Murray In The Middle

The preposterous Douglas Murray is crowing about some attack on Alan Duncan which he has had published in some Murdoch rag in New York. Where no one has ever heard of Alan Duncan. Says it all, really.

Specifically, published in the Murdoch rag in New York that said that Scooter Libby was innocent, which compared any study of the influence of Leo Strauss to the theories of Lyndon LaRouche (while Murray's own book on neoconservatism does not mention Max Shactman or Trotskyism at all, it really is that bad), and which wants an open borders amendment to the US Constitution in the service of big business. Do we get a family of Palestinian, Iraqi or (soon enough) Syrian Christians for every one of these people whom we deport to the holiday camp that you keep telling us that the Gaza Strip is? We could easily settle, so to speak, for that.

Speaking of LaRouche, if you believe 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 the events of 11^th September 2001, or in any connection between Iraq and those events, or in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or in such weapons 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, then you are exactly as sane as if you were a birther, or an 11^th September 2001 truther, or a LaRouche supporter, or someone waving an Obama-Hitler placard at a Tea Party. Except that none of those people has ever caused a war. Likewise, if you were or are any sort of supporter of Newt Gingrich, whose schemes to colonise the Moon and Mars make him the Republican LaRouche, who as President would have started an awful lot of wars.

Doubtless, Murray vigorously supports the merger between Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu on the basis of the latter's commitment to the denaturalisation of the only two growing sections of the Israeli population, the Arabs and the "ultra-Orthodox" Jews. Of course, merely taking away the citizenship of ancient indigenous Christians is very small beer by neocon standards. Look what Murray's filthy kind has done to them in Iraq and is planning to do to them in Syria. All the while cheering on the replacement of the present Lebanese coalition of Christians and Muslims under a Sunni Prime Minister who is the Arab world's leading centrist politician, with a ghastly Salfi-dominated alternative encompassing Phalangists and irredentist Lebanese Forces fighters (a kind of real IRA), with Armenian Stalinists and others making up the numbers. All of which rather calls to mind the lists of signatories to the Euston Manifesto and to the Henry Jackson Society, especially when they are set alongside each other. Molotov-Ribbentrop all round.

There are regular elections to the Palestinian Authority. There are in Lebanon, so long as Murray and his mates don't get their way. There are in Iran, likewise. There are in Egypt and Tunisia now, but I cannot imagine that you like the results too much any more than I do in, especially in the Tunisian case. If there aren't free elections in Iraq, then what was it all for? None of those places has two governing parties both of which are funded entirely from abroad, mostly from the United States, where the reverse would rightly be illegal.

None of those places has two governing parties at least one of which wants to revoke the citizenship of two large and growing sections of the population, within one of which sections are the original inhabitants who became Christian when the Roman Empire did and who then became Arabic-speaking, not much of a jump of what they spoke already, at the time of the Muslim Conquest. And none of those places has two governing parties both of which nevertheless sit in coalition with a party from the other of those groups, a party which holds that Gentiles were created as beasts of burden and that the concept of human rights is a Christian invention (which it is) whereas the Biblical Hebrew word for a human being can only refer to a Jew (which is rubbish, but that is what people now governing Israel really do believe and teach). Arguably, Israel was a kind of liberal beacon a long time ago. She is sure as hell no such thing now. Lebanon, in particular, is now better.

At least unless Murray and his motley crew get their way. Then they will turn Lebanon into into yet another example of  "the centre ground"? Who has staked out that ground, who has built on it, and who now occupies it? The 1970s campus-based sectarian Left, variously Stalinist, Maoist and Trotskyist. Though with chemical and sexual habits that would not exactly have been tolerated in the USSR or, at least officially, in the PRC. And the 1980s campus-based sectarian Right, devoted to apartheid South Africa, with its official monument to Hitler, and to the Far Right, often Nazi-harbouring pioneers of monetarism in Latin America and elsewhere.

Though with chemical and sexual habits that would not exactly have been tolerated by P W Botha or by General Pinochet. Those were the same chemical and sexual habits in both cases, and the two supposedly warring sides indulged in them together. Since they both came to unchallenged power, those habits have become legal for all practical purposes, and fall increasingly within the realm of enforced social respectability. Everything from cannabis and cocaine use, to sex between men and teenage boys. To be spread throughout the world. By armed force if necessary. That, apparently, is "the centre ground".

The archetype of this supposedly mainstream, moderate, sensible polity is the carve-up of Northern Ireland between a fully armed Marxist terrorist organisation, and a bizarre fundamentalist sect with little or no connection to the norm within Ulster Protestantism. The former could not have been more closely linked to the New Left. The latter could not have been more closely linked to the New Right, although it probably just wasn't told about the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Both are now permanently in government in what remains nominally a part of the United Kingdom. That, apparently, is "the centre ground".

And the good old cause of these soi disant centrists is European federalism; see, for example, the Statement of Principles of the Henry Jackson Society. That has always been opposed by the completely ignored figures of pro-Commonwealth Keynesians in both main parties. And it subjects us to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura, neoconservatives such as now run Germany and at least until recently ran France, people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, Dutch ultra-Calvinists who will not have women candidates, and a French Green who is unrepentant about his active and proselytising sexual abuse of very young children when he was a leader of 1968 student movement, the genesis and Genesis of neoconservatism, which seeks to bomb the world into conformity with John Lennon's Imagine.

That, apparently, is "the centre ground".