Wednesday 4 February 2009

Democratic Awakening, Indeed

Straight in to see Hillary Clinton after she had patted David Miliband on the head and sent him away was his German opposite number, a more serious person simply by virtue of being a different person. And of much more interest and importance to Clinton.

Bill Clinton, the Real Secretary of State, always preferred Germany to Britain. And why not, if he felt that that was where America’s interest then lay? Germany’s ostensibly unilateral recognition of Croatian and Slovenian independence was the catalyst for Clinton’s bloody dismemberment of Yugoslavia.

But Angela Merkel is – like Sarkozy, Berlusconi or Barroso – a more than faintly comical Bush Era throwback, much as if Tony Blair or John Howard were still in office.

And her remarks about the readmission of Richard Williamson to Catholic Communion (and one notes with dismay today the Holy See’s capitulation to those who wish to treat the holding, not of any erroneous historical opinion at all, but of one which is particularly contrary to their own political agenda, as if it were a heretical proposition or a schismatic act) have been utterly outrageous. Not least, she failed to mention that the large German District of the Society of Saint Pius X had disinvited him to perform its Diaconal Ordinations this year.

Like Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Barroso, Aznar and others, Merkel is a classic example of neoconservatism’s hijacking of historically Catholic political movements in order to transform them utterly into vehicles for its own explicitly anti-worker and pro-war, and at least implicitly anti-life and anti-family, ideology. How much longer can the CDU retain its name? How much longer can the CSU retain any connection with it? And how much longer can the CDU, or the CSU if that alliance remains in place, expect or receive Catholic votes?

Catholics in Austria are already looking for an alternative to the ÖVP after it condemned the Pope for having the temerity to appoint an orthodox Catholic as a bishop. Now Germany, too, stands in manifest need of a new formation to give the voters a pro-life, pro-family, pro-worker and anti-war option at the ballot box. Where is it? And where will be next?

4 comments:

  1. Where will be next? North West Durham. Go for it.

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  2. You acn't be on an AWS unless you have got yourself onto my list. And you can't get onto that unless you are totally pro-abortion. So there. Yes David, if she is on an AWS, then se must be totally pro-abortion "up to and including partial birth." Or she would not be there. I won't let her. I'm in charge.

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  3. Do you think if the order had been the other way round, you’d have written something like the following:

    “Poor old Milly. Not only was he patted on the head by Hillary Clinton, but he had to suffer the humiliation of not seeing her first, but after the Germans - someone of much more interest and importance to Clinton. What special relationship? Well what indeed?”

    In other words – you take whatever the situation is, and twist it to fit your views of the world, rather than reacting to what is actually happening…

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  4. It wouldn't really have mattered in which order she had seen them, although I do think it quite telling that Milly had to be got out of the building first.

    Germany has always mattered more than Britain to the Clintons.

    And anyone at all by definition matters more than Milly, whether to the Clintons or to anybody else. Even I can't fault them on that one.

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