Cranks' Corner

Read Harry's Place while you can. It is in its last days, about to be finished off in the libel courts by George Galloway. Everybody knows this. If you do not know it, then you are nobody. Anyway, today it passes beyond even its own usual level of self-parody by commanding its cultists to vote Labour on the instruction of Norman Geras and Oliver Kamm. Neoconservatism is always a cult, of course. But the Kammite sect is particularly bad even by that standard. However detestable the writings of Max Shachtman, Leo Strauss or Ayn Rand may be, they are at least the works of functioning intellects.

Whereas Kamm is desperate for a Prime Minister susceptible to his influence, who must therefore be as stupid and unlettered as Tony Blair, a man who has now written one more book than he has ever read. Accordingly, Kamm graciously confers the Labour Leadership on David Miliband, a Marxist dynast, buyer of babies off the Internet, and moron. A worthy successor to Blair, who well into his Premiership did not know that they spoke Portuguese in Brazil. I don't know about you, but, with no family or other connection to Brazil, I cannot remember a time when I did not know that.

Rather than to Shachtman, Strauss or Rand, Kamm is most obviously comparable to Lyndon LaRouche, since he himself really does seem to believe the deranged things that he puts into the minds of his simple, credulous followers. Among numerous other examples, look at the nonsense that they repeat endlessly about me, a figure with whom no sane person would be obsessed, but with whom they are to the point of dementia. You will find views, held in utter sincerity, that are precisely as related to reality as are the claims of LaRouche about the Queen's drug-dealing or what have you.

But then, the same is true of belief in "al-Qaeda", or in "the global terrorist network", or in "Taliban" distinct from the Pashtun as a whole, or in any connection between Afghanistan and 9/11, or in any connection between Iraq and 9/11, or in WMDs in Iraq, or in such WMDs as a threat to America or Britain even if they had existed, or in an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, or in such a programme's threat to America or Britain even if it existed. Doolally. Stark, staring mad.

Though also venal to the most horrific extent. Remember, no one, at least in Britain, ever supported the Iraq War except to make himself a great deal richer than he already was. And no one, at least in Britain, continues to defend it, as Nick Cohen pointedly stops short of doing in his Observer column today, unless it has indeed made him a very great deal richer than he already was. Simply by doing so, such a creature declares itself.

Meanwhile, this is the latest contribution to the highly organised campaign to incite an assassination attempt against the Pope when he visits this country, by creating a mood in which at least one is bound to occur. Such are the intellectual fruits, if "intellectual" be the word, of the lunatic schism between the potentia absoluta and the potentia ordinata, of the lunatic schism between reason or experience and the revelation apprehended by faith which alone proclaims the objective reality of rational and empirical knowledge, of the lunatic schism between the Classical and Biblical traditions that are in fact integral to each other, and of the lunatic schism between art and science. Another of that lot was on Broadcasting House, eventually announcing that he would be withholding his vote. Thank goodness for that.

After the collapse of Anthropogenic Global Warming (not the same thing as climate change), which will be the next fortress to fall, the next to collapse among academic disciplines constructed to "prove" highly politicised presuppositions, so that they cannot come to any other conclusion, and no one who doubts that conclusion can ever have any part in the peer review process?

I can think of plenty: population control, the "free" market and with it almost all economics at least as taught to Sixth Formers and undergraduates or given media attention, the organisation of political science on a spectrum devised by Continental Marxists and not really applicable in practice even to their own countries, the entire sex education industry going back to Kinsey and his gang of psychopaths, embryonic stem cell "research", the historiography of science assumed by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Biblical criticism, its underlying liberal theology, and that theology's underlying concept of the rational or empirical method as somehow existing apart from Augustinian illuminism as a whole, to name but a few.

So, once all of those practitioners are out on their ears, what should we do with the vast sums of money thus saved, and why?