August 2010

On its submarines Britain has 48 nuclear warheads, each one eight times as powerful as the nuclear bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. In other words, theoretically Prime Minister James Cameron could order the almost instant incineration of 384 large cities around the world. Barely anyone in parliament mentioned it, much less debated it in the many years Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in office. Not before its time the coalition government of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats appears to be gearing up for a decision, partly because the missiles are slowly but steadily wearing out and partly because many senior voices in the military in the post Cold War world would like to see the money spent on other, more immediately useful, weapons, transport. Many Conservative and Liberal Democrat members of parliament are doubtful about the value of an independent nuclear deterrent. Perhaps there is a window of opportunity for...

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Six years ago after we had talked about all manner of jihadists for an hour – jihadists in Kashmir attacking India, jihadists in Afghanistan attacking America, jihadists infiltrating India and jihadists in Pakistan attempting to kill President Pervez Musharraf – I asked the American ambassador in Islamabad, “don’t you feel that you spend all your time just picking up the pieces for the wrongheaded policies when the West supported the jihadists as a tool against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan?” He sighed, nodded and replied, “That’s right”. Driving away from that conversation I was convinced more than ever that the various terrorist movements unleashed in this corner of the world over the last twenty years have their origins in the policies of Jimmy Carter, that most pacific of all post war American presidents who, prodded by his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, decided to undermine and repel the Soviet invasion...

Martin freedom is quite restricted, since June. He will enter freedom again on September 4, 2010. Why? Because of his belief in non-violent action. We applaud him wholeheartedly! Read more.

By Jonathan PowerAugust 11, 2010 During the difficult years that preceded the British handover of Hong Kong to China the Chinese government’s intense antipathy to opium and the still fresh memories of the evil that eighteenth century buccaneering Britain had inflicted on China and Hong Kong added an extra emotional charge to what, anyway, was a most complicated transition. Without opium there would have been no Hong Kong. The British only acquired it because of the Opium Wars, and the city’s early economic success was built on the opium trade. It was the British who fed the Chinese propensity for opium. Historians point out that the Chinese would have found it elsewhere, even grown some of it themselves. But the truth is the Indian-grown opium was the brand the Chinese smokers savoured and the British East India Company marketed it with commercial élan. Today the Chinese authorities regard opium as...

By Jonathan PowerAugust 5, 2010 The idea of human rights has been around since the thirteenth century. It gathered speed during and after the French and American revolutions. But it never gained general acceptance, despite the ringing words. Jefferson himself kept slaves. Karl Marx was a vociferous critic of “The Rights of Man”, the seminal French document. “They are nothing but the rights of egotistic man, of men separated from other men and the community and the rights of the restricted individual withdrawn into himself.” The cause seemed quiescent. Neither Stalin’s mass executions nor the persecution of the Jews in Germany re-ignited the cause. The dam of apathy was not breached until shortly after the commencement of the Second World War when the great science fiction writer H.G. Wells (“The War of the Worlds”) together with a few socialist friends, including A. A. Milne, the author of “Winnie the Pooh”,...

August 5, 2010 Jonathan Power The idea of human rights has been around since the thirteenth century. It gathered speed during and after the French and American revolutions. But it never gained general acceptance, despite the ringing words. Jefferson himself kept slaves. Karl Marx was a vociferous critic of “The Rights of Man”, the seminal French document. “They are nothing but the rights of egotistic man, of men separated from other men and the community and the rights of the restricted individual withdrawn into himself.” The cause seemed quiescent. Neither Stalin’s mass executions nor the persecution of the Jews in Germany re-ignited the cause. The dam of apathy was not breached until shortly after the commencement of the Second World War when the great science fiction writer H.G. Wells (“The War of the Worlds”) together with a few socialist friends, including A. A. Milne, the author of “Winnie the Pooh”,...