleet of combat ships.

meanwhile, let’s just briefly consider the role of western liberal journalists, the ones who staff the Sunday papers. They almost to a man (and a woman) decry Assad and call for his replacement, apparently oblivious to the complex ethnic make-up of Syria, split between Sunnis, Shias, Alawites, Kurds and Christians. Our Al-qeda friends are more than keen to start their ethnic cleansing, but it’s Assad who is the whipping boy.

I guess it’s difficult to get journos like Jeremy Bowen and Joan Williams to understand when their salaries depend on them not understanding! Little wonder that Gerald Celente was forced to come up with the soubriquet “prestitutes” to describe these people.

Nick Clegg – only two and a half years before he’s gone

I remember meeting Nick Clegg , as part of a large-ish crowd at a dinner in mid-Wales in 2005. It was shortly after he’d first been elected to Parliament.

I raised with him the issue of European immigration, and of how it was forcing down the wage levels of those competing for the same sort of unskilled jobs as were being filled by young men and women from eastern Europe. He dismissed my concerns and extolled the virtues of pluralism, a reaction that was in some ways both expected and unexpected.

Expected in the sense that with his Dutch family background, Spanish wife, and career in Brussels as a protege of the dubious Leon Brittan, he is only tangentially British. How could anyone expect him to be all that bothered about the working British poor? And yet, given his fetishistic adoration of neo-liberal economics, how could he possibly deny that given an increase in supply (of labour, in this case)  the price (wages) would, of necessity, be lowered?

And now here we are, half-way through the governing disaster that I dimly perceived all those years ago in that room at Brecon. Clegg has succeeded in making his name a by-word for betrayal and treachery, he has brilliantly decimated his own party’s local government base, and after a 25% fall in membership numbers in 2011, held the loss down to a mere 10% in 2012.

And the message to those who don’t agree that liberalism is all about right wing economic nonsense is that they can jolly well bugger off to Labour!

Yes, all the careful work and thought of more than a century, from many great minds, including T.H. Green, C.F.G. Masterman, Graham Wallas, and H.H. Asquith and David Lloyd George, can all be dismissed, for true Liberalism is just the market, as brought to you by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.  The ideological sophistication of the Lib Dem thinkers – Clegg, Laws, Richard Reeves, Stephen Tall –  bears more than passing resemblance to the geological skill exhibited by six-day creationists.

It’s true that there has been a bit of an uptick for the Lib Dems in local government by-elections, but that seems to be more of a case of retrieving recently lost seats than anything else. There is certainly no evidence of any inroads into new territory. As Tony Greaves put it recently in Liberator:

“The party is being hollowed out in so many areas, members are drifting away, campaigning has stopped . . .”

Greaves recalled the days when what parliamentary seats were to be fought were decided across the country on an ad-hoc basis, and saw those days returning. But they already have! That’s what happened in England and in Wales on November 15th. In the PCC elections, most seats were not contested by the Lib Dems.

While the numbers of those in poverty in Britain increase and the party falls behind UKIP in the polls, the Gadarene rush to destruction continues. The great new crusade is for “equal marriage,” an issue that nobody mentioned in any manifesto and which may directly affect as much as 0.01% of the population. It’s positively orgasmic for well-off, semi detached, soon-to-be former MPs like Lynne Featherstone, but truly disastrous for the party.

The peculiar blindness of politicians like Clegg lies in their seeming obliviousness to the need for troops on the ground to win Liberal Democrat seats at the next general election. Of course, Clegg inherited a “safe” Lib Dem seat and before that was elected to Brussels via the party list system. More than the other two parties, the Lib Dems have relied on the “ground war” of leaflets and local campaigning, rather than the “air war” of television and national newspapers.

But come 2015, where are these local campaigners going to come from? Many have left and many will stay at home. And that, rather than the headline poll figures, is what will do for the calamity known as Clegg.

A Small Death in Constantinople

In 336, the elderly Christian, Arius, who had been the cause of a controversy over the divinity of Christ, was in the newly built Roman capital. The trouble was that his chief protagonist, Alexander, presided over the church in that city and was faced with a dilemma.

Alexander had been instrumental in getting the first Council Of Nicea, in 325, to condemn and anathemize the views of Arius and the two of his supporters who stood out against the tide of 300 bishops who took the opposing view. As a result, the Emperor Constantine sent Arius into exile. Two years later Eusebius of Nicomedia persuaded the Emperor to recall him from exile and in 336, the aging “heretic” entered Constantinople.

The city divided into factions. Eusebius stirred things up and Alexander felt an obligation to allow Arius to partake of Holy Communion, an obligation he felt he could not comply with. Alexander then resorted to fasting and prayer, along the lines of:

“If the views of Arius are correct, then may I not live to see the day I discuss this with the Emperor, but if I am right, then may he suffer for his ungodliness . . .”

Well, when Arius went out about town, he was suddenly struck down . . .

It was then Saturday, and . . . going out of the imperial palace, attended by a crowd of Eusebian  partisans like guards, he [Arius] paraded proudly through the midst of the city, attracting the notice of all the people. As he approached the place called Constantine’s Forum, where the column of porphyry is erected, a terror arising from the remorse of conscience seized Arius, and with the terror a violent relaxation of the bowels: he therefore enquired whether there was a convenient place near, and being directed to the back of Constantine’s Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died. The scene of this catastrophe still is shown at Constantinople, as I have said, behind the shambles in the colonnade: and by persons going by pointing the finger at the place, there is a perpetual remembrance preserved of this extraordinary kind of death.

To me, it sounds like a clear case of poisoning by Alexander or one of his followers, which goes to show how the “Elect of God” felt they had a right to behave like. British historian of the church, N.R Needham, naively swallows the “struck down by God thesis,” and generally goes along with the denigration of the character and person of Arius, who held to his heretical view, we are told, because of his “ungodliness.”

How does anyone know that? Nobody had any problems with his godliness until he brought up the subject of the divinity of Christ. And incidentally, I would have endorsed the view of the 300 bishops had I been at Nicea.

But Christianity had by now introduced totalitarian ideology into the world. If belief could save you, then error could damn you. Belief became a matter of right and wrong and justified the untold millions of deaths in the name of Christ ever since.