The Last Ditch

Why I love Americans

I hosted a "thank you and farewell" dinner in Moscow last night for three gentlemen who were my first major clients here. They are experienced Russia hands and were reminiscing about the petty restrictions of old. 

In those days, if you couldn't produce the currency exchange receipts on exit, the customs officer would smilingly "confiscate" any unspent roubles. An American to whom this happened, on having the rules explained to him, apologised and said that of course he would not take his roubles out of the country if that was against the law. Then he took out his cigarette lighter and set fire to them. His travelling companions saw what he was doing and passed their roubles to him to be burned. Then they smilingly set off to board their plane. 

That's the spirit a Welfare State kills, and the world would be a worse place without it.

Old Tom's Destiny...

...is to be claimed by right and left. It's always idiocy, of course, to judge a historical figure's views by the standards of today. He had ideas about social security and land tax, which might not have worked out as well as his ideas about liberty, but he hated tyranny above all. Whether you are an admirer of the man from left or right, right or wrong, please enjoy the song...

Honey trap?

Beekeeper was spy for Stalin - Telegraph.

War and Peace

What I Learned From My Old Dad - Washington Rebel.

Do please click the above link to read a very touching piece about "Washington Rebel's" father's experiences on Omaha Beach, and how they affected the rest of his life.

He explained to me how do-gooders and reformers were little Stalins looking for a corpse to feed on.  He understood these things because he saw through their pretenses -- which they could not see in themselves.

They don't seem to have affected his judgement though. Do read it all, it's good stuff.

Such a rich nation

In the Labour heartlands in Manchester is "The People's' History Museum," the disingenuous trading name of the National Museum of Labour History. Liberty-minded readers need know no more than that the word "People's" here is used as in "People's Republic".

While, as a registered charity, it must purport to be politically-neutral, the most cursory examination of its website will reveal its true colours. It began as the collection of the Trade Union, Labour and Co-operative History Society and holds the archives of the Communist and Labour Parties.

Since 1990, it has been funded by Manchester's local tax payers. They deserve no better. They have proved they would vote for a bacterium if it were the Labour Party candidate. The "museum" has recently secured another £7.18 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Nothing could better support the view of those who see the National Lottery as "a tax on stupidity". How amazing that - deep in the greatest debt in history - we have money to spare for such stuff.

An employee of the "museum" wrote to me about an upcoming exhibition to be called "Carried Away", which will illustrate the "history of protest" with photographs of demonstrators being forcibly removed by the authorities:

One of the images we are including is dated 17th May 1972 and shows a protest by the Schools Action Union in London...

I am trying to trace any of the children in the photograph (or anyone that participated in the demonstration).  Your blog came up when I googled “Schools Action Union” so I was wondering if you or anyone you know was there that day.

... it’d be great if you could share any memories you have of that day with us, as it would really bring the exhibition to life if we could include first-hand accounts...

Boy, is she barking up the wrong tree. I disclosed my misguided youthful involvement in the SAU in this post, which partly explains how my journey from teenage Maoist to adult libertarian began. Somehow I doubt it is an account of Labour movement history that could ever feature in this politically-neutral "museum".

A famous trade union poster showed a mine-owning "toff" on a miner's back with some such slogan as "a miner carries enough burdens". After 63 years of Socialism in Britain, productive workers are now an exploited minority. The heavy burden they carry includes much such nonsense as this propaganda tool disguised as a "museum".

Change

Last night I was in a Shanghai club, drinking with some young friends. We were discussing how the world might change in their lifetime. I remembered having a similar conversation with my late grandfather.

His generation saw more change than any in history. He remembered seeing the first car in our home village (little did he know as I found later, that Mrs P's grandfather was its chauffeur). As he put it to me, "I grew up in a world of horses and carts and lived to see Man walk on the moon." He also saw much political change; most of it bad. He and his brothers built a business worth £1 million in the 1930s from a single steam powered "Sentinel " truck they bought with money borrowed from their father. When he was invalided out of the Army with a broken back which disabled him for life, his grateful government rewarded him by taking his business from him by force. His was the era of Socialism - a word he once had to explain to his mother who had never heard of it. Yet he also lived to see the end of that era, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. If only he had lived to see the British "intelligentsia" acknowedge the stupidity of what they did to him in 1946.

The technological advances in my life have been less radical. The personal computer has changed my life, but it hardly touches many. It's important, but if I had to choose between car and computer, it would be back to Filofax and "farewell blogging". The mobile phone is handy, but it's a mere evolution. It's Mr. Bell's original work combined with that of Marconi. I crossed the Atlantic on Concorde, but there is no passenger plane so fast now. I have basked in the presence of (but never, sadly, driven) the awesome Bugatti Veyron. It may well prove to be the high-water mark of automotive power, given the daily outpouring of crazy Gaian hostility to Mankind's greatest creation. Besides, onboard computers and better ergonomics apart, there is not really that much to distinguish my Maserati Granturismo from the 1940s original.

Few of my technological dreams, as an excited 13 year old boy hero-worshipping Neil Armstrong, have come true. I have walked the ramp Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin used to board Apollo 11. I have never been more excited than I was (pictured here) in the presence of a Saturn V rocket, the most powerful vehicle built by Man. Yet that was designed and built more than 40 years ago. For all we have done in space since, Apollo 11 might as well have been the faked stunt many moonbats now claim.We reached the moon, but we have still not reached further. Ultimately it seems that, for the politicians who control the public purse, the moon landing (despite all their contemporary claims for collateral benefits on Earth, some of which came true) really was - for them - just Cold War propaganda. How sad, especially for the heroes who risked and died for it.

Technological progress has slowed and the New Luddites of the Green movement will reverse it if they can. They are the deadly threat to human civilisation that now-laughable Socialism once was.

So the greatest changes in my lifetime have been political. As a student politician I wore a badge (among many, including my beloved "Ramon Mercader fan club" badge) which called for "Free elections in the East." It was a sort of idealistic joke, but I lived to see it happen. I am delighted to have been present for free elections in both Poland and Russia. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of "the evil empire" is the greatest historical event of my lifetime. The student politician covered in idealistic badges never hoped for it. Without superb Western leaders like Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, it would never have happened. The French and the Germans (and Gordon Brown had he been born earlier) would have been sucking up to the Kremlin gerontocracy yet.

A life with such unexpected good fortune cannot, for all its other woes, be considered a bad one. At least not on beautiful sunny Sunday in Shanghai, a city I never expected to walk freely at my leisure, still less to have young friends in to make me think about the future. I hope the changes in their lifetimes are as great on the technical side as they were for my grandfather. If they are politically as dramatic as they have been in mine, they can reasonably hope (and work) for marvellous things. My grandfather's generation defeated Nazism and (more slowly) the Soviet Union. Our generation has been less effective. Maybe we have just rested on their laurels. More probably our collective drive has been sapped by their massively (if honourably) misguided Welfare State. My young friends' (and my daughters') generation doesn't have to be limited by ours. To have great hopes, they just need to zoom out the historical lens.

"Here in this place, where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead"

I can conceive of no better way to commemorate the 65th anniversary of Operation Overlord than by listening to this moving speech by Ronald Reagan from 25 years ago. He was able to speak of the spirit of the men who took part as no modern politician can. Indeed much of what he said would stick in a modern politician's throat.

Listening to his explanations of what motivated the soldiers of all nations who fought to liberate Europe, it was hard not to worry if such motivations still exist. I doubt a better speech will be made today and I am grateful to Iain Dale for reminding us of it.

Well-deserved obscurity?

normblog: Obscure author.

This gem of a post from the British blogosphere's favourite leftist academic made me chuckle. Of course, one understands how disappointing it must be to a man whose Wikipedia entry reports that "...In a long academic career, he has contributed substantially to the analysis of the works of Karl Marx ..."

Haven't you heard of Karl Marx?

No. Should I have?

It was historically inevitable that the workers of the world would unite in throwing off the ideological chains of the man whose ideas killed them in millions and impoverished them by hundreds of millions. Who would have dared hope, however, that it would begin to happen quite so soon?

Great rows in the pub, remembered

Tom Paine- No explanation needed - inamdar's posterous.

This, courtesy of Posterous (great name!) a communal blog I have never heard of before, is a plaque on the wall of the White Hart in Lewes, Sussex. Next time you think your bar room oratory (or your pamphleteering blogging) is a waste of time, take heart. Tom's debating at the "Headstrong Club" in an obscure provincial town changed the world for the better. Though the future seems dark right now,  there is always hope if we can only stay calm enough to articulate our ideas clearly at the right time. Despite the inscription, old Tom achieved rather more with pen than sword too, which is a cheering thought when age has wearied one's sword arm.

If I seem less grumpy than usual and these thoughts unusually bright, in a spririt of full disclosure I confess it may be a question of microcosm and macrocosm. Mrs P survived a nine-hour operation yesterday and (though she has much recuperating to do) is much on form today. After so much stress, no let's be honest, fear, to see her smile and crack a joke has put me in my best mood for a while. So don't go starting any revolutions solely on the basis of my optimism, ok? Get some other opinions first.

You had to be there.

You had to be there to grasp the scale of Margaret Thatcher's revolution - Telegraph

Can that brave new dawn have really been almost thirty years ago? So much hope, followed by so much despair. Simon Heffer is a grumpy old so-and-so and annoys as often as he pleases, but today he reminds me very well of how it felt to be alive - and politically-active - in 1979. I drove old ladies to the polls and they told me that while they were going to keep voting for their local Labour councillors - because they knew them - they were going to give Mrs Thatcher a chance, because "she couldn't do worse"

This was revolutionary stuff deep in the Labour heartlands of the North. And most heartening. Yet here we are. She came, went and changed little. We are at the end of another epic Labour fail and she is an old lady unable to help this time. For which, as I blogged yesterday, she must take some of the blame. Though she was an Education Minister, she never took it seriously enough. State education followed the introduction of mass voting rights and a member of the House of Lords famously supported it with the words "We must educate our masters." Yet Margaret allowed the enemies of freedom and free enterprise to retain control of the educational establishment and to indoctrinate generation after generation with hostility to business and "bourgeois" freedoms. That is why - as Heffer grumpily complains - younger people don't know what she was all about. They see her as a demon, because that is what they were taught.