Greece and Apocalypse Now

Greece joined the Euro when it became a local currency in 2001. The immediate impact on the Greek economy according to ‘Stratfor’ (see http://www.stratfor.com/) was that the differential cost of borrowing between Germany and Greece fell by 18%, achieving parity on borrowing, between the two nations.

All nations are thankfully, not alike. It is the national character that defines a nation’s uniqueness; that enables us to celebrate diversity.

Many years ago, in response to the perception that heavy alcohol consumption was viewed as positive the Australian Government ran a nationwide advertising campaign whose intent it was to demonstrate the Neanderthal behaviour of those who drank to excess and thus, to discourage this worrying attitude. The campaign backfired. Australians are a relaxed lot, they like their leisure activities. Sans alcoholic overindulgence, it is not a fault but an enviable part of the Australian character.

To complete this comparison, America and Germany are nations for which making money is embraced with enthusiasm. At least in theory, everyone choosing to thrive has the opportunity to do so.  Their societies are driven by a work ethic that is different to that of Australia, or Greece.

The EC was created because the Americans were looking for a way to stop the European propensity for slaughtering one another and the negative impact this militant imperial provincialism had on the rest of humanity.

Greece, even with its 18% reduction in cost of borrowing can not, at this time in its history, compete with Germany. Although it has been a member of the European Community since 1981 perhaps it never will be as competitive as Germany is. Nor should it have to be. But any economic system that is not based on the ability of the participants to repay their loans within mutually acceptable periods of time is based on charity.

Charities grow for three reasons. The first is self-identification, the second legitimately occurs because of need.  Its end goal must be self-extinction or it becomes a self-perpetuating parasite, living off the living flesh of its victims.  To those people who will be offended by this analogy, some parasites exist within a symbiotic relationship with their host. Most do not.

No nation should be a charity case and those that are, are defined by their corruption, their greed and the excessive degree to which they victimise their own people.

Prime Minister George Papandreou has two choices.  He can lead Greece into default, in which case all its outstanding international loans become worthless to its owners; or it will have no choice other than acquiescence to decades of recovery.

Both Germany and France, as its two main creditors profited from their relationship with Greece. It is not the Global banking system that failed us all, this time.  If Greece does default the repercussions for Global growth will be significant.  For far too long the relentless drive to increased profitability has been achieved at the expense of society and its unrealisable expectations for unlimited Consumerism.

We may be entering a period of sustained economic stagnation.  Perhaps the volatility of markets with its cyclical boom and bust will finally be brought under unintentional control.

The greatest threat to Global stability is uncertainty. It leads to fear. Bad governments create crises to deflect criticism from them-selves. Military insecurity increases the possibility for war. Migration collapses and population transfers cease to occur except by ethnic cleansing and expulsion.  This in its turn accelerates the destabilisation of nations.  Societies are forced to cope with the finite resources at their immediate national disposal.

The clash of civilisations may be realised as isolationism, fear and extremism catapults the fundamentalists everywhere into positions that protect their own communities.

If the party is over, it is possible for a more equitable society to emerge from the debris. If nations can develop humility as a counterweight to ambition and greed it may be worth the hangover.

Musings on Peace, Israel & The Arab Spring

President Anwar Sadat told his Foreign Minister just prior to being the first Arab leader to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state that “we are dealing with the lowest and meanest of enemies. The Jews even tormented their prophet Moses and exasperated their God.” (The Camp David Accords, a testimony. P321 Muhammad Ibrahim Kamel 1986 Quoted from “Palestine Betrayed,” Ephraim Karsh).  Whether Sadat’s assent to Jerusalem and subsequent Peace Treaty with Israel would have ultimately lead to an entirely new paradigm for Jewish-Muslim and Arab-Israeli relationships we will never know.  Because war is more than just an absence of conflict, it is a state of mind.

And it is a state of mind that Sadats’ successor, Hosni Mubarak, never intended to encourage.   When Sadat started down the road to recognition and limited reconciliation with Israel, Vice President Hosni Mubarak was against it and he never changed his mind, or his conduct.  His contemptuous behaviour provided Egyptians with a role model whose negative attributes towards Israelis as Jews would be emulated throughout Egyptian and other Muslim societies from the moment that Mubarak became Egypt’s dictator.  To believe that the Arab Spring might provide hope for a better relationship with the Arab / Islamic world is at best naive and at worse, dangerously underestimating an implacable enemy whose historic baggage of ethnic conflict and theological hate can perhaps, never be sated.

Mubarak was vice-president of Egypt when Anwar Sadat responded to Menachem Begin’s invitation to speak at the Knesset thus precipitating the peace process that culminated in Egypt regaining everything it had lost in War, through Peace. And while, since the signing of that treaty in 1979 Israel has had 32 years of ‘peace’ it has been a peace of undiminished diplomatic confrontation and hate-drenched antisemitic propaganda. Mubarak the General was the implacable enemy of Jews as religious entity and Israeli's as national polity; he opposed Sadat but accepted the peace reluctantly and without a single act of friendship at any point in the intervening years.

I would suggest that this is because Islam views its minorities as no more than a sacrifice to the Islamic extremists within its own societies.  Full peace with Israel will not be realised as long as Egyptians can take pride in the Korans’ baser statements of ridicule, its bigotry, its perception of religious superiority for the Muslim world and its racial superiority for the Arab world.

The Torah, the Jewish Bible portrays acts of violence as time specific acts of necessity or outrageous deeds that violate human decency,  bringing shame to the Jewish people (such as the rape of Dinah and her brothers subsequent revenge against the Canaanites in Genesis 34).  Modern Orthodoxy theologically and therefore theoretically rejects violence and discrimination perpetrated in the name of God by the Hebrews. Most Jews apologetically find excuses for the unpalatable because as a faith, we have always recognised that not even the Decalogue is entirely sacrosanct. The inclination towards peaceful co-existence, cultural pluralism and universal justice are cornerstones of Judaic development even if the modern ultra-Orthodox fundamentalist reaction to persecution and power has created a frightened, reactionary and backward sectarianism that the more mainstream Jewish groups are horribly reluctant to challenge, thus alienating the secular community from their faith. 

But we need each other, because humility is not a natural state of human consciousness and secular belief without a limiting deity is as dangerous a faith as any form of fundamentalism.

Christianity was foundered by men who deliberately downplayed their Jewish roots so that they could conquer Roman society for their religion.  Nevertheless, the Christian Bible is, for the most part, a testament to peace and co-existence even while its leaders exploited its texts to conquer much of the globe and to this day find it easy to make excuses for collaboration and appeasement with Islam.

Only the Muslim Bible, the Koran, seeks to dominate, to annihilate, to control by conquest.  Violence as an act of religious fulfilment; slavery as an act of demonstrable subservience, these are an Islamic patrimony that precludes equality and co-existence. It is this issue that defines the Muslim relationship with Israel and with the rest of humanity.

Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Egypt as religious nations are incapable of respecting the treaties they have signed with their neighbours unless they deliver their neighbours into their respective spheres of controlling influence.  Peace is not a bi-product of adherence to a literary tradition bound in antiquity that is militantly biased towards its own kind with a preoccupation towards global conquest based on a self inflated worldview of its own religious predestination towards dominance.

Israel, like all nations, is a product of settlement and immigration. But it has been a renewed magnet for religious Jews for almost a thousand years.  While secular Jews began their journey to Israel mainly after the 1880’s, many Palestinian Arabs were attracted to Israel, not by history, but by the phenomenal success of renewed Jewish immigration.  Zionism as a mainstream movement has its extremists on the periphery of society, as all societies do. But Zionists from both the left and the right did not assume a land ethnically cleansed of Arabs or non-Jews, nor did they ever expect to expel the minority from its land.  Only the Arabs did this and continue to believe that this is an option. With the active collaboration of the British Government the Arabs restricted Jewish immigration while simultaneously encouraging Arab immigration to Israel. Its leaders manipulated violent confrontation in order to profit from its chaotic blood-drenched outcome.  And all of their atrocities were committed in the name of their god Allah and their prophet, Muhammad. That the Arab nation was and still is incapable of sharing the land is obvious by Arab pronouncements.  This intolerance of diversity is intrinsic to Islam and Islamic tradition.

It is for this reason alone that any accommodation that denies the Jewish identity of Israel is no more than a cynical deconstruction of Jewish nationhood.  In Islamic terms anything else is theologically redundant; the existence of a Jewish state is the denial of Islamic theological dominance but more important, in Arab terms a renunciation of Arab imperialism. It is therefore curious that the West’s political Left has wholeheartedly embraced the Arab (Palestinian) narrative.

Jewish literary traditions are bound up in antiquity but the difference is one that separates the two religions like night and day. Islam believes its traditions are inviolate, the word of Muhammad are God’s word and therefore unchangeable.  Islam has never permitted its prophets to be anything other than God’s thugs. Judaism interpreted and reinterpreted God’s word so often that the faith of 4,000 years past was unrecognisable with that of 3,000 ago and without much similarity to the faith of 2,000 years ago and certainly nothing like it is today.  But that is what Islam sees as Judaism’s greatest failure, whereas it is what Jews see as our faiths greatest strength.

For those who would assume American support for Israel, History is not always as it seems.  In 1948 as today the US State Department was dominated by Arabists, Pro-Arab establishment bureaucrats not unlike their European or British Foreign Office equivalents.  Israel has always been an irritant that interfered with the orderly process of accommodation and appeasement with nations predisposed towards dictatorship. In 1948 President Truman recognised Israel and not because he liked his ‘Jews’ and not because he sympathised with their plight in Europe. He recognised the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination; something Britain’s University and College Union even today does not. But that was not the reason he recognised the State of Israel in the United Nations vote on the partition plan on November 30, 1947.    On that day the USA and Russia voted, for the first time on the same side because The Jewish far Left in Israel controlled 12% of the vote in Palestine and a vote against partition would undoubtedly have pushed Israel into the arms of Communism, thus providing the Soviet Union with a base in the Middle East that was both reliable as an ally and not dependent on aid to survive (as the Arab countries were.)  Out of fear for its corrupting influence on US society, in the 1950’s the US still banned much of the ‘revolutionary’ music the Jews played on their radio stations in Israel despite that decision on recognition.

Nothing is quite as it seems. In 2011 the USA installs radar systems in Turkey that face Iran but can just as easily relay information on Israel to Israel’s enemies. Satellites can be just as effective but they need to have 24/7 over-flight of a country to ensure complete cover.

On the 7th of June 1967 Defence Minister, General Moshe Dayan, made a vow in the shadow of the Wailing Wall.  “We have returned here, never to part from this city of Old Jerusalem again,” speaking calmly as he addressed his battle weary troops, many of them sobbing with emotion, General Dayan added: “to our Arab neighbours we offer even now our hand in peace….we did not come here to Jerusalem to conquer the religious shrines of others or to interfere with those of other faiths, but to ensure peace and to live in fraternity with others.”   (Quoted from Press Cuttings of June 8, 1967).

Today, imagination is sadly lacking in Israeli political circles on how to engage its enemies on its own terms. Perhaps Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has less time than he thinks.

Gilad Shalit to be released from captivity

The whole nation welcomes home Gilad Shalit. Or it should. But there are prominent Israelis who have argued against the price to be paid for his return to Israel.  The price for swapping him is 1 Israeli for 1,027 Palestinians. People are right; it is an exorbitant price beyond all acceptable standards. And yes, there is a probable price yet to be paid in Israeli lives lost.  And it even sends a message to the Islamic world. After all, the morally corrupt President of Iran, Mahmoud Achmadinejad has unambiguously stated that Islam must defeat the corrupt West because “We (the Islamic world) love death and the West loves Life.”

In the Yom Kippur service there is a passage that refers to Pidyon Shevuyim (redeeming the captives). Islam theologically views the non Muslim as no better than cattle, to be bartered, stolen, abused and despatched to his or her death when no longer of service. As such, Islam is the true spiritual heir to the Roman Empire whose civilisation likewise produced great works of art and literature and, defined statecraft and ethics as the celebration of power and death, imaginatively delivered to lesser beings.

The one thing that has differentiated both the USA and Israel in their statecraft from the rest is the tension between foreign policy pragmatists (realists) and foreign policy idealists.  It is why the home of Capitalism boycotts its enemies and why the most significant opposition to war has always come from within our two societies not outside of them.   It is why Israel’s enemies fired almost 10,000 rockets and missiles at Israel’s citizens; nevertheless Israel permitted its enemies to escape with their families in the assault on Gaza that began on December 27, 2008.   And Israel has the most diligent military prosecution service in the Western world, to ensure that those forgetting the ‘rules of war’ do not escape scrutiny from an Israeli court.

It may not be much but it is what differentiates ‘us’ from ‘them’.

On November 30, 1947 the Arab Higher Committee issued its manifesto to rouse the population to a higher plane of consciousness – it wanted the Palestinian Arab populace to be prepared for the conflict with the Jews. It was titled “Kingdoms are established over dead bodies and skulls.” Rousing stuff.

In a not dissimilar vein, Neturei Karta, the fundamentalist Jewish worlds very own Jew haters may be correct about one thing only and that is that a people with a state will compromise on following God’s commandments.  They bleat that only a God created state is permissible therefore they ignore the state and often actively work to undermine it.  Their ethics are without Jewish foundation. In order to survive,a state will inevitably make compromises and God is in the struggle, not in full time study and disengagement from the life of the nation.

Those who would abandon a captive to his or her fate betray Jewish values.  That a senior Israeli Rabbi could publicly suggest this, is an indication of moral degeneration, not of piety.

Israel must not forget that the ethical foundation of the state of Israel is not Turkish, nor Arab, nor British; it is Jewish, and it is Israeli.  Ethnic cleansing is symbolic of Islam’s foundation mythology.  Pidyon Shevuyim is symbolic of Israel's founding ethic. Some of us appear to have forgotten that.

Pirkei Avot 2.6 (Hillel) "In a place where no one behaves like a human being, you must strive to be human.”

Ethics and Slavery

Ethics: defined as a system of moral principles and not that different to ‘morality’ which is, in essence, ‘appropriate conduct.’  It is talked at us by self-righteous moralists to berate as opposed to educate, and given to us as an instruction rather than as a choice. This is fascism mixed with a dollop of McCarthyism just for good measure and just in case we think too much.

The world is divided into the West and the rest. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 but it needed further legislation in 1990 to reinforce the original law and the reality is that slavery remains celebrated in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world.  No one should believe, almost 1,400 years after the death of the founder of the Islamic faith that this is a religion of universal peace, justice and mercy; 1,400 years after the death of Muhammad, slavery exists and its greatest supporters remain the Islamic, Arab world.

And the West keeps silent because the West / Rest dichotomy renders the slavery issue an inconvenient distraction and in any case if the focus is turned on them they can always blame it on the Jews or the Zionists.  We engage in dialogue with Islamic fundamentalists whose faith demands we return to inferior status, to a position little better than slavery and to institutionalised, contractually ‘bound’ (dhimmi) inferiority with our rights not even guaranteed if we return to medieval subservience.  And then we have British institutions such as the NUS (national union of students) decreeing that Jews, uniquely, have no rights to self-determination.

In 2007 Slavery was abolished for the fifth (?) time in the Islamic republic of Mauritania (up to 20% of the population are believed to be slaves).

Slavery is subjugation and exploitation and so is prostitution, child labour and female inequality; in Islam it is personified by the burqa covering the female body from head to foot to conceal the shame of their sex. All of these elements are culturally self-inflicted and justified by the benefit of a theologically mandated psychosis which outwardly perceives human beings as being created for the purpose of serving a genocidal God superior to all others (Allah).

In the West we say little or nothing because we fear the accusation of ethnic particularism. France outlawed the veil (niqab) and the burka while we in Britain proudly boast that our freedom is greater than theirs, when in fact it is no more than intellectual cowardice that we celebrate. The undercurrent of violence we too, celebrate.  The ethical should be universal which is why we no longer rejoice in torture as a means of punishing the offender in society.  But we have a moral blindness when it comes to Islam.

Hegel’s idea of morality was the state based on public morality. But if the state is informed by society then who leads in formulating this standard?  During the Inquisition it was the clergy; in Arab society the Imam is often the most racist of the pack of human hyena, using their religious literary patrimony to espouse every evil known to society. A defective psyche does not sadly, preclude flamboyance or charisma. Hatred and violence are intoxicating emotions that are not so difficult to harness; ambition and greed make the rhetoric of demonisation a cheap substitute for compassion, and far more seductive. The language of violence creates its own momentum. The veneer of civilised discourse can easily be erased or with a specific target, create a false narrative. Piety is no guarantee of sobriety. Power is conditional respect which in reality, is not respect but leveraged fear.

To radicalize the youth, create dissent, demand sedition or separation (apartheid), to intimidate secular society through the riots and then bring in the radicals to placate those same rioters, is clever.  It is also what fascism used to bring about the overthrow of the nascent democracy in Russian in 1917 and in Germany in 1933. The emerging mainstream Islamist groups in the so called ‘Arab Spring’ seek ‘respectability’ then power. They censor debate as they did in Iran then they ride to power with the support of their dupes. In Iran it was the Mujahedin (Left wing) and the Tudeh (Communist) alliance.  Here it is the committed Left and their liberal allies. Like Nazism they use a combination of populism and the threat of violence. The Salafi movement of puritanical Islamic zealots are often seen to be synonymous with Wahhabi Islam – the ultra orthodox faction that has ruled Saudi Arabia for two centuries. It is they that are blamed for the murder of Copts and the burning of churches in Egypt. But they are no different to any of the Islamic fundamentalists from Djakarta to Karachi and from Amman to Teheran in their extreme intolerance of difference and their hatred for democracy.  If they account for 5% of the voting public in Egypt, it is best we remember that 10% is regarded as ‘critical mass’ for any movement that wishes to become a serious contender for political power.

In the Babylonian Talmud there is an expression: “The ‘tripartite tongue’ slayeth three parties: It slayeth the speaker, and he that heareth what is said, as well as he that is being spoken about” (Arakhin 15b) - my apologies I cannot find from where I read this. In fact the violence of language has ruled men’s hearts for all of our thinking history and while it is true that it poisons the ‘soul’ it’s impact is usually intended to be much more localised. It is only the person of whom the slander is spoken that damage is intended. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “It is easier to live with the no-truth or half-truth, but it is tedious to live with the whole truth.”  Can there be Peace with Islam while their world knows only propaganda, lies and demi-lies?

Our ongoing sanitization of the Arab world is not morally justified nor may we hope for securing a stable future if we acquiesce to it. It is an ethical failure that afflicts all our Societies and it is an issue that will need to be ventilated if we are to survive.  The problem is that in so doing we expose the bankruptcy of Muslim regimes not just in the Arab world but across the globe.

I would suggest it is this ethical betrayal that is at the heart of our inexplicable and wretched obsession with Israel and global ambivalence to Jewish self-rule.

Ethnocentricity and the BBC

Ethnocentricity is a word I first heard in The States in the early 1980’s. It means the tendency to view other cultures through a narrow majority perspective. This was usually accompanied by a sincerely felt shame that our hero or heroine expressed for an insufficient display of obeisance or humility before the cultural attributes or behaviours of the minority.  Inevitably it led to demands for the provision of superior rights to the minority as indicative of sincerity by the majority. Examples of this abound at the BBC. Rageh Omaar’s four-part biopic of the Life of Mohammed asked only two serious questions and glossed over the consequences for human history in his reply to both of those questions. Shappi Khorsandi is a Persian Comedienne who presented a documentary on the contribution of foreign food to Britain last week. What she basically stated was that all Asian / Near-Eastern food is Islamic.  Once again the BBC gave a proponent of Muslim cultural colonialism a platform for propaganda that essentially denied the contribution of any one else to the British way of life.

Claudia Roden was interviewed selectively to support this position which is interesting because the history of British cookery writing can be reductively divided between the contribution by British Cookery writers beginning in the early 1940’s with rationing and the foreign born cookery writers who teased Britain out of its provincial culinary mind set in the 1960’s. The two writers most responsible for the latter were Madhur Jaffrey, an Indian actress and Hindu food writer who introduced the Western world to the diverse cuisines of India (and she, unlike the Muslim, Shappi, credits everyone) and similarly, the Jewish Claudia Roden, born in Egypt and best known as the author of ‘Middle Eastern’ cookbooks who again never attempted to compartmentalise cookery as the inheritance of any one people.

How interesting that the BBC could so shamelessly broadcast a solid sixty minutes of documentary propaganda which was clearly an outrageous, prejudiced attempt to define Britain’s acceptance of diverse culinary traditions as solely Islamic.  The stated conclusion was that the weakening of ethnocentricity in Britain is part of the Muslim inheritance that defines its universal contribution to society.

This programme was no less than cultural rape.

The BBC should be ashamed, but it won’t be. I am sure it is patting itself on the back for yet one more obsequious and toadying biopic of historical revisionism.

Capitalism, Socialism & Norway

Any form of extremism is wrong because it creates a state of expectation that can only be realised at someone else’s expense. Extreme atheism on the one side and extreme religion on the other compel the believer to deny the legitimate aspirations of the non-believer. They share a common dysfunction of intolerance.

As pure philosophies, Capitalism and Socialism are the two sides of the same coin; without compassion or respect for the society without which they would not exist.  Capitalism celebrates individual achievement at the expense of the collective; socialism celebrates the collective at the expense of the individual. Both deny us our humanity as they pursue their ends. Capitalism and socialism are self-justifying.  They are reliant on conspiracy and adversity to flourish; both have annihilated the other in the pursuit of power.  They fail to recognise that morality is the public expression of a personal if imperfect belief.

When I look at the collective I see a vision of the master race without a fixed point on the compass – neither left nor right. The masses as automatons, religious & secular fundamentalists wedded to a cause without thought and devoid of empathy.  And as clarity is their greatest strength, it is a paradox that it is also their greatest weakness because they cannot envision compromise.  If society cannot function efficiently without consensus, conflict ultimately debilitates society.

We have prostituted secular culture to the false deity of self abnegation, the indifference to complexity mistaken for diversity but which has created a spiritually impoverished society desperate for the tangible as if a mixture of material delights and sensory experiences negates the need to confront the ethical contradictions in our society. This destitution of the spirit is a product of modern societies desperate for stimulation and possession. The demand for instant gratification and acknowledgement of self worth has left us impatient, dissatisfied and frightened. Instead of creative dissonance we have chaos and fear. 

A return to less complicated simpler times is no more than an illusion for most people because those simpler times, if they did ever exist were times of terror and poverty, without hope and too often with even less purpose. Humanity has lived through centuries of extremism and we have hundreds of millions of human corpses to testify to our failure of compassionate insight.

The capitalist who demands ever greater returns on investment, inbuilt obsolescence that artificially inflates demand and creates privation; the socialist celebrating the social parasite and excusing evil, selectively, to salve his conscience for his intellectual indigence. The Norwegian model with its intellectual Quislings and its celebration of mediocrity is fuelled by hate to keep boredom at bay. The particularity of the individual expressed within the collective is masked as universal values; its facile universalism concealing a particular prejudice.  Without its wealth the Scandinavian nation would be exposed in all of its hypocrisy.

What do I want? Full employment and work for all those who want it. We could begin with a simplified education system that takes the educationally unsuited out of the school yard and into apprenticeship from the start of the teenage years.  A designated non taxable category of industrial non-competitive advantage which recognises that not everyone can be an office worker or an engineer, a scientist or a doctor but that everyone has the right to work even if the same job can be done at a fifth of the cost in a distant country.   Efficiency is not at issue. But in seeking to drive down costs we have sacrificed the labour force to fear and despair; greed and inhumanity.

The social contract, or a version of it states simply that no one is left behind; the state protects the vulnerable and provides an opportunity to everyone seeking it.   The consideration for this contract is that we agree to abide by the rules that govern society. We accept obligations that protect both ourselves and others.  We renounce a degree of freedom for the common good.  The social contract is disintegrating because it is ill-defined and lop sided.   The assumption that responsibility is defined by legality rather than morality has left society without a vision of itself. When a child has money to buy £70 - £100 Nike's but no money for the books he or she needs for his or her education they are simply aping the most visible attributes of our celebrity society.  The solution is to lower our expectations from top to bottom. And that means a return to a more civil society, a more reliable and less materialistic one where we equally respect each others differences and renounce the language of superiority and hate; where expectation is the mother of invention and not the father of fear.

Civil Disorder in England

The riots that tore through England burning down whole blocks of buildings, threatening the lives of its occupants and murdering innocent bystanders came as a shock to social commentators and the chattering classes alike.  Criminal gangs exploited this violence for their own ends – a brilliant move by them.  Why were we surprised?

At the end of the World War II people talked of a new beginning where wealth would cease to be an important predicator of social mobility.  Class would stop positioning people in stratified layers that defined them.  But in the last half century the opposite has been the case.  Income inequality has worsened. The traditional measure of income inequality in society is called the Gini Coefficient (after Corrado Gini, an Italian Statistician who invented the measure in 1912).  While success is the measure of ambition and translates into reward, the theory does not take into account the widening disparity between separate groups based on sex, education, race and other criteria relating to society.  The gap between rich and poor has continued to expand as the lingering perception of what is possible has simultaneously, in our materialistic society, psychically expanded as it has physically receded.

A liberal will see the merits of income equality but put freedom first. But the ultimate test of a person’s personal morality is their pursuit of life’s goals without violating the freedom of others.  A meritocracy without equal opportunity is not a meritocracy but the continuance of Class advantage. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz noted that “markets do not lead to efficient outcomes, let alone outcomes that comport with social justice” but like all things it is because markets are of human design they take on the greed or altruism of the society in which they operate.  And Social Democracy has become inseparable from materialism and the Markets.

Competition can be rationalised and socially engineered to the point of delusion.  Competition without control and ethical guidelines is subject to a free market of ideas that can lead to totalitarianism.  No market can be truly free because absolute freedom becomes the antithesis of respect.

It would be a neat generalisation to condemn News Corp for the climate of aggressive individuality that created the News of the World scandal. The outraged cries for justice fuelled by a lynch mob mentality neatly disguised the partisan commercial considerations that accompanied the toppling of the news print behemoth.  Realistically News Corp is the fall guy that ultimately facilitated a bloodless coup by the BBC.  It allows global and hegemonic conglomerates such as the BBC to exercise control over news and entertainment. I find this even more frightening than mercantile exploitation by Rupert Murdoch’s capitalist empire. The BBC has the political ‘faith’ and unrestricted global power without even the limitations of commerce to restrain it. It is hardwired into the British establishment, into her government, her Foreign office and into the system of Royal patronage.  It is the propaganda arm of the British Treasury.

As I wrote in an earlier blog (“News of the World - a Peculiarly British Conspiracy”): “An unregulated press has dominated our lives and informed our intelligence since the dawn of the electronic age.  The internet and mobile phones have made the dissemination of information ubiquitous as it has prostituted knowledge to fashion and convenience, gratuitously bestowing sanitised nonsense on the believer.”   After the civil disorder in England much has been spoken about respect.  Respect is an idea, not just a word. Our respect is conditional on what we may gain from it.  And because immediacy of gratification is an affliction of our age we have little or no time for respecting that which does not bring an obvious or instant return.

The principle that legitimised intrusion into the private lives of individuals remains wholly supported across the media which in the electronic age has failed to address the issue of responsibility as it has enjoyed unprecedented power to influence society. The ends justifying the means precludes respecting the Individual and the Group.

There are those now arguing for national service as a sop to solving Britain’s social problems.  But in societies that need it, it is argued that the Army can never replace the social worker and those that committed much of the violence are likely to be excluded from national service.  So this is not the answer.

Respect is a contract that defines us at every level of our society but we as a society do not appreciate that it is intrinsic to every thing we do as individuals and as a group.  John McEnroe screaming at the umpire or the UK Guardian Newspaper columnist on a recent TV program constantly interrupting the other speakers are both of them equally guilty in instructing our bad behaviour.  The corrupt politician and the rap artist swearing are both delivering the same message that what is acceptable is defined by the individual and not by rules of behaviour; not by what society calls ‘ethics’.

Calling for a national commission of enquiry is also without purpose because it will be political and therefore unable to look at what society is, let alone what ails it.  Brutality has always been a hallmark of human society, it is not imagination or more money that we need. Until we recognise that it is society that is at fault at every level, we cannot expect respect to be a solution. Perhaps then, we are returning to darker times where respect is fear and control is the Establishment pulling our strings as perhaps it always has.