Yep, in many parts of continental Europe racism and bigotry are utterly unreconstructed and every bit as shocking as you describe. They simply haven't even begun to engage with matters with which - despite all its faults and imperfections - the UK has been engaging for decades.

One of the major Slovak leaders recentyl intoned that he didn't want to see Bratislava filled with turbans - meaning Turks, harking back to the various sieges of Vienna, etc. This is a kind of garbage politics.

Craig

The link in your article links to a photo of Tony Blair! I agree it is also disgusting but I don't think he was at Berlusconi's!

I mean on this occasion!

alien.

No, that is indeed a photo of Tony Blair taken at Berlusconi's villa

The alliance between Conservatives and the extreme right-wing in Europe is worrying. Have you written to David Cameron about it?
Concerning Tony Blair - I assume his crime in your view was a 'crime against peace' in pursuing an illegal war of aggression against Iraq. But the issue of the legality of the Iraq war is a contended one, and opinions are not unanimous, as the following page from the Guardian indicates:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/mar/02/uk.internationaleducationnews

Abe Rene

Those controlling great power and wealth will always find academics and lawyers to argure that what they do is legal. I am surprised at your naivete. Of course it was an illegal war of aggression.

...and if Cameron won't listen to Hurd, Clarke and Patten - who have all lobbied him - he won't listen to me.

You really are the blog that that just keeps giving.

I saw the heading...euro porn.

I read ....and it said something about people with no clothes:

I clicked the link ( as you do ), whatever it was I was hoping to see it wasn't THAT prick.

I visited a village in central Slovakia. At the bottom of the viilage hill was an old graveyard, When I went closer, I saw that it was a Jewish graveyard. The dates on the headstones went up to 1942, none beyond. Many of the headstones had been defaced and kicked over and it was clear that this had been done in the last few years. There have been no native Jews in Slovakia since WWII because the Slovakian govt PAID the Germans to take all Slovakian Jews to concentration camps and yet there are shits in central and eastern Europe who still to this day deep inside themselves celebrate the Holocaust, and search avidly for a new Other - and I don't mean just dyed-in-the-wool neo-Nazis. They have learned nothing. Nothing.

My contention was not that the war in Iraq pursued by America and Britain was a 'good' thing. But if its illegality were obvious, judges would not imprison service personnel who refused orders to participate on the assumption that it were illegal. Therefore, it was not obvious to judges, who are experienced lawyers.

PS. If you have personal experience of the far-right groups in Eastern Europe which is better than that of the Tories you mentioned, better to make the fact and your concern known to David Cameron. Then at least you've done your bit.

Oh Craig what a sad man you are. Blair is a bigger man than you will ever be. Why do you persist with this puerile abuse?

eddie

Now I don't agree with you there. In my view Blair is a very small man indeed.

@eddie
Take your pills and go to bed you sad deluded thing

@eddie
Take your pills and go to bed you sad deluded thing

Craig

Before I clicked on your link I thought...this is going to be a picture of a rent boy...spooky or what?.

A similar piece of political criminal porn to Blair @ Berlusconis greeted me from the BBC World Service after my morning prayers. David Kilcullen, a spy who says he was studying colonialism from the writings of the master spy Lawrence of Arabia on how to infiltrate and corrupt Arab societies like Iraq, at the age of twelve!

He was speaking on The Interview and no doubt much of what he said is untrue. These guys have tried to persuade Muslims that our security services get information from observant street cleaners, Ha Ha, not bugs, cameras and satellite positioned telephone calls.

Nevertheless the photo on the BBC's website shows a relaxed, Blair-like, performer who thinks that converting Muslim patriarchal corruption into Western neo-colonial power is a job to be proud of. Nobody thought that using overwhelming, unimaginable power in illegal invasions, in order to soften up Muslim societies, followed by Lawrence like snake dealings, didn't work. Of course it works, because human beings can only stand a certain amount of torture, homelessness and overwhelming force.

But it doesn't remove Islam, it strengthens it, so it fails in its main objective. Second, this whole corrupt process destroys the respect for the West that exists in Muslim countries.
The Qur'an states that the only reason why the disbelievers are given life , is to be given rope to demonstrate just how low they can stoop. Blair and Kilcullen unashamedly glow in the triumphal victory parade of their war crimes, forgetting the Day of Judgement and forgetting the prayers which brought me to my radio at five oclock in the morning.

I'm currently studying in Italy and have a number of Italian friends. What I find staggering is just how commonplace casual racism is in this country, even among people on the Left. There's a tacit approval of really quite nasty elements, many not too far from fascism or self-identifying as such. Parties like the Alleanza Nazionale and Lega Nord are truly mainstream, and it is acceptable for intelligent people to describe themselves as fascist or confess admiration for Mussolini, as a 30-year old professional type I give English lessons to did recently.

Conversely the hard left is pretty much dead, and the centre-left ridiculously divided at a time when Berlusconi is rallying elements of the right into an unassailable coalition.

D
I think Italy alias ancient Rome is one of the nations like Iraq alias Babylon that Zionism would like to destroy while it is enjoying this temporary position of supremacy on the back of the US. Some nationalities have long memories. In Pembrokeshire St David is still virtually alive. Zion got a bit of a thrashing from these two countries in the past.

Self-destructive racism is the opposite of what I think of as the normal Italian mentality, which leads me to suspect that its culture is being actively subverted. Cmon Eddie give us good put-down, you puerile, sad, pompous, Zionist toad.

Ugh. Couldn't you just have linked to a picture of goatse or something? I was eating.

anon

I don't think Zionists are out to destroy Italy. What a pecculiar thing to allege.

Anon @12.35 am I heard the World Service interview with this Kilcullen and Lyse Doucet, a further example of the BBC's crapaganda. It was outrageous in the cold dispassionate way the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan were referred to. They are just disposables.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0036xg6Link to the interview and a photo of this execrable individual.

'David Kilcullen is an expert in counterinsurgency and has worked in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.

A former Australian army officer he joined the United States State Department in 2005 before becoming a special advisor to General David Petraeus and then Condoleeza Rice.

This week on The Interview David Kilcullen talks to Lyse Doucet about modern warfare and the need to try to understand the culture of the enemy -- to get to know the way they act and think.'

Anon, Racism has been a major problem in Italy for a very long time and Mussolini turned it into a modern pseudoscience. Much of it has to do with a sort of manufactured Roman triumphalism and also with its view of southern Italians - "terrune" - people of the dirt or else as "Africans" (the term is used in this context in a disparaging manner).

If you read the work of Primo Levi (and that of many others) you will discover that this racism, mingled with cuurents extant from the old Vatican Inquisition/ Papal-Fascist Concordat, etc., also manifested as Anti-Semitism - though of course as with most racist parties they have allied themselves in recent times expediently with Zionist racism - as did Apartheid South Africa - because they know that they have a better chance of success that way.

There's also a pernicious, Spain-like cultural anti-Muslim propaganda/ denial of common historical inheritance which dates back to the time after Sicily was ruled by Arabs.

There was the recent case of Gypsy girls - and African - drowning on a beach and people simply contiuing to sunbathe with the bodies lying there.

There are many, many anti-racists in Italy though, people who find all of the above views abhorrent.

Your analysis of covert and overt operations by esp. the USA and UK over the years is spot-on. I like your phrase about turning corrupt patriarchy into neoconia, very apt, that's exactly what's been happening over many decades. I cannot agree about Wales and Italy though in relation to 'Zion'. I think it is not constructive or accurate to attempt to relate everything to 'a Zionist plot' - I'm not saying that plots do not occur, to some extent they represent the normative maintenance of the fabric of power - but to seem to obsess centrally about Zionism detracts from your other, often very astute, arguments in relation to power and also is inaccurate. Zionism is one manifestation of colonial racism which has allied itself, unsurpringly, with the colonial powers whence it derived. But it's not the whole story. The whole story is far more complex and more profound and therefore less remediable than if Zionism were at the centre of the Gordion knot.

Craig,

You are babbling again.

The Law and Justice party was set up well after you left Poland, and you did not do a political job at the Embassy.

If as you say the Kaczynskis are so anti-semitic, how do you explain their strong personal support for the major Museum of the History of Polish Jews initiative which is heading for completion at long last?

What do you mean by saying that PiS is 'miles to the right of the BNP'? Drivel.

"I actually know these people". Really? When precisely was the last time you were in Poland and/or talked to anyone from PiS, or PO, or Polish Families, or Self-Defence?

You're right to say that there are racist instincts and tendencies out there in former communist Europe as in Western Europe. It is a long slow job weaning societies away from such things, as we have seen in this country.

One unambiguous (and NB intended) success of the Kaczynskis has been to marginalise politically the former lumpen populist parties in Poland, and so create a much more 'mainstream' political space there with fewer, bigger and more stable pro-European parties. Hence Poland's relatively strong position now - a huge gain for the EU.

If one takes politics seriously, something to be praised, not jeered at?

Charles

Well I personally don't like seeing Africans loping around any European city. Forza Berlusconi.

Are you being ironic, Mr Keep, are you quoting from Berlusconi, or are you expressing your own view? I'm sorry if I'm missing something very obvious, it's not clear from your text.

Charles

" When was the last time you were in Poland?"

Five weeks ago.

Frankly I knew you were very right wing, but a fan of the Kaczynskis? Yes, they continually make statements condemning anti-semitism. I did say that in my post. If you take that at face value you are very naive.

Did you ever visit Radio Marija?

What does it tell you about Cameron's Tories that they do not care?

They may begin to when it comes back to bite them at the next general election. Or even before then -- if we start filling the letter columns of the local papers with choice quotes from their new European allies, what might that do to the Tory candidates?

Charles Crawford
I was under the impression that in the last ten years, British society was being weaned from its natural tolerance into a state of acceptance of illegal invasions and destroying other civilisations, not the other way round.
We are trying to defend our British values against a collaboration of neo-cons from Conservative and New Labour parties who want to make the UK a totalitarian state.

Eastern European states have been brought into the Capitalist system since the early 1980s, but the model chosen for them has collapsed under the criminality of the banking system. You talk as if everything is going according to your plan, but in reality everything has fallen apart and your policies are at the root of the world's economic problems.

One of the most obvious signs of our political class' love of fascism, is the creation by old colonial methods of a brand new banana state in Iraq. Total control of any opposition and 100,000 people in US newly built jails. Oil flowing nicely and six million refugees in neighbouring countries too terrified to return.

If this is your model for European democracy, you can keep it. Thanks very much.

Craig

If you look at Zionist websites,you can see open discussion of what Israel needs to do to protect itself and its insane apartheid system from destruction.

I know that it is an extreme allegation to suggest that Israel would like to keep free society as far away from its borders as possible, especially when there has been a history in Old Testament times of problems for Israel coming from that particular direction.

With Israel we are not dealing with British commonsense, tolerance and fair play, we are dealing with the most fundamentalist, fanatical, and at present in the US, powerful -ism on earth. Unlike you my warning bells start ringing loudly when social decencies are destroyed and we start to hear about orgies in public office. The fact that Tony Blair is working for the Zionists and partying with Berlusconi has significance to me. Mr Blair is not welcome everywhere as he may yet be prosecuted for his war crimes. His indictment will come God willing from this country, not from the Hague, when this country wakes up to what he has done in this country to further the Zionist cause.

Charles Crawford
It is self evident that you are an insufferable boor but your comments on the PiS are really taking the P**S. The Kaczynskis are ultra Catholic ideologues of the Old School; homophobic and antisemitic. No-one is fooled by their pro-Jewish posturing as they try to buddy up to the US. Except you, of course: so the fact that you rose through the ranks to become HM Ambassador to Warsaw just goes to prove the Peter Principle: 'In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence'
Craig
I have been left deeply traumatised by your link to the image of the Bliar. I have spent the last two years deep-cleansing my mind of any traces of that grinning avaricious charlatan and now I shall have to start all over again. You cruel man. ;-)

Berlusconi rides high on Camorra/ N'Drangheta/ Mafia money. He is a Mafia front-man, just like Andreotti was but with less guile. Swaggering emptiness. How dare he insult Arabs and Africans? How dare he insult Obama? Berlusconi is a nothing, he is a turd with a mouth. It's all for domestic consumption, of course. He feeds his supporters shit and they eat it, gleefully, they fill up their heads with it, they become it.

And as for that terse comment made earlier today on this blog by Mister Keep, which was deliberately provocative and which does not deserve a discourse, yet which I do not think should go unchallenged, well, all one can say is that the iteration tells one everything one needs to know about people like him. Lopers, dopers, no-hopers.

Just back from the cinema. Looks like my improvisation of an election slogan for Signor Berlusconi may have benefitted from more explanation.

Oh well. Ho hum. Such is blog life.

Still - Lopers, dopers, no-hopers works just as well (with a suitable graphic).

Good point, my sincere apologies for going off the (wrong) deep end.

Suhayl

I look for poetic simplicity because the wool is often pulled over our eyes by distractions in politics. I do not know if Berlusconi is mafia, but I do know that orgies and torture are from Shaytan, or as Craig describes them, porn.

With regard to David Kilcullen, Lawrencian spy, his words in The Interview on the BBC World Service describe the horrible truth of the Iraq war. Up to 500,000 innocent men and women were imprisoned after their doors were kicked in. They were taken as innocent hostages to be bargained with by US spies in exchange for co-operation of Family leaders. This goes beyond the concept of George Bush that the enemies of the US in the war on terror lost their human rights, because these hostages were innocent civilians.

I know that some people would say that these family leaders were corrupt but what are they supposed to do, either now, or under previous regimes, when their family members male and female are being tortured in prison, other than try negotiate a flawed path out of the terrible fitna or nightmare created by US and UK overwhelming violence?

All the evidence from Iraq is that the US again and again ignited sectarian violence by false flag operations, i.e. blowing up civilians in public places to light the fire of civil war. Everybody with a grain of intelligence knew what the outcome of starting that war would be, but the British public do not know a fraction of the calculating, mercenary, chilling wickedness of the machinations of Blair and the aptly named Kilcullen.

Fortunately they have exposed themselves to the light of day by their triumphal and indeed pornographic glorification of their evil actions in Iraq, now to be repeated in Pakistan. If anyone thought that Gordon Brown was different from Blair, remember that Brown has taken exactly the same condemnatory stance towards Pakistan that Blair took towards Iraq, They went to the same school. It is Zionism. If I'm wrong, forgive me, that's how I will continue to see it until the target of these abominations is seen to be other than Islam and Muslims.

Anon,

I agree with nearly all of what you've written in the above post.

Right now, Muslim countries are potential targets because they are weak and disunited and their leaders are conflicted in their allegiances and often reliant on their colonial overlords in the West for the retention of their power. The only semi-independent states, like Iran, are attacked because they are semi-independent; independence is not permitted. Global hegemony is the goal, control of resources, one of the means. And yes, Uber-Zionists have positioned themselves in key positions within the colonial structure and have positioned Israel as an indispensible beach-head for the US/UK/ Western military-industrial machine. It is these people who were responsible for the attack in Iraq and it is they who continually clamour for an attack on Iran.

In the recent past, the Enemies were the Soviet Union and China and Islamic movements were created and supported by the West as fighting forces against communism. Now oppositional forces outside the capitalist empire have coalesced around these movements and so they are seen as the Enemy.

The USA and her allies destroyed Indo-China, large parts of Africa and Central and South America in its fight against those peoples gaining independence while communism was seen as The Enemy. Now it's Muslim lands which are being destroyed. The fact is that if the West got their fingers out of those countries and allowed them find their own way to progress, eventually they might become independent and that is what cannot be allowed, any more than it could be allowed in Nicaragua in the 1980s, Iran in the 1950s or Chile in the 1970s.

What I write below is complementary, rather than in riposte, to what you've written.

I think it is important to bear in mind that politics and history are neither simple, elegant nor poetic. Nonetheless, there's no harm applying the ocassional poetic maxim or two, such as this one - albeit out of context:

Study the river well, know its courses. But do not mistake the river for the ocean.