StephenKMackSD's Blog

Now the retooled Soviet Socialist Realist paintings of Lenin preaching to the Proletariat, with Corbyn’s face superimposed into the image, is a propaganda tool now discarded by the wily Oxbridgers of the Economist editorial staff. But the Oakshottian contempt for the ‘lower orders’ and its current political instrument, Mr. Corbyn, remains the political mainspring of this Tory tabloid.

Headline: Theresa May’s failed gamble

Sub-headline: The Conservatives’ botched campaign will bring chaos—and opportunities

Her political career has been defined by caution. So it is cruel for Theresa May, and delicious for her enemies, that it may have been ended by one big, disastrous gamble. Eight weeks ago she called a snap election, risking her government for the chance to bank a bigger majority against an apparently shambolic Labour opposition. With the Conservatives 20 points ahead in the opinion polls, it looked like a one-way bet to a landslide and a renewed five-year term for her party. But there followed one of the most dramatic collapses in British political history. As we went to press in the early hours of June 9th, the Tories were on course to lose seats, and perhaps their majority.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21723191-conservatives-botched-campaign-will-bring-chaosand-opportunities-theresa-mays-failed-gamble

Notice that the opening paragraph ignores the arrogance, not to speak of  self-destructive character of the Tories, under the leadership of both May and Cameron, demonstrated by their penchant for calling elections, when they were far ahead in the polls. May failed to learn from the Cameron debacle. Which leads to a pressing question: where was Rovian Political Guru Lynton Crosby? Was he advising Mrs. May to bank on that old Rovian standby of the 1% margin of victory? Notice this sentence fragment that was once a cornerstone of the Economist’s Party Line on Corbyn: an apparently shambolic Labour opposition. Mr. Corbyn’s campaign seemed to be very well organized, with help from Bernie Sanders and one of his campaign staff, so the use of shambolic describes the thought of the May campaign. The Economist editors/writer seek to distance themselves from this once mainstay of their Anti-Corbynism.

The best case for the Tories today is a wafer-thin majority under a prime minister whose authority may never recover.

What constitutes that ‘wafer-thin majority’ is described in detail by Robert Mackey of The Intercept:

Headline: After Election Setback, Theresa May Clings to Power in U.K. Thanks to Ulster Extremists

At the end of an election campaign that was nasty, brutish and short, British voters punished Prime Minister Theresa May at the polls on Thursday, depriving her Conservative Party of its governing majority in Parliament, and forcing her to rely on the support of a small party of extremists from Northern Ireland to stay in office.

Despite a late surge in support for the opposition Labour Party, whose leader Jeremy Corbyn offered a more uplifting vision of the future, the Conservatives managed to hold on to most of their seats, but are now the largest party in what’s known as a hung Parliament, where no single party can rule without some form of support from at least one other.

May said on Friday that she would govern with the backing of the Democratic Unionist Party, or D.U.P., extreme social conservatives from the Ulster Protestant community whose main aim is keeping Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom.

As several commentators observed on Friday, the British public generally pays no attention to politics in Northern Ireland, and so might be in for a shock to discover just how extreme members of the D.U.P. are.

The party, founded by the virulently anti-Catholic, evangelical preacher Ian Paisley — who once denounced Pope John Paul II to his face as “the antichrist” — still includes fundamentalist Christians who believe in creationism but not climate science, and have fought to keep U.K. laws permitting both abortion and same-sex marriage from being implemented in the province.

Mrs. May, that product of Church of England carefully cultivated moral/social respectability, is now forced into a political alliance with some very unsavory political actors. Will she recognize the weakness of her political position? Will she, like the adroit Rovian, accept her position?

Ignoring the above, or just exercising the myopia of Neo-Liberals, the editors at The Economist posit three crises that will challenge the next Prime Minister. The ‘as if’ here being that May will no longer be Prime Minister.

First is the chronic instability that has taken hold of Britain’s politics, and which will be hard to suppress.

Second, the economy is heading for the rocks in a way that few have yet registered.

And third is the beginning, in just 11 days, of the most important negotiation Britain has attempted in peacetime. Brexit involves dismantling an economic and political arrangement that has been put together over half a century, linking Britain to the bloc to which it sends half its goods exports, from which come half its migrants, and which has helped to keep the peace in Europe and beyond.

Note on the first ‘crisis’ that the ‘chronic instability of British politics’ is posited as in need of ‘suppression’ this is, on its face, authoritarian. The fact is that Thatcherism and its political epigone New Labour have failed! But that kind of honesty is beyond the ken of the writers and editors of this publication.

The second ‘crisis’ is a product of the utter failure of the Neo-Liberal model as noted in my comment on the ‘first crisis’.

The third crisis is the Brexit negotiations and who will lead them. The Economist writers are in search of a Strong Man who can successfully lead Britain out of the wrong turn of The Brexit. The Economist scribes offer this:

…no politician has seriously answered the question of how the economic pain of Brexit will be shared.

The concluding paragraph of this weak, even craven editorial:

And yet it is just possible that something better may rise from the ashes. Last week we lent our backing to the Lib Dems in this election, not because we thought they would win, but because we identified a new gap in the radical centre of British politics that was being neglected. The election result suggests that voters, too, are not much convinced by the inward-looking bent of either Mrs May’s Conservatives or the hard-left factionalism of Mr Corbyn’s Labour. Our backing of the Lib Dems was a “down-payment” for the future. As the Tories ponder a new leader to replace the tragic Mrs May, that liberal future is once more in play.

What is the meaning of  ‘the radical centre of British politics’? The ‘inward-looking bent of either Mrs May’s Conservatives’? The ‘the hard-left factionalism of Mr Corbyn’s Labour.’ ? The positing of the Economist’s Our backing of the Lib Dems was a “down-payment” for the future.? Or the ludicrous claim that Mrs. May is ‘tragic’ instead of just hubristic? Call all of this the rhetorical garnish for the the protracted deathbed soliloquy of a  Thatcherism, in it various iterations.

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/video/bdc96067-b1de-45fb-ad74-adc1c7513811

There really isn’t much here except the usual chatter of myopic Pundits, Ganesh and Barber, looking at the second defeat of the Tories, in such a short period of Political Time: Cameron’s vote was on June 23, 2016!  How can the Tories be so utterly out of touch with the prevailing political mood of the electorate?  I put this in italics because this is the kind of rhetoric used by the Financial Times headline writers, and its stable of ‘Free Market’ apologists. The dissatisfaction of the disenfranchised  young voter garners a mention as the engine of Corbyn’s almost victory of the perennial back-bencher.

I received this from The New York Times this morning, a short, for want of a better term, analysis, of the British Election by David Leonhardt, Op-Ed Columnist. The title of which could very well be ‘The Revenge of The Young’. Mr. Leonhardt being a house broken  Neo-Liberal,  he uses the standard misdirection of the vengeful young, instead of the abject failure of The Free Market Mythology, to bring about the Brave New World imagined by the Trinity of Hayek/Mises/Friedman. Mr. Leonhardt and the duo of Ganesh/Barber are in agreement on the fact that the ‘young voter’ is the villain of this episode of the continuing British Political Melodrama. I quote, in part, from the New York Times e mail:

(Formatting could not be removed)

Notice too that Leonhardt recognizes only the utterly corrupt  New Democrats, led by the Clinton Coterie, as the only  potential opponent of Trump and Trumpism! Ideological myopia is a transatlantic phenomenon.

Committed Observer

In his recent essay, Mr. Ganesh avoids the obvious use of political cliches, but still manages to sound the notes of a baffled ‘Occidentalism’ that cannot come to terms with the glaring fact that America and its European Allies, and their ‘Mideast Partners’ Saudi Arabia and its camp followers, with the addition of the Apartheid State of Israel are engaged in pursuing Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’. And for there to be an end to ‘Terrorism’ a strategy predicated upon those actors ending their siege against Islam, in its various expressions. As that will never happen, Mr. Ganesh engages in this oracular malapropism:

If voters would rather not dwell on such dark realities, there is no shame in that. It is the unique burden of leadership to resist this temptation and go to the heart of the matter.

Mr. Ganesh describes, or more accurately sketches, this political nexus of the pursuers of that ‘Clash’ with a telling brevity. Except that this thread of a possible argument for ending that ‘Clash’ remain in the political territory of  lost, indeed, squandered opportunity.

In the closed world of security think-tanks, consultants and journalists, there has been a rich discussion about the government’s anti-extremism strategy since it was led by Tony Blair.

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/4b162b66-4787-11e7-8d27-59b4dd6296b8

From the headline and sub-headline of just two days ago, June 3, 2017, in The Financial Times by Paul Mason :

Corbyn has caught the mood of a UK grown tired of austerity

Britain is not a leftwing country, but voters want a story to unify around

Notice that Corbyn’s seeming surge in the polls is both a product of a change of the electorate’s ‘mood’ and about a ‘story’ : this an attempt to trivialize the fact that New Labour’s Neo-Liberalism is in a state of collapse and that the Tories are still dressed in the tattered rags of Thatcherism.  And that Corbyn is about a resurgence of Labour, that addresses the needs of an electorate, that is no longer willing to settle for warmed over nostrums/policies of Thatcherism, with an impasto of Public Relations. Blair and his allies represent a past and a political present in the grip of the Free Market Delusion, whose collapse and its emancipation from that state is dubbed Austerity, but reserved exclusively for those in 99th percentile. But note that Mrs. May is distant and austere, while Blair exuded faux bonhomie and a telegenic charm, expressed by that his reliance on that irrepressible lupine grin .

Mr. Mason’s first two paragraphs are worthy of full quotation:

Jeremy Corbyn has, in the space of six weeks, staged a spectacular polling revival. The plausible range of outcomes in next week’s general election are anything from modest Tory gains, to a hung parliament, to a minority Labour government. On the first two of those outcomes, Theresa May has failed in her own terms, and would have to resign. Even if, as seems likely, Mr Corbyn cannot win outright, he would re-enter parliament leading a massively emboldened opposition. If Labour wins a majority, Britain would become the second western democracy after Greece to reject the neoliberal model from the left.

The Corbyn fightback is the result of an astute combination: deft political economy, personal affability and the accidental intrusion of dark, global forces into what had been a pale, parochial campaign.

https://www.ft.com/content/3cc15f1e-478b-11e7-8d27-59b4dd6296b8

Political Economist and film-maker Mr. Mason then attacks the political platform of Corbyn’s Left Wing Social Democracy as answer to that ragged Thatcherism.

Segue to June 5, 2017 and Joshua Chaffin’s essay:

Headline: Jeremy Corbyn’s surge: miracle or mirage?

Sub-headline: Opinion polls tighten in UK general election race as polling day nears

Mr. Chaffin speculates that the political race is ‘tightening’ so that Mrs. May will win, given the fact that book makers are never wrong on the odds? and more reliable sources of polling data are never subject to error? With less that three days till the voting, The Financial Times now shifts into full propaganda mode. That worry of a ‘hung parliament’ is relegated to an irrelevance:

https://www.ft.com/content/39b6628c-4624-11e7-8d27-59b4dd6296b8

That is sacrificed to the more pressing imperative of a carefully modulated, even muted Anti-Corbyn hysteria.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/304cc976-47ae-11e7-8d27-59b4dd6296b8

Israel provoked the Six-Day War in 1967, and it was not fighting for survival

Political Reporter

Andy Divine serves up more Trump Hysterics, instead he should be paraded in front of the world in sack cloth and ashes, for his part in making ‘The Donald’ a part of American’s rickety political furniture. His last contribution was his mealymouthed ‘endorsement’ of the vile Mrs. Clinton, she appeared in the guise of ‘the lesser of two evils’ .

Then Mr. Divine takes a swing at the British election, its the usual New Labour chatter: the object of his contempt is Jeremy Corby who is presiding over the wake for New Labour. See this informative essay, at the Tory tabloid The Financial Times, for the data on the impending ‘hung parliament’ that gains a rhetorical nod from our expert.

https://www.ft.com/content/39b6628c-4624-11e7-8d27-59b4dd6296b8

This on Mrs. May’s strategy as answer to Mr. Corbyn:

https://www.ft.com/content/7ab1fb64-46c1-11e7-8519-9f94ee97d996

And this Financial Times wan endorsement of Mrs. May, that echos Mr. Devine’s faint praise for Hillary :

https://www.ft.com/content/67949e4a-45e2-11e7-8d27-59b4dd6296b8

And on the vexing question of the bulling of the Evergreen College students, on one of their own, raises the equally vexing question of Mr. Divine’s troubling history of his own attempts to silence his critics: his late subscription site had no comment section, his ‘Dish’ column, or better yet, a nearly autonomous opinion duchy, eventually did not have a comments section. He convinced Ms. Tina Brown, the editor of The Daily Beast, that one was not needed, or was in fact actually superfluous. Move further back in Mr. Divine’s career, and the reader encountered his rhetorical bulling of those who dared to express an opinion on 9-11, that did not echo his own, in The New York Observer. Or his shameless advocacy, in the pages of The New Republic for ‘The Bell Curve’.

Here is a link to Charles Lane’s devastating critique in New York Review of Books, commentary that challenges the sources of that ‘Conservative Sociology’:

The Tainted Sources of ‘The Bell Curve’

Or this essay by Charles P. Pierce at Esquire that comments on the Rightward drift of The New Republic under the editorship of Martin Peretz and his editor Mr. Divine:

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a31829/a-bad-week-for-the-new-republic-and-a-good-week-for-the-rest-of-us/

And this from the Southern Poverty Law Center on Charles Murray:

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/charles-murray

Mr. Divine engages , at crucial moments, in more adroit forms of bulling, and attempts to silence , shame and hold his critics up to public ridicule. And at other times he engages in lazy political hysterics, or appeals to those in editorial power, that characterizes his critics as illegitimate, if not 5th Columnists, who threaten an utterly perverted ‘Centrism’

Old Socialist

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/can-the-west-survive-trump.html#comments

This pronouncement by the editors of the august Financial Times ought to produce guffaws in the regular reader of this Tory tabloid:

The Financial Times has no fixed party allegiances. This publication stands for a liberal agenda: a small state, free trade, free markets and social justice.

The Financial Times allegiance is to Neo-Liberalism, even in its present state of mid-collapse, and the utter failure of Austerity, as the answer to the predations of Robber Capital. And the fiction that the EU Cartel is some how an answer to the Enlightenment Dream of a United Europe: A Cosmopolitan State Utopia that is instead a collection of states under a German Hegemony headed by the Merkel/Schäuble duo. As for ‘Social Justice’, what did Ebenezer Scrooge opine? Are there no Work Houses? Not quite that bad, but descriptive of ‘the climate of opinion’ on the undeserving poor! And that designation is about what is never discussed in this publication, rampant class prejudice, except the perpetual denigration for the lower orders, in all its Oakshottian contemptuous dimensions, that focuses on Corbyn and his politics from below. Call this the end of the New Labour of Tony Blair.

Not too many weeks ago this publication was pronouncing on the inevitable and ignominious defeat of the Political Nostalgic Jeremy Corby! Now, this newspaper has discovered that the Tory Triumphalism doesn’t match the polling data, meaning that Mr. Corbyn’s ‘political nostalgia’ is making dangerous inroads into a once apathetic electorate. There is an Alternative in answer to Thatcher’s shibboleth? The possibility of a ‘hung parliament’ now looms large in Tory speculation, or should it be called panic?

https://www.ft.com/content/39b6628c-4624-11e7-8d27-59b4dd6296b8

That ‘old backbencher’ seems to have a canny ability to rebuild Labour. But never fear, the headline writers at The Financial Times realize that a propaganda campaign is not just about the substance of a ‘news story’,  but about the proper rhetorical framing that the headline offers to the wiley political publicist:

Headline:Theresa May seeks to stem Corbyn surge with declaration on Brexit

Sub-headline: Prime minister puts focus back on EU divorce after opinion poll jitters

https://www.ft.com/content/7ab1fb64-46c1-11e7-8519-9f94ee97d996

Of the three ‘policy technocrats’ that Mr. Luce mentions in his essay on Zbigniew Brzezinski: Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and George Shultz, only Mr. Shultz had any real combat experience, as Mr. Scowcroft was a career military bureaucrat. Mr. Brzezinski’s hawkishness was not born of any military experience, but born out of an animus toward post-war Soviet Expansionism. Yet the Yalta agreement between Churchill, Stalin and FDR decided the matter well before the Cold War began. Here is a portion of the Wikipedia entry on  Brzezinski that is revelatory of his hawkishness:

After attending Loyola High School in Montreal,^[11] Brzezinski entered McGill University in 1945 to obtain both his Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees (received in 1949 and 1950 respectively). His Master’s thesis focused on the various nationalities within the Soviet Union.^[12] Brzezinski’s plan for pursuing further studies in the United Kingdom in preparation for a diplomatic career in Canada fell through, principally because he was ruled ineligible for a scholarship he had won that was open to British subjects. Brzezinski then attended Harvard University to work on a doctorate with Merle Fainsod, focusing on the Soviet Union and the relationship between the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin‘s state, and the actions of Joseph Stalin. He received his doctorate in 1953; the same year, he traveled to Munich and met Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, head of the Polish desk of Radio Free Europe. He later collaborated with Carl J. Friedrich to develop the concept of totalitarianism as a way to more accurately and powerfully characterize and criticize the Soviets in 1956.^[13]

As a Harvard professor, he argued against Dwight Eisenhower‘s and John Foster Dulles‘s policy of rollback, saying that antagonism would push Eastern Europe further toward the Soviets.^[14] The Polish protests followed by the Polish October and the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 lent some support to Brzezinski’s idea that the Eastern Europeans could gradually counter Soviet domination. In 1957, he visited Poland for the first time since he left as a child, and his visit reaffirmed his judgement that splits within the Eastern bloc were profound. He developed his ideas he called “peaceful engagement.”^[14] He became an American citizen in 1958.^[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski

That Brzezinski  felt the need to criticize Eisenhower and arch-reactionary, not to speak of perennial Cold Warrior, John Foster Dulles’ ‘policy rollback’ demonstrates the depth of Brzezinski’s unslakable bellicosity.

Mr. Luce then descends fully into his bailiwick of turgid New Cold War Political Melodrama:

The threats confronting today’s America require the meritocracy of intellect it nurtured in the cold war.

The question that confronts the reader is bathed in political nostalgia for a someone like the fearless, not to speak of stalwart, Brzezinski. Who will lead the ‘West’ out of the mire that is the collapse of the Post-War Settlement. And its integuments of NATO, the faltering EU and the European Central Bank as cudgel of the German Hegemon. And the rescue of the Free Market Mythology aided by the World Bank and the IMF: all of this propped up by American Political Will in the person of  President Trump. While the Russians, under Putin’s leadership, are poised on the long border with Europe to do exactly what? Again this is the stuff of the small screen of America of 1952, except that the actors in this installment are different, but the places remain the same.

A link to a Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998 interview with Brzezinski is informative of America’s support for the Mujahadeen in July of 1979 , before the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

On the question of East Timor and the part played by Brzezinski, an excerpt from the National Security Archive :

In mid-1977, Carter Administration officials, led by then National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, blocked attempts (Document 23) by a U.S. Congressman, Donald Fraser (MN) to obtain a copy of the explosive cable transcribing President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger’s December 6, 1975 meeting with Indonesian President Suharto in which Ford and Kissinger “went out of their way on the eve of the GOI move on Timor to assure Suharto of an understanding attitude by the U.S.” Twenty four years later, in December 2001, the National Security Archive published the full text of this cable.

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB174/

This last note of kowtowing to the Brzezinski Myth is about the utter lack of candor of Mr. Luce’s unstinting praise for another operative of The American National Security State, and the manufactured Pantheon of Policy Technocrats, laced with gloom.

Brzezinski’s legacy is a testament to the value of knowledge. The more you understand the world, the higher your chance of shaping it. By that measure, America is rapidly squandering its influence.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/54a7af64-4530-11e7-8d27-59b4dd6296b8

StephenKMackSD

@Quietly Waiting @StephenKMackSD

 

I had read a great many essay by Mr. Kennan in The New York Review of Books,the editors of that book review were his close political allies . And I was a subscriber/reader of that publication from 1970 to 2007. But after reading these books:

‘Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy’ by Anders Stephenson

‘The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington’ by Gregg Herken

‘Joe Alsop’s Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue’ by Edwin Yoder

‘The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms’ by Kai Bird

And a forum on the Gaddis biography of Kennan in ‘The Journal of Cold War Studies Volume 15, Number 4 , Fall of 2013’. Mr. Stephenson, generously recommended this issue to me in an email:

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/jcws/15/4

The historical insights offered by Stephenson, aided by the views offered by Mr. Herken, and the glances of Kennan offered by the other writes, and the forum writers led me to a more, how to say it? agnostic position on Kennan. Not taking away from his stand on the NATO expansion, and his opposition to the invasion and subjugation of the ‘Iraq War’ of 2003.

Best regards,

StephenKMackSD

P.S. Mea culpa! not to forget these two books by Kennan:

Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy

At a Century’s Ending: Reflections 1982–1995

When he ran to be US president in 1968, Robert Kennedy questioned whether gross national product could measure American greatness while it counted napalm, cigarette advertisements, environmental ruin, “special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them”. He sensed the loftier needs of a rich but troubled nation. Within a decade, slow growth and extreme inflation put paid to such high-mindedness and gifted the west to free-marketers until, well, now.

Mr. Ganesh should not show so readily his ignorance of American Politics, as practiced by Robert Kennedy in 1968. Poor Bobby was number three in the Kennedy household, after Joe Jr. and Jack. He was once an operative for Joe McCarthy and an legal antagonist  of the Mob, and its putative creature Jimmy Hoffa, when he was Attorney General. Jack joked that he waited till very late to announce his appointment as Attorney General, ‘its Bobby’, in a whisper out the Whitehouse door! One of the saving graces of Jack was that he had a sense of humor and a quick wit, by all accounts. Bobby  lacked those gifts!

Bobby came late to the 1968 campaign, Eugene McCarthy was the leader of the Democratic dissidents. Bobby was an ‘pragmatist’ like his older brother,  like Obama ‘he evolved politically’ in his usual one step forward three steps back, in sum Bobby was politically timid. Ganesh’s quotation is from Bobby late in the Presidential Game, as he grew into the role of the martyred  brother’s heir apparent. Aided by the Kennedy Clique and the propagandists like Sorensen, Schlesinger, and the myriad chatterers in the Press, about the legend of Camelot. Ganesh’s use of the quotation makes Bobby appear ‘Liberal’ when in fact he was a Centrist in Economic and Cold War terms. Historical carelessness puts the usually adroit Ganesh in a very bad light. But he doesn’t stop there:

A post-economic world, where voters look past the material to nobler priorities, is always in the offing. A smart politician should assume that the offing is where it will stay. The thought occurs because traces of that Kennedy-Cameron naivete — is it a trust-fund thing? — survives in Britain’s general election campaign.

Call the very notion of a ‘Kennedy-Cameron naivete’ about ‘a post economic world’ as beyond naivete, into the territory dominated by deliberate misapprehension fueled by ideology. But facing the charge of ‘a trust-fund thing’ sounding, just for a moment, like one of the dread Populists. Call it a rhetorical feint to elide from the conversation the collapse of the Free Market, a subject to be avoided at all costs in the pages of the august Financial Times.

Then the appearance of ‘Economic Imperatives’ enters from Stage Right as something that both May and Corbyn ignore. In this portion our dramaturge assign May the role of Disraeli’s One Nation Conservatism and Corbyn as Romantic Socialist, or just suffering from a case of destructive political nostalgia.

Again from Stage Right enters ‘Industrial Strategy’ as the Tory wrong answer to the looming catastrophe of Brexit: too little,too late the Ganesh verdict. There is a great deal more back and forth on the shortcomings of both Tory and Labour, until the reader reaches the last paragraph which echos the rhetoric of the dread ‘Populist Menace’ that haunts both the waking and sleeping life of all Virtuous Capitalists.

Mrs May and Mr Corbyn will deny indifference to growth and claim what they want is a fairer version of it. But the British will not happily weather a rough period on the way, especially if it is attributable to government policies. Any post-material consciousness is still confined to a sect. It is the politics of the retired asset owner and the too-rich-to-care bohemian. Everyone else — the average-earner, the welfare claimant, the millionaire investor — is hair-trigger sensitive to fluctuations in GDP and the way prices relate to wages. The poorer-but-happier thesis has it the wrong way around. If anything, public anger stems from the crash and a recovery of historic slowness — from growth that is too weak rather than a will to transcend growth altogether.

‘Any post-material consciousness is still confined to a sect.’ The ghost of the ‘Liberalism’ of Bobby Kennedy reappears as an aphoristic mist. And even the 2008 Economic Crash gets a mention, in lower case letters, to ensure its position as trivial. The reader recognizes the cast of characters except for one: ‘the too-rich-to-care bohemian’ should the reader consider it a reference to Bloomsbury Group?

Scene:

John Maynard Keynes arises at noon, his breakfast tray arrives, with the morning papers. He sips his Irish Breakfast tea and sets to work. After some diligent reading of the stocks and bond markets pages he telephones his broker. It’s now four o’clock and he rings for his butler and asks him to bring in the afternoon papers as soon as they arrive.

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/90f00e54-4449-11e7-8519-9f94ee97d996

Mr. Dickinson,

Thank you for your comment. I took my lead from Mr. Ganesh’s long and rambling essay. That is my only defense to your ‘Comments are generally more effective when they are precisely aimed.’

To so totally misread the political career of Bobby Kennedy, deliberate or feigned, as Mr. Ganesh has done, more than probably a function of his ideological position. Not to speak of his penchant to scold both May and Corbyn for their ‘deviationism’ from his political ideal: a idiosyncratic interpretation of Thatcherism in all its rampant mean-spiritedness.
Such was the power of the person and the Bobby Kennedy Myth, that in actuality, he attracted such a diverse range of voters, from across the American political spectrum, that after his murder many of his followers voted for George Wallace in that ’68 election.

Wallace’s “outsider” status was once again popular with voters, particularly in the rural South. He won 9,901,118 popular votes (out of a total of 73,199,998)—that is, 13.53% of votes cast nationally—carried five Southern states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi – won 45 electoral votes plus one vote from a faithless elector, and came fairly close to receiving enough votes to throw the election to the House of Representatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace_presidential_campaign,_1968

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

To witness a suicide bombing up close is to understand, at its etymological root, the meaning of the word “carnage.”

A bomb packed with nails, ball bearings and metal scraps — the sort that Salman Abedi detonated in Manchester on Monday night — doesn’t just kill. It shreds.

Human beings are turned, instantly, into scraps of bone, organ and flesh. The smell of explosives mingles horribly with that of charred skin, burned metal, melted plastic and enormous quantities of blood. Cafes, buses, markets and concert halls become abattoirs, public and obscene.

The bomber dies, too. The act turns the perpetrator into somebody’s martyr while denying his victims the possibility of justice. Mockery from beyond the grave thus compounds the nihilism of the act: “I got you; you can never get me.”

Thirteen years ago, on Azza Street in Jerusalem, I saw a man’s body on a blown-up bus swaying back and forth, as if reciting a final prayer. He was one of 11 victims that day, in a bombing that took place a block from where I lived. It’s a sight that’s never left me.

What Mr.  Stephen leaves out of his political testament, in the guise of an anguished  cri de cœur against the carnage of Terrorism, is the record of the Terror practiced by Zionists. Just three of the myriad examples of how Gaza was turned into Zionism’s Warsaw Ghetto on the Installment Plan:

Operation Operation Cast Lead

Operation Pillar of Defense

Operation Protective Edge

Not to forget that Mr. Stephens assumed the editorship of The Jerusalem Post, the official organ of Israeli State Propaganda at age 28, through ‘serendipity’ ! Zionism re-enacts the forms of their European Oppression, on their Semitic brother and sisters!

Karl Kraus’ Ghost