RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/ireland-abortion-referendum-irish-exceptionalism-ending-european-identity/

The long experiment in cultural transformation has proved to be a mere detour on the way to becoming West Britain.

In Bernard Shaw’s great play John Bull’s Other Island, an English liberal character who at first seems a silly-ass Englishman but who later emerges as a more Machiavellian one, exclaims enthusiastically at one point: “Home Rule will work wonders under English guidance.” This is a surefire laugh line in the theater. It is also a prediction of something that finally happened on Friday, May 25, with the landslide passage of the referendum to liberalize Ireland’s abortion law more or less in line with English precedents. And it symbolizes the end of a 100-year diversion in Irish history from West Britain to a prickly independent Catholic Republic back to West Britain again.

That something this important was at stake was realized very early by William Butler Yeats, who had commissioned the play from George Bernard Shaw to open Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Yeats rejected the play and gave several reasons for doing so, but his main motive was almost certainly that it was alien, both politically and in literary form, to the kind of Irish national theater that Yeats was trying to establish. Shaw thought so and many years later described the incident as follows: “Like most people who have asked me to write plays, Mr Yeats got rather more than he bargained for. . . . It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland.”

Andrei Gromyko believed that the so-called Westphalian system, in place at least until the Second World War, had been replaced by a duopoly in which only the USSR and the United States counted as powers that could truly affect things. Moscow these days is full of rumors and speculation regarding an impending bid by Putin to revive at least in part and in a new form, the Gromykan “duopoly” by reaching out to the Trump administration in Washington.

Putin knows that without reaching out to the US, he may not be able to consolidate his gains in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Georgia, while he could become stuck in the Syrian quagmire with no prospect of getting out anytime soon.

Russia’s isolation was best illustrated during the big annual military parade in May 2017, when of all the foreign dignitaries invited by Putin only one turned up: the President of Moldova.

“Consolidation”. In Moscow these days this is the word that most flavors discussions in political circles. The idea is that, thanks to President Vladimir Putin’s bold and risk-taking strategy, Russia has made a number of major gains on the international scene and must now act to consolidate those gains and reduce the diplomatic, economic and political price it has had to pay for them.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12483/london-al-quds-terrorism

The leader of last year’s London Al Quds Day rally, Nazim Ali – director of the “Islamic Human Rights Commission”, which organizes the annual march – called for the annihilation of Israel. They also carried banners that said, “We are all Hezbollah,” (what a comforting thought for the British). If, however, like the scholar Robert Spencer, one reports on these activities, one is barred from entering England.

The real problem is the contrast in how the slightest criticism of Islam in the UK is perceived by British police, who readily go about arresting and prosecuting people for it.

An afternoon of racism is in store for Londoners on Sunday, but as long as the hate is directed against Jews by Muslims, British authorities apparently have no problem with it.

On Sunday June 10 in London, the yearly so-called Al Quds Day march — Al Quds is the Arabic name for both Jerusalem and for the day, invented by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led Iran’s 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah — will take place. The march is, basically, a call for the destruction of Israel, sometimes also Jews in general. Many other cities, among them Toronto, Berlin and Tehran, will also be “celebrating” the day.

Last year in London, around 1000 people waved countless Hezbollah flags, in honor of Iran’s proxy terrorist organization, while chanting slogans such as “Zionists/ISIS are the same, only difference is the name” and “From the river to the sea – Palestine will be free”. They also carried banners that said, “We are all Hezbollah,” (what a comforting thought for the British).

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/kim-jong-un-murderous-dictator-tyrannical-regime/Summits won’t change the nature of the North Korean tyranny.

‘This will not be just a photo op,” President Trump said Thursday of his meeting next week with Kim Jong-un. “This will be — at a minimum, we’ll start with, perhaps, a good relationship. And that’s something that’s very important toward the ultimate making of a good deal.” Later that day the president added that he might, if things go well, invite Kim to visit him in the United States, perhaps even at the White House. “He has also discussed [possibly] golfing with Kim,” a “senior Trump administration official” told the Daily Beast.

Golf? Too soon, Mr. President. Unless this is part of a strategy to get under Kim’s skin — he’ll be uncomfortable, after all, when he hits the links at Mar-a-Lago wearing charcoal fatigues. More likely it’s another example of the president’s view that relations between leaders are more important than the relationships between states, regimes, cultures, and ideas. You try to woo Xi Jinping with “a most beautiful” piece of chocolate cake, for example. Even if the results are not ultimately what you wished for.

Let’s remind ourselves of whom, exactly, President Trump plans to meet next week. For Kim Jong-un is no ordinary man. The Dear Leader occupies the summit of a hierarchical system of some 25 million people whose lives are controlled by his central government in Pyongyang. Some years ago, Christopher Hitchens described the ruling juche ideology this way: “It is based on totalitarian ‘military first’ mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.” He did not mention the troops and artillery North Korea has amassed on its southern border, and the engineers who toil in underground laboratories, building nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States.