The Pope visits Auschwitz

The national press today is reporting that Pope Francis has visited the former concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland, where - we are expected to believe - more than a million supposedly Jewish people were put to death in gas chambers.

The communist leanings of the newspaper in question can be gleaned from the fact that it reports that Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army in 1945.  Why do they not report that it was captured by the Soviet Red Army?

How many Polish women were raped by Russian soldiers as the Red Army advanced across Poland?  How many people from western countries were allowed to visit Auschwitz in the immediate aftermath of the war?  (I believe that the one figure was considerably higher than the other, which may in fact have been zero.)

The truth is that for more than forty years after the end of the Second World War, Poland was effectively a vassal state of the evil Soviet Union.  There was no democracy, and very little freedom of speech.

If Pope Francis has yet spoken out about the evils of communism, then I'm afraid it has passed me by.  Also, I have yet to hear Pope Francis condemn the wars perpetrated by the evil governments of the USA and the United Kingdom.

Come to think of it, I can't recall Pope Francis ever advising Catholics not to vote in elections for political parties which support abortion.  Comments are welcome.

Related previous posts include:
The Archbishop speaks out
Catholics, stand by your Polish brother

Theresa May: accessory to murder

Having voted for Britain to leave the EU, I was naturally pleased that the outcome of the referendum was a majority leave vote.  I was confident that the EU would collapse in due course, and that the referendum vote would therefore serve either to accelerate or to delay an inevitable process.

Nevertheless I am not optimistic.  Freed from its European shackles, the United Kingdom can now restrict immigration from other European countries.  Unfortunately we cannot expect a government led by Theresa May to take immigration seriously.

Theresa May served as Home Secretary for the whole of the six years that David Cameron was Prime Minister.  As such she was accountable for government policy on both crime and immigration.  A pledge to cut immigration to just tens of thousands each year never came close to being realised, but police budgets were cut, and criminals are the winners - notably fraudsters.  Frauds reported to the police very rarely result in a prosecution, even where substantial evidence is provided.

It is also inconceivable that Theresa May had no input into the faked murder of Labour MP Jo Cox.

As I write, a young woman has recently been murdered in Sheffield, which I'm sorry to say does not surprise me one bit.  Given that the worst Home Secretary in British history is now our Prime Minister, we must not expect the homicide rate to fall any time soon.

Related previous posts include:
A sense of the inevitable
Who murdered Jo Cox?
Tories pretend to be tough on crime ... again

Another Bastille Day bloodbath

The major news story as I write is the recent murder of dozens of people in the French city of Nice, which took place during the annual Bastille Day celebrations.

Bastille Day is the unofficial name given to a national holiday which takes place in France on 14 July each year, which celebrates the storming of the Bastille on that day in 1789.  The Bastille was a large fortified prison in Paris in which people could be imprisoned on the whim of the monarch.  In other words it could easily be seen as a symbol of state oppression.

On 14 July 1789, a mob attacked the Bastille, and was soon reinforced by a regiment of soldiers.  The attack ended with the governor being murdered, and the inmates being released.  In other words it was an act of mob rule.

As it happens, there were only seven inmates in the prison that day, and only one was a political prisoner.  Nevertheless that is a detail.  Even if the Bastille had been full to bursting with political prisoners, then its storming would still have been an act of mob brutality.

I have long wondered why the French people celebrate this act of barbarity, and I also wonder why - to my knowledge - nobody in France has ever argued for it not being celebrated.  The word stupidity comes to mind.

More than two hundred people died on the original Bastille Day - more than double the number who died in yesterday's terror attack in Nice.  It is also worth noting that the original Bastille Day bloodbath was not connected with Islam.

Wallets versus bicycles: the psychology of crime

I have learned the hard way that it is rarely a good idea to try to explain why crimes are committed.  Explanation can easily be misinterpreted as justification, and I do not want to be accused of trying to justify crime.  Nevertheless, today I feel motivated to ponder on why certain crimes are committed.

Many years ago it was reported on national television that a study had been carried out into what we might call public decency.  Wallets full of money had been left lying on pavements in a number of different towns and cities, and each one was handed in to the police station.

Also many years ago, a national newspaper reported a similar experiment, but with different results.  Bicycles were left abandoned in towns and cities around the country, and each one was stolen.

How can we explain this?  A very simple answer would be that the wallets were all found by decent people, while the bicycles were all stolen by black-hearted villains.  This explanation is unlikely ever to be misconstrued as justification.

Unfortunately, I am not satisfied by this simplistic approach, and I feel inclined to delve further into the matter.  Why were none of the wallets found by black-hearted villains?  Why were none of the bicycles found by decent people?

The second question is not too hard to answer.  I will assume that you are a decent person.  Suppose you find a wallet lying on the pavement.  People do not normally abandon wallets deliberately, and so you assume that it was dropped accidentally.  You pick it up, and hand it in at the nearest police station.

Now suppose that you find a bicycle resting against a lamp post.  People do not normally leave bicycles by accident, and so you assume that it has been left there deliberately by its owner.  You might reflect that the owner of the bicycle is foolish to leave it unattended and unsecured, but that is not your business.  You leave the bicycle where it is, and continue on your way.

Do I dare attempt to answer the first question?  Yes.  The wallets were all found by decent people before the black-hearted villains came upon them.  Theft is theft, and I am not inclined to gloss over it.  Stealing a wallet is wrong, and stealing a bicycle is wrong.

The national press versus democracy

First of all, I do not like the Conservative MP Michael Gove.  In fact I am not aware that I like any MP of any political party.  Nevertheless he does not deserve some of the abuse being dished out to him at the moment.

As I write, Gove has recently declared an interest in becoming the next leader of the Conservative Party - and of course Prime Minister.  A lot of comment in the national press is using the word betrayal, along with violent metaphors.  Consider this recent quote from a newspaper columnist:

Six years on, I still cannot quite comprehend how Ed Miliband could effectively knife his own older brother to get his hands on the Labour crown.

Some background is required.  In 2010 Ed Miliband became leader of the Labour Party after winning an election in which his older brother David Miliband was another candidate.  I have lost count of the number of times in which newspapers have labelled this as a betrayal or a stab in the back.  It was nothing of the sort.

 

Ed Miliband contested the leadership of the Labour Party as he had every right to do.  His brother contested the same election, as he also had every right to do.  To regard either brother as having betrayed the other strikes me as utterly childish.

Similar childish language is now being used about Michael Gove in respect of the Conservative leadership election, although for some reason it is not being used about all of the leadership hopefuls.

The use of words like narcissism and Machiavellian are also curious.  Any politician who seeks a higher office can perhaps be described as narcissistic, but the selective use of such a word suggests a bias on the part of the comment writer.

The word Machiavellian is problematic.  It refers to a book called The Prince, which was published in 1532.  It had been written some years earlier by the Florentine former civil servant Niccolo Machiavelli, who died in 1527, and it is not clear if he ever intended it for publication.

The Machiavellian prince is not a simple construct, and it is easy to use a word like Machiavellian without thinking too clearly about its actual meaning.

I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that many people who write for the national press have absolute contempt for democracy.  If one candidate for the leadership of a political party is a narcissist and a Machiavellian, then why can these labels not be applied all of the other candidates as well?

My conclusion - and I may be wrong about this - is that many people in the national press consider it their divine right to ordain who shall lead either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party.  While they are entitled to indicate a preference for one contender over another, the use of infantile language serves no useful purpose.

 

I do not support the Conservative Party, but I hope that it will choose its new leader wth regard to the issues at hand, and without regard to childish rants by comment writers who ought to know better.