When cruel politicians ‘do God’

Beginning his working life in the aviation industry and trained by the BBC, Tony Gosling is a British land rights activist, historian & investigative radio journalist.

For Jews, Easter is a time to remember the Exodus ‘Passover’ where the blood of a lamb on the door marked out Jewish families to be saved from the Angel of Death and signaled their release from Egyptian slavery.

For Christians, the Last Supper is the Passover meal before Jesus’ final sacrifice on the cross, the lamb of God whose blood is shed for all mankind.

But there we part company with the infinite because for David Cameron Easter is but a marketing opportunity, a forlorn attempt to prop up his collapsing credibility before next year’s general election.

Collected around the Prime Minister at a Downing Street ‘Easter Reception’ last week were the nation’s most eminent church leaders. 

Speaking of a roundly discredited policy of cutting community projects and expecting the same work to be done for free by hungry and destitute people, Cameron rubbed salt in the wounds: “Jesus invented the Big Society 2,000 years ago, I just want to see more of it.”

 

A lie that would shame the devil for a Prime Minister who has presided over such a catastrophic decline not just in spending on community centers and groups but in welfare for the sick, disabled, mentally ill, unemployed and otherwise needy. 

He wants those with nothing to submit to the law of the jungle.

Could all this possibly be ‘carrying on Jesus’ work? 

Perhaps wise political leaders don't ‘do God’ because voters of all faiths judge governments not by their words but by their deeds, or fruits, and on such a basis Cameron’s canker-ridden vine produces only lies, misery and war.

Figures on destitution this week reveal that almost one million three-day food parcels were distributed by what has become Britain’s fastest growing industry - food banks. 

Up three-fold in just a year, the food bank epidemic, which has grown more than 150 percent in a year, flies in the face of Jesus’ message. In fact, the Coalition government is viciously determined to take from those with nothing to give to their millionaire friends.

In the seventh richest country in the world, one quarter of all British children have to survive from day to day, below the official poverty line. 

While the Tory media look the other way, Cameron's government is literally tearing Britain apart. 21 percent of 18-25 year olds are unemployed with three quarters of a million of them, nearly half, telling The Prince's Trust they have 'nothing to live for.'

 

Annually, 70,000 families on the bread line are ‘sanctioned,’ or forced to live on no money at all for around two months.

A homeless man sleeps on a park bench next to a bicycle with bags of his belongings in London.

Thuggish Bullingdon toffs with the cheek of the devil

The reality behind Tory establishment rule in Britain is as far from Christian as you’re likely to find. 

It has all the characteristics of a cult which despises talent in favor of personal friends and pliable puppets. 

At the heart of Tory Britain is an overgrown gang of thuggish teenage toffs, former members of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club who have been close personal friends since their school and University days. 

It was privilege rather than aptitude that turned them into politicians, hedge fund managers, feudal lords, university principles, leader writers and broadcasters.

Although most of the club photographs and membership rolls are secret, we know Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor George Osborne, Tory mayor of London Boris Johnson, heir to the Rothschild dynasty’s banking fortune Nathaniel Rothschild and Financial Times leader writer, Jonathan Ford, were all Bullingdon boys.

Historical giants too such as ‘pioneer’ of the British Empire in Africa, Cecil Rhodes were also ‘in the club. 

'Few understand Rhodes’ seminal role in building modern international tensions as the 1909 founder of the Round Table groups. 

These spawned the New York based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and London’s Chatham House, which remain to this day the West’s richest, most dangerous, and influential defense industry foreign policy lobbying groups.

Oxford's Bullingdon club is known for its excessive drinking, drug taking, blood-letting and generally smashing up not just the crockery but venues where they assemble. 

In his day, Osborne would return to the venue a few days after one of their drinking parties, Bullingdon checkbook in hand, to pay for the damage. 

Back in the day George Osborne was known as ‘The Oik’ and was badly bullied. 

Now, the City of London private bankers just carry on with the thuggery, knowing the boy at the Treasury will be easy to push around.

The BBC’s weekly flagship discussion ‘Question Time’ rarely broaches the issue of Britain’s elite institutions being run by a wealthy privileged club, possibly because the programme’s long-time anchorman, David Dimbleby, is also a former Bullingdon Club member. London’s Tory mayor outed him in a March 2010 edition of the show. 

Boris Johnson points straight at the programme’s chairman shouting “Dimbleby, he’s a Bullingdon man,” to which an uncharacteristically sheepish Dimbleby replies “But I’m not running for office,” as if that lets him off the hook.

The best man at Osborne's wedding, Peter Davies, is on the management committee of investment brokers, Lansdowne Partners, who made £100 million from the 2008 crash. 

Davies’ firm was given privileged terms to buy vast quantities of shares in October 2013 on the privatization of Britain’s Royal Mail postal service. 

He cheated on what had been a 'gentleman's agreement' and his fund walked away with £36 million profit that day.

Far from being followers of Christ, the Bullingdon Club set are oddly reminiscent of Britain’s notorious eighteenth century ‘Hell Fire Club’. 

Here prostitutes were smuggled in to ‘service’ members of the aristocracy and government at the club’s secret cave complex under the parish church in Medmenham in Buckinghamshire.

 

Like George Osborne, the Hell Fire Club’s leader, Sir Francis Dashwood, was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1762-3 but in less than a year he had made such a mess of the British economy he was ushered out of the job. 

Dashwood was moved to a surveillance job, as chief opener of the nation’s mail or ‘Postmaster General’, an office he took to and successfully held for over a decade from 1770-81.

These cult-like methods for selection of future leaders was lampooned brilliantly in the 1960s ITV spy series ‘The Avengers’, which in two 1966 episodes ‘A Sense of History’ and ‘A Touch Of Brimstone’ dug deep into the hidden world of the supposed ‘great and good’. 

This popular drama spearheaded the early days of commercial television and portrayed in eye-popping detail how a tiny debauched elite could hold the real power in the land from positions of invulnerability behind the scenes.

Britain’s pioneering 1960s writers pointed out, in a way that journalism and documentaries could never do, that many of the nations’ royalty, political and military leaders get a thrill from getting up to no good behind the public’s back. 

Those indiscretions act too as a leash that can be pulled tight if they step out of line in their public duties.

Without mentioning the schools by name ‘A Sense of History’ hints too at the narrowness of elite schooling through just three educational establishments: Gordonstoun, Eton and Harrow, all of which value fierce competitiveness and instill in impressionable young heads the unshakable conviction that they are born to rule.

'By their fruits shall you know them’

So as David Cameron shamelessly takes the Lord's name in vain this Easter, any Christian leader with backbone should be weighing into the government as Jesus did to the teachers, lawmakers and priests of his day as ‘liars and hypocrites.’ 

But the present head of the Church of England, former oil executive Archbishop Justin Welby, is the perfect establishment choice as he is hardly likely to tear into his ex-colleagues in an energy industry that has governments hooked, took the lead in smashing workers’ rights in the Western world and is devastating the planet to boot.

While the homeless are sleeping on the pews, Giles Fraser, the St Paul’s cathedral canon, a priest of the Church of England and a journalist, so supportive of the Occupy London camp on the cathedral steps in October 2011, even stooped to the headline, ‘Bless you Dave for doing God’ this week. 

He mentions nothing of the gratuitous poor-bashing havoc his government is wreaking across the land.

 

The church's failure to weigh into Cameron is a double blow to its integrity. 

Not only does Cameron thieve Christ's good name to add to his party coffers, but his glorification of greed and shameless denial of the facts of poverty contaminates the church.

Fascists who use Christianity as a cover for their crimes

History is littered with examples of old-fashioned tyrants and more modern fascists who trumpeted a supposed Christian faith by ‘doing God’ in the run-up to a civil war or other bloody power struggle. 

The whites, or Falange nationalists, in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War for example, professed the Catholic faith but were fighting to maintain strict class divisions. 

These fascists wanted to maintain a system of cheap labor which had been depriving ordinary people of a decent life, forcing them into the dark satanic mills, the factories of the property-owning moneyed class.

Bob Dylan said, "Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace." 

Never mind his war on the destitute at home, Cameron’s greatest crime of hypocrisy in professing ‘Christian faith’ is his material & intelligence support for the very armed Islamists in Libya and Syria he is supposed to be jailing at home as terrorists. 

More recently too he has backed neo-Nazi and openly Nazi factions in Ukraine that took over the Kiev parliament at the point of a gun.

I wonder if the Prime Minister can remember the Messiah's rebuke when Peter drew his sword to defend his master against arrest? 

No, Mr. Cameron. He didn't say 'Who dares wins'. Jesus said, “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword.” 

So come on Dave, which side are you really on?

 

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this website.

Nuclear-scale asteroid blasts in atmosphere '10 times more common' than thought

There have been 26 nuclear-scale asteroid explosions in the Earth’s atmosphere, according to a new report. 

The most powerful of the impacts was dozens of times the magnitude of the atom bomb that devastated Hiroshima, Japan in 1945.

Most of the asteroid explosions occurred much too high in the atmosphere to do any damage on the ground, according to findings by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization. 

The group operates “a network of sensors that monitors Earth around the clock listening for the infrasound signature of nuclear detonations.”

 

The 26 incidents measured by the organization ranged from 1 to 600 kilotons of energy. 

The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the United States, for example, contained 15 kilotons of energy, according to the B612 Foundation, which presented visualization of the findings at a press conference in Seattle on Tuesday.

The data show “that asteroid impacts are not rare — but actually 3-10 times more common than we previously thought,” said Ed Lu, co-founder and chief executive of the B612 Foundation.

None of these 26 potentially-catastrophic asteroids were picked up or noticed in advance by any space- or Earth-based observatory, the Guardian reported.

Experts attending Tuesday’s event pointed out how random perilous asteroids can be and what kind of threat they are to Earth.

 

“While most large asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire country or continent have been detected, less than 10,000 of the more than a million dangerous asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire major metropolitan area have been found by all existing space or terrestrially-operated observatories,” said Lu, who is also a former astronaut.

 

“Because we don’t know where or when the next major impact will occur, the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a ‘city-killer’ sized asteroid has been blind luck.”

 

The most damaging asteroid to explode over Earth in recent times occurred in 1908 above Tunguska, Siberia. 

The energy yield of that detonation fell between the equivalent of 5,000 and 15,000 tons of TNT. 

About 770 square miles (1,239 sq km) of remote forest area was razed by the eruption.

Asteroid impacts with more than 20 kilotons hit South Sulawesi, Indonesia in 2009, the Southern Ocean in 2004, and the Mediterranean Sea in 2002.

 

More recently, an astral body exploded in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia with the strength of 40 Hiroshima bombs, temporarily blinding and deafening hundreds of people below and causing extensive property damage.

The B612 Foundation plans to launch by 2018 the world’s first privately-funded deep space operation, the Sentinel Space Telescope Mission. 

The project aims create an extensive map of the solar system and to identify potentially threatening objects hurtling toward Earth yet still millions of miles away.

 

“Sentinel will detect and track more than 200,000 asteroids in just the first year of operation,” the B612 Foundation said in a statement.

Good vs Evil: The false god guiding Western foreign policy

By Claudio Gallo is a journalist, currently working as a Culture editor at La Stampa, where he also was foreign desk editor and London correspondent. His main interest is Middle East politics.

Hillary Clinton (Reuters / Gaston De Cardenas)

                                          

The trip is from Crimea to Crimea, the name of the game is Propaganda. Ironically indeed, a war in Crimea in the mid-19th century (with the following Boer War) was the modern starting point of Western propaganda.

Now, with the current Crimean crisis, the circle is dialectically closing with a return to the same that is also very different. The difference is that today the deeply ideological scheme mainly used in the western media to explain not only Crimea, but the most dramatic crisis in the world, is Good vs Evil: the West is right because it represents the Light, the others are wrong because they are the Darkness. It is a moral dualistic scheme before being a political one.

To William H. Russell, the father of all war correspondents, the man who, writing from Crimea, invented the expression “Thin Red Line” and described the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade in Balaclava, dividing the world into Good and Evil had no sense. The old wars between empires were fought by ever-changing coalitions: today’s enemy might be tomorrow’s friend.

 

Unfortunately, Russell’s candid belief that “no power on Earth can now establish a censorship in England, or suppress or pervert the truth. Publicity must be accepted by our captains, generals, and men-at-arms, as the necessary condition of any grand operation of war” was completely overturned by the governments that, from then on, wanted forever to be sure to decide how to tell the story. The technology of the media went to their rescue with the invention of cinema and then of television.

 

Now they are telling us the story that propaganda was invented and was functional to the totalitarian states of the 20th century. The young Mussolini loved Gustave Le Bon’s “The Crowd,” one of the first books on crowd psychology, and Hitler gave a free hand to Goebbels, true. But as Noam Chomsky has demonstrated many times, propaganda was the very creation of democracies. In our Internet times we can observe this truth in front of us, so clearly that many are not able to see it.

The currently widespread scheme of Good vs Evil has come mainly from the Unites States after the last world war. The WWII was sometimes experienced in Europe in the spirit of a civil war, the bloodiest case of human fighting: Nazis vs Communists was its most ferocious variation. All is viewed within the famous Carl Schmitt’s polarity: friend or foe.

 

Let’s push the fast forward: now we are in 1983. The US President Ronald Reagan, addressing the National Association of Evangelicals in Florida, defined the USSR as “The Empire of Evil.” The president-actor simply highlights what Hollywood has been silently suggesting for a long time with its movies. Go on.

 

George H. Bush presents the first Gulf War (OK, the first was really Iraq-Iran...) in 1990 like a battle between Good and Evil. In 2003, his son George W. went beyond that and said to the stunned Palestinian leaders, in their first meeting, that he was told by god to invade Iraq and attack Osama bin Laden's HQ in Afghanistan as part of a divine mission to bring peace to the Middle East.

 

Talking about Palestine, the US president was reported to have said: "I feel god's words coming to me: 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.’”

George W. Bush (AFP Photo / Brendan Smialowski)

Mission Unaccomplished, as we can sadly see now. George W. Bush was the one who employed the scheme with more creativity: he also compared the ideology of Islamic terrorists to Communism. (To create more confusion his neocon “maître à pensers” coined the term “Islamo-Fascism”).

 

Good vs Evil was the hidden leitmotif of Western military intervention in Libya, in 2011. Gaddafi, who with hard work and a lot of money had just reached the honorary Western status of “our bastard,” had to sink again in the realm of Evil. Unfortunately, the just liberated New Libya remained good for just a short time, pushing the usual realists of the day after to regret the devilish Colonel.

Good vs Evil apparently remains the background of the relationship between the White House and Iran, especially in the nuclear dialogue: nothing of what Tehran says is taken on face value, but is deconstructed in its supposedly hidden evil intentions. With different religious references (but always under the hat of monotheism) Iran has being doing the same from 1979.

The roots of this western attitude are mainly in the dominant American culture, deeply permeated with Biblical values. In a survey made by American Barometer in 2008, the 62.4 percent of American people thought that the world is a battle between Good and Evil.

 

The God of the Bible is, in many aspects, a tribal divinity, as the general Namaan, healed from leprosy by the prophet Elisha, recognizes in 2 Kings 20: “There is no God but the God of Israel.” Christianity’s attempts to universalize the Biblical God resulted in the expansion of the borders of the tribe. In the Western imperialist expansion of 19th century, Namaan should have said: “There is no God but the God of Westerners.”

 

Like any ideology, you cannot find it overtly on the surface of the speeches, which are occupied mainly by technicality as who has already won this never done war, how many Ukrainians want to join Europe, how much the Russian gas is important for Europe, how many dollars is Obama sending to rebels. The scheme is usually hidden in the discourse except that sometimes it bursts out in a very emotional way.

One of the most topical ways in which the scheme strikes our addicted imagination is the Reductio ad Hitlerum as Leo Strauss (one of the neocons’ philosophers of reference) puts it first as a kind of fallacious rhetoric: the comparison with Hitler, practically the absolute Evil, a way to disqualify forever your opponent without discussion.

 

Good examples are not lacking. In 2002, one year before to reveal to be “on a mission from  god,” like John Belushi, George W. Bush, during a NATO summit in Prague, compared the challenge of Saddam Hussein to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, which led to World War II. More recently, on September 2013, the US secretary of State John Kerry said: “Assad has now joined Hitler and Hussein,” putting the Syrian President down to Hell.

Finally, not many days ago, Hillary Clinton compared Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine to Adolf Hitler’s. “It’s what Hitler did back in the 30s,” she said. “All the Germans that were ... the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right.”

 

This is obviously not to suggest surreptitiously that the current ideological scheme should simply be reversed, that what is now the Evil should be seen as the Good. To try to cope with the reality from a more human point of view, probably, the best solution is to think that everyone should be considered evil, our friends not less than the others.

 

If Clint Eastwood invaded the Caribbean island of Granada in 1993 to fight a revolutionary junta in the American courtyard, why Russia doesn’t have to protect Russians in Crimea and save its only access to the Mediterranean? Let’s come down to the Earth, where everyone follows one’s material interest and cultural obsessions: Ukrainians, Russians, Europeans and Americans. And, please, don’t wear the mask of God to talk of human matters.

 

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of  this website.