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( 1 July 09) .....By an odd coincidence, Hal G.P. Colebatch's excellent article "UK bill an attack on faith" appeared in yesterday's The Australian about five days after I had the pleasure of delivering the annual St Edmund Campion lecture at Sydney's Campion College.... Anyone familiar with Elizabethan history in Britain may recall that Campion was tortured and executed in 1581 for trying to keep alive the old faith - Catholicism - in Britain after Henry VIII's historic rift with Rome in 1533.....Now, instead of finding itself persecuted by Elizabethan spies, informers and hangmen, Catholicism finds itself under severe assault from the self-righteous, politically correct social engineers of Britain's political Left. Thankfully the same thing has yet to happen in Australia, but with the increasing politicisation of public education here by an ideologically driven Marxist Left, something very similar may not be far away. Already Christianity in all its forms is treated with increasing contempt in societies that basically believe they have evolved and so distanced themselves from what they imagine are the old-world superstitions - and attendant moral constraints - of their past......Until the advent of postmodernism, communism was Christianity's most persistent and relentless recent foe..... The Left is killing religion , Giles Auty, The Australian .... Now postmodernism in all its largely Marxist-inspired guises - political correctness, gender theory, feminism, post-colonialism, determinism, deconstruction, relativism, structuralism, historical revisionism - has become a stealthier and thus even more sinister adversary that flourishes, generally unremarked, in our midst. Why has Western society, with all its proud history, generally allowed such an abject internal collapse? American Roger Kimball, who is one of a number of international cultural commentators with whom I have corresponded through the years, explains the whole matter as well as anyone: In America, scattered if much-publicised episodes of violence have wrought far less damage than the moral and intellectual assaults that do not destroy buildings but corrupt sensibilities and blight souls. The success of America's recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. Postmodernism corrodes society largely through assaults on its soft underbelly, principally through theeffective hegemony it has created in the arts, education and culture generally.....as Colebatch makes clear, the postmodernist Left is intent on wiping out the remaining pockets of resistance that exist in private and religious schools.....
( 1 July 09) .....The rapid expansion of wind and solar "green power" will waste billions of dollars and destroy far more jobs than it supposedly creates. That is the damning message from what appears to be the first serious analysis anywhere in the world of the actual real-world performance and impact of subsidising and force-feeding these very expensive and semi-useless alternative energy sources. That in itself is damning. That governments, including both state and federal in Australia, have embarked on massive multibillion-dollar wind and solar schemes, without anywhere engaging in even the most basic analysis of cost let alone (perish the thought) their actual energy effectiveness is worse. You can search in vain for any serious cost-benefit analysis from our utterly compromised Federal Treasury, which used to be a bastion of reason and intellectual substance, but is now an institutional apostle of climate hysteria. Its purported analysis of the impact of cutting emissions was an embarrassing extended 292-page joke....The analysis has two major conclusions. That for every "green job" the state manages to finance, at least 2.2 jobs are lost elsewhere in the economy. And that does not count the extra jobs that could have been created if the money poured into wind and solar had been spent elsewhere...... The enormous cost of hot air , Terry McCrann, The Courier Mail .....That's the second point: the huge waste of money. The study calculates that, since 2000, Spain has spent $571,000 ($A1 million) to create each "green job", including subsidies of more than $1 million per wind-industry job. Indeed, it goes on to discover that the whole process has created a surprisingly low number of jobs, two-thirds of which came in construction, fabrication and installation. A further one-quarter were in administrative positions. Just one in 10 jobs had been created at the permanent level of actual operation and maintenance of the renewable sources of energy....Even with its huge commitment, Spain is only getting started down the alternative energy route. As the analysis noted, despite solar power being subsidised at seven times the mean price of the power pool, it was yet to get to 1 per cent of Spain's total electricity production. And conventional power is already much more expensive in Europe than here. So the extra cost from solar and wind would be much greater here than there. If we seriously tried to get to 20 per cent "alternative", the cost on consumers would be huge, the destruction of real jobs massive.....
REPOSTED:
I first posted this Giles Auty essay to my website in June 2000 and thought that in light of the recent writing by Giles Auty and Hal G.P. Colebatch, it would be timely to dust it off and take another look at it. It is still ten years on a fascinating read..
......It is widely believed that as we grow older we tend to look back on earlier times in a spirit of generally unjustified nostalgia. Yet let us suppose for a moment that life really was qualitatively better in certain vital and readily identifiable ways thirty, forty or even fifty years ago. Why has it become so impossible for us to admit this?.... The rhetoric of radicalism is one of the most potent forces in society today, yet is essentially anti-intellectual. Perhaps its most damaging effect is the way it manages to sell the idea that ill-conceived and destructive initiatives are automatic examples of progress, and all who resist or obstruct them are reactionaries, conservatives or worse. The rhetoric of radicalism permeates so much of contemporary thought that many people have become inured to its essential intellectual dishonesty...... The trick, from a progressivist point of view, is to get the first fallacy past the publics guard while it is not paying proper attention, in order that the superstructure can later be built upon it. The seminal lie of radicalism is that all change is automatically for the better, even though much of our experience of life teaches us otherwise. It was on the basis of this simple lie that self-styled radicals were first able to seize and retain the moral high ground and to pour hot oil from there on any doubters or dissenters below......How did Western society allow itself to tumble into such an intellectually dishonest morass? The answer as in so many other cases, has been a general lack of vigilance and vision or will to safeguard our freedoms. By contrast, most of those who have been swept along by cultural fashions and catchphrases fail to foresee the likely consequences of their actions...... Postmodernism's assault on Western Culture , Giles Auty, Quadrant June 2000 ,,,,,,, Frequently they are too young to do so and, lacking knowledge of other political systems an almost universal problem for young Australians have no idea of the value of the system they are attempting to destroy..... Marxist-inspired revolutionary initiatives of the late 1960s did not simply go away. Driven by the teachings of influential figures such as the Italian Antonio Gramsci, the would-be subversives in our midst next targeted those more vulnerable areas of Western life which form the soft underbellies of our nations: education and the arts. If these could be subverted successfully from within, corrosion might soon succeed where political confrontation seemed likely to fail. Political programs which would not stand a prayer at the polls thus simply by-passed the inadequate defence mechanisms of democracy and achieved a choke-hold on our cultures instead. I do not think the communist parties in Australia or Britain ever polled even one per cent of the vote n general elections; yet Marxist ideas control much of tour contemporary education and culture.......back in the 1970's some of the earliest manifestations of political correctness seemed so silly that intelligent people were more inclined to ignore or laugh at them than bother to answer their allegations. In the event, the folly was probably ours for failing to foresee how inexorably political correctness and related movements would grow in stridency if not in moral force..... Most ordinary people remain as confused to this day about what postmodernism is as they do about its aims and origin. They are merely aware that a great number of things with which they disagree totally are slowly changing their lives. So what is postmodernism? One easy answer is that it is radical relativism gone rampant. But the answer I prefer is that it represents an attempt to usher in a new kind of left-wing totalitarianism via the unlocked back doors of democracies. Postmodernism represents the neo-Marxist conquest of Western cultures by stealth.
( 30 June 09) .....A sinister new equality bill is before a parliamentary committee. So far there has been surprisingly little about it in the British media, although the Catholic Church has called attention to the fact it would give the government unprecedented powers to police not only public but private religious and other activities. The Thomas More Legal Centre's director Neil Addison recently said that under this bill, "nearly every form ofdiscrimination is banned, even for private associations and churches. Christian churches are to be banned from preferring Christians in their employment practices except in the employment of priests or religious teachers. They are not going to be ableto insist that employees live in accordance with the ideals or principles of the church, and any employment ormembership decision they take can be investigated by an unelected quango, the Equality and Human Rights Commission." This is only the first stage. The Catholic bishops of England and Wales have warned that religious schools and care homes could be forced to remove crucifixes, holy pictures or other religious symbols or icons from their walls in case they offend atheist or non-Catholic cleaners. Under the terms of the bill, Catholic institutions could be guilty of harassment if they display images offensive to non-Catholics..... UK bill an attack on faith , HG.P. Colebatch, The Australian ......The draft bill defines harassment in the widest possible terms as "unwanted conduct ... with the purpose or effect of violating a person's dignity, or of creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading or offensive environment" .....The practical consequences of this are that a Catholic care home, for example, may have crucifixes and holy pictures on the walls (that) reflect and support the beliefs of the residents. A cleaner may be an atheist or of very different religious beliefs. Nonetheless, if a cleaner found the crucifixes offensive, there would be no defence in law against a charge of harassment..... Catholic schools could likewise be forced to remove crucifixes or holy pictures if atheist or non-Catholic dinner ladies found them offensive. Beyond decorations, symbols and icons, this may open the way for state interference in invisible and perhaps more profound matters of doctrine.... The bill is largely the creation of the Labour Party's deputy leader and Equality Minister Harriet Harman, one of the party's most committed left-wing social engineering activists, who probably has as much clout in the government as anyone.....There has been a string of cases of people suspended or sacked for expressing their religious convictions, wearing religious symbols such as crucifixes or, in the case of one nurse, offering to pray or a patient......