25.12

Here we are again, the unavoidable 25th! I wouldn't mind Christians celebrating the supposed birth of Christ (though if his birthday was noted at all it would have been in the Hebrew calendar), but why did they allow the festival of the mother and babe to be replaced by the festival of the red-cloaked Father, symbol of the economic power of the male? The most amazing thing is that most of the work of this festival of patriarchy is done by women; not only do they do much of the present-buying but they also have to do most of the cooking.

My mother was not an ardent feminist, but she always signed her presents 'Mother Christmas'. That was after I had discovered the awful truth; at the age of six I found my infant scrawl to Father Christmas in the bottom drawer of my parents' desk. I did not cease to cross-examine my poor mother until she had admitted that she was the bringer of presents. I felt deeply aggrieved at this deception, and my faith in my parents was badly dented.

The other thing that gave me a lifelong dislike of Father Christmas was his supposed method of entry, down the chimney. I had been told and re-told the story of the wolf and the three little pigs, in which the wolf gets into the house by the same route, and I knew there were foxes in the garden. Father X became intimately tangled in my mind with these terrible carnivores. It was one thing to hear about a wolf in a faraway country eating little pigs; it was quite another to know that our own chimney had been used by Father X, and it meant that a fox might come the same way to get me. It was only when I actually saw a fox, not much bigger than a cat, that I finally shook off this phobia. Moral: do not lie to children!

Merry Solstice

Greetings on this, the one singular day in December, the end of shortening days! Help to reclaim our good old pagan festival from the Christians who have moved it to the wrong day, who celebrate it for the wrong reason and who have sold it to commerce. Today is the day to enjoy good food that has cost no animal its life and to drink good wine without drunkenness.

When they moved the beginning of the year to midwinter, they got the wrong day. The year should really start with the solstice. That would have avoided the eight days of suspended life that now runfrom 24th December to 1st January.

And while on my annual grumble, could those who spend public money please stop pouring it into reminders of the Christian festivals? Either that or be equally lavish in marking the Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and other feast days. Weeks of Christmas, Christmas , Christmas make it hard for non-Christians to feel at home.

Collusion

My dying computer has just swallowed a whole page of blog. Very discouraging! It was to say that I'm reading a brilliant book The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion by Finkel and Leibovitz. It shows, with massive documentation, that Chamberlain was not a peace-lover hoodwinked by evil Hitler but a scheming warmonger who thought, like most of the Conservative Party, that they could use Hitler to destroy Soviet communism. Chamberlain told Hitler he could have a free hand in Eastern Europe as long as he didn't attack the West and the British Empire. It was only when Hitler made his pact with Stalin in August 1939 that Chamberlain realized he might make war on France and Britain, but even then he still hoped for an accommodation. Only the invasion of France put an end to his machinations.

Britain had already shown complete contempt for the League of Nations and all it stood for. We had allowed Mussolini to invade Ethiopia, Japan to take over Manchuria, Hitler to remilitarize the Rhineland, rebuild his armed forces and annex Austria, and we had said nothing when Germany and Italy helped Franco to overthrow the elected government of Spain. And yet here we are seventy years later showing exactly the same contempt for the United Nations and international law, conducting foreign policy as if all that matters is the protection of our misconceived interests, propping up corrupt governmments and arming crazy dictators. There can be no peace without justice, but do our governments even want peace?

Bushy Rabbit is still occupying the garage. No serious gnawing yet, but he knocked over a broomstick. He seems to have thought it was a minaret, so he takes himself for a Swiss vigilante. I hope the Swiss will now go all the way and ban the building of churches with belfreys - bell-free churches only please! No seriously, how Nazi can you get without being Nazi? Don't they remember what Hitler did to Jews?

The big joke is that people claim Muslims are against pluralism. Goodness! Don't they know that Muslims restored pluralism to the Eastern Mediterranean after the Byzantine emperors had spent three centuries trying to eliminate every religion except orthodox Christianity? It was the British who enabled most of Palestine to be turned into a state for one religion, endangering the peace of the whole region.

I've just watched a mind-numbing set of interviews with Sarah Palin fans. It seems that the best qualification for being U.S. President is that no one knows your policies, as long as they are thought to be far-right. One bloke thought that Obama's books were about Marxism-Leninism. There was a nice spelling mistake: Sarah Plain! www.dontpaniconline.com/magazine/original/sarah-palin-supporters-are-stupid

Undermined!

How shocking that Obama's administration has announced that it will not sign a treaty banning land-mines! Does he imagine that they present any military advantage that will out-weigh the negative impact on his image? And where are we on cluster bombs and biological weapons? I don't follow military diplomacy, but I don't expect any surprises there either. This is all beginning to look like Clinton mark two.

On the home front I have been invaded by a rabbit whom I can only call Bushy. As soon as he arrived in the house he set about occupying my Iraqi carpet. He never crossed the frontier on to the Algerian one though. Lucky I don't have an Afghan rug. After a fortnight's occupation he suddenly launched himself at my ankle like an exocet, teeth foremost. He did it twice just in case I didn't understand the first time. My only offence was to walk across 'his' carpet. Next morning I offered him his democratic rights and left the French windows open. After five minutes thought he chose the garden. Now he has occupied the garage. I wonder whether a rabbit can gnaw a hole in a bicycle tyre.

I would have liked to get him vaccinated, but he never gave me a chance to catch him. I reckon he needs psychoanalysis. He was probably taken away from his mother too young, and his six weeks in a pet shop must have been traumatic. I am not in favour of pet-keeping anyway, so the whole episode has reinforced my prejudice.

It was amusing to see the conservative press shedding tears because the EU has not chosen A. Blair as the President of the Council. He is apparently the man 'who could stop the traffic in Peking'. Why not Baghdad? If he stepped into a road there several cars would drive straight at him, and good riddance. But I suppose all this is useful confirmation that the said Blair is the darling of all true-blue market fundamentalists. I haven't heard recently how he is getting on in his job as adviser to J P Morgan on their Iraq investments; perhaps business is not booming quite as he had hoped - or perhaps there are too many booms!

I read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine recently. One of the most interesting chapters describes how G W Bush privatized war. The US Army has been reduced to a provider of bodies for corporations to dress, feed, transport and arm. Haliburton, ex-VP Cheney's company, has done particularly well; they receive soldiers in gigantic camps that they have built all over Iraq and Afghanistan, just like a sort of military Butlins. All these corporations make huge profits out of supplying the army with everything it needs, and of course the US taxpayer foots the bill. The nasty thing is that if so many shareholders do so well out of war, they have a strong incentive to press for more wars. Now how about bombing Iran, you guys?

Having said that I can't resist the chance to have another dig at this horrible expression 'you guys'. It seems the word 'you' is just too short, like Spanish 'vos', which can't stand on its own but has to drag 'otros' along behind. Anyway, 'guy' is masculine. You couldn't possible call Madonna a guy. In the same language she is a 'doll'. So it gives me the creeps to hear a young woman saying to a group of women 'Hey you guys'. Just when we've all learnt that a minister or a doctor is not necessarily 'he', here comes sexist language again by the back door.

Somebody has complained about me not blogging. That is the nicest thing that has happened for months, and here is the response.

There was a news item a couple of days ago that really took my breath away. Obama is planning to send thousands of civilian advisers to Afghanistan to tell the Afghans how to run their country. There was a clip of these civilians training in their flak jackets and steel helmets. They will have to go around with military escorts and Afghan translators, so you can imagine the scene: 'Howdy folks! I'm your new civilian adviser; don't take no notice of these soldiers, they're just here to keep me company. Now Ahmad, explain that in Pashtoo.'

I had a visit from an American friend today. He's been in Saudi Arabia for most of the last twenty years, so he knows what happens when well-meaning Americans tell other countries how to run their affairs. He agreed that this idea of civilian advisers is just pathetic. I suppose it all goes back to the days when self-righteous puritans crossed the Atlantic to get away from the corruption of the Old World and set up their ideal society. They seem to have succeeded in handing down the idea that America is uniquely good, 'God's Own Country'.

It would be nice if we knew how to run our own countries. I came across a blog recently, saying that Labour has ruined this country 'as they always do'. In fact the financial collapse of the past two years is the long-term result of decisions taken in 1979, when Mrs Thatcher came to power. She subscribed to the thoery that countries progress from a primitive state in which they mainly produce raw materials, through an industrial stage, to become finally a 'service economy' that earns its way in the world by supplying services such as banking and insurance. Her government set about systematically demolishing the regulations that controlled the financial sector. The City has since just grown and grown. Labour's great mistake - and it was heartily embraced by Brown - was to continue this policy to the bitter end.