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Professor Bunyip
Just felt like posting this ... Neither, however, entirely explains the absence from the bloghead. The reason for that, sadly, is Spain. When news of the bombs reached these quarters, dismay at the latest Islamic horror was worsened by the sure suspicion that things were going to get worse, which the election results from Madrid have now confirmed. Depression and withdrawal were the responses, hence, with the other excuses, the lack of posts. It is folly to elect socialists anywhere and at any time, as the peace-loving voters who swung the election will no doubt discover when their economy comes down with the inevitable chills. But to do so now, to indulge stupidity and pretend that craven expedience will do just as well as courage in a moment of crisis, well, it verges on the criminally negligent -- and like most criminal acts, it will hurt the perpetrators as much as the victim, which in this case, ironically, is nothing less than democracy itself. Do the voters who swung their support behind the appeasers really believe that the bombers will now leave them alone? Do they imagine that the timely renunciation of resolve can placate an implacable foe? As sure as eggs, the Wahabi scum will be back to demand more concessions. The highest moral station to which Spain can now aspire -- and it is a miserable ambition -- will be to make Greece its model. Greece, where authorities made a point not to apprehend Palestinian terrorists, and if they did, if the offence was so egregious that there was no alternative but to slap on the cuffs, where the accused were gently treated, mildly sentenced, and then set free as quietly and quickly as possible. Now the Greeks are preparing to host the Olympics and living in dread of a terrorist assault. Fat lot of good being so pliable did them. "Usurpers in Andalucia," the correspondence will go, "to avoid our further wrath, dwell not on the cells of our agents who have made their base in your country. If you value your trains, turn a blind eye." And because the Socialist Workers Party won power on a platform of cowardice, there will be no going back, for to do so would repudiate the very source and origin of what passes for its authority. If the current suspects from the mosques are indeed the ones responsible for the train bombings, how can the incoming government reject the inevitable request that the culprits be set free? The short answer is that it wonât -- and if it does, if it tries to draws a line in the sand, it can expect more violence. Why should the Islamisists restrain themselves. In Spain they now know massacres work wonders. Many Spanish voters will no doubt now be kidding themselves that they have bought peace. They havenât, as Orwell could have told them. In "Spilling the Spanish Beans", he writes at one point of the bargains and truces of the moment that formed and shifted in the war against Franco, and which doomed that cause to defeat: peasant allied with the bourgeois in league with Stalinâs manipulators. The players have changed, obviously, but Orwellâs observation that a government built on such feckless betrayals of principle could never hope to stand, let alone triumph, remains just as true today, when Spanish voters have surrendered their first and greatest weapon against the new fascists: the will to resist them. The anti-Franco coallition, wrote Orwell, "is a combination with about as much vitality, as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity." Just such a monster is the new Spanish government -- a democratic assembly risen to office on a promise to appease those whose who hold democracy itself in contempt. Like all freakshows, there is something depressing about the spectacle. Spanish memories must be short if so many have forgotten how the nationâs last round of squalid compromises brought Franco to power, and how very long the country had to live with him as a consequence. It is a depressing thought that any nation of free people would sell its honour so cheaply. Posted by: tipper 2004-03-15 |
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