A Place to Stand

This was sent to the Herald & the Daily Record & published by the Record on Wednesday

The Chinese recently surfaced an undetected submarine in the middle of a US carrier group thereby "accidentally" proving that carriers can be sunk almost at will. There are other weapons systems that make carriers obsolete. If the real purpose of spending £5 billion on them is to save 4,000 jobs, as the statements of Scottish politicians would indicate, we could save far more, across all of Scotland, by accepting the cancellation & seeking a few hundred million extra regional aid as compensation.

Spiked does a lot of interesting articles. They, in a previous incarnation did the article revealing that IRN had faked, allegedly accidentally, their Bosnian "Concentration Camp" Video which ITN successfully sued them for - the court finding that what they had said was "essentially true" & thus found against them. They did not appeal but were not bankrupted & the assumption must be that an agreement was readied whereby they would not have to pay but would agree to steer clear of the subject in future.

There was a recent article, by a Swede, on objections to a "right winger" getting a Nobel for Literature & pointing out a number of artists who have supported dubious left wingers. Among them was the mention of Harold Pinter supporting Milosevic. So i sent in this - it is a bit ranty & unpolished because I, considering what I have just said, I didn't expect to see it published & was agreeably surprised when it was.

Norberg writes that Harold Pinter supported Slobodan Milošević. This is a curious one seeing as the allegation in Norberg’s article is that Vargas Llosa’s leftie critics have not objected to extreme left wingers winning the Nobel Prize. But unless the entire British media are wholly and completely corrupt, Milošević was so extremely right wing that he was described by the press as ‘another Hitler’.

Of course there is no actual evidence of that, nor of Milošević being an extreme leftist – perhaps he was simply a national leader from a socialist party with such a liberal nature that he went to great lengths to placate terrorist organisations openly committed to genocide (the KLA, Croatian ex-Nazis, Bosnian Muslim ex-Nazis, NATO, Germany, the Vatican the US and UK governments etc).

Is it contended here that Pinter is open to criticism because he supported a left winger or because he supported a right winger? If so, why not include the entire run of media celebrities who went round to Downing Street for drinks whenever Tony Blair, a man who is by the standards used at Nuremberg a war criminal and practitioner of racial genocide, called. By any objective standards they supported someone far worse than Milošević.

That I both support our own country having a credible defence & oppose using it to commit war crimes may make it difficult to pigeonhole me in the current political system. That is because i am a traditional liberal - a theory so successful that most parties want to claim the title despite the fact that none of them are entitled to it.

Labels: British politics, letters, Yugoslavia