Month: October 2024

That was the date in 1932 on which the last free interbella elections were held in Germany. It was also the last chance to stop the Nazis, who had lost much of their earlier support.

The NASDP was still on course to score heavily, but a bloc of the Socialists and the Communists could have it outvoted. The Nazis knew it, and their diary entries at the time were suicidal – they were bankrupt and, if they lost, they would never be able to launch another electoral bid. Time for a bottle of schnapps, a revolver and a farewell note to the liebschen.

The forecasts were accurate. Conservatives led by Hindenburg came in first, but the old man was on his last legs, and everyone knew it. The SPD and the KPD together did receive 1.5 million more votes than the Nazis. Yet the Nazis were still ahead because the two Left parties weren’t together.

The socialists, by far the larger party, had sought a bloc with the communists. Had they succeeded, it’s almost certain that the Second World War would have been prevented.

Alas, while the SPD was an independent party, the KPD wasn’t. It was Stalin’s puppet, and Stalin’s plans didn’t include a peaceful Germany. He wanted the Nazis to take over the country and use her as what Lenin had called “the icebreaker of the revolution”.

He knew a Nazi Germany would attack the West sooner or later, with the war exhausting both sides whatever the outcome. Stalin would then ride in on his white steed and take over a ruined Europe. What was Lenin’s fantasy could become Stalin’s reality, and he wasn’t about to throw it away.

So the KPD was told to forget any blocs. Its leader, Ernst Thälmann, obeyed the order, thereby eventually buying himself a one-way ticket to Buchenwald, where he was killed in 1944. The Nazis seized power in 1933 and, well, you know the rest.

Far be it from me to compare Britain circa 2024 with Germany circa 1932: the differences are too obvious to mention. No British party, whatever its parliamentary majority, is likely to create anything near the catastrophe that befell Germany and the rest of the world back in the 1930s. However, there also exist some similarities, and these aren’t too obvious to mention.

Our ruling party, Labour, is enjoying a vast parliamentary majority delivered to it by Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system conspiring with the mind-numbing incompetence of the Conservative Party.

Fundamentally, the latter springs from the Conservatives’ disavowal of conservative policies, abandonment of conservative principles and, as a result, forfeiture of conservative competence in matters economic. Essentially, the Tory Party had become Labour Lite, and there was always the danger that the public would opt for Labour Full Strength.

When in the previous general election, Labour fielded a rank communist, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Tories countered with charismatic Boris Johnson, that outcome was deferred for a few years. However, it couldn’t be prevented.

The Tories ditched Johnson, who really didn’t have much except charisma going for himself. They eventually replaced him with Sunak who was much less appealing without being much more conservative. Labour, on the other hand, came to its senses, replaced Corbyn with Starmer, who knew how to make bogus moderate noises, and won by a landslide.

Having done so, they took the support of about 20 per cent of the electorate for a ringing mandate and immediately began to drive the country on the road to destruction. The mighty Tory Party has been reduced to a rump faction unable to provide genuine opposition.

It owes some of its misfortune to the emergence of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party that cost the Tories some 100 parliamentary seats. Had they kept those 100 seats, they still would have lost, but by a smaller margin. That would have enabled them to put some brakes on Labour’s drive to the precipice and also to harbour some hopes of resurgence.

Like the German Left in the 1930s, the British Right (if the Tories qualify as such) was split and ready for plucking. However, whatever mess Labour will create over the next five years, it’s far from certain that either the Tories or Reform will be able to oust Starmer on their own.

The Reform Party is trying to appeal to the conservative spirit of the British people, but that spirit has largely evaporated. Nigel Farage’s key message is immigration, which he wants to reduce to a barely noticeable minimum. That strikes a chord with much of the electorate, but single-issue parties hardly ever form governments.

Farage knows it too, which is why he harmonises his main theme with secondary subjects, lower taxes and defence. These traditional Tory policies also appeal to many voters, and they sound good to most.

However, once the echoes of the sound have died out, scrutiny will start. To get to the target of three percent of GDP, our defence budget will have to grow by about £30 billion. Lowering tax revenue even by a modest 10 per cent would shave some £82 billion off the Exchequer’s receipts. We are looking at what Labour politicians call a budget hole, to the tune of at least £112 billion. How will Farage fill it?

I hope he has a plan, but somehow I doubt it. But even if he does, sound economics dictates a sweeping reduction in spending across the board, starting with social projects and proceeding to blaspheme against the sainted NHS.

In other words, the only proven way of achieving the targets of Reform’s rhetoric would be to pursue the whole raft of conservative policies, trying to boost economic growth and hence tax revenue. However, I’m not convinced the British public has an appetite for going conservative to that extent. Decades of rabid socialist propaganda have produced the intended corrupting effect.

Thus one would think that a merger, or at least an electoral bloc, of Reform and Labour Lite, aka the Tories, would dilute conservatism to a point where our brainwashed and dumbed-down electorate would find it palatable. However, just like the Left parties of Germany’s past, I can’t see any rapprochement between the two Right-ish parties of Britain’s present.

Farage has already declared he’d never agree to any bloc with the Tories, and I think he means it. After many years of trying, he has finally gained a seat in the Commons, as a leader of a small but up-and-coming party. Reform will never become king, but it could well become king maker, thus gaining power beyond its numbers.

At the same time, Mr Farage barely conceals his contempt for the wishy-washy Tories, who have delivered the country to raving Lefties in moderate clothing. That feeling is enthusiastically reciprocated, what with the Tory mandarins, federasts almost to a man, hating Farage for the role he played in Brexit.

The last time we had an electoral bloc was in 2010, when Cameron and Clegg brought together the Tories and the LibDems. However, the two parties were much closer together: politically, Cameron and Clegg were dizygotic if not quite identical twins. Even so, the alliance was short-lived.

Whoever is elected to lead the Tories in the on-going free for all will still be Labour Lite and hence opposed to everything Farage stands for. Then again, either leader would rather be the big man in a small pond, even if the pond ends up the size of a puddle. The leader’s chair would be too small to accommodate two egos.

I do hope the two parties will find some arrangement they could live with, for without it the harrowing prospect looms of Labour running unopposed for a generation, to devastating effect.

Study late-Weimar German history, chaps, would be my advice. You may learn that, unless you hang together… well, you won’t hang separately, like Thälmann. But neither will you win, and all of us will end up losers.

I’m not suggesting that the two countries have decided to join forces against the European Union. As things stand, I doubt Iran and Israel can see eye to eye on any cause.

But the unfolding conflict in the Middle East may soon make Europe see the two countries as accomplices. As a result of Iran’s continuing aggression against Israel, both direct and by proxy, a new refugee crisis beckons, and the EU is ill-equipped to handle it.

As it is, the ideological attempt to create a bloated pan-European Leviathan is failing – and largely because of the fallout from an explosion of Muslim immigration. For all the fiery speeches, the EU is constitutionally and philosophically incapable of solving this problem.

Europeans have learned to shrug with indifference when observing the steady empowerment of the EU. Most members are net recipients of EU funding, and few people will reject handouts on a matter of principle. Some nod their agreement at tirades about compromised national sovereignty, but the masses are quite complacent about that sort of thing.

Comparing, say, France with pre-Brexit Britain, one detects a similar demographic breakdown. The intelligentsia are predominantly pro-EU and the common folk are just as predominantly anti. Yet one detects little appetite in France or elsewhere in Europe for actually leaving the EU, as opposed to making it less bossy and meddling.

Should France get a referendum similar to ours in 2016, it’s hard to tell which way it would go. But this is futile speculation because the French upper classes will block any such development, and they have more power in their country than their British counterparts have in theirs.

One would think the EU should therefore be quite secure and so it would be – but for one nagging issue: porous borders and the ensuing influx of Muslim immigration.

That influx is threatening to flood the political mainstream in Europe, sweeping away the pro-EU sentiments residing therein. Because – and let me make perfectly clear that, as founder and chairman of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I deplore such attitudes – Europeans don’t mind a bit of diversity, but they dislike too much of it.

When they see their neighbourhoods overrun with people who talk funny, dress eccentrically and behave oddly, they begin to complain first, rebel second. That gives an open goal to the big hitters on the national-populist fringe, and they are beginning to score heavily.

Just the other day the Austrian Freedom Party ran away with the national elections, and its parteigenossen from other countries have either done the same already or are threatening to do so in the future. Another million or so arrivals from the Middle East may well tip the balance in their favour.

As it is, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in Holland, Viktor Orbán in Hungary are already in charge, while the National Rally in France and AfD in Germany are close to electoral victories. Even in the Anglophone countries close to my heart, Britain and the US, unchecked immigration is a key electoral issue for nationalist candidates.

Those European parties that run the anti-immigration issue up their flagpole aren’t the best friends of the EU. The idea of a single European state governed out of Brussels by grey-faced bureaucrats goes against the grain of nationalism or even patriotism. For the sake of consistency if nothing else, the nationalist parties must make anti-EU noises to the point of disavowing that organisation.

Hungary and Poland lead the way, but Holland and Italy aren’t far behind – for now. However, the situation is changing by the day. Up to a million Lebanese have already been displaced by the on-going conflict, and most of them are fleeing to Syria.

Something tells me they don’t see Syria as their final destination. In fact, they are certain to take the path to Europe well-trodden by millions of others. Nor is it the only path: Turkey is another popular stopover on the way to France or Germany.

Why can’t Saudi Arabia or the UAE take them, you may ask? Aren’t Muslims duty-bound to offer hospitality to their brethren in distress? They are but they don’t. One detects no willingness on the part of the rich Islamic states to open their doors to immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, North Africa and Gaza.

They haven’t forgotten what such hospitality did to Lebanon in 1975-1990, when a beautiful and westernised Middle Eastern country was turned into smouldering ruins by the Civil War caused by Palestinian immigrants. If there is one thing the Saudi and Gulf Arabs cherish as much as money, it’s social tranquillity. They obviously know something Europeans don’t.

So far the EU has tried to curtail the influx by bribing the governments of Turkey and Syria to limit the outflow. That has kept the numbers of new arrivals down to millions, as opposed to tens of millions. Yet even that has proved too heavy a burden for Europe’s fragile finances to bear.

Neither Turkey nor Syria is among Israel’s best friends. Europe is, or at least pretends to be. That stance may make those two countries reluctant to offer the EU a helping hand at its time of need. Hence a new migrant crisis looms large over Europe, with unpredictable consequences.

Much as I despise the EU and the ideology behind it, I’m not going to gloat over its misfortune. Its financial troubles – and France has just announced a deficit spinning out of control – affect us as well, what with the growing economic globalisation.

But what I really dread is a Europe of countries run by nationalists of various political hues. Nationalism by definition presupposes not only the love of one’s own country but also hostility to those of a less fortunate nativity.

A Europe run by national-populist parties will become a powder keg, and the conflict between Israel and Iran threatens to hoist such parties to power. By this, I certainly don’t mean to imply that Iran and Israel are equally complicit in creating this fraught situation.

Iran is the indisputable aggressor, while Israel is fighting for her survival. Yet both an anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic animus is strong if still largely dormant in Europe. Most anti-Semitic outrages there are committed by refugees from Muslim countries or their children.

However, most nationalist parties in Europe have anti-Semitic antecedents. Some have tried to live that heritage down, but the sentiments thrive at the grassroots. That’s why, as such parties gain more power, their countries may well turn against Israel. I don’t know how soon or how strongly, but such a development is likely.

Meanwhile, the refugee crisis continues to fester in Europe, and it’s threatening to blow it apart. I’ll be on hand to tell when that happens, but you’ll probably know it without my help.

Baroness Theresa ‘Darling Bud’ May has delivered a rousing oratory waxing indignant about the likes of Trump and Farage who describe climate change as a “hoax” or a “scam”.

You could see me wiping my brow even as we speak. Since I only describe it as a swindle, I find myself outside the range of Darling Bud’s slings and arrows. That’s why, rather than feeling defensive, I can sit back and reflect on her remarks dispassionately.

The first thought that comes to mind is that susceptibility to cults is inversely proportionate to the level of culture. And this is one telling difference between a religion and a cult. The former heightens one’s ability to acquire culture, the latter nips it in the bud.

(G.K. Chesterton said the same thing with epigrammatic precision: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything”.)

This observation is true of individuals, and it’s equally true of societies. That stands to reason.

An essential part of culture is discrimination, and I’m using the word in its proper, rather than political, sense. A cultured person has an ability, both innate and acquired, to tell right from wrong, good from bad, true from false, beautiful from ugly, intelligent from stupid, credible from incredible, plausible from impossible.

His ability to discriminate makes him impervious to any newfangled orthodoxies. Before he accepts them as such, a cultured person will cast a critical eye over them to make sure they fall on the left side in each pair I listed in the previous paragraph.

If upon such scrutiny he finds them wanting, a cultured person will reject such orthodoxies out of hand, regardless of how many people accept them. Conversely, an uncultured person will avidly gobble up any thin gruel of an idea as long as it caters to his hunger for a higher purpose. Because he needs to believe in something, he is ready to “believe in anything”. Including such unscientific, ahistorical nonsense as a climate catastrophe awaiting the world unless the western part of it destroys its economy with ‘net zero’.

I don’t know whether Baroness May has any religious faith but, if she has, it hasn’t in her case fulfilled its civilising potential. Either she genuinely worships the cult of global warming or, as a politician, accepts that it has already graduated to the status of orthodoxy, and I don’t know which is worse.

Most zealots will react angrily, possibly violently, to anyone who dares to argue against their cherished cult. Rather than being seen as a sensible individual coming up with well-reasoned arguments, such a naysayer will be regarded as a heretic or apostate. And no aspiring politician wants to be cast in any such role: there’s no applause awaiting and, more important, few votes.

When I ill-advisedly find myself arguing against exponents of the climate cult, I always ask a lapidary question: “Have you read a single book on the subject?” So far I’ve received a single yes answer to that question, which made me ask a follow-up: “Which one?”

The next reply I received, “What the **** does it matter?”, confirmed what I knew already. My interlocutor, along with most people, arrived at his belief without having taken the trouble to study the subject. Like most modern, which is to say uncultured, people, he suffers from the deadly combination of high passion and low knowledge.

In what sounded like self-laceration but was meant to be a scathing attack, Darling Bud lashed out at the “out-of-touch elite” that uses the climate change debate “to fight a culture war”. This brought to mind the canonical story of a thief running away at full pelt from his pursuers and shouting “Stop thief!” louder than anyone else.

Having set up her stall, Baroness May then proceeded to fill it with pseudo-evidential goodies. One such is the economic bonanza that net zero will create: “When the sceptics say that the green transition will cripple business, we say they could not be more wrong. Study after study shows that the transition to renewable energy will unlock global market opportunities worth trillions of dollars over the next decade alone – with businesses in every world region able to capitalise.”

Show me your study, I’ll show you mine. And mine will demonstrate convincingly that, even if we assume that wind farms and solar panels will eventually provide enough domestic energy, they will never be able to sustain a strong industry. Since the need for industrial output will persist for ever, industry jobs will go to countries that ignore Western cults.

The other day I experienced acute schadenfreude when I read an article calculating that the cost of running an electric car is already twice that of a petrol or diesel vehicle. And that’s before millions of batteries go zonk.

Though Baroness May isn’t as far as I know a communist, she operates in the same idiom. The cost of energy is climbing up steeply, and households are already reeling under the impact. But Darling Bud wants them to grit their teeth and accept today’s pain for the sake of the glittering future awaiting tomorrow. Or perhaps the day after. Or maybe never – it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is keeping faith in the cult.

In the same spirit, she then attributed everything awful in life to global warming, showing a creative ability to construct chains of causality out of thin air. Modern slavery, for example, is a direct result of warm weather.

Those who couldn’t keep up with the runaway train of her thought were treated to a staggering explanation, link by causal link. Because of warm weather, “life becomes a matter of survival from one day to the next, and into that picture come the criminal gangs making money out of human suffering. Because these situations make people more vulnerable to being trafficked and taken into slavery.”

Darling Bud then added a few touches of colour by telling her audience some harrowing stories of a 53-year-old Romanian electrician forced into the sex industry and a seven-year-old girl sold into slavery and forced to sleep with dogs, one hopes only literally.

All because of global warming, Baroness? If you have to ask, you don’t worship the cult.

One could offer her any number of facts showing this swindle for what it is. Such as that warm and cold periods have always alternated, and climate has been warmer than it is now for about 85 per cent of history, or that the warm peaks have produced periods of the greatest prosperity.

But that would be a pointless exercise. Cults are impervious to facts or reason, and their worshippers, such as our former PM, neither activate their own minds nor appeal to anyone else’s. They just scream their harangues, and in this regard the supposedly grown-up Theresa May is no different from that evil Swedish child with learning difficulties.