Monday, July 25, 2011 Close down the blogs - by Richard...

Monday, July 25, 2011 Close down the blogs - by Richard...

Norway's extremists don't tend to gather in visible "rightwing groups". But online, they settle into a subculture of resentment, writes Thomas Hylland Eriksen for The Guardian.

He tells us that "anyone familiar with the darker waters of the blogosphere would for years have been aware of the existence of a vibrant cyberscene characterised by unmitigated hatred of the new Europe, aggressive denunciations of the 'corrupted, multiculturalist power elites' and pejorative generalisations about immigrants, targeting Muslims in particular". Thus ...

Breivik must willingly have allowed himself to be brainwashed by Islamophobic and extreme rightwing websites. However, had he instead been forced to receive his information through a broadsheet newspaper, where not all the stories dealt with Europe's loss of confidence and the rise of militant Islam, it is conceivable that his world would have looked slightly different.

Perhaps one lesson from this weekend of shock and disbelief may be that cultural pluralism is not necessarily a threat to national cohesion, but that the tunnel vision resulting from selective perusal of the internet is.

This is seriously scary stuff ... a world where the MSM retains its monopoly as information providers, where "citizen journalists" are corralled and then banned where they do not follow the approved path. This is the voice of a new totalitarianism. And it's coming your way.

The generals finally share the blame - by Richard... Monday, July 25, 2011

"Richard North, the author of Ministry of Defeat and independent blogger, has passionately writtenthat the Committee report, more than the hacking scandal, has highlighted the flaws of both Parliament and the media.

James Arbuthnot and the members of the Defence Committee should have been aware of these issues long ago but they repeatedly failed to address them until now. North has also accused Arbuthnot of maintaining the myth of 'ministerial responsibility', the equivalent of Robinson's modern day 'stab-in-the-back'.

The media for all its interest in Afghanistan also failed to understand what was happening especially in terms of strategic questions and civil-military relations. Newspapers like the Sun and the Daily Mail chose to vilify Gordon Brown while making Generals like Sir Richard Dannatt the honourable soldier.

The Sun as well as the Mail have both been oddly quiet on reporting the Committee's findings, no surprise. The Sun's sister paper The Times, to its credit, did publish this article last year which mirrored this week's committee findings".

It's a good piece ... well, I would say that - but it still is. Read it and then buy the book. I need the money.

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You can't defy gravity - by Richard...

It looks very much as if the latest squirming by the "colleagues" isn't even going to get them past the holiday period. The deal is already beginning to unravel. Ambrose is in fine form as well.

To be honest, though, there really isn't a lot more to say on this issue. It is just a matter of waiting for the crash and, to some extent the details don't matter. But we can take issue with Ambrose, when he says "Europe's ideologues took the whole world to the brink of disaster" as if this is in the past. We are teetering on the brink at the moment, and the "colleagues" are going to tip over, and attempt to drag us all down.

There is a sort of inane piece here as well – stirring stuff, but not getting to grips with the issues. The choice is between a rock and a hard place, but the "colleagues" are determined to stay put – not for economic but political reasons.

Thus, Ambrose tells us that the root problem is that vastly disparate nations with different growth rates, productivity patterns, debt structures, sensitivity to interest rates, legal systems, wage bargaining practices, and inflation proclivities, were meshed together by Hegelian politicians acting against the warnings of the Bundesbank and the European Commission's economists.

But that isn't it at all. The real root problem is that economic means are being used to attain political ends ... ever closer union, all on the basis that this is the only thing that stands between the nations of Europe and war. The "colleagues" are not going to let go of that. They have too much invested in it and, no matter how bad it gets, they will tell you that the alternative is worse. They will persevere, no matter what damage is caused.

But, as I've written before, you can't defy gravity. The wax is melting and soon the body will plummet to earth. These people took off without parachutes. They are not repeat sky-divers.

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