MY CHRISTMAS REVISITED

Two interesting emails from two different readers provoked by my Christmas-day postings:

"I enjoyed the account of your Christmas Day and wanted to contribute to the Scots/English debate, I am half-and-half with a with a Jewish great-grandfather. My grandparents came to London from Glasgow a hundred years ago and they were keen, lifelong Conservatives, in fact my Grandmother worked at the Party headquarters. My grandparents belonged to some society for Scots in London where my grandfather played the piano for Scottish songs and dances, there was a party at Halloween for the grandchildren and New Year's Eve was celebrated in the usual way. However, apart from my grandmother sighing over us grandchildren as "Sassenachs" because we ate our porridge with sugar and my granfather telling me about the Auld Alliance with France and pointing out the French origin of some Scots words "a silver tassie" for a silver cup for example, I don't remember any expressions of Scottish nationalism.

The bad thing about Scotland was the lack of economic opportunity and it was for work that my grandfather came to live in London.

I would say that my family felt they had certain advantages over the English because we are by nature more intelligent, more industrious and have better values! Having married a half Franch-Canadian and lived in Quebec before the "Silent Revolution"I would say my family's sense of being separate from the English was quite different from the French Canadian "distinct society" identity.

Incidentally, I often pretend to be a "kiwi" here in eastern Canada, as my "cut-glass" English accent is resented and Canadians don't have a good enough ear to hear the dufference. An actor friend tutored me in "Canadian English" but although I made some changes in my pronunciation and vocabulary I was always found out!"

The misspelling of "dufference" above will be understood by anybody who has ever heard New Zealanders speak. They are the only significant European nation to have lost a whole vowel in recent times. Regarding Scotland, readers might also find some relevance in the latest series of jokes up on Wicked Thoughts. Anyway, the second email:

"As a UK resident I found the Queen's Christmas speech quite depressing. I have never been a fan of her Xmas speeches and this was the first I had heard for several years. It sounded as though it might have been written by Cherie Blair or a BBC journalist. Bland, full of phoney re-assurance and pointless.

Of course the ethnic communities shown would seem respectable rather as red carpets are rolled out for members of the royal family. In recent elections the British National Party received up to a third of the vote in parts of the Black Country and elsewhere. Perhaps these voters see a less sanitised version of developments.

I believe most British people welcome the more cosmopolitan changes in the population in recent decades but not the mass take over of our major cities by Muslim immigrants, which seems demographically inevitable on present trends".

I can certainly understand the final point above

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ELSEWHERE

Lawrence Auster says that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim. He is wrong. One of the major religious leaders (and a former Prime Minister) of the world's largest Muslim country is actually pro-Israel. And I'll bet Lawrence does not even know whom I am talking about. That there is no such thing as a moderate ARAB Muslim I might tend to agree with, however. No doubt there are some decent Arabs but they seem to be vastly outnumbered by others whom I can only call disgusting.

There is a good article here pointing out the biased and deceptive reporting of the famous "100,000 war deaths" poll conducted in Iraq and reported in the British medical journal Lancet. Given the blatant bias in the reporting, the whole study has to be suspect.

There is an article here about the situation in the Netherlands which shows that the Dutch have finally realized that their experiment in multicultural tolerance of Muslims has failed. It will be interesting to see what their next move is. They are already getting tougher on the Muslims in small ways. One would hope that the failure of the super-tolerant Dutch will show others that not everything can be mindlessly tolerated.

An article here says that Islam now fills the role in French ghetto suburbs that Communism once did. The author sees that as a hopeful sign for the future, which it may perhaps be, but given the big role that the Communist party had in France up until recently, it is a pretty bleak comment on the present. It does confirm, however, that France has always been a revolting country.

There is an article here from an historian which argues that Bush and Blair may one day be seen as akin to Roosevelt and Churchill

The absurd George McGovern seems to have learnt nothing over the years since he was a failed Democrat Presidential candidate. He now wants America to surrender, not just withdraw from, Iraq. How deep his hatred of America must be! And he's what they call a "progressive" these days! At least the American "Progressives" of 100 years ago were patriotic. The American Left these days really is deeply decayed.

There are some interesting defences of a variety of libertarian ideas here

There is a prayer request here that many of my readers might like to heed.

Jeff Jacoby shows via historical quotes that GWB's military interventions in the Muslim world are very similar to past interventions by esteemed Democrat Presidents like JFK, Truman and FDR. The modern-day American Left has clearly lost its way. Democrats once had principles. Now they are pure psychopathic nihilists who believe only in power for themselves.

Antisemitism denied: One of my readers has sent in a fisking of a Leftist claim (by Tony Judt in The Nation) that antisemitism is not a serious problem in France. See here.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

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