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. 
07 January 2011 10:50 PM
If you forget your British history, Professor, you will fall behind
Share this article:
05 January 2011 3:08 PM
Organ trafficking, eugenics and corruption: meet our new EU 'partners'
Sunday, 16 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.
Posts
