1. When the Left Lies, Conservatives Plead Guilty
[…]
The story began when the Guardian published a piece warning that a Tory MP, Daniel Kawczynski, was planning to attend a conference on national conservatism at which the leading speakers would include hard-right and anti-immigration figures such as the Hungarian prime minister “and a niece of Marine Le Pen”. In the Spectator Kawczysnki disputed this account and said he would go to Rome anyway. After which the story exploded with adjectives flying in all directions.
[…]
Both these cases should have taught the party not to yield to these fake scandals generated by the Left. But the Tories panicked, decided that the easiest way out of the situation—perhaps one that would protect their advantage over Labour in the anti-Semitism stakes—was to sacrifice Kawczynski to the mob, throw out a few mysteriously vague charges at unknown people abroad, and “move on”. In reality they will only be allowed to move on to the next scandal concocted by guerrilla journalists of the far Left playing to internet mobs.
As Frank Furedi of Spiked pointed out here, the Tory party’s behaviour in this case shows that it has no grasp of how to fight a culture war that the Left has no intention of abandoning. It controls all the cultural institutions, and it intends to use that power to determine what words mean, what political ideas will be allowed in public debate, and what people it is respectable to associate with. On this occasion it used its power to rule that it is not respectable to associate with distinguished conservatives in Europe and America who seek to revive opinions that all conservatives in the recent past took for granted—that patriotism is a virtue, that a nation is a moral community united by common culture and sympathy, and that it’s entitled to protect its borders, its institutions and its identity. The Tory response, notably its sacrifice of Kawczynski, showed that it doesn’t really have confidence in its own beliefs and perhaps in itself.
[…]
Those journalists who ransacked the internet to find phrases, links and extended associations between people unknown to each other that might be knitted together to imply racism, anti-Semitism and so on where none existed are, of course, the original initiating villains. But such people exist to do such things, and there is no use complaining about the weather.
[…]
It’s the Tories who deserve the most obloquy, therefore. They had a duty to examine a serious but unfounded allegation against one of their colleagues before doing anything. They should have learned that necessity both from liberal theory and from common decency, not to mention their own recent experience.
Both these cases should have taught the party not to yield to these fake scandals generated by the Left. But the Tories panicked, decided that the easiest way out of the situation—perhaps one that would protect their advantage over Labour in the anti-Semitism stakes—was to sacrifice Kawczynski to the mob, throw out a few mysteriously vague charges at unknown people abroad, and “move on”. In reality they will only be allowed to move on to the next scandal concocted by guerrilla journalists of the far Left playing to internet mobs.
As Frank Furedi of Spiked pointed out here, the Tory party’s behaviour in this case shows that it has no grasp of how to fight a culture war that the Left has no intention of abandoning. It controls all the cultural institutions, and it intends to use that power to determine what words mean, what political ideas will be allowed in public debate, and what people it is respectable to associate with. On this occasion it used its power to rule that it is not respectable to associate with distinguished conservatives in Europe and America who seek to revive opinions that all conservatives in the recent past took for granted—that patriotism is a virtue, that a nation is a moral community united by common culture and sympathy, and that it’s entitled to protect its borders, its institutions and its identity. The Tory response, notably its sacrifice of Kawczynski, showed that it doesn’t really have confidence in its own beliefs and perhaps in itself.
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/03/when-the-left-lies-conservatives-plead-guilty/
2.The Crimes of WHO’s Tedros Adhanom
WHO’s Tedros Adhanom Should be put on Trial for Crimes Against Humanity
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as well as being the first WHO director without a medical degree, also has a somewhat political background compared to his predecessors. On his online biography, the WHO lays out his qualifications as Ethiopian Minister of Health from 2002 to 2012, impressive stuff.
Aside from his medical credentials, Tedros happens to be a member of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) which is an organisation about as peaceful as its name suggests. Founded as a communist revolutionary party that came to power in 1991, it led a guerrilla campaign against the Mengistu dictatorship and formed a coalition with two other ethnic parties after his exile.
[…]The TPLF was listed as a terrorist organisation by the US government in the 1990s, and is still listed as one by the Global Terror Database because of its unfortunate habit of carrying out armed assaults in rural areas.
[…]Not content with denying aid to political dissidents, Tedros was also health minister at a time when the regime was accused of covering up epidemics. A cholera outbreak spread the region in 2007, infecting thousands in neighbouring countries. When it spread to Ethiopia, the government simply renamed the outbreak and called it Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD). International organisations were pressured not to call it Cholera (despite the UN testing the infected and finding Cholera), and were pressured by government employees not to reveal the number of infected. Another stunning victory for the health minister.
[…]In 2012 he was appointed foreign minister and there quickly followed a crackdown on journalists and government opponents in the country, and an attempt to extradite those who had fled to Yemen in exile.
[…]Tedros of course takes every chance he can to praise the good governance of China, and given the human rights record of the People’s Republic, it’s no wonder he likes them so much. From projects like media propaganda centres, mass relocations, and social credit style score cards, Ethiopia’s governance in many ways resembles a carbon copy of the Chinese authoritarian model. Complete with a one party state and focus on profit over human rights.
[…[So how did a man with a record like Tedros become director of the WHO?
It’s quite simple really, the WHO has been riddled with scandal after scandal for some time now. Facing almost no rise in budgets during the 1990s, the WHO turned towards the corporate sector for additional funding, and by 2008, corporate donations made up 80% of the organisation’s budget.
[…]The role that large drug companies played in shaping global health policy created a serious conflict of interest
[…]The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation played a large role in promoting Tedros.
[…] The director is selected by the executive board, who are in turn appointed by a rotating minority of the World Health Assembly who are made up of health ministers appointed by world governments. The WHO therefore has the same problem as many other global institutions, that its director is an appointee of an appointee of an appointee of someone who may have been elected legitimately.
https://www.roughestimate.org/roughestimate/the-crimes-of-tedros-adhanom
3. How Poles and Hungarians Turned Back the Mongol Horde and Saved Europe
Arguably the worst Mongol savagery was in 1258, when Hulagu Khan and his Ilkhanate Empire (along with allies from the Christian states of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, the Kingdom of Georgia, and the Principality of Antioch) destroyed Baghdad, thus ending the so-called “Islamic Golden Age. The Mongols raped and pillaged for days, destroyed the city’s libraries and universities, and murdered at least 3,000 of the city’s notables. The Mongol destruction of Baghdad was far worse for the Muslim world than the Crusades; Muslims flourished in the Crusader states after the fall of Jerusalem in 1099.
The Mongols did not spare Europe. The horsemen from Central Asia invaded at a time when the formerly great state of Kievan, Rus was fractured. On May 31, 1223, a Mongol army of approximately 20,000 defeated an alliance of Russian princes at the Battle of Kalka River when the principalities and duchies were already exhausted after years of civil war.