The case of the Turkish Tories (the Islamist AKP is a member of the European People’s Party, from which David Cameron has never had the slightest honest intention of withdrawing) is a useful illustration of why political parties should not be funded by the State, which must rightly reserve the right to withhold public money.
Suddenly the Turks are news across a very wide area, from the land of the Balkan Turks, through Turkey itself, via Cyprus, all the way to the land of the Chinese Turks. At least in the Balkans, in Turkey and in China, the news (if such it be) is that they favour Islam in all its militancy, and that if any opposition to this exists among them, then it is in the form of an equally militant ultranationalism. Such also underlay, and to date still underlies, Turkish separatism in Cyprus.
I cannot improve on John Laughland and Peter Hitchens where Karadzic is concerned. I can only say (as no doubt John would, too) that it gives this Catholic no pleasure to have to point out that the Croats backed the wrong side and were thus derelict in their historic duty as a people. (That said, it is not clear exactly when the Serbs went into schism from Rome: their second King, Stephen II, brother of Saint Sava himself, received in 1195 both his royal crown and the title prvovenčani, or primus coronatus, from Pope Honorius III.)
And I do have to wonder how differently people might react (not least in post-9/11 America) if someone tried to set up a Wahhabi state in Europe these days. Except, of course, that someone has recently done exactly that, with full American and British backing. Do we never learn? Or rather, why do we never learn?
Hitchens is of course quite right that the (always US-backed) EU breaks up multinational states in order to subsume their constituent parts. It did so in Yugoslavia. It did so in Czechoslovakia. It is doing so right now in Belgium. Next on its list are Spain and the United Kingdom.
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Hark at him! David Lindsay quotes approvingly from John Laughland - a columnist for the evil neo-con Brussells Journal!
ReplyDeleteNow all my political anchors have been dislodged!
And of course I'd forgotten that it's the EU that wants to break up Belgium and the Flemish nationalists are just pawns in their game.
Well I never! Paul Belien and chums are clearly all secret Europhiles. All is explained! (Why Laughland is writing for these people though I've no idea!)
I dare you to tell either John or the editors of The Brussels Journal that they are neocons!
ReplyDelete"the Croats backed the wrong side and were thus derelict in their historic duty as a people"
ReplyDeleteCould you expand on this? How could one know a people's "historic duty"? What is the relationship between an individual's duty and the duty of "the people" to whom the individual belongs?
Might be a blog post in its own right, the answer to that question.
Might indeed.
ReplyDeleteFor now, though, those who so held the line against the Turks that Pope Leo X called them "Antemurale Christianitatis", "the Ramparts of Christendom", were manifestly derelict in lining up with them both during the War and in the 1990s.