Death to the United Provinces of Smugness

In the dissapointing third installment of the Austin Powers trilogy, there's one funny moment when Austin's father, played by Michael Caine tells us that there's two things he cant stand: people who're intolerant of other cultures - and the Dutch.

It's funny because while there's never been any love lost between the English, French and Germans, most of it's managed to bypass the low countries, with Holland in particular regarded by many people as having an ideal balance in the way it runs it's country and it's people regarded as relaxed and tolerant, while their neighbours are percieved as being arrogant (Britain), Rude (France), or German (Germany).

While Dutch people are generally polite, probably the most annoying thing about them, apart from their language, is the smugness. While it's true that they have much to be smug about, living as they do in one of the most open and equitable societies in the world, sometimes their attitude to the rest of the world can be extremely grating. When I was working as a horticultural technician for arond 55% of what was the statutory minimum wage in the country at the time, my boss managed to reinforce the stereotype of smugness as well as parsimony by lecturing me endlessly on the situation in Northern Ireland. There was little point in telling him that the homicide rate was higher in Amsterdam than in Belfast, or that the conflict in the North really had nothing to more to do with me than the conflict in East Timor had to do with him.

What was most curious was that told me that they used to have the same sort of problems way back when, as if I hadn't got the point that their society was generally more advanced in every way. I remember my father had been to the Netherlands a few years earlier, and he faced the same anti-Irish prejudice. He told me that they were stunned by his intelligence, which he didn't mean as any sort of boast, just that they imagined that we were all idiots because we were so much poorer than them at the time.

We're richer now, so we must suddenly have got smarter in the last ten years.

I'm still wondering what those ethnic problems they used to have were. Was it when the Germans invaded their country in the 40's, or the French in the 1790's, or the Spanish in the 15th and 16th century? I'm pretty sure if the area near the German border was still part of Germany and half the population were German and they marched under nazi flags on Hitler's birthday the Dutch natives wouldn't lay down and accept this, though that was the premise of all his endless condesencion.

Yet in the years that followed the war some unspeakably terrible things happened in Indonesia, though they've more or less gotten away with them as they suffered so much under the nazis. It wasn't that they were repressed that much, it's just that Holland had a history of being an imperial power and being a colony was a bit much for it to take. The odd thing is that it's colonial empire was based on sand as they would have been invaded by Germany a long time before if it had been a unified state, and it was protected from France by a natural border with France in the shape of a big soggy marsh which froze over in 1795 allowing the French Revolutionary directory to take over their country virtually instanteneously. When you know stuff like this, their smugness seems a lot less justified.

Yet I'm sure that if I went there again right now, I'd encounter the same prejudices. I can console myself by saying that they're probably just jealous that we're so much richer than them and have so much more literary talent. After all, Holland's most famous writer was a 13-year-old German girl. (They do have lots of good painters). And we're richer than them. Did I mention that? We have more of the one thing Dutch people like most - money.

And, Oh, I almost forgot, theirs is the country that has more chance of ethnic conflict in the short-term. Just as their empire in the past was based on sand, the facade of liberlism is based on the exploitation of immigrants from places like Morocco and Kurdistan. So there probably wouldn't be a million dutch on permanent sick leave sitting around smoking dope if there wasn't the same number of immigrants willing to work in their place. Clearly the Dutch authorities must have thought that the immigrants would merely fight among themselves like they always do, after all that was how their countries got colonised in the first place. Instead, it seems many of them have links to organistions like Al-Queada.

The chickens started to come home to roost when Pim Fortuyn, a bald, homosexual, rascist (only in Holland) who insisted that the country was "full" got killed a few years ago. Next up was Theo Van Gogh, a filmaker who said that Islam was a "retarded" religion. (He has a point)

I'm afraid that something has to be done about these awful Dutch people fighting each other. Perhaps the British Army should intervene and stop them, they've done such a good job in the North. Of course, the Irish army have an excellent record in peacekeeping missions abroad, and wouldn't the irony be piquant.

But, with the revelation that the man who sold chemical weapons to Sadamm Hussein was also Dutch, perhaps they're going to face a war from George W Bush. The country seems to fit all the criteria for invasion, it gives comfort to terrorists by giving them employment and supplies arms to terrorist regimes.

It wouldn't be that hard to put together a coalition of the willing. Britain is no problem, Bush just has to go down to the butchers and get a nice bone for Tone. Germany might come on board as they've never forgiven Frank Rikhard for that incident in the 1990 world cup. Even France might join as they used to own Holland before and Louis Napoleon might have been concieved in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. Spain, too, has a proud history of Holland-owning.

Though Holland is an advanced industrial economy, invading it would be relatively easy, as much of the country is under water. In fact, if Bush wants to destroy this hotbed of terrorism, he should just let Americans pump greenhouse gases into the athmosphere as much as they want and Holland will eventually sink.

Which is pretty much what he's doing already.

Maybe he's smarter than I gave him credit for.

Ken Sees Red

I used to live with a guy who grew up in the pre-Celtic tiger years who, like many Irish people of his generation was forced by economic circumstances to go and live in the UK. He found himself living on the streets of London and heard that there was an Irish centre there where he might find accomodation. After queueing for hours he finally got to meet the man behind the desk, who was none other than the then leader of the now defunct Greater London Council, Ken Livingstone.

It's a tribute to a man that must have had a busy schedule at that time that he was willing to take time out to help members of an ethnic minority in this way. Ken is often accused of egocentricity, yet when he was leader of the GLC in the late 70's and early 80's he was only paid £6,000 a year, about as much as someone playing for Birmingham City gets every week these days.

He's consistently shown himself to have a much better understanding of polictics and economics than a lot of people on the labour front bench today and if he'd lived in an age when ideas counted more than image or spin, he could be in a position of genuine policitcal influence rather than the joke job of mayor of London.

It's a job somewhat akin to being leader of the Palestinian Authority, with all responsiblity and no power. For example, when Ken was forced to cover his ass after the Madrid bombing, the otherwise wonderful activist site Alternet accused him of scaremongering.

Even though the Labour Leadership fought tooth and nail to stop him becoming mayor, his election may have worked to labour's advantage as he alllows some to indulge in the fantasy that labour are still a left wing party. When he expressed some sympathy for the May Day marchers a few years ago the Daily Telegraph got it's knickers in a twist, as it has somewhat of a prediliction for doing.

This week, though, Blair will be wishing that it was Buster Merryfield lookalike Frank Norris that got the job. Ken's gotten himself into a spot of bother by accusing a Daily Mail journalist of being a Nazi.

That seems like a reasonable enough accusastion to me. When I read Micheal Burleigh's The Third Reich: A New History, I was somwhat sceptical of his assertion that the Germans blamed their defeat in the first world war on the fact that the British had better propaganda. I was somewhat sceptical about this but then I was staying with some German friends and flicked through a calender with a photograph commerating what happened every day in history. On One page there was a picture of the Mail which that day was leading with a story that went something like: "Government plans to reduce age of consent for gays - SHOCK!" I wondered why the extension of gay rights in England could be of such concern to Germans, but it turned out that they were commerorating the birth of Viscount Rothermere, the founder of the newspaper, who had such an impact on their own countries history.

During the first world war, the Mail used to print stories about German soldiers eating babies which a newly literate but hardly disciminating working class lapped up. After the war Josef Goebbels studied their methods and realised that if you kept telling people the same thing, even something ludicrous like that Germans are the master race, they'd eventually believe it, and he turned out to be right. The Bush administration uses similar tactics when dealing with the US public, as does the contemporary Mail when dealing with issues like immigration.

The Mail has never been as much of a friend to the Irish as Ken has (to put it mildly), so I'm more inclined to take his side. During the second world war, they portrayed De Valera riding a donkey to "satirise" his policy of neutrality. It's sister paper, the London Evening Standard was even nastier when it, at the height of the troubles in the North, it printed a cartoon of a horror film simply titled The Irish. This is exactly the sort of thing that the Nazis used to do, and if you study what they write about immigrants and what the Nazis used to say about gypsies, you find find any great fundamental difference. So I agree with Ken when he says that their staff would have been the first to collaborate with the Nazis if they'd won the war, though I suspect the Telegraph would have been jostling in the Queue.

Yet Ken is being asked, even by the Guardian, to apologise. Why on Earth should he? Have they ever apologised to him for helping Margeret Thatcher to cripple the GLC, or for saying that he's too irresponsible to be mayor? For that matter, have they ever apologied to anyone for anything they've ever said, ever, except when losing a libel appeal? Not that I'm aware of. Tony Blair's request that he, like, y'know, says sorry shows him to be paranoid about the pernicious influence of the Mail, even though his party is way ahead in the polls and the worst thing that can happen him is a shrinking of his majority which might lead him to need to appease the left of his own party.

Yet for real chutzpah, would you Adam and Eve this article from the Telegraph, which argues that this event represents a new rudeness in British politics for which labour are mainly responsible. So I guess it must not have been Margeret Thatcher who shouted "Out, Out, Out", or Michael Howard who told single mothers to go and live in the gutter. Or John Major who described his cabinet colleauges as "Bastards". Or William Hague who goes round telling rascist jokes. Or Nicholas Ridley who accused the Germans of trying to take over Europe. Or Norman Tebbit who told unemployed people to get on their bikes. Or Micheal Heseltine who twice stormed out of interviews.

As to whether this will affect London's chances of hosting the next Olympics, well, Paris is a far more beautiful city with better infrastructure, existing stadia and a better location. But in London it's much easier to get drugs. So even after Ken's faux pas and the Mail's puerile reaction, maybe they have a chance.

Fox News: You're still all going to die

Some of the many articles I've read on the subject of Fox-Hunting over the last seven years have suggested that the "sport" is a sort of displacement activity, a connection with the visceral that many upper class people would otherwise lack in their lives.

One typically arrogant, right-wing hunter, Roger Scruton argues that's it's the things that repel other people about the "sport"; the blood, gore, and suffering, that draw him to the sport, as he sees little of this in his career as a right-wing "philosopher". I can see where he's coming from as he obviously lives in a world where there's so little excitement or danger, but he'd have more of a point if there was any danger in the "sport" to anyone other than the fox.

Perhaps Scruton should give a torque wrench to some eco-warriors and agree to let him have a two minute head start to be chased around South London. Then he'd enjoy a real sense of danger, I'm pretty sure.

Scruton is a "philosopher" who thinks that people shouldn't have sex before marraige as it weakens what he percieves to be traditional roles for males and females. He thinks the sexual freedom of our age is responsible for a breakdown in western values, etc, etc.
It takes a special kind of arrogance to think that while killing a small, defenceless, animal is a "connection to the visceral" while having promiscuous sex is morally indefensible.
He also argues that the rituals around hunting are another tradition worth preserving as they represent a bond with the nation's past as if the "sport" has achieved legitimacy just by being old and having the state's seal of approval. Perhaps he thinks promiscuous sex is alright in the context of a arab harem as well.

Our own Fox-Hunting advocate, Kevin Myers seems to come from a similar position.

It would be flippant to say that some people enjoy the viscerality of sex while others get the same adreniline rush from violence, as if the issue of consent never arose.
Yet it's undoubtedly true that fox hunting is still popular among the British upper classes, a set of people with a reputation for prudishness and anal retentivity that's not totally undeserved.
Milan Kundera has a joke in one of his books where an English Lord says to the wife: "I do hope you're pregnat my dear. I'd hate to go through those bizarre motions again."
So perhaps many English foxes have died because English aristocrats weren't at ease with their sexuality, having been handed over to wet nurses while their mothers agonised over what time of day to have tea.

The irony is, by killing foxes, they push up the rabbit population, and, as we all know, rabbits fuck like... um, I'm lost for similes.

More importantly, though, what are we to make of Prince Charles current engagement? He's a traditional English upper-class sort and it's possible that he's never had sex with a woman that he's not married to, though when you see some of the things that his kids get up to, you wish he never had sex within marraige either. He's also been a keen hunter, though he acknowleges that parliment is the legitimate government of the country and has agreed to obey the law. Yet only a week before it comes into "force", he gets engaged.
The ironic thing was that he caught a fox 25 years ago when he married Diana but never seemed to appriciate how lucky he was to married to such a babe. Now that the dogs can't go out hunting any more, he's had to take one of them home with him.

I'd hate to be the royal photogarpher that has to capture Camilla Parker Bowles' inner beauty. I'd hate to be a father who used to call his daugther "princess" as this may have been a compliment when Diana was his wife but in future it may be considered libelous.

The odd thing is that while Al-Quaeda await the date of the wedding - actually, Osama, I think you're past it, you're scared of the British security forces and you're going to let the chance to kill loads of patriotic brits gathered in one place pass you by - Prince Charles could probably get away with hunting all along, as the Police have declared it a "low priority" and argue that it would be impossible to enforce. Call me a sceptic if you like, but it seems to me that they manage to apprehend a huge amount of illegal drugs which are detectable only by the most sophisticated survelliance techniques, they have so many security cameras around the place that the average Londoner is filmed 1000 times a day, yet they say they can't be expected to locate a huge convoy of horses, dogs, and oh, guns?

This latest development is a serious kick in the teeth for labour supporters, many of whom are genuine humanitarians, though some are motivated by mere class hatred, which I have no issue with. They've waited nearly eight years for the government to give them this one scrap and when they do it's not even to be enforced properly.

This is desperatly dissaponting to me. I was looking forward to seeing English aristos crushed by the same jackboot that's persecuted miners, eco-warriors and anti-globalistion protestors in the past. The fact that they show such deference to the upper classes shows that they're a nation locked in the past no matter how the government tries to portray the country as being modern and enlightened. I hope that enough Labour supporters in Britain will be dissapointed enough to register their anger at the ballot box in May.

This course of action isn't available to us here, as Fianna Fail have never shown any interest in the issue and the only alternative is..... Fine Gael.

But at least the hunt sabateours who're so experienced at breaking up hunts might come over here and help us to end this barbaric practice.

Hold on, people, waste management is a subject that affects the whole planet!

In Don DeLillo's masterly novel Underworld there's a section where he deals with waste. Trash, garbage, detritus. It's a more interesting subject that people might imagine. He takes the view that the transition from pre-history to history took place when people started discarding things which gave future generations a clue to how they lived. It also represented the point at which we started to see ourselves as being outside nature and saw the earth as being something that was there for us to exploit, a belief we subsequently reified through the invention of religion.

Heaven only knows what whatever the amoeba evolve into after we are all gone will make of us. We make stuff from minerals that we find under the ground, package them in other minerals that we find under the ground, then when we are finished with it we dig another big hole in the ground and throw it all into it. They'll wonder how any civilisation who dealt with the Earth in that way could have lasted so long; excpet of course that post-industrial cilivisation has only lasted around 200 years and it may not last that long again. Then again, Human consciousness has only existed for 30,000 years at most, so it's possible that if any other life form develops they'll see us the way we see the way we see the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs.

That's something to think about next time you throw a used condom into the bin. Unfortunately I'm thinking about waste an awful lot lately, becuase I live in the northside of Cork and people are refusing to pay bin charges and the waste is really starting to pile up and stink the place up.

It's getting to be a bit like London in the 70's, or that Simpsons episode where Homer gets on the wrong side of City Hall and they refuse to pick up his waste.
A few things struck me about that episode, for instance the Simpsons kept using disposable nappies when clearly it would have made more sense to use old-fashioned cloth nappies in the circumstances. It's neatly symbolic of how we've become locked in to an endless cycle of generating waste.

In Britain in the 70's the binmen went on strike for ages. It could have provided an oppurtunity to start looking at waste in a different way, to stop even calling it waste and to start looking at it more as a resource, as they still do in many Eastern countries. In Tibet, cadavers are fed to birds of prey, and in most of India vegetable waste is eaten by cows who convert it into fertiliser. Needless to mention, this way of thinking was alien to the high anglican cleaniness-is-next-to-godliness Margeret Thatcher, who thought smashing the unions was the answer, and though the bins did get picked up it did nothing to solve the long term problems of waste management.

Clearly people in the Northside of Cork have learned nothing from this, choosing to respond to the ham-fisted way the City Corporation has imposed bin charges by leaving all their trash out on the street and hope that city hall will eventually give in, though there's no sign of them backing down as of yet. When the summer comes and tourist agencies for flies start telling them that Cork is the new Calcutta, it might be a different story for the people running the soi-dissant City of Culture, though they might persuade visitors that the piles of trash are some sort of outsider art project, which in a very loose sense I suppose they are.

Though I have little support for either side in this stand-off, I joined the protest in Cork last weekend. I kind of joined in the chanting, though I could never summon the same sort of wrath I could for the Iraq war and occupation. At one stage I started my own comically prolix chant, which went something like "What do we want? An integrated and environmentally sustainable waste management policy! When do we want it? Now!" The organisers weren't amused. Neither were the cops, of whom there were enough to clean up the streets (in a literal sense) if they weren't expressly prohibited by law from doing so. The really Orwellian thing is that while anyone advertising a demo by handing out fliers can get nicked for littering, the government have washed their hands of any responsibilty for keeping the streets clean.

I'm actually in favour of the polluter pays principle, the problem is that while they're charging €5 per bin, the initial charge is €255, so a household only has to pay twice as much if they fill a bin every week than if they only fill it once a year. As well as this, while the government endlessly shows ads telling us to recycle stuff, they rely on the private sector to take care of it, as they seem to have got it into their heads that these people are selfless altruists for whom making money is a serendipitous epiphenomon. And it's ordinary consumers that are being picked on, not big business or construction.

I've been making an effort to recycle my stuff for years, but it ain't easy. Ireland is one of the worst countries in Europe for recylcing and Cork is one of the worst cities in the country for people who don't want to throw stuff out.
I wish the government would stop waiting for those nice capitalists who love the Earth so much to take care of the problem and do something themelves. I wish they's discourage all the superfluous packaging that makes consumers lives more difficult in every way and get newspaper publishers to stop having so many supplements, especially motoring supplements, which no-one reads (as far as I know)

Not that recycling isn't profitable, though. Rumour has it that while we see all that plastic that our consumer goods get stuffed into as waste, those resorceful Chinese see it as a resource. If recycling companies can do a deal with them, the whole process will go like this:

1. Company makes product, puts it into packaging, which is referred to as "adding value", though really there're just adding cost.

2.Company sells prodcut to consumer, charging extra for the packaging.

3. Consumer a) throws stuff into bin, contributing to waste Charges, or
b) gives it to recylcing company who take it for free, which looks like they're doing you a favour, then

4. They sell it to Chinese guys at a massive profit, they reconstitute it, sell it to companies and the cycle goes back to 1.

Everyone's a winner, except the consumer who gets fucked over at every stage, and the people whose countries get invaded to provide the oil to make the plastics and the people who's trees get cut down to provide the paper, and living organisms that need oxygen to breath.

This bigger picture is one many bin charge protestors seem to miss. When Joe Higgins of the Socialist party was in Cork he showed himself to extremely well informed about environmantal aspects of waste management, but I got the impression from local counciller Mick Barry that he wanted people to recycle stuff just to get out of paying bin charges.

It's this sort of tunnel vision that's leading to rubbish pile up on the streets, though, like in that Simpsons episode, the solution is pretty simple. If the Corporation just gave a complete waiver to anyone on disabilty, charged a resonable price, and made sure everyone had access to recycling bins, all but the most hard-core refusniks would comply.

Yet it seems to me that we're a city of Homers with no level-headed Marge among us.

Rice Curies favour - But not with me

This week Marshall McLuhan must be laughing so much in his grave that the locals must be aboot to go down to the mounties and ask what all those funny sounds from the graveyard are, eh?
Marshall, if you're not dead, I'm desperately sorry.
McLuhan was the man who told us that the medium was the message and predicted pretty accurately in my humble estimation, that as we became more saturated with media information, the shorter our collective attention spans became.
Couldn't help thinking of this when I read some of the encomia that greeted the arrival of the new American secretary of state in Europe this week.
After Colin Powell resigned I put up some snide insinuations that she and Bush might be having some sort of affair.
I think the internet was invented for stuff like this that would never see the light of day in any print medium.
I'm less sure about the nature of their relationship now. It seems that W was introduced to Rice in 1998 by his much more moderate and sane father (that, as you know, aint saying a great deal) who realised that his so was the Republican party's choice and wanted a relative moderate on his team as a counterweight to some of the neo-cons like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
The key word here is "relative". While Rice may be moderate compared to the people I mentioned, this is clearly no great feat.
Remember that when the Bush administration was trying to convince the world that it was the "moderate" Miss Rice that warned the world the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud? I sure as fuck haven't, but it seems that some European journalists who've been seduced by the "mood music" emanating from her general direction. Even on the supposedly left-wing Guardian people were at least suggesting that she should be given a chance.
When the Bush administration were asked by the UN and the government of every civilised country in the world to give the UN weapons inspectors a chance, Rice told the world to go and take a flying fuck, or words to that general effect. So why should we listen to her now?
One possible answer is that the poor old people of Palestine have been through so much that any straw that seems to offer a chance a peace should be grasped, that a starving man doesn't care where his food is coming from.
I'd go along with this general line of argument I had enough trust in the Bush administration to think their words might mean something.
Yet it's important to realise where the Bush adminsitration are coming from on the Middle Eastern question.
Around 50 milion Americans believe in the Rapture, which means that they think if they've led good lives and not watch Sex and the City or go around with any underwear on display
then God will lift them up to heaven and leave sinners like myself behind. They believe that a sign that the rapture is going to come is when Israel regains all it's Biblical lands.
It doesn't seem to matter to Rice that many of the people who believe this are the same people who were bullying her when she was an African-American growing up in the archetypal hick state of Alabama.
Not that Rice is above accusing people of Rascism when she wants to get her way: "don't impugn my integrity" is her among her favourite phrases.
Coming from the background that she did, she ought to be able to able to sympathise with the Palestinians , but the truth is that even if she does care about them, it would be political suicide for Bush to allow the creation of an independent Palestine, as the shocking truth is that 9% of Americans already think Bush is too much of a lefty and if many of them desert him then people will start to get suspicious when the disparities between the opinion polls and election results get really big?
So why all the sweet talk?
Have a read of Ron Suskind's book on Paul O Neill
to get a sense of what the answer might be. It's revealing of what both Bush's attitude to Israel is - apparently he favoured a complete pull-out of peace-keeping troops as he thought this might help "clarify things" and the Machiavellian political tactics that the Bush team employ. It seems that they appointed him just so they could get their insane tax cuts past senate and congress, which given that he too had a reputation as a "moderate", he was able to do. When he'd done this, they hung him out to dry, starting a "whispering" campaign against him on places like Fox News and Talk Radio, claiming he was loose-lipped and "too honest" which is one of the worst criticisms Bush can make, it seems.
The really sad thing is that the Bush adminsration never sued Suskind, which means that either everything bad he says about Bush is true or they just don't give a rat's ass as swing voters in Ohio don't read books anyway.
As O' Neill was Bush's moderate face on Capitol Hill, so it seems to me Rice is Bush's moderate face to the world.
It's a difficult job but my fear is that Rice may be able to pull it off, perhaps convincing the world that she stays up nights worrying about the plight of Karen hill tribe people and that their future invasion of Burma has nothing to do with that country's long border with China.
Over the last 3 1/2 years Americans have been going on about how they're willing to kill and die for their freedom. Maybe now's the time to exercise that freedom by questioning the adminstrations motives.
But if we can't even do this in Europe, what chance in Nebraska?

They've got the guns, and, um, that's it

It seems the peace process in the north has finally broken down and the level of recrimation here is so strong that I'm forced to concede that whoever it was that said that the Irish are a very fair-minded race because we never speak well of each other may on some level have had some sort of valid point.

The scaremongering on the RTE news last night was so bad that I thought my house had blown away and landed in Kansas.

True, when people who've made their collective name killing and maiming people warn the rest of us not to underestimate the gravity of the situation that could be interpreted as some sort of threat but it really ought to be the people over on the other side of the Irish sea shitting themselves.

Thing is, they've also got the fear of Islamic terrorism to worry about and this must be a very confusing development. Hopefully the British nanny state will come in and take care of the situation by having green alerts when they're supposed to fearing the IRA and sort of orangey, mosque-coloured alerts when the danger is percieved to come from muslims.

You may think that I'm being facetious but I'd really be upset if the IRA started bombing England again, not because the number of casualties have ever been that high, but because there's always a section within their society that's so willing to exploit anti-Irish sentiment, and far from having gone away, they're in rude health, (and isn't "rude" the appropriate word) though it seems with BNP, Ukip and whatever Kilroy-Silk's new party is called, they're just as vulnerable to fragmentation as extremists over here.

Meanwhile the politicians here are falling over themselves deciding who to blame.

I blame Micheal McDowell. If it wasn't for his insistence that the IRA give up all sorts of crime, there might be no prospect of the IRA going back to war. It may be that this is part of a cunning plan to outsource crime abroad as the level of crime has way escalated since the peace process began but my feeling is that he's let his vicious, class-based hatred of the IRA get in the way of his political judgment.

History may remember his insistence last December that the IRA give up all sorts of crime as well as all their guns as the last chance ever for peace in the country being thrown away.

He's never asked that the US stop starting illegal wars in Iraq before they are allowed use our air bases again.

He's never asked the British goverment give up their massive nuclear and conventional arsenals, with which they could bomb Ireland back into the stone age if they wanted. This danger is hardly a negligible one. After all, the British do have a history of attacking Ireland, murdering, starving and enslaving the people, a more recent history of bombing anyone that doesn't like George Bush as much as their own government; and they are the race that invented the phrase :"My country, right or wrong."

If George Bush and his junta of neo-cons get it into their swivel-eyed heads that Eye-ur-land poses some sort of terrorist threat, he just has to go down to the butchers and get a bone to feed Tone and next thing we could be facing sanctions followed by saturation bombing and then Halliburton taking control of our massive natural gas fields.

You may think I'm being facetious again, that the British govemment acknowledge the existence of the Irish Free State, even if many of it's citizens don't, and that they let us have our own legitimate army. I must say that's it's absolutely spifffing of them to let a sovereign independent state have it's own army, especially when there's no posibility of any war between the Republic of Ireland and the UK.

Or is there? I have to say that I'm deeply concerned with Tony Blair's loyalty to George Bush and what the consequences are for the future of Europe, and Ireland in particular. In 1984, the "British Isles" have become united with the United States to form Atalntica, which is in a permanent state of war with Eurasia. There are those who might say that this was just a work of fiction set in an imagainary future which has already become the past. But so many of it's predictions are coming true, with the United States facing a future of perpetual fear and foreign wars fought in the name of a freedom that is more imagined than real.

Meanwhile, while hostility to other European nations seems to be as strong as it's ever been in the UK, the population is more supportive of the so-called war on terror than any other European nation. It's largely because the British feel a sort of ethnic affinity with Americans, though more people in the US are of German descent.

Throw in the fact that in the 70's, a middle-aged Donald Rumsfeld was trying to convince the world that the IRA were being backed up by the Soviet Union (No Shit!) and the notion of the UK severing itself from Europe, allying itself to the US and then launching an attack on the Republic of Ireland doesn't seem quite so outlandish.

Things I once thought unbelievable in my lifetime have come to p-a-a-a-a-s, which is why predicting the future is such a treacherous business. After the first world war people thought the horrors that they'd witnessed were so awful that there'd never be another war. But they didn't count on the obstinate agressiveness of the Germans. So maybe we should be a little more aware that the British have a bit of a history of attacking nations that they percieve to be a threat.

On the other hand, there's probably no point in dwelling on it because there's precious little we can actually do about the fact that they have such a massive army, whereas there is something they can do about the much less substantial but far more immediate threat that they percieve themselves to face.

When looked at it from that perspective, the IRA's obstinacy might not seem quite so obtuse. I don't claim to know their mindset, but it must seem frustrating that the British can get away with the criminal theft of Iraq when they can't even rob a bank.

I can't defend Mitchell McLoughlin's statement that the murder of Jean McConville wasn't a crime. It was a morally heinous act by any standards.

Except by the standards of the Bush admistration that we implicitly support. According to them, if you give comfort to terrorists, you're a terrorist yourself, and the only way to deal with terrorists is to kill them. The British Army were a state terror group at that time. For me, it was a crime, but it's a crime the US and British have commited 100,000 times in the last few years.

They've gotten away with it, as they've gotten away with demonisind Irish people throughout the world because between them they represent the world's only hyperpower. There are those, like McDowell, who think that they enjoy this power beacuse they're better than us and that we should therefore cower before it.

I'm not among them.

For a slightly different perspective on similar issues, see here

A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest

Last week the oscar nominations came out, and for the first time in Donkey's years I hadn't seen a single one of the five films nonimated for best picture. I had a chance to watch Finding Neverland for free back in October but it seemed a bit schmazly, though that's not usually that much of an issue for the acadmedy. A couple of other of the nominated flicks had been on release for a few weeks but I preffered to indulge of the brooding European Angst of movies like Vera Drake and The Inheritance.

Yesterday I tried to rectify this situation by catching up with two of the nominated films. The Aviator wasn't bad at all. Million Dollar Baby was.

I expected to come out of this movie saying, like, y'know, it was alright, but no girlfight, the way poncey soi-dissant film buffs like myself usually do. Instead I was left reflecting how troubled a society must me to take such a militantly rascist, right-wing movie to it's collective bosom.

I was hardly expecting a radically anti-establishment film from the Republican mayor of whatever one-horse shithole Clint Eastwood is the mayor of. He is the guy who made his name playing the one-man hippy-killing machine Harry Callahan.
And it is a movie about boxing. Ever notice how most American movies on this subject seem to concern people descended from non-aryan countries like Ireland (City for Conquest, Gentleman Jim, The Great White Hype); Italy (Somebody up there likes me, Rocky, Raging Bull); Puerto Rico (girlfight) or the Israeli diaspora (Body and Soul)?

It seems that Hollywood is trying to tell us that while Americans from ethnic backgrounds are pugnacious trogladytes that can only express ourselves through our fists, those or Anglo-Saxon or German/Scandanavian origin are peaceful people that are only stirred to violence when threathened by peasants from Afganistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam, Laos, etc.

Eastwood's latest work continues this igniminous tradition. He might have considered actually making a movie about an African-American fighter; as, astonishingly, when I looked up my 1996 Time-Out film guide, I couldn't find a single film about a black American fighter, though since then, Ali and The Hurricane have been made, though even then both of these are factually based.

Eastwood hamfistedly attempts to redress this balance by having the film narrated by a black boxer played by Morgan Freeman. Oddly enough, many of the same people who criticised Alexander for excessive use of narration are salivating over this movie. I've never liked Morgan since he lectured a vegetarian journalist insisting that she'd have a weak immune system as a result of her humanitarianism. Maybe he should go to India and drink the same water as Hindus and then see who's got a stronger immune system.

He didn't endear himself to me any more with a performance that makes Uncle Tom look like Brother Huey, as a feckless, improvident gambler. The only other black character is an obnoxious bully who taunts both a simple-minded hick and the girl played by Hilary Swank.

She's Irish, so she is. Oh, faith and begorrah, she's as Irish as a bowl of mashed potatoes cooked over a turf fire. She wears a green robe with a harp and the words Mo Chuise. She's got great teeth, which means she ain't English. And guess what? Her family, the Fitzgeralds are feckless and improvident, like all Irish-Americans. And they're from that well-known centre of the Irish diaspora, Missouri, though some IRA propagandists like to put it about that most of them live in Rich, liberal states like Massacheutsits. (I probably didn't spell that right, but then I am an ignorant Irish hick myself)

Made by Bush-backing AOL-Time-Warner, the film seems like an advertisment for the Republican plan to destroy social security, by portraying her welfare-dependent family as overweight, ignorant, greedy, ungrateful scum. What happened you, Warners? You used to make movies that sympathised with the disenfranchised, like The Public Enemy and I am a fugitive from a Chain Gang. Now you seem to think that it's there own fucking fault that they're disenfranchised.

Trying to free herself from a life of anomie, Ms. Fitzgerald does the one thing that Irish people know how to do, and that's fight. She fights her way through Europe where there's always a sea of green, white and gold, as there's always ( according to Morgan) either Irish people or people who want to be Irish. It's more the former than the latter dude. If you put on a cap backwards and started talking in rhyme, you'd find out that they wanted to be black. Taking on those slimy Europeans proves to be her downfall, as she fights a black former prostitute from East Berlin who likes to fight dirty. Any more right-wing American prejudices you'd like to reinforce, Clint? Why didn't you portray her reading Dude, waroom ist mein land? before the fight?

The odd thing is that many liberal critics seem to have taken this movie to their heart as it lambasts the hicks who often vote repeblican, though there isn't a bush-Cheney sticker in sight. The truth is that Missouri isn't the most right-wing state by a long way and preffered a dead dude to John Ashcroft.

In trying to make himself more Irish, he reads Yeats translated into "Gaelic" (oddly enough) and then renders The Lake Isle of Inishfree perfectly back into the original, so maybe he gets TG4 by cable. But even though, as may be clear, I despised the film, I could see genuine echoes of Ulysses in Clint's search for his real spiritual daughter.

But Clint's a republican and they don't read books, preferring Fox News and Radio Talk shows. If you think that's a stereotype, then go see Million Dollar Baby yourself. Then you'll know what stereotypes are.