Well done, Professor. But maybe you would have got there sooner if you'd been reading more history and less science. In particular, the history of Henry V and how he became the man to lead the English and the Welsh to an impossible victory over the French at Agincourt. Honey helped save the life of the 16-year old Prince Hal after he was shot through the face by an arrow in the 1403 battle of Shrewsbury. Here it is, from Juliet Barker's terrific 2005 book, Agincourt: 'An arrow struck the sixteen-year-old prince full in the face but he refused to withdraw [from the battle], fearing the effect it would have on his men...' 'A way had to be found of extracting the arrow that had entered his face on the left side of his nose. The shaft was successfully removed but the arrowhead remained embedded six inches deep in the bone at the back of his skull.' 'Various "wise leeches" or doctors were consulted and advised "drinks and other cures," all of which failed. In the end it was the king's surgeon, a convicted (but pardoned) coiner of false money, John Bradmore, who saved the prince and the day.' 'He devised a small pair of hollow tongs the width of the arrowhead with a screw-like thread at the end of each arm and a separate screw mechanism running through the centre. The wound had to be enlarged and deepened before the tongs could be inserted and this was done by means of a series of increasingly large and long probes made from "the pith of old elder, well dried and well stitched in purified linen cloth...[and] infused with rose honey."' 'When Bradmore judged that he had reached the bottom of the wound he introduced the tongs at the same angle as the arrow had entered, placed the screw in the centre and manoeuvred the instrument into the socket of the arrowhead. "Then, by moving it to and fro, little by little (with the help of God) I extracted the arrowhead."' 'He cleansed the wound by washing it out with white wine and placed into it new probes made of wads of flax soaked in a cleansing ointment, which he had prepared from an unlikely combination of bread sops, barley, honey and turpentine oil.' ''These he replaced every two days with shorter wads until, on the twentieth day, he was able to announce with justified pride that 'the wound was perfectly well cleansed.' A final application of "dark ointment" to regenerate the flesh completed the process.' There is a dispute as to just how Henry launched such plain Englishmen and Welshmen into the battle. According to Barker, one version quotes the king in this way: 'In the name of Almyghti God, and of Saint George, Avaunt baner! and Saint George this day thyn helpe!' The other version has it the king just roared: 'Felas, let's go!' That one sounds about right to me. But there it is anyway: Kosovo, a territory ripped from Serbia in a war led by the Islamic terrorist organisation the KLA, is still on the EU's list as a potential candidate for membership. This, despite all the evidence that Thaci and his Albanian thugs engaged in 'inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking of human organs in Kosovo.' In other words unknown numbers of Serbian prisoners were murdered so that their bodies could be sliced open and their organs sold by Albanians calling themselves 'Kosovars.' Senator Marty's report was commissioned by the Council of Europe, a 47-member organisation older than the EU, and which is no part of the Brussels empire. As the Serbian writer Srdja Trifkovic points out in the current issue of Chronicles Magazine: 'Long dismissed in the mainstream media as "Serbian propaganda" the allegations of organ trafficking were ignored in the West until early 2008 when Carla Del Ponte, former Prosecutor at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, revealed in her memoirs that she had been prevented from initiating any serious investigation into its merits.' 'She also revealed -- shockingly -- that some elements of proof taken by ICTY field investigators from the notorious "Yellow House" [the blood-spattered house where organ harvesting took place] in the Albanian town of Rripe were destroyed at The Hague, thus enabling the KLA and their Western enablers '--hello, Brussels -- 'to claim that "There was no evidence" for the organ trafficking claims.' 'In April 2008, prompted by Del Ponte's revelations, 17 European parliamentarians [ie, from various European parliaments] signed a motion for a resolution calling on the Assembly [of the European Council] to examine the allegations.' In June 2008 the Swiss Senator Marty was asked to write the report. He had already gained international prominence by his previous investigation of accusations that the CIA abducted and imprisoned terrorism suspects in Europe. The report says that Thaci's links with organised crime go back to the late 1990s. This means assassinations, beatings, narcotics trade, the lot. So murdering for body parts wasn't all of it, merely the worst of it. And the same lot of thugs who were doing all this are still there in Kosovo, sucking up the millions of euros the EU has been pouring into the place. Not that she much wants to know what is true and what is not true in Kosovo: the EU wants Kosovo 'stable,' even if that means the butchers stay in power. Or as Senator Marty noted in his report, 'even certain representatives of international institutions did not conceal their reluctance to grapple with these facts. "The past is the past," we are told, "we must now look to the future."' (I'd say that is a line you won't hear much at, for example, the Simon Weisenthal Centre in Vienna.) Now to the next lot of unsavoury new 'European partners' back in the news, the Romanians. This lot, of course, are already members. But they are still forced to sit in the back of the bus: they were allowed to join the EU despite the rampant organised crime and corruption in the country -- of course they were, the Brussels empire is both voracious and omnivorous -- but now they are in the French and the Germans and the rest are getting sniffy about them. So Romania is not being allowed to join the Schengen Area, the group of European countries which has dropped all border checks. The feeling seems to be that street encampments of Romanians are causing enough ructions in France and Italy without having the Romanian mafia moving around in a Schengen-without-frontiers. Which is where I start to feel a sneaking regard for the Romanians. They aren't going to put up with being told they are second-class members of the EU. The parliament in Bucharest has started to threaten to make trouble over Croatia's accession, and to block or at least delay a deal rigged up that would allow extra MEPs to take their seats in the European Parliament (an issue too confusing to go into now), if their country isn't allowed into Schengen. Berlinski lives in Istanbul. 'Any place else would bore me senseless' she says. 'What curious student of history could resist the chance to see something like this with her own eyes?' What she sees is 'Weimar Istanbul, dread and exhilaration in a city on the verge of political catastrophe.' It is 'a city where sudden liberalisation has unleashed the social and political imagination -- but where the threat of authoritarian reaction is always in the air.' Poltical Islam was unleashed with the rise to power in 2002 of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) -- and as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now AKP prime minister, infamously said in 1995, 'Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.' Istanbul is no melting pot. It is a city caught between two revolutions. The Westernising secular transformations of Ataturk have still not been assimilated; and the new - or rather, old -- Islamic culture has come to challenge them. Just read the recent Turkish headlines: Kurdish rebels admit Istanbul bus bombing -- Strategy expert warns of ethnic clashes -- Ethnically polarised societies easy targets for provocateurs. 'The concentration of the media in the hands of government cronies has dramatically contracted press freedom, as has the govenment's persecution of journalists and its use of punitive taxation to bring dissenting elements into line.' 'That the city is not only on a political fault line but on a literal one adds to the mood; when an earthquake comes -- and it will --much of Istanbul will collapse because the AKP has done little to crack down on corrupt, lax and dangerous contruction practices.' 'The conflict between the ancient, the modern, and the reaction is in evidence everywhere here, especially in the small, weird details...the barracks of the imperial military have been purchased by investors and refashioned as the W Hotel...The rooms come complete with "intimacy kits" containing condoms. Perhaps you should use them, too, because the government takes a dim view of foreign sperm. Women who leave the country for artificial insemination are to be prosecuted.' Eugenics, Turkish style: none of that cross-breeding with Europeans. And yet: 'I have rarely in the West seen promiscuity such as that which characterises Istanbul's elite, secular class. Come the Revolution, they will surely be shot. Yet the women complain to me, in tears, that they cannot understand why the men they bed never call the next day. The poor things, I think. They are so new to this.' And on Berlinski goes, painting a picture of a city, of a Turkish culture, that is an unexploded bomb lying at Europe's door: 'The PKK, an ultranationalist Kurdish organisation, spent the summer setting off bombs. Enraged Turkish nationalists went on a counter-rampage, destroying shops and buildings, clashing with security forces, burning official vehicles and attacking police stations Kurds to lynch.' One newspaper calls it 'Civil war rehersal.' 'All very Weimar. All very Istanbul.' We've already had one Weimar in Europe, we don't need another. But I'm not saying that as though Istanbul is a bad thing. The Turks can do what they like. It is just that Turkey is not a good thing for Europe. All Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary -- that's him on the left -- and his ministers will have to do is chair meetings for things such as fisheries, foreign affairs, and agriculture. The flashy jobs will be left to 'President of the European Council' Herman Van Rompuy. Flashy job number one for Van Rompuy: trying to make sure he elbows the other 'president,' José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, and the 'High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy,' Catherine Ashton, further down the receiving line when anyone genuinely important has to be greeted in Brussels. The only job left for 'President' Orban will be to hold the coats. Still, the Hungarian presidency may turn out to be a lot more interesting that this past six months of Belgians in the chair. Already members of the German left have called for Hungary to be stripped of 'the honour' (the what? I'll let that pass for the moment, and not just because Hungary holds the rotating presidency by treaty law, not by reason of particular virtue). Their grouse is not that the Fitch agency has just downgraded Hungary's credit rating to just above junk status, so that having Hungary in office will be embarrassing (which I find delightful: getting on towards junk status puts Hungary right into mainstream euroland, without even being a member of the single currency). No, the left, along with some of the sniffier eurocrats, are grousing because Orban's new centre-right government has passed a law that will expand the state's power to monitor and penalize privately-owned news media. There will be fines for websites which breach new rules on 'balance' and 'human dignity.' Sounds bad. But then you have to hesitate when you see who the critics of the new Hungarian law are. In the first place, I doubt whether the likes of confessed kiddie-fiddler (now retired, apparently) and left-wing Member of the European Parliament, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, would be in such a lather over Hungary taking the rotating presidency if a similar law had been passed by a left-wing government. Orban, you see, has a thumping two-thirds majority for his conservative Fidesz party. So the left want to throw as much muck as possible at the Hungarian ministers before they arrive to take up the rotating presidency in Brussels. As for the law itself, you are hardly going to expect me to support any legislation that lets a government fine or close down news media. But again, look who worries about whom. Remember, this multi-millionaire Democrat big-gun is chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. When he makes a public statement saying the government ought to shut down Fox News, that is an attempt at bullying (it is also a demonstration of the failure of Rockefeller's expensive private education: the FCC only regulates broadcast airwaves, while Fox is cable. Duh.) But I haven't heard anybody in the European Parliament demanding that Rockefeller be 'stripped of the honour' of, say, visiting the countries of the EU. Of course not. He is a Democrat, and the journalists he most wants to suppress work for rightwing Fox. So that's okay, then. Also, check out what these let's-protect-the-Press eurocrats actually believe. First they believe in trying to influence journalists by way of big chunks of the commission's annual €2.4bn annual propaganda budget (that is the figure for 2008, calculated by Open Europe, and at todays exchange rate equal to just over £2bn). Plenty of perks, free trips, prizes and 'training' courses in nice places are available for compliant journos. In some cases the European insitutions simply hand cash to reporters for unvouched 'expenses.' (And before you ask, no, this blog doesn't take EU dosh.) More to the point, look at the detail of the so-called Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in the Lisbon Treaty. Article 11 is supposed to guarantee 'freedom of expression and information,' including 'the freedom and the pluralism of the media shall be respected. ' (Wouldn't the judges at the European Court have fun defining 'pluralism?' Is Britain soon going to be forced to subsidise a national Islamic newspaper to ensure 'pluralism' in journalism?) Okay, then keep going, past all the other 'freedoms,' until you get to the final article of the charter, Article 54: 'Nothing in this Charter shall be interpreted as implying any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms recognised in ths Charter or at their limitaton to a greater extent than is provided for herein.' In other words, far from protecting the right of each man to express his political opinions as he will, this charter limits the protection of the right to free speech and the right to the freedom of the press to the right to support the 'permissible' opinions defined by the charter. Example: Article 7 says: 'Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.' Yet just recently there has been outrage in Britain after Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, a failed asylum seeker who ran over a 12-year old girl and left her to 'die like a dog,' was saved from deportation because of the Human Rights Act. The Act, according to immigration judges, meant that Ibrahim, an Iraqi Kurd, could not be sent home because he had fathered two children in the United Kingdom. Expulsion would allegedly breach his right to 'a private and family life.' Now, plenty of people are demanding that Cameron repeal the Act, as he promised before the election. Obviously he won't, because he is Cameron the Wriggler. More to the point, even if Cameron did get parliament to repeal the Human Rights Act, criminals such as Ibrahim could still dodge expulsion by means of the Lisbon Treaty's charter. Which before the election -- oh, hey, I remember now -- Cameron also pledged to give the British people the right to reject by means of a referendum. But to the point about the freedoms allegedly secured in the charter (a charter which, I will repeat, has been secured by Cameron): since this so-called 'right to repsect for private and family life' is guaranteed in Article 7, that means that, according to Article 54, none of us has the right to campaign for the destruction of that article. In other words, while Ibrahim can kill and the charter will protect his freedom to stay in Britain, any British citizen campaigning against the ludicrous justice-dodging wheezes in the charter can be stripped of his right to free speech, and any journalist doing the same thing can lose the protection of the freedom of the press. So my advice to the British is: Hold on, my friends, to the great charters on which your own constitution -- and the American constitution -- stand. Hold on: Magna Carta of 1215, the Petition of Right of 1628, the Bill of Rights of 1689. And fight to destroy the Lisbon Treaty and its oppressive and undemocratic Charter of Rights which wants to sweep the ancient rights of the English-speaking peoples all away -- even though the EU law says you now have no right to engage in such a fight.
07 January 2011 10:50 PM
If you forget your British history, Professor, you will fall behind
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05 January 2011 3:08 PM
Organ trafficking, eugenics and corruption: meet our new EU 'partners'
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28 December 2010 1:42 PM
Orban to Brussels: who you calling totalitarian?
Sunday, 9 January 2011
The BBC World News was getting pretty excited tonight about the discovery by British Professor Paul Davis -- the man who invented the pregnancy test -- that bandages inspired by the chemistry of honey could make wounds heal more quickly.
As the young Henry was enduring all that, the fragrant knights of the French aristocracy were writing poetry, jousting and glorying in such names such as Lancelot, Gawain, Tristram, Floridases and Palamedes. Such men would, a dozen years later, have to face this tough young English prince who had endured and defeated an arrow shot through his head. The men fighting alongside the courageous Henry would be no fragrant 'Tristrams.' His few, his band of brothers, would be men with names such as Tom, John, Robert, Thomas, Nicholas and Richard.
So far, the European Commission is trying really hard to pretend that the report accusing Hashim Thaci, the prime minister of Kosovo, of a revolting list of violent crimes doesn't actually exist. Or if it exists, it doesn't matter. Or if it matters, it ought to be ignored because it was written by the Swiss Senator Dick Marty and, obviously, you can't expect a Swiss to be on-message with Brussels.
So you would think that the European Commission might have a more muscular reply to
Senator Marty's report than what was offered just before Christmas by Cecilia Malmstrom, the Swede who is Home Affairs Commissioner. When confronted by a journalist about the report, she stuck to: 'We do not deny there are problems in Kosovo and in other countries. This report you refer to, I have read about it in the media, I cannot comment what is true and what is not true.'
Meanwhile, to another potential member, Turkey. Both David Cameron and William Hague are mad-keen to get Turkey into the EU, and that alone if nothing else -- though there is plenty else -- ought to put you on alert that Turkish membership must be a bad thing. But if you doubt it, I suggest you have a look at an excellent article by Claire Berlinski in the Autumn edition of the American magazine,
City Journal.
January 1st means Belgium hands over the six-month rotating European Union presidency to Hungary --- or, what's left of the rotating presidency. Since the Lisbon Treaty created the post of permanent president, there is not much purpose or prestige left in the office.
Just last month, US Senator Jay Rockefeller (yes, great-grandson of the oil gazillionaire, that's him on the right) and powerful member of the Democratic party, said he wanted to see the US Federal Communications Commission shut down the conservative Fox News -- and leftish MSNBC as
well, for that matter: 'It would be a big favour to political discourse [and] to our ability to do our work here in Congress.' Well, of course. Muscular criticism from journalists is always a problem. Life would be so much easier without it, wouldn't it, Senator?
My advice to the British when faced with this EU creeping control over freedoms? I recall a line from Daniel Webster, the 19th century American Whig: 'Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again.'
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