Wee Eck vs. the Strasserites?

The Murdoch Press are having a lovely time over Alex Salmond’s acquittal. One doesn’t doubt for a moment that they were expecting the bastard to go down. After all, if the #MeToo generation could get Harvey Weinstein, why not one of our own? And since Salmond is a Far-Left loon, an anti-English hatemonger and a Russian stooge, not to mention a grotesque oaf to boot, I’m quite sure The Times's editorial team were rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of him, er, eating porridge for a while.

So what went wrong?

As usual, the answer is almost certainly Conspiracy. And then the real question is of course What sort?

Salmond is himself no slouch when it comes to coughing up conspiracy theories and pointed accusations. Back in 2015 he fingered both the BBC and the “metropolitan” press for their coverage of his referendum campaign to destroy the UK. (One can understand why a politician who hates Britain with every fibre of his being wouldn’t be too fond of the British Broadcasting Corporation - even though to all extents and purposes they’re really just British in name only.) This time though he’s going to go all in to get back at conspirators within his own party.

So, there’s going to be an inquiry, and he’s going to write a book. And his allies within the Party are rallying behind him. Nicola Sturgeon, who for most English people has always appeared to be little more than the Janette Tough (aka “Wee Jimmy Krankie”) to Salmond’s Ian, has declined to comment, but one can imagine that whether she wants to or not she’ll end up being cast on the side of the gruesome tartan fembots who, for reasons so far known only to themselves, have lined up (and apparently colluded with each other in doing so) to denounce Wee Eck for his wicked ways.

The internal politics of the SNP are of course impenetrable to outsiders, not to mention quite irrelevant to the vast majority of British subjects. Life’s too short to go into them in any depth. Suffice it then to refer to Sayre’s Law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” And I suppose one should add that when the motive is primarily ideological, sectarian or nationalistic (and the SNP is all three) the struggle is only going to be even more vicious. (My own feeling is that this is indeed a battle between the Scots Nazis’ “woke” and “nationalist” wings. Basically they’re Scotland’s Strasserites and Hitlerites du jour, and if not an actual Night of the Long Knives then at least some sort of reckoning is definitely on its way.)

Not to be out done, of course, The Times have come up with their own conspiracy theory, which as ever involves none other than dear old Vladimir Putin. (Who else?) Because not content with gassing civilians in Syria, rigging the US presidential elections and threatening the peace and security of western Europe, he’s now apparently taken time out to try and destroy the Scottish National Party. ‘Analysts say that President Putin’s regime has strategic reasons to put pro-EU and pro-Nato Scottish nationalists in its sights.’ What-ever!

For what it’s worth, one can easily imagine the Far Left of the Far Left of Scots nationalism objecting to Wee Eck’s having a chat-show on Russian telly. And the objection would be essentially the same as their objection to Julian Assange after he helped get Trump elected. “Putin is nath-ty. Putin is Hitler. Putin betrayed the Revolution by being nationalistic. Orange Man Bad! Russia Evil! Alex Salmond Too Sexy!”

Well, it’s something to think about. With luck it will at least be entertaining, at least once we’re all allowed out of our hovels again and back into the so-called “real” world.

The St Gallen Mafia

No, sorry, I just don't believe in the "St Gallen Mafia" conspiracy theory. They failed to get Martini elected in 2005, when Martini himself told them to support Ratzinger in order to stop Bergoglio. Austen Ivereigh of course claims that they then had a change of heart, and that the three of them who were left (three out of 115!) conspired to get Bergoglio elected in 2013. But how likely is this really?

Indeed is there any real evidence for this outside of the tittle-tattle collected by Ivereigh and Bergoglio's other liberal boomer boosters? Alas, not really! Ivereigh claimed in the first edition of his silly book that just before the 2013 conclave the three of them got Bergoglio's consent to campaign for him, but he was then forced to retract this allegation for the second edition. And is there any real reason even to think it, given that no one (apart from the St Gallen group, supposedly!) even thought of Bergoglio as a "liberal" before he became Pope? Certainly he was not considered liberal by his fellow Jesuits in Argentina, with whom he was deeply unpopular. At a time when "liberation theology" was booming in South America, Bergoglio was seen as something of a "conservative" JPII sycophant.

And for what it's worth I don't believe in the "British coup" theory either. (Again, would we really do such a thing? Did some just think it would be funny to have an Argie as Pope? "Haw-haw! That'll annoy The Sun.") On the face of it, yes, one can easily imagine Pope Bergoglio being elected as Dave and Nick's puppet as much as Obama's. After all, Britain is at best Washington's poodle and at worst Mini-Me to Uncle Sam's Dr Evil, so there's a certain thematic logic to it. In one sense the ultimate success of the "liberal" proddy British Establishment would be to have a Pope elected who was a liberal protestant in all but name.

And yet! And yet! For one thing, once again, the source! This is Ma Pepinster, the elderly schoolgirl who for no readily apparent reason is still writing for Britain's most oleaginously pro-Establishment "Catholic" periodical. And secondly, once again... just think about it. These are the same British Establishment lickspittles who are diehards for the EU on the grounds that internationally Britain is now a post-imperial pipsqueak. They're the sorts of Catholics who would despise the Commonwealth of Nations as an embarrassing relic of a bygone age (even though in practice they would approve of much that it does). Surely the idea that our own James Bond helped to get Pope Francis elected is one sycophantic conspiracy fantasy too far even for them?

In fact easily the best summing up of the "political" situation in the Church I've read in some time comes courtesy of someone called Shane Schaetzel on his blog here. The Catholic Church is "split" (although not technically, and for crude financial reasons it probably isn't going to be any time soon either) between American neocons and German liberals. The former are trying to keep the JPII "conservative" vision of Vatican II alive. The latter are basically in hoc to the German secular state thanks to its "church tax". What's more, they don't really believe in anything anyway and they don't see why anyone else should either. (And more to the point they don't want them to!) The way the whole "Pope Francis" phenomenon fits into it is so straightforward there just isn't space for conspiracy theories about Jesuits, conspiracy theories about the St Gallen mafia, conspiracy theories about the British Embassy in Rome, or even conspiracy theories about Communists, Freemasons and Jews, etc.

Because the simple truth is that when Ratzinger resigned the papacy he was seen as being old and weak. He'd wanted it for himself, for his vision, for his "reform of the Reform" and his "hermeneutic of continuity". And he'd failed. The Cardinals wanted another JPII. The American neocons at any rate remembered "their" Pope as a tough guy who used to stand up to one sort of son-of-a-bitch (i.e. the "atheistic" Commies) and pal around with the other sort (i.e. Galtieri*, Tudjman, Saddam, etc.). They wanted a strong man, they thought Bergoglio would be it, and even if Ratzinger wasn't seen as an old, weak has-been (and I suspect he was), the remorseless logic of the conclave was simply that Bergoglio was next in line. Besides, he was Sodano's golden boy, Sodano had been Galtieri's golden boy, and so as far as JPII's groupies were concerned Bergoglio could do no wrong. (See George Weigel, especially!) And so once again it was the Yanks wot won it - led of course by American Establishment Cardinal par excellence (see here and here) the Archbishop of New York (where else?) Cardinal Dolan.

Buyer's remorse has of course since set in fast, but the simple and obvious truth remains. When future church historians finally start to write up the fate of the glorious new Americanised Catholic Church that emerged after Vatican II, the answer will simply be that they did it to themselves.

*We now know exactly whose side he was on.

The Purging of Paul Joseph Watson

It may make me even more of a heartless, callous, mean-spirited right-wing bastard, but... it's hard for me to feel too sorry for Paul Joseph Watson. At the end of the day, unlike however many other hundreds of thousands of YouTubers, he's one of the ones who's landed on his feet and (apparently, according to that recent, slightly blubby documentary) he lives off the proceeds of his wordsmithying in quite a nice flat in South London. (Would that we could all make the Internet work for us like that!)

Having said that though, there are three points very much to be said in his favour:

1. He is very, very good at what does. (I'd rather listen to his angry ranty [Sheffield-born] Battersea-boi screeds than watch most other things on YouTube, let alone television.)
2. He does happen to be right about most things. (OK, I haven't listened to all his stuff. For all I know, he may once have touched some political live wire to do with US government pedo pizza parlours or whatever. And no, I'm not a free speech, gay rights and Paki-bashing libertarian-type either. But to most extents and purposes he's impressively perceptive. By the standards of the modern British right, he's surprisingly "sound".)
3. And yes, the most important thing he's right about is the matter of whether or not modern social media platform providers have the right and/or responsibility to censor what we say (and think) via their services. (Apparently it's all to do with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which some Republicans are supposed to be trying to reform. Or something.)

Because yes, that last one is a genuine effing problem. If President Trump doesn't have the right to block lippy followers on Twitter, why should Twitter have the right to ban users just because they don't like the cut of their jib - provided, that is to say, what they're being banned for isn't actually criminal. And then again, on the subject of criminality, how can Google claim they're just providing a service (essentially no different from the US Postal Service) that just happens to be abused by criminals from time to time (for example when nonces are sharing kiddie-porn) and yet reserve the right to censor YouTube (for example... if they don't like the cut of your jib).

And that of course brings us to PJW's recent problems with the Magic Face-Book. Watson has written up his own account of being banned by Facebook on Human Events and given a reasonably intelligent interview about it to sp!ked. And James Delingpole has come out swinging for the lad at Breitbart (in the wake, it has to be said, of The Donald himself on Twitter), declaring with characteristic British understatement that 'Silicon Valley censorship poses one of the biggest threats to Western Civilisation in the world today'. (It's up there with 'fundamentalist Islam, China, eco-fascism, neo-Marxism, and so on', apparently.*)

As it happens, I think PJW is right.

This is nothing less than election meddling. Everyone Facebook has banned was instrumental in getting Trump elected. This is punishment. This is a political purge. This has nothing to do with ‘hate’ or ‘violating terms of service.’

Well quite!

It just remains to be seen (a) whether or not it will work and (b) whether the likes of Donald Trump and his "conservative" allies will do anything about it.

*Demographic obliteration doesn't quite make the grade for Dellers's threat matrix, presumably. (Not to the same extent as the world 'badly needs' conservative jokes and memes, at any rate!)