Electricity: Politicians, Not Low Lake Levels are to Blame

If it wasn't for the tragedy of it all, the news that we don't have sufficient electrical generating capacity to get the nation through the winter would be laughable. The real tragedy is not that some of us might have a few cold showers and darkened city streets, but that materially we live in one of the most resource-rich countries in the world. Possibly we are only second to Australia in the amount of resources available, measured on a per-capita basis. Our little land mass is larger than the whole of Britain including Northern Ireland. We have four million people, the Brits have around 60 million. Japan, with about 100 million people, is also smaller. They aren't facing power cuts.

There can be only one reply to the problem and that is gross mismanagement. The problem is certainly not low lake levels. Whatever the faults of the old Ministry of Works it did practise something called forward planning. But forward planning doesn't have any meaning in the new sanitised, corporate, free market, world. For the new Managerial Class there is no visible future beyond the next 'presentation of annual accounts' or the next election. The Managerial Class aren't 'burdened' with those fuddy-duddy beliefs and ideas of mum and dad's days; according to them history and past experience is only for those who 'can't move with the times'.

We used to have a Ministry of Energy. It wasn't always a very good Ministry. It mostly had competent staff but its weakness was the age-old problem of the misuse of power. When Bill Birch was Energy Minister he forcefully (ab)used his position to squash the development of alternative, decentralised sources of electricity and fuel. He, and subsequent Ministers of Energy, used their all-powerful position to enact a policy that has resulted in the squandering of most of our known natural gas. Now our main gasfield is nearly dry. A considerable percentage of electricity is generated in gas-powered thermal stations. Birch and others were repeatedly asked, even begged, by people who competently understood the mechanics of energy, to implement more sensible use of the gas. When used directly for heating (cooking, hot water, home heating, etc.) natural gas is very efficient. When it is burnt in a thermal power station to generate electricity, and then transmitted over long distances and used for cooking, etc., a great deal more gas is required.

Bill Birch and the late Sir Robert Muldoon, then Prime Minister, forced their 'Think Big' nonsense onto the country in response to the 1970s oil crisis. Central to the programme was the Motunui Synthetic gas to petrol plant. It did make petrol for a number of years, but then after its sale as part of 'privatisation' it resorted to the more profitable practice of turning gas to Urea, much of which has been exported. We once had a half decent natural gas reticulating system in parts of the North Island. It is possible to run motor cars very well on natural gas (CNG) and many people were doing this. The higher-compression diesel engine runs even better. Two-thirds of the energy value of our natural gas was wasted in converting it to petrol. The Motunui Synthetic petrol plant left the nation with several billions of foreign debt. The Government then argued that this would be compensated in less expenditure on imported oil.

The Government of that day even said it supported greater national self-sufficiency; funny why some of its members (Mr Birch prominently so) later were enthusiasts for global 'interdependence' and the abandonment of national sovereignty. With just a little encouragement over the last 25 years the average New Zealand home would now have a solar water heater. The modern types are efficient and virtually maintenance-free. With a little encouragement proposals by farm groups back in the 1970s to develop farm produced fuel (ethanol for petrol replacement and vegetable oils for diesel) would have gone ahead. They would have provided added security to farmers and rural towns, reduced dependence on imported oil, reduced pollution and been decentralised. No foreign borrowing would have been required to develop such an industry.

A long list of interesting ideas, some of them amazingly innovative, have never got off the ground, either through lack of just a few dollars or the harsh determination of centralised planners who detest nothing more than ordinary individual initiative. Even within the old centralised structure so much more could have been done. Two expensive oil-fired power stations were built at Marsden Point never used and was later dismantled. Marsden A has not been used for many years but was only mothballed and available for future use or occasional emergencies during low lake levels. Then it was partly dis-assembled. Now there is a panic to try and get it up and running.

Just south of Auckland lies the remains of the old coal-fired Meremere power station. This operated until nearly a decade ago, then was mothballed. It also was available for use in emergencies. Coal can be sourced from nearby, or brought in by truck or rail. It was situated alongside the main trunk railway line. About five years ago a private company, Olivine New Zealand, put forward a proposal to burn garbage waste, along with some coal, at Meremere. The company held a number of public meetings in the old lunch room and the chief engineer for the company was the man who had overseen the station's original construction and its mothballing. The proposed scheme would have handled all of the rubbish from Auckland, Tauranga and Hamilton and every town in between, and possibly from further afield. City rubbish is now a massive problem and huge landfills are being used which are an eyesore and will be a pollution problem for the next hundred plus years, and may well have to be dug up for treatment decades from now.

The burning may or may not have been the ultimate solution to the huge waste problem but Olivine was never given a fair hearing; what is certain is that the small amount of waste fumes (barely measurably) from the proposal would have been a minor problem compared to the present method. Olivine's proposal was to operate the old Meremere Station to get some income and then build a new, more efficient waste-to-electricity plant, alongside. After endless hours and more than a million dollars spent on hearings and submissions to councils and governments the company was forced to give up. It is now working on a project for Perth, Western Australia.

But that was not the end of the matter. As if to ensure that Olivine or anyone else would not make such a suggestion again for the old Meremere plant, it has been dismantled. It was a perfect back-up solution for Auckland during low hydro-lake levels. In the meantime we send ship loads of West Coast coal to Japan at one of the lowest international coal prices in the world. The electricity shambles entails much more than just a shortage of generating capacity. But what more could we have expected from the privatisation 'reforms' of the Lange-Labour government of 1984-90 or the faithless and morally-lazy National lot who came after?

Could we have expected anything different from a mob of inexperienced academic theorists who had been stuffed fill with Collectivist ideology. They sold Air New Zealand which the taxpayers had to later bail out. They sold the Railways which now needs bailing out. The 'reformed' hospital system is a bureaucratic shambles. They amalgamated the old little councils into Fascist bureaucratic mini-states quite content to oversee our collapse into a Third-world banana republic, so long as their own generous early retirement pensions are ensured and they can get accolades from their fellow Collectivists at the UN and World Bank.

Here are a few off-the-cuff suggestions that we could consider if we had a coherent government interested in doing its proper job:

Immediately offer a 100 percent tax rebate for solar water heaters The assistance only to be offered for units fully manufactured in New Zealand by fully-owned New Zealand companies.

Re-nationalise (with proper compensation) the electricity industry but with every New Zealand citizen now being an equal shareholder and administered by a board of directors elected by all shareholders of voting age. This would be a return of stolen property. Stolen by the politicians not the private owners. If a new power station is proposed the shareholders of that district to have the final say, via a local referendum, if it can be built. This would overcome the present nonsense of Green MPs stopping the building of a small hydro station on the West Coast because it will cause the flooding of a few hundred acres of mostly gorse wasteland. Likewise it would prevent a city population from imposing an unwanted station in another part of the country.
The elected board to liaise with Parliament and District Councils but no politician to have arbitrary power over it. Two-percent of shareholders (or the board) be able to initiate a referendum with the result binding on the board (for example, for the replacement of an unpopular board member, or whether to build a new hydro station or wind farm, or whatever). The Electricity Company to have access to credit from the publicly-owned Reserve Bank for new constructions at not more than the cost of the bank¹s administration (as used to be the case and the charge was then 1 percent). Any profits not be used for new constructions because this withdraws necessary purchasing power away from the community. Any profit to be divided equally between a dividend to shareholders and a reduction in electricity cost.

100 percent tax rebates (commercial and domestic) to those installing lower wattage modern appliances and lights.

So long as there is no objection from neighbours within reasonable proximity or anyone else who might be physically affected, then no other obstacles to be placed in the way of those (commercial or domestic) who would like to generate their own electricity. These to have the right to sell also to willing neighbours. The national Electricity Company obliged to buy surplus power from private generators but not above a price that would represent a financial loss to itself.

Private generators to pay no tax on profits derived from renewable sources for the first five years of operation. Only fully New Zealand-owned companies to be eligible for the tax incentive. Similar incentives could be used to encourage the development of cleaner, renewable vehicle fuels.

But nothing like the above is going to happen until we can put the right sort of pressure and demands on the politicians. It is said that if a people won't fight when they have a good chance of winning then they will be forced to fight when their chances of success are lower. So many people in the past have made heroic efforts and it too often seems that the ugly steamroller of unrepresentative government just ploughs on, relentlessly dragging us towards the abyss. But surely the purpose of past mistakes is for us to learn from them.

Please find the time to collect signatures for Steve Baron's petition.

But alongside this we also need some new initiatives publicity. No one person has all the answers which is where we all come into the picture. The campaign for binding referenda was in much greater swing a decade ago. But a few more of the chickens from the policies of the 'sickly white liberals' have come home to roost since then so that even in some 'upper' circles there is now greater distaste at the nation's direction. Let's see if we can make a real impact for dead solders and the children not yet born and we owe it to ourselves.

Binding Referendum Petition

Aucklander Steve Baron has been getting some useful media publicity for his petition to the Government. He is requesting a referendum to be held concerning altering the existing Referenda Act so that referendum results are binding. We quote from a sizable item in Auckland's Central Leader (7-5-03):

"A national referendum should be held to determine if New Zealand creates a Supreme Court to replace the Privy Council, says a newly-formed democracy group. Three-month-old Voters Voice believes the Government should hold a public ballot on an issue 'as important as this'. . .

Spokesman Steve Baron says such referendums are the only way to display true democracy in New Zealand. Why should the Government always decide important issues. . . "Mr Baron challenges the view that citizens are not interested, or would not respond to a referendum on issues such as a Supreme Court, and that it would be a costly exercise.

"New Zealanders will only take an interest in their own affairs when they know that their vote counts. And that they aren't getting lip service paid to them in a non-binding referendum. A referendum can be held at election time. That keeps the costs down. It'¹s a very small cost in terms of democracy.'

"Mr Baron cites the 1999 referendum on the size of parliamentary membership. "Eighty-five percent of New Zealanders voted and 82 percent wanted fewer MPs. But, the Government has made it clear it has no intention of doing what the people want. There were 1.7 million people voting for 99 MPs and the Government has ignored it.'

"Voters Voice believes New Zealanders' attitudes to referendums would change if they knew they were binding. "They would become empowered and take more pride in their country and its decisions,'Mr Baron says."

A copy of the Voters Voice petition form is enclosed with this On Target. Further copies of the form can be downloaded from the group's Website (www.votersvoice.org.nz) or from PO Box 38-938, Howick, Auckland. Blank forms can also be photocopied.
We do urge everyone to make an effort on this. But we feel the best results possible must also include letters to newspapers and comments on talkback radio, and any other possible local and national publicity.

Defence Dollars Go Down the LAV

by Richard Prosser (acknowledgement to Guardian Bulletin, Autumn, 2003, 26 Warren St, Oamaru

This article was specially written for the Guardian Bulletin. The author is a winemaker, viticulturist and freelance journalist who lives in Central Otago. He is a long time Social Creditor, a Reiki Master, organic gardener, self-confessed environmentalist, and proud New Zealand nationalist. Richard is a contributor to Investigate magazine:

In June, the New Zealand Army will begin taking delivery of its newest hardware, the LAVIII Armoured Personnel Carrier. Built by General Motors Canada in a consortium with General Dynamics Land Systems, the 105 armoured vehicles are intended as replacements for the Army's aging M113 APCs. But serious doubts exist as to the ability of the LAVIII to perform the task required of it, and questions are being asked, both here and in the US, where the Army has ordered in excess of 2100 similar variants of the machine.

The decision to order the LAVIII was largely driven by now discredited former Army chief, Maj. Gen. Maurice Dodson. However, many servicemen, both in New Zealand and the United States, have questioned the wisdom of replacing the steel-tracked APCs currently in use in both Armies with a wheeled vehicle, which runs on rubber tyres. Dodson, a close contemporary of US Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, appears to have adopted his American counterpart's views on wheeled armoured vehicles. Shinseki was the leading proponent of the US Army's adoption of the LAV, or Stryker as it is known in the US, but his thinking and strategy in moving away from tracked armoured vehicles have been widely criticised by both former and serving military personnel, engineers, and politicians.

There is mounting evidence in the US that certain elements of the military Top Brass may have falsified claims and information relating to the LAV, or Light Armoured Vehicle, in order to make it compare more favourably against the existing competition. In particular, there are doubts as to whether the LAV can be carried by the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft (a specified requirement), and that its armour is capable of providing protection for the vehicle or its crew. In addition, wheeled vehicles have severely limited off-road mobility compared to their tracked counterparts. The distinction does not however work the other way; when tracked vehicles are fitted with steel/rubber composite 'band tracks', their on road performance is comparable to that of wheeled vehicles.
Questions have also been asked in the US as to how the winning tender could be a vehicle which would cost almost twice as much as its primary competitor, and would not only have lesser capabilities than that competitor, but take longer to enter service.

Defence spending has become a somewhat contentious issue in New Zealand in recent years. The Armed Forces have been allocated far too small a slice of the GDP pie for far too long, with the result now being, inevitably, block obsolescence of much of the nation's military hardware. The Labour Government has made grandiose claims of increased defence expenditure since destroying the Air Force and gutting the Navy, most of which fail to pass scrutiny. The supposed $3 billion to be committed to capital expenditure over the next decade can be accounted for out of money already approved by the previous National Government, money set aside each year by the NZDF out of its inadequate budget, and money "saved" by scrapping the RNZAF strike wing.

The only new initiative brought by Labour, that of adding an additional Rifle Company to each of the Army's two Regular Battalions, has been quietly scuttled, with little fanfare from the New Zealand broadcast media, which has been unashamedly complicit with the Labour Government in spreading lies and misinformation concerning defence issues. All the services need new equipment, and the Army is no exception. Unfortunately however, a third of the next decade's worth of defence capital items budget, is about to be squandered on a white elephant.

The Army needs new APCs; but it doesn't need the one it is getting. Army HQ has apparently now arrived at the conclusion that it would have been better off upgrading its existing M113s. However, at this stage it is probably too late for New Zealand to pull out of the LAVIII deal, despite the manifest inadequacies of the vehicle. The LAVIII's shortcomings can be summarised as follows;

Cost: Originally budgeted at around $280 million the project is now up around $800 million, and we still haven't bought the necessary support vehicles. When the final bill is totalled up, it will be around $1 billion.

Number: The original number of units to be purchased was 55, with an option on a further 50, yet we are buying all 105 in one go. New Zealand doesn't have the troops to fill 105 LAVIIIs, let alone the mechanics to service them.

Transportability: This is a twofold problem. Sea Transportability is a problem in that we don't have a military sealift capability since the disposal (and nonreplacement) of the Charles Upham, and we can't guarantee that any commercial alternative sea transport will be available during times of necessity, particularly as we now can't offer it any protection because we no longer have an Air Force.

Air Transportability is a subject in itself. Whilst some variants of the LAVIII may be able to be squeezed into a C-130 Hercules by waiving the safety rules, there is no guarantee that ours can be. Despite what the MOD might claim, no-one has done any tests on whether a New Zealand-configured LAVIII will fit into a C-130 Hercules, because the New Zealand-configured LAVIII hasn't been built yet. Our best information to date suggests that even if the tyres are let down, the New Zealand-configured LAVIII is too tall to load onto a C-130 with the turret in place. This means that a) it can't be airdropped, and b) on landing it will require a safe time window (estimated at anywhere between 12 and 45 minutes), and heavy lifting equipment, to make it operable.

Even if the LAVIII will fit into a C-130, serious problems remain. The RNZAF has five Hercules aircraft, of which, on average, two are serviceable at any given time. The weight of the LAVIII is so great that the range of the Hercules carrying it is reduced to around 300 - 500 nautical miles. This won't get us to Norfolk Island, let alone Australia, without air refuelling, which again, we don't have the capability for. Two Hercules are manifestly insufficient for transporting 105 LAVIlls, especially if one of them has to carry the turrets, the crews, and the lifting gear. The weight also dictates that the Hercules' undercarriage cannot land it on anything other than a tarmac airstrip. Even if we could sealift the LAVIII to theatre, the C-130 is not capable of forward-deploying it, under any circumstances.

Armour: The LAVIII is not bulletproof. It won't stop 7.62mm ball ammunition, 14.5mm HMG ammunition, or 5.56mm armour-piercing ammunition; in other words, anything it is likely to have to face. Appliqui armour, ceramic or otherwise, adds greatly to both the weight and the physical size of the LAVIII, further restricting its air transportability.

Mobility: The LAVIII cannot go off road, successfully, anywhere where New Zealand is likely to need it. It's use is restricted to hard, formed roads, and to hard deserts, and to other hard surfaces. The LAVIII is not able to negotiate soft or boggy ground, soft sand, or steep slopes. In environments such as the Pacific Islands and South-East Asia, where there exists a prevalence of poor volcanic soils, marshy terrain, and steep slopes, the LAVIII is not mobile. Its absolute ground pressure is far greater than that of an equivalent tracked vehicle, a problem compounded further when the added weight of the necessary appliqui armour is included. The LAVIII is also not able to negotiate obstacles in its path, such as roadblocks or burnt out vehicles, and it cannot straddle ditches or traverse inclines in the way that a tracked vehicle can.

Armament: The 25mm chain gun main armament to be fitted to the New Zealand configured LAVIII is not effective against either reinforced bunkers or other armoured vehicles. The vehicle's grenade launcher cannot be made to be accurate unless the vehicle is stationary. These factors render the LAVIII ineffective as an infantry support vehicle in operations against either entrenched positions, or armour-supported (indeed, unsupported) infantry attack.

Vulnerability: The LAVIII is vulnerable to attack from light weapons, rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs), and ordinary Molotov cocktails. It's supposed "run-flat" tyres, quite simply, don't. Because its mobility is limited to formed roads and hard surfaces, and because it is unable to negotiate obstacles in its path, and because it is not able to pivot quickly on its axis and retreat (as a tracked vehicle can), the LAVIII is highly vulnerable to attacks from both land and air, neither of which it has any defence, or protection against. For these reasons it is not effective as a transport or support vehicle for infantry carrying out peacekeeping operations, in any theatre where the threat level may include light weapons and Mototov cocktails, upwards.

Conceptual and Practical Suitability: A wheeled Armoured Personnel Carrier is not suited to any purpose New Zealand is likely to need it for, in either a combat or a peacekeeping role. The Soviets learned, the hard way, how vulnerable, immobile, and ineffective wheeled armoured vehicles are in combat, in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Australians discovered in East Timor that the LAVI was ineffective as an infantry transport or support vehicle because of its inability to negotiate the terrain encountered. They reverted to the use of their M113 tracked APCs. The LAVIII, as with other wheeled APCs, performs very well on tarmac and other hard roads, and its armour and armament are highly effective against unarmed civilians. Beyond these parameters, its military usefulness, in either combat or peacekeeping, is negligible.

Lack of Competitiveness: The Army's existing M113 tracked Armoured Personnel Carriers can be upgraded, to a level of capability far beyond that of the LAVIII which was not the most competitive wheeled tender), for a fraction of the cost of purchasing new LAVIIIs. This is the option selected by both Israel, and Australia, which has contracted Tenix Defence Systems to upgrade in excess of 300 of its M113s in favour of purchasing new LAVIIIs. The Australian decision was driven largely by experience of the inadequacies of the LAVI in East Timor. Depending on the options selected armament, electronic systems, environmental systems, drive train and track type, these upgrades will cost between AUD$100,000 and AUD$500,000 per unit.

The US Army estimates that upgrading its M113s to comparable LAVIII capability (in terms of road speed, fuel economy, environmental and electronic systems) will cost around US$500,000 per unit. All upgrades will retain the M113's existing advantages of lighter weight, lower ground pressure, mobility, armour protection, C-130 air transportability including airdrop capability and trans-Tasman range, and lesser vulnerability to attack. The US Army has around 17,000 M113s in storage, from which pool such additional numbers as New Zealand may require, may be purchased.

The US Army is paying around US$2 million each for the 2100-plus LAVIIIs it has ordered. New Zealand is paying around NZ$8 million a piece for our 105 LAVIlls, and rising. When all the necessary support vehicles, ammo-carriers, mobile workshops, water tenders and so on are included, the unit cost will be around NZ$10 million.

Summary: We are paying two-and-a-half times the going rate each, for twice as many vehicles as we need. The unit cost is between three and eight times greater than that of the alternative, which has better capabilities in every measurable parameter. The LAVIII will not make any contribution either to the Defence of New Zealand, or to our overseas peacekeeping efforts. It is not bulletproof and it cannot go off road. We have no way of transporting it outside New Zealand, and no way of protecting it, either in transit or in theatre.
The LAVIII to be purchased by the New Zealand Army is not capable of performing any military function, other than to travel quickly, on hard roads, within New Zealand, and to kill unarmed civilians.

The former Minister of Defence in the last National Government has indicated that had he been made aware of these facts at the time of the decision to purchase the LAVIII, he would have put the project on hold. All these facts, and more, have been made available to the present Government, many times. Yet the purchase is going ahead. Why? What plans does Helen Clark have for her shiny new fleet of civilian killers? Failing that, who, other than General Motors and General Dynamics, may be getting rich out of this insane contract?

The greatest irony of this colossal waste of money is that the billion dollars about to be flushed down the LAV would not only have upgraded the Army's existing APCs to the level they actually need, but also paid for a third frigate and a new fighter squadron. These last two items provide New Zealand with a capability which land forces cannot; they contribute both to the defence of our isolated maritime nation, and to the security of the region. Our friends, neighbours, and allies, such as we still have, would far rather that New Zealand had committed its scant defence spending to the high-tech, low manpower, air and sea environments in which we have technological and educational advantages they are unable to match, rather than low-tech land forces where we are unable to compete with their large populations.

An Assignment (TV One) programme is being prepared by TVNZ for showing later this year Little Boots* and the Passing of Laura Norder by Dewi Hopkins
(reprinted from Liverpool Newsletter, Spring, A.D. 2003)

The British Prime Minister is accused of various faults, and I must confess that if I were asked to provide a character reference I should be a little reluctant to do so. On the question of his honesty, however, in the form of promise-breaking I should hesitate to join in the outcry. Take, for example, the promise to "be tough on crime and the causes of crime." As criminals appear to thrive under his regime public outrage at the broken pledge grows more clamorous every day, but I would question whether Mr. Blair has broken this pledge. I think he is doing his best to keep it.

What people don't realise is that his words do not mean what they innocently took them to mean. I say "innocently," as if they were not culpable, but they are. If we are offered a verbal formula and hastily equate it with some policy of our own we are stupid and disobedient. Disobedience? That's a bit it stiff isn't it? Not at all: there is a Dominical commandment to be as wise as serpents and as harmless (innocent) as doves. Innocence is coupled with wisdom; so wilful stupidity must be a moral fault. I am sorry to say that it is a fault all too common in British people.

We do not say, "What on earth does he mean by that." We say, "Isn't that nice! Let's vote for him." Just like the Dufflepuds. For the point about this particular formula is that it does not declare war on criminals, as so many have assumed, but on "crime," which has "causes". When you come to think about it that sounds like something rather different. It is. You see, there is no such thing as crime (just as, in another area of human affairs, there is no such thing as an unpredictable natural force that makes money scarce and then makes food short.) There are only criminals: that is, people who do bad things and from whom we expect the Government, through the police and the courts, to protect us.

If all burglars, for example, were in jail they could not do very much burgling, and perhaps potential burglars would be discouraged. I do not mean to suggest that these is no alternative to imprisonment. As Michael Lane recently pointed out, in the Middle Ages the Church didn't say that people must obey the Church: it just (logically) excommunicated those who chose not to. If it were of genuine advantage (not just criminal advantage as at present) to be a British subject it would be sensible to deny the advantages to those who would not accept their corresponding responsibilities. I have in mind such good things as a National Dividend, the protection afforded by a British Passport, and various other benefits of the increment of association.

Mr Blair, however, is a socialist, and it is unfair to expect a socialist to be something other than a socialist. He believes (and if he denies it that is where the real dishonesty comes in) that man is what my late dear friend, Geoffrey Dobbs, used satirically to call "a fleshlump," a biological unit automatically obeying the laws of a blindly determinist material universe. What the term is meant to suggest is the completely illogical assumption in the pronouncements of a socialist (or other collectivist) elite that its own members are not mere fleshlumps, cogs or statistical units, but some sort of superbreed that, against all the odds, has developed the faculties of rational judgement, a new moral perception, and effectual will.

Lacking common sense they are unable to see the contradiction in their own thinking. Which provides grandiose schemes and programmes not just for their own self-important little lives but for the whole of mankind, or, as they might put it, the "global community." In thinking like this they are thinking nonsense, and in thinking nonsense they are, according to Jesus, wicked. This is the wickedness of Mr. Blair. He himself takes it for virtue, which is why he wears (I think it is sincere) that baffled expression and says, "But look "
This supposed virtue assigns lesser people, who are entirely governed by physical/electro-chemical/biological stimuli, to the kindly tyranny of the Society whose existence Mrs. Thatcher correctly denied (and after all these years is still execrated for it.)

Crime is not, in this conception of society, the doing of evil deeds: it is the symptom of a disease: it has a cause or causes; and it can in most cases be cured. In the process Society will have cured itself (or "progressed") and a "better world" will have been created. (So you can see that all this is blasphemously religious as well.) Part of the treatment will be the bullying and taming of recalcitrant traditionalists by the purely temporary toleration of what we call criminals. (Read Solzhenitsyn)

The other part will be compulsory psycho-medical treatment, including hospitalisation. The problem of overcrowded jails will have been solved overcrowded asylums have been a few months or a few years, in the brave new world compulsory hospital treatment (especially for such delusive symptoms as belief in private property, free choice and most of all - believing that religion has any connection with reality) will be for as long as it takes, life if necessary. In the case of incurables euthanasia will be a last resort.

Mr. Blair is not a liar, though: just a megalomaniac who believes what he says. Do I hear someone say I must be a crank to believe all that? Just consider the case of Tony Martin, who shot and killed a persistent burglar. When the time came to consider his parole application one of the grounds on which it was turned down is reported to have been his belief that the enforcement of law and order was better in the 1950's than it is now. That is, he believed in his experience rather than in the politically correct opinions of a sociologist. Can he ever be cured? Will he ever get out?

* Caligula - "Little Boots," so called for his bossy ways)

The New Times Survey and Heritage

The two other journals that we distribute are the monthly New Times Survey and quarterly Heritage. The first is published by the Australian League of Rights and edited by Jeremy Lee while Heritage is published by the Aussie League's division, The Australian Heritage Society. Sample copies can be sent upon request.

The April NTS begins with an editorial on the increasingly impossible burden of debt and the everyday effect this takes on ordinary people. The figures quoted are Australian but mirror the situation here and elsewhere. Then follows a significant expose of Tony Blair's fundraiser, Lord Michael Levy. The very wealthy Levy, who pays virtually no personal income tax, has raised millions of pounds for the British Labour Party and received his peerage straight after Blair's election in 1997.

On the same page NTS quotes the following from The Australian Jewish News of 14-2-03: "Jewish donors were among the biggest corporate and individual contributors to party political funds in 2001 and 2002, the Australian Electoral Commission revealed in its last political donations return released last week. Westfield shopping mall developer Frank Lowy topped the list of Jewish donations with $624,200 - $311,900 to the Australian Labour party and $312,300 to the Liberals."

Another article examines how the policies of the IMF and World Bank are responsible for causing child starvation in Argentina's northern provinces. "Since October Argentina has reported the deaths of scores of children from malnutrition, with thousands more hospitalised and fighting for their lives. Nearly half a million children malnutrition across the country."

Two articles, by noted journalists Israel Shamir and Seymour Hersh, give further insights into the U.S.s invasion of Iraq. Here are some extracts from the Hersh article: "Last September 24th as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorising President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq¹s weapons capability. . . According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly classified and took place in the committee's secure hearing room, Tenet declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high strength aluminium tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium.
"The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear programme under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the CIA had recently received intelligence showing that between 1999 and 2001 Iraq had attempted to buy 500 tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world's largest producers"

. . . On the same day, in London, Tony Blair's government made public a dossier containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being given in secret uranium from an unnamed African country. . .(The charge was denied by both Iraq and Niger). . ."President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminium tubes, in his State of the Union message, on January 28th, while crediting Britain as the source of the information. . . Then the story fell apart.

"On March 7th, Mohamed El Baradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the UN Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. - The IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents. . . are in fact not authentic,' El Baradei said. "One senior IAEA official went further. He told me, - These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking".

"The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger's 'yellow cake' comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan and Spain. "Five hundred tons can't be siphoned off without anyone noticing," another IAEA official told me. "This official told me that the IAEA had not been able to determine who actually prepared the documents. "It could have been someone who intercepted faxes in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger Foreign Ministry, in Naimey. We just don't know," the official said. "Somebody got old letterheads, and cut and pasted".

"[Jacques] Baute [director of the IAEA¹s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office], according to the IAEA official, confronted the United States with the forgery: " What do you have to say?. They had nothing to say. . ."

"Over the next year, a former American intelligence officer told me, at least one member of the UN inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable intelligence reports and tips funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and elsewhere. "It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn't move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world," the former official said. There was a series of clandestine meetings with MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually at safe houses in the Washington area. . ."

On march 4th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally asked Robert Mueller, the FBI director, to investigate the forged documents. Rockefeller had voted for the resolution authorising force last fall. Now he wrote to Mueller, "There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq. He urged the FBI to ascertain the source of the documents, the skill-level of the forgery, the motives of those responsible, and why the intelligence community did not recognise the documents were fabricated". A Rockefeller aide told me that the FBI had promised to look into it.

Heritage: The glossy-covered Heritage magazine is a high-quality quarterly, and always a tribute to its tiny team of voluntary workers and contributors. The Heritage Society's first patron was Sir Raphael Cilento and the inside front cover carries his observation: "Our Heritage today is the fragments gleaned from past ages; the heritage of tomorrow determined by your actions today."

There is an article by Daniel Neyer, The Peasant's Faith Versus the Faith of (and in) Experts. Neyer is publisher of his own quarterly One Sword At Least. He is the modern equivalent of the Chivalrous Knight; unhesitating in his defence of the innocent; upholding Charity and absolute in his attack against the dominant notion that defining the Christian Faith is something to be left to the experts. ". . .And what killed the peasant faith (the only type of faith worth having) of Western man? We know the litany: scholasticism, Protestantism, Rationalism; all made their contributions; all helped sever the link between man and God. The pagan peasant climbed the cosmic tree that connected heaven to earth. But his connection was only to something cosmic and impersonal, to some Star Wars-type of 'force'. It was Christ who personalised the pagan cosmic tree by submitting to a crucifixion upon that tree."

Neyer is a Catholic convert, attributing the major influence on his decision to the works of Shakespeare, but he attacks the Catholic 'expert' as much as any other experience of faith, and thus, a reed for every expert-wind that blows. . . The shift from a fairy-tale appreciation of the Faith as a concrete, personal, earth-shattering experience, to a derivative, philosophical system is subtle and slow but devastating in its effects when it takes hold. . .

The professors of theology (the experts), both clerical and lay, are generally the people who least understand religion. Why is this? Because religion, like literature, is a complete worldview. It cannot be studied in a compartmentalised way. One cannot approach the religious experience with only the analytical burner turned on in one's brain. One must approach it with one's whole heart, mind and soul. (Who once said something about loving with one's whole heart and mind and soul?)

But the religious experts, like the literary ones, do not approach their subject with the integrality necessary to give an accurate depiction of the religious experience. We receive from them a distorted view of religious faith. And we desperately need to see the Faith whole and unperverted. .

Heritage (Summer 2003) has 32 pages of the sort of grit that makes one proud of his heritage. There is an article on Australia Day and another about former Prime Minister Bob Menzies who managed to keep the financial blood hounds somewhat at bay for a little while. Thinking of his loyalty causes nausea when we compare him to some later Prime Ministers in Australia and here.

Anthony Cooney reviews Frances Hutchinson's new book Is Social Credit True?, while John Brett looks at the outstanding courage of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the eternal wisdom that he has to offer to us all. The Republican Vs Monarchy debate is put into perspective and a 1953 article by Dr. Geoffrey Dobbs goes to the hub of the difficulty many well-meaning people have with regard to freedom can be trusted with personal freedom, or do we hold to the old prevailing view that some measure of control is always needed; not, of course, for ourselves, but in order to ensure others 'do the right thing'?

Other articles include one on the therapeutic benefits of gardening, personal war experiences, the benefits of the jury system and of Habeas Corpus, on Duty and Service, the origins of St. Valentine's Day and the story of George Frederic Handel's oratorio, Massiah. An annual Heritage subscription is $20 and The New Times Survey $25. Free samples upon request.

The Nineteenth Century Counter-Attack
by Daniel Neyer (from One Sword At Least, Spring, 2003)

I do not hold the traditional Catholic view of Western civilization. That view looks on the 13th century as the epoch of Christian civilization with a steady decline following in each ensuing century. I look on Christendom somewhat differently. I see it as one, whole entity from the 700s until 1917, with each century having some very negative anti-Christian heresies and each century having some important Christian elements which other centuries lacked. But all the centuries preceding the 2Oth century in Europe and its satellites, such as America, New Zealand, and Australia, were Christian centuries.

My favourite century is the 19th, and I think there is contained in that century the foundations of a future restoration of Christian culture. What I call the separatist heresy, that which separates man's physical nature from his spiritual nature and his reason from his other senses, has been with us since the Greeks, but it was codified in that "great Catholic century," the 13th.

In each subsequent century, that heresy ate away at the vitals of the Faith, and in each century until the 20th century there has been a Christian counter-attack. These counter-attacks were not planned, reasoned attacks; they sprang up organically from the mystical body of the Christian Church. In the 19th century, the attack was fiercer than in any of the preceding centuries, but the counter-attack was also greater than in any other century.

The attack came in the form of Darwinism, capitalism, and communism, which were logical outgrowths of the Catholic separatist heresy. The Christian counterattack came in the form of a greater interiorisation of the Christian Faith. The Pauline Christianity of "if you have not charity" was developed more fully in the 19th century than it had been in any previous century. It was as if the European Christians were saying, "You have driven us to the wall, so we will cling to the most essential element of our Faith." That precious element was of course Christ's sacred humanity. God is human, God is humane, and hence our link to God is through the human.

My assertion of the greater interiorisation and humanising of the Christian Faith in the 19th century is not based on the number of people who attended church but on the testimony of that century's great authors, because I believe the great authors reflect not only their own personal vision but also the soul of their age.

The one exception to this is Shakespeare. Ben Johnson was correct in saying that he did not belong to any age. In fact, to the extent that he does belong to an age, it is the 19th century. I do not see the Pauline Christianity in the British writers alone; I find it in Dostoyevsky, Spyri, and Schiller as well, but I will limit the discussion to the British authors. A partial list includes the following: Sir Walter Scott, Jane Porter, Charlotte M. Yonge, John Ruskin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, George MacDonald, Thomas Hughes, William Edmoundstoune Aytoun, Kenneth Grahame, John Buchan, P. C. Wren, and C. S. Lewis. The last four did their work in the 20th century, but they were very much men of the 19 century.
By looking at three aspects of the 19th century literary heritage we can get a better idea of what was taking place in the mystical body of the Church during that century.

The Greek Heresy
It is not intrinsically evil to study the Greek and Latin languages. Nor is it evil to study classical cultures. In fact, both intellectual pursuits can be a great good. The danger lies in the adaptation of the Greek mindset. If one goes down that dark alley, he will be at the mercy of every self-proclaimed Socrates and will be hopelessly cut off from the personal, revealed God of Christianity.

Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's School Days and Tom Brown at Oxford, is aware of the difference between Plato and St. Paul. He realizes there is more than a slight shifting of emphasis between an impersonal force, even if it is called a spiritual force, and a personal God with a name. The result of Hardy's management was that Tom made a clean breast of it, telling everything, down to his night at the ragged school, and what an effect his chance opening of the Apology had had on him.

Here for the first time Hardy came in with his usual dry, keen voice, "You needn't have gone so far back as Plato for that lesson." "I don't understand," said Tom. "Well, there's something about an indwelling spirit which guideth every man, in St. Paul, isn't there?" "Yes, a great deal," Tom answered, after a pause; "but it isn't the same thing." "Why not the same thing?" "Oh, surely, you must feel it. It would be almost blasphemy in us now to talk as St. Paul talked. It is much easier to face the notion, or the fact, of a demon or spirit such as Socrates felt to be in him, than to face what St. Paul seems to be meaning." "Yes, much easier. The only question is whether we will be heathen or not."

"Why, a spirit was speaking to Socrates, and guiding him. He obeyed the guidance, but knew not whence it came. A spirit is striving with us too, and trying to guide us - we feel that just as much as he did. Do we know what spirit it is? Whence it comes? Will we obey it? If we can't name it in no better position than he." That quote illustrates the great 19th century Christian counter-attack.

The Greek philosophers can be read but only with a critical eye, not with the eyes of a devotee seeking guidance. The way of the Cross and the way of Platonic thought are two separate things. The one weakness in C. S. Lewis's masterpiece, The Last Battle, is when he has the Professor say, "It's all in Plato, all in Plato." Well, it's not all in Plato.

The 19th century Christians did not defeat the Greek heresy, which outlasted them into the 20th century, but there were the beginnings, in the 19th century, of a necessary rebellion against the Greek mindset. The rebellion was and is necessary because when faith becomes philosophy or pure mind, the heart and soul of that faith is eliminated. The Faith becomes a myth, which can be studied and examined and found to be necessary for the psychic health (Jung, Campbell) of the individual, but it cannot be acted upon as if it were literally true. What the Greeks and their Catholic followers fail to grasp is that pure mind will always fail to find God because God can only be found through the fairy tale mode version of the myth.

Chivalry
What had its tentative and rather formalistic beginnings in the medieval ages was deepened and enlarged upon in the 19th century. Tennyson's Arthur is a saint while Malory's Arthur is a pagan with a few Christian trappings. Mere fighting skill is not sufficient; the knight must be fighting for those causes that support His reign of charity. Again, this is expressed well by Thomas Hughes: Here all likeness ends, for the muscleman seems to have no belief whatever as to the purposes for which his body has been given him, except some hazy idea that it is to go up and down the world with him, belabouring men and captivating women for his benefit or pleasure, at once the servant and fermenter of those fierce and brutal passions which he seems to think it a necessity, and rather a fine thing than otherwise, to indulge and obey.

Whereas, so far as I know, the least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief that a man's body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, and advancement of all righteous causes and the subduing of the earth, which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he.

And what are the works of Scott if not an attempt to bridge the scholastic-created gap between God and men by way of chivalry? The fair damsel was imprisoned in the Darwinian tower and guarded by a capitalist dragon. (Yes, I know Scott wrote before Darwin's thesis, but the scientistic worldview that spawned Darwin was present when Scott wrote.) It was left to the knight with "But the greatest of these is charity," engraved on his shield to rescue the maiden from the dragon.

The Hero
There is a false apologetics which for many years was the unofficial official apologetics of the Catholic Church: Thomas Aquinas's infamous five proofs for the existence of God. God's existence but did in fact make millions of potential believers believe that there was no God. And then there is the real apologetics that has led countless unbelievers to the foot of the cross. The real apologetics consists of the apprehension of something Godlike in one particular human being. It may be a parent, a friend, or a sibling, but we see in that person more than a mere collection of molecules. That apprehension is not necessarily limited to one individual; we may see that quickening spirit in other individuals as well. And that vision of something more than nature in another human being enables us to see and believe in the God-man.
Through humanity and through humanity only can we come to Him.

If we only cogitate God, we will forever go around and around in a philosophic gyroscope, getting an occasional blast from some cosmic force as we whiz by, but we will not see the living God. In contrast, the sympathetic bond we form with the hero is our true link to God. Let us look in on Tom Brown as he comes to do homage to his deceased hero, Arnold of Rugby, in Tom Brown's School-Days:
He raised himself up and looked around, and after a minute rose and walked humbly down to the lowest bench, and sat down on the very seat which he had occupied on his first Sunday at Rugby. And then the old memories rushed back again, but softened and subdued, and soothing him as he let himself be carried away by them. And he looked up at the great painted window above the altar, and remembered how when a little boy he used to try not to look through it at the elm-trees and the rooks, before the painted glass came - and the subscription for the painted glass, and the letter he wrote home for money to give to it.
And there, down below, was the very name of the boy who sat on his right hand that first day, scratched rudely in the oak panelling. And then came the thought of all his old school-fellows; and form after form of boys, nobler, and braver, and purer than he, rose up and seemed to rebuke him. Could he not think of them, and what they had felt and were feeling, they who had honoured and loved from the first the man whom he had taken years to know and love? Could he not think of those yet dearer to him who was gone, who bore his name and shared his blood, and were now without a husband or a father?

Then the grief which he began to share with others became gentle and holy, and he rose up once more, and walked up the steps to the altar; and while the tears flowed freely down his cheeks, knelt down humbly and hopefully, to lay down there his share of a burden which had proved itself too heavy for him to bear in his own strength.
Here let us leave him - where better could we leave him than at the altar; before which he had first caught a glimpse of the glory of his birthright, and felt the drawing of the bond which links all living souls together in one brotherhood - at the grave beneath the altar of him who had opened his eyes to see that glory, and softened his heart till it could feel that bond?
And let us not be hard on him, if at that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks.

Such stages have to be gone through. I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship, to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes. For it is only through our mysterious human relationships, through the love and tenderness and purity of mothers, and sisters, and wives, through the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers, and brothers, and teachers, that we can come to the knowledge of Him, in whom alone the love, and the tenderness, and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these dwell for ever and ever in perfect fullness.

The 20th and the 21st century movements that purport to be Christian all seek to copy the technique of former times but care nothing for the spirit of those days. They seem to want Christian ethical behaviour for utilitarian purposes, but they do not want a Christian spirit. But it is the spirit that we should seek to recapture:
Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, 0 Lord, are more than they.

Ah, what a perception!

Does not Tennyson echo St. Paul?
"Our little systems have their day" - "And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries. . ."

They sinned much in the 19th century by placing a Darwinian monkey beside His altar. But the 19th century Christians did not respond to scientific wizardry with a wizardry of their own. They saw their redeemer in the faces of His creatures and faced modernity with only St. Paul's assurance that charity never faileth. They followed the path of the Ancient Mariner: He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

We of the 20th and 21st centuries have chosen a different path from the ancient Mariners of the 19th century. We have chosen wizardry over the God-Man. We have killed the Albatross, but we have not repented. Instead we have gone on to shoot down robin redbreasts, sparrows, doves, and every other bird that is the harbinger of fair weather. Why? I suppose it is because we do not want fair weather. We have become so used to foul weather that we think it is beautiful and fair weather. To us, "fair is foul and foul is fair."

It is useless to posit a faith in God as a response to modernity if that Faith is only a faith in a computerized caricature of the true God. We need first to join Lear in the hovel and learn the difference between mercy and sacrifice. Then, and then only will we be in union with the 19th century Christians and with Him.

Addendum
I do not see the deeper, more developed Christianity reflected in just the great authors of the 19th century. Its artists reflect the same vision. Gustave Doré is the prime example; his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Bible, Idylls of the King, and other works are also examples of the great Pauline Christianity of the 19th century....

Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned the West:
It is with a strange feeling that those of us who come from the Soviet Union look upon the West of today. It is as though we were neither neighbours on the same planet, nor contemporaries and yet we contemplate the West from what will be your future, or look back seventy years, to see our past suddenly repeating itself. And what we see is always the same, always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so profusely; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralysed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval. What will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us.
But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be.

The Literature of Social Credit & the Social Credit of Literature
by Dewi Hopkins

(A Review of six new booklets. Source: Liverpool Newsletter, Spring, AD 2003).

Mr Hopkins lives in North Wales. He is a retired school teacher, writer, poet, husband and father. We hope one day that he will put to paper the fascinating tale of how he, with inspiration from the late Dr. Geoffrey Dobbs, stopped the compulsory mass medication by fluoride of local water supplies. The example will be helpful to others and should be more widely known. It is easy to describe the appearance of a book as a milestone, but that is the only way to welcome these six. (see end of review for titles etc.) Their publication is a milestone indeed, and the Australian Heritage Society is to be congratulated.

Anthony Cooney and Michael Lane are the most significant Social Credit/Distributist writers active at present: and that implies no contempt for a number of others. We can all be Indians, but we can't all be chiefs. I would describe Mr. Cooney and Mr. Lane as traditionalists, and having used that vague term I shall have to show what I mean by it;. for on another day I would be just as likely to call them revolutionaries, in the sense of that word understood by most of the writers considered in these books.

By traditionalist I mean (here at least) one who is in a tradition: not one who seeks novelty for its own sake in order to stand out from past and present as an innovator, but one who, seeing truth and goodness, holds to it and even enriches it with his own contribution. As has been often pointed out, it is such a person that is a real 'original' or, as Lewis and Tolkien put it, a subcreator. The tradition within which Cooney and Lane work is that of Christendom, or western civilisation, though both are well aware of virtues that exist in other traditions. The best criticism is within the tradition, and if we look at, say, our major literary critics they have been engaged in judging not only poetry and prose but also, and in the process, the development (which for a considerable time now has seemed a decline) in the culture of the society (western society, that is) and the interactions of its distinctive parts.

It is useless to conceive of a culture as a thing separate from both 'high' and 'popular' culture if we wish to advance the cause of Social Credit and/or Distributism: obtuse to say, 'Oh, I don't read poetry or take much interest in art, and I don't know much about music.'

If the money power is ever to be defeated it will be by a people that knows itself, with a confident and integrated knowledge. Everything seems to combine to achieve the opposite result now, and this tendency has to be reversed before anyone can effectively take on the money power. So it should come as no surprise to find Mr. Cooney starting, in Clifford Hugh Douglas, from the new mathematics and relating it to poetry and music and to Douglas' thought and writing.

Some of Mr. Lane's readers in Triumph of the Past might have been surprised to find his actually describing Douglas as a poet and his writing as poetry. Mr. Lane is, of course, like Mr. Cooney, a scholar and has published work on the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf.

Still, there you are; if you choose to read serious writers you have to be prepared to read them seriously, and to fathom out their paradoxes. Speaking of which, it is in this sense that they both remind me of G.K. Chesterton. To read him you must be prepared to see sparks fly; and mighty glad I am that Mr. Cooney has engaged in a dazzling piece of literary criticism that again reminds me of Chesterton himself who, as a literary critic, almost invariably saw straight to the heart of a matter and expressed his judgements with startling clarity.

It would have been well worth mentioning among recent reprints Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature, published recently by Edgeways Books, an imprint of The Brynmill Press. In the case of Chesterton's poetry, it is shown to be in advance of modernist poetry, not only in that he did compose some free verse (inspired perhaps by Walt Whitman) but also in that his best poetry is multi-levelled, shifting within one poem between times, places and situations. He is referred to as constantly focusing and refocusing his "camera."

I hope I shall be forgiven for expressing my amazement that Mr. Cooney must have been writing this at the very time when I was writing for Mr. Lane's Triumph of the Past that another poet, the Scot, Andrew Young, had what I dubbed 'the cinematic imagination' and that the cinecamera was an invention waiting to happen. Another friend on reading my essay, telephoned to express his own surprise on finding that he had used (or as he thought 'coined') an expression in an essay that he had sent to his editor only to find that it had been used in my essay already. How or whether this synchronicity can be accounted for I do not know, and I bring in this personal note because I have long considered that reviews are really conversations among writers with readers listening in.

I think that if I entered Anthony Cooney's study I should find the air alive with static electricity from all the ideas generated there over the years. You will see what I mean if you read Social Credit Asterisks, which deals in the liveliest way with a number of topics with no connection obvious to the uninitiated to Social Credit, but each one related to a quotation from C.H. Douglas: thus getting beyond the usual range of Social Credit writing. Political analysis, social comment what I think I found most entertaining of all was his scourging of the 'God Slot,' in which all is shown to be chummy, chummy churchiness Without the sense of sin' and with no content whatsoever of Christian teaching or controversy.

The book on Belloc is incisive, with, even so, amusing and sad autobiographical details engaging my sympathy before the account of Belloc's work on history and tradition leading inescapably to his exposition of Distributism. Whereas he gives us the detailed theory as well as the historical justification of Distributism down from ancient Rome and through the middle ages into the modern period, Chesterton less directly conveys the very spirit of the movement in all his writings. Unlike them, Douglas (between whom and Belloc there was recognition and mutual respect but also rather sharp difference my satisfaction anyway, to reconcile) remains a somewhat elusive figure because he forbade the writing of a biography.

Cooney gives us what he can and laments the paucity of recorded informal sayings. I can offer one here, related to me more than once by the people to whom it was spoken. When they were a young man and woman they had told Douglas that they were fully persuaded by his ideas and proposals and asked him, 'What should we do now?" to which he replied, "My dears, you are writers. What you must do is write." And I was assured that he did not mean that they should write Social Credit pamphlets.

Therein, I am convinced, lies the real "real Social Credit." We are given what talents we are given, and we must develop, enjoy and use them. To give us the conditions in which we can practise this freely is the true policy of Douglas, Chesterton and Belloc and of the Christian Church when (occasionally) being true to itself. Only from this cultural background will worthwhile individual initiative come; and it is against this background of "tradition and the individual talent" that I like to view the newest talent upon the stage.

Michael Lane is a highly educated young man (young compared with me, that is, and I hope he will be pleased, even if surprised, to be so described), and in his monthly Triumph of the Past connects to the age-old Tradition and also shows great respect for wisdom wherever it is to be found (India or Japan, for example.) This is the traditionalist. Being aware that nothing comes from nothing he has studied everything he can find that embodies the Social Credit and leads to Douglas. It is inevitable that what he finds will not simply say what Douglas said before Douglas said it (just as the Chesterbelloc had a vision of the same reality as Douglas but not viewed from quite the same angle.) He is a meticulous researcher, painfully careful to say just what he means and willing to express reservations where necessary. He is zealous but no zealot.

The two books considered here have already appeared in parts, as essays in Triumph of the Past, but here they are presented as most satisfactory wholes. Tom Robertson and Charles Ferguson, both of whom realised the flaws and frauds of the monopoly financial system, need careful exposition because, But they are riches indeed, and I can only acknowledge that Mr. Lane's presentation of them has enlarged my understanding considerably. I still need to read Herald of Social Credit more than once again to be sure that I have fully grasped him, partly because Ferguson's prose style is as dipped as Douglas' and his use of some terms such as 'capital' and 'finance' seems to vary between one meaning and another but his proposals to free people to finance themselves independently of the banks through local initiatives seem so radical as to be too good to be true. Examples show a basis in history, however.

Robertson's concept of Human Ecology, too, sounds novel, but it embodies not only financial understanding but a view of the integrity of the sound man in a sound society that ties it in with the view of Chesterton that truth is quite simply sanity. His dissatisfaction with the Christian Church is rather ruefully acknowledged by the (Catholic) Mr. Lane to be far from baseless and this is one of the things that make Lane my kind of writer: that he has an open-minded attitude to criticism. His defence of the Church is none the less convincing for being restrained and rational. All this, as I say, makes him a traditionalist.

The Great Tradition what I also find in him is what I find in all the authors I have mentioned (and certain others, naturally.) That is, a sense of joy; that in reading him I am engaging with a real person. I cannot escape the feeling that now, at last, something is going to come of it all. For eventually the mask of careful impersonality is dropped, and there comes an inspiring peroration. I experience the pure, laughter-inducing pleasure that depends not on jesting (though jesting is a good thing too) but on high intelligence and a fine grasp of vital truth. I am sure that the final chapter of his book on Ferguson holds out promise that an initiative is on the way. I hope to live to see it brought to fruition.

There is a light sprinkling of small misprints. A Social Credit publisher would perform a wonderful service to literature generally if he took this very seriously. It is a matter of honour sense. How much does it matter? Well, if I know there are misprints I will assume that "fatality" (Ferguson, page 42) is a misprint for "fatalism." If I know, on the other hand, that misprints have been eliminated I shall give some thought to why Ferguson used the word in this unusual way. How much credit am I to give to the publisher's final text? When I read of Mr. Cooney's "Guild of St. George," which elsewhere he consistently calls the "Gild of St. George," I shall not know whether some point is being made or whether the author is being officiously 'corrected' by the printer (and why he spells the word that way is something he might tell us some day: I feel sure there is an interesting historical reason.)

Anthony Cooney
Clifford Hugh Douglas ($8)
Social Credit Asterisks ($10)
One Sword at Least

Michael Lane
Human Ecology & Social Credit: The Legacy of Tom Robertson ($11)
Charles Ferguson, Herald of Social Credit ($13)

Prices include postage within New Zealand. Orders to Conservative Books, PO Box 12-752, Penrose, Auckland.

Burying The EU Constitution
(email from British freedom campaigner and health researcher Phillip Day)

Here's what to do. . . Britain's Daily Mail has finally nailed its colours to the mast and come out in indignation about the proposed new EU Constitution which will change forever the British way of life and remove our sovereignty after 1,000 years of independent history. Tony Blair is offering the Iraqis a referendum on their constitution, but denying Britons a chance to vote on whether to remain an independent nation or not. The Daily Mail, Britain's second leading newspaper in sales, has mounted a campaign to force Blair to carry out a referendum on the EU constitution, which he would be expected to lose. The e-mail you are reading has been sent to encourage you and as many as possible to send your own e-mail in to the Daily Mail as part of the campaign.

Here's what to do:
1) Copy the text of the letter below onto a new e-mail.
2) Fill out your name and address at the bottom.
3) send it to europe@dailymail.co.uk as soon as possible.
4) Get everyone you know to do the same.

This will take three minutes to do, but the response is expected to be massive. If you live abroad, please mention the fact that you are an ex-patriot British citizen. Thank you. Phillip Day, Campaign for Truth in Europe

Subject Header: Stand up for Britain

Dear Mr Blair, The new European Constitution will mean fundamental changes to my way of life and how our country is run. I believe that we, the people of Britain, should have the democratic right to a say over our future. I call on you to grant us a referendum.

Signed: Name: Address: (Send to: Stand up for Britain. e-mail: europe@dailymail.co.uk)

To get Phillip Day's free email service contact eclub@campaignfortruth.freeserve.co.uk/ Phillip Day runs two associate organisations; The Campaign For Truth in Medicine and The Campaign for Truth in Europe. Non-Britons will need to alter the wording of the suggested letter. Those without email facilities can post a letter to The Daily Mail, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT

Behold Our New God
by Sean Gonsalves (received via email)

The power to create and destroy life is considered one of the central attributes of God, at least in Western civilization. The first words in the Bible are: "In the beginning God created. . ." Those words were originally written in Hebrew and the Hebrew word used in Genesis 1:1 was bara, which means to create something out of nothing. Theologians call it creation ex nihilio of the 20th century, the "death of God" was proclaimed. It was the detective work of an acquaintance of mine who gave me a glimpse of the new god, one that also creates something out of nothing.

Mark Anielski, a Canadian economist, sent me a paper he presented at the 34th annual conference of the Canadian Economics Association in June. The paper delves into the complex topic of money. In it, he quotes Reginald McKenna, Britain's former Chancellor of the Exchequer and former chairman of the Midland Bank: "I am afraid that the ordinary citizen would not like to be told that banks can create money and destroy money. The amount of money in existence varies only with the action of banks in increasing and decreasing deposits and bank purchases. Every loan, overdraft, or bank purchase creates a deposit and every repayment of a loan, overdraft or bank sale destroys a deposit."

We have a debt-based fractional reserve money system that controls the blood flow of the economy. Nearly all of our money supply comes in the form of debt: mortgages, government debt (bonds), commercial debt, margin debt (borrowing against equity capital gains) and individual debt (credit cards). This all represents a claim against real wealth, which is finite. There are basically two types of money notes (currency and coins) and bank deposits, created through loans. Over 98% of the money in the US and Canada is now in the form of debt!

"It must be recognized that deposits and loans only represent bookkeeping entries. As such, when a bank charges interest on a new loan, it is receiving income on a bookkeeping entry that it created out of nothing. Thus, over time, it oversees the transfer of wealth to the bankers of the world.

"Of special significance are bank loans given to government. Borrowing money through banks makes governments dependent on the bankers, while over time transferring wealth from taxpayers to the bankers to pay the interest on these loans that were created out of nothing. Today, this interest represents a large percentage of all taxes collected, with most tax departments now representing a collection agency for world bankers," Aneilski says.

So when president-elect Bush talks about the tyranny of taxes, he's either glossing over an important truth or is ignorant of a central economic fact - our tax system is a mechanism of massive wealth transfer to the rich. The former director of the Bank of England, Lord Josiah Stamp, says candidly: "If you want to be slaves of the bankers, and pay the costs of your own slavery, then let the banks create money. The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that has ever been invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin."
That's not how our next president sees the economy.

"This is a miracle, but not a mystery," he told the Greater Des Moines Chamber of Commerce in a December 1999 speech. "The momentum of today's prosperity began in the 1980s (when Reagan went on his bank de-regulation bonanza) money, deregulation, the opening of global trade and a 25 percent tax cut. . . creating new wealth out of silicon and genius."

The total outstanding US debt has grown from $425 billion in 1950 to $25.6 trillion as of 1999. As of December 1999, US market credit debt exceeded the entire $2.5 trillion debt of the Third World. "It is important to realize that, because of the nature of the debt laying claim to real wealth, in excess of the physical supply of real wealth, it means the debt is effectively unrepayable," Anielski says.

"There is only one conclusion to this journey: the repudiation of all debt or the collapse of the entire (economy) as the debt becomes impossible to repay."

Speaking of the World Bank and IMF, Bush has said: "They should not impose austerity, bailing out bankers while impoverishing a middle class. They should not prop up failed and corrupt financial systems."

The Good Book says no man can serve two masters, God and mammon. But who believes that anymore?
Behold our new god.
Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and syndicated columinist. Tuesday, January 2, 2001

Insanity
by Daniel Neyer
(One Sword At Least, Spring 2003)

When the war started, it was supposed to be a war against terrorism, then it shifted to "a war to liberate the Iraqi people." As to the first reason, isn't this war more likely to increase the chance of terrorism at home? Doesn't Bush recall that it was after his daddy shot up the Iraqis in the first Gulf War that Bin Laden declared war on the U.S.? Is there anyone who believes that a terrorist attack is less likely now that we have bombed Baghdad?

As to the second reason, the liberation of the Iraqi people, shouldn't a government's first concern be its own people? While we are "liberating" Iraq, Bush & Company are importing Somalis and Bantus into the United States and dispersing them throughout the country. And a nation that has actually declared war on us (Mexico) is allowed to occupy what used to be white American soil.

If the first two reasons for invading Iraq don't hold up, the conservatives shift to the "Bad Dictator" reason.
"Saddam Hussein is a bad man who kills and tortures his own people."
Yes, but is there an Arab dictator anywhere who doesn't kill and torture his own people? Isn't that the major pastime of Arab dictators?

Could a benign dictator ever rule a Moslem country? (Remember the Shah of Iran.) The dictators are no harsher than the Moslem god. Are we then going to bomb all Arab dictators? Yes, we are, according to Donald Rumsfield, but I don't think even the U.S. can afford that many bombs. And the Arab dictators are saints when compared to the African dictators. Why don't we bomb them? Well, we all know why we don't bomb them.

There is something very sinister at the heart of this assumed U. S. right of conquest. The assumption is that the whole world should be democratic and capitalist. This is a religious war, it is another crusade, but it is not a Christian crusade. It is a capitalist crusade. The capitalist-controlled governments are always the most dangerous governments because capitalist societies must always be expanding and consuming like the giant blob in the movie of the same name. Naked aggression is called "bringing democracy and free markets" to those who have not had democracy and free markets. But democracy means legalised abortion and the tyrannical rule of an elite band of managerial experts and bureaucrats. We don't kill and torture as openly as Saddam Hussein, but if we opened up our abortuaries to scrutiny, we would easily surpass Hussein in barbarity. Granted it's a more sterile, post-Christian, technocratic barbarity, but it is barbarity nonetheless, and it makes Saddam look clean in comparison.

A free market economy, as the capitalists view it, is anything but free, because you are not free to reject it. If you don't shop at Wal-Mart, you don't shop, and if you don't want porno, CocaCola, and McDonalds in your country, William Kristol and his Neos will order their conservative lap dogs to bomb you. And since capitalism respects no boundaries and no hearth, any country can be bombed (Serbia, Iraq), any person (Randy Weaver), and any group (Branch Davidians). Of course this war is merely an expansion of our own Civil War. Two different views of nation were at stake then, as they are now.

Bush and his minions believe in a non-nationalist concept of nation. He believes the U.S. should be like a large corporation, open to all who are willing to take their place at the bottom of the corporate pyramid. There are no boundaries in Bush's corporation, and there is but one God, Mammon, but all must be members of the corporate body or face "severe consequences."

Members of right-wing "fringe groups" have a different view of nation. We believe a nation has boundaries and should exclude those of different races and creeds from crossing those boundaries. And because we believe in boundaries which we require that others respect, we respect the boundaries of other nations and do not send massive jets to bomb those nations into oblivion so that we can rebuild them in our own image.

And finally, when capitalists go to war they take the ethics and language of the corporate boardroom with them. Killing civilians seems to be more concern for Moslem civilians than there was for Serbian Christian civilians rest can have democracy. Isn't that the same line we are fed at home? Killing babies is called pro-choice, and they too must die so that the rest of us can have democracy. But of course it is quite fitting that our generals should talk like corporate big shots, because in the U.S. business is war and war is business.

The Terror by Night
extract from Rhodesia Christian Group Newsletter, April 2003

". . . Morgan Tsvangirai MP, leader of the Opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), is in court on a trumped-up charge of treason. One of his [Party's] main speakers, Job Sikhala MP, [is] described as a "roaring lion" because of the power of his oratory. No more. Recently [Sikhala] had his home raided and everyone in it assaulted, including his wife who had just given birth. "According to the UK Independent "they took [Sikhala] to Harare Central Police Station and accused him of plotting to overthrow President Mugabe. . . After being kept overnight in a police cell, he was taken to an unknown location where he was subjected to eight uninterrupted hours of torture. . . Two men took turns to beat the soles of his feet. Then they applied electric shocks to parts of his body." Some of the torture Mr Sikhala was subjected to was too horrific to mention in this newsletter.
"Mr Sikhala is now trying to recover in a Johannesburg clinic. He appears to be a broken man, but his concerns are for the others who were arrested at the same time and were similarly tortured. Because of their less eminent positions [they] are not able [to] have the treatment he himself is receiving.

The hospitals of Harare and Bulawayo are groaning under the weight of men, women and children with ghastly injuries, burns and broken bones "The UK Economist (April 8th) quotes the case of an MDC supporter whose real name cannot be given. "They tortured him for three days, beating his feet, face and buttocks, and running electric shocks through his toes, tongue and private parts at such voltage that it sent him into convulsions." "From his hospital bed, where he is recovering from head injuries and two cracked vertebrae, he laments that his family has had to hide in four different homes in the past six weeks."

"It has just been revealed that Gibson Sibanda, deputy leader of the Opposition, has been arrested, thrown into a stinking cell for a week and temporarily released on crippling bail conditions. . ."

- And no where in New Zealand can we find a comment, let along an apology, from any of the thousands of former students, lecturers, journalists and others who campaigned twenty five years ago to get the terrorist Mugabe into power. Their only interest was to eliminate (literally, if need be) any semblance of 'colonialism'. By their silence in the face of Mugabe's on-going brutality they demonstrate that they never did care about the black people.

Now, For Something Inspiring

My question to all of you is: Would you have made the same choice?

At a fundraising dinner for a school that serve learning-disabled children the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question. When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?" The audience was stilled by the query.
The father continued. "I believe, that when a child like Shay comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes, in the way other people treat that child."

Then he told the following story: Shay and his father had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, "Do you think they'll let me play?" Shay's father knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but the father also understood that if his son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging. Shay's father approached one of the boys on the field and asked if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and, getting none, he took matters into his own hands and said, "We're losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. Guess he can be on our team and we'll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning."

In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay's team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the outfield. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as his father waved to him from the stands.

In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay's team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat. At this juncture, would the boys let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game? Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn't even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball. However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least be able to make contact. The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher. The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game. Instead, the pitcher took the ball and turned and threw the ball on a high arc to right field, far beyond the reach of the first baseman. Everyone started yelling," Shay, run to first! Run to first!" Never in his life had Shay ever made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled; everyone yelled, "Run to second, run to second!" By the time Shay rounded first base, the right fielder had the ball. He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher's intentions and intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman's head. Shay ran toward second base as the runners ahead of him deliriously circled the bases toward home. Shay reached second base, the opposing shortstop ran to him, turned him in the direction of third base, and shouted, "Run to third!" As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams were screaming, "Shay, run home!" Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the "grand slam" and won the game for his team. "That day," said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, "the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world."

And, Now A Little Footnote to this Story: We all send thousands of jokes through the e-mail without a second thought, but when it comes to sending messages about life choices, people think twice about sharing. The crude, vulgar, and often obscene pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion about decency is too often suppressed in our schools and workplaces. If you're thinking about forwarding this message, chances are that you're probably sorting out the people on your address list that aren't the "appropriate" ones to receive this type of message. Well, the person who sent you this believes that we all can make a difference. We all have thousands of opportunities every single day to help realise the "natural order of things." So many seemingly trivial interactions between two people present us with a choice: Do we pass along a little spark of love and humanity or do we pass up that opportunity, and leave the world a little bit colder in the process?
You now have two choices: 1. Delete this. 2. Forward it to the people you care about.

Book Specials!

Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by Dr. Antony Sutton. $5
Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by Dr. Antony Sutton. $5
Uprising: One Nation's Nightmare, Hungary 1956 by David Irving. $5
Shadows Over New Zealand: Defence, Land Rights and Multiculturalism by Geoff McDonald. $2
Social Credit by C.H. Douglas. $10
The Siecus Circle: A Humanist Revolution by Claire Chambers. $5
A Study in Syncretism: One World Church by John Cotter. $5
A Time to Speak by Ivor Benson (3 essays on Carroll Quigley, C. Gordon Tether & Antony Sutton) $2
. Initiative & Referenda: The People's Law by Prof. Geoffrey de Q. Walker. $2
The West's Betrayal of Civilisation by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. $2
The Truth About New Zealand by A.N. Field. $5
Secular Humanism: the most dangerous religion in America by Homer Duncan. $3
"Whose Service Is Perfect Freedom" by C.H. Douglas. $5
Pawns In the Game by William Guy Carr. $5
The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc. $5
State Secrets: Secret Revolutionary forces behind Anglo-American Politics by Count Leon de Poncins. $5
Democratising Banking by Charles Pinwill. $5
The Alberta Experiment by C.H. Douglas. $5
The Fabric of Freedom (A Study of Australia's Flag), by D.J. Pinwill. $3
We Want Some Money by Max Crarer. $1

Who are we? On Target is published bi-monthly by the New Zealand League of Rights, in association with it's division, Conservative Books. Editor is Bill Daly. Yearly subscription $20.00. All enquiries, book orders and subscriptions to: P.O. Box 12-752, Penrose, Auckland. Fax: 09- 636 9913 or Email: legort@xtra.co.nz. Website: alor.org