Arrogance & Ignorance

No shortage of events, near & far, to take in. Let's take them chronologically.
I took a, perhaps, perverse pleasure in the three year prison sentence handed down to Nazi apologist David Irving by an Austrian court. There are those who say that this gives Irving the martyr status with the far Right which he craves. I don't buy that. Nor is it possible for the BNP to use this as some sort of recruiting agent. The disaffected white working class, if aware of Irving, certainly wouldn't respond to it as they would with tabloid scare stories about asylum seekers.
There's also a personal reason for my loathing of Irving's vile denials of the Holocaust. My late father was one of the first British troops to liberate the concentration camp at Belsen, an experience he related to me shortly before his death. He told me there was no way he could get those images out of his head.

As a republican I shouldn't really be surprised by the witless utterances of the Royals. Yet there was still something breath-taking about the, ahem, "thoughts" of Prince Charles in the writings presented for all to see in the Mail on Sunday case.
[BTW, hasn't someone told him that it would be so much easier for him if he joined the rest of us & kept a blog?]
Comments about the Chinese at the time of the hand-over of Hong Kong bordered on the racist; titling his missive, "The Great Chinese Takeaway" says all we need to know about his Blimpish mindset.

I've previously mentioned the problem I've had with anti-social behaviour in my neighbourhood. One of the youths responsible for the problem was jailed this week for being part of a gang of thieves. Jay Sands, 19, a youth whose greed is matched only by his stupidity, was apprehended by police after a botched robbery attempt in which he was covered with indelible red dye from a boobytrapped cash box. Sands & his five fellow defendants were jailed at Liverpool Crown Court, the sentence for Sands being six years. I wasn't aware of the news until Wednesday morning when telling a local police officer about shouts & screams emanating from the Sands' rented house in the early hours. The officer phoned back to impart the good news.

Tonight's news has featured the riots in Dublin. There is, of course, no excuse or justification for the attacks. However, the key question is what were the Irish authorities thinking in allowing the Orange Order, a rabble every bit as repellent as the Klu Klux Klan & the BNP, to march down O'Connell Street. It was also reported by RTE this evening that the bigots would have walked past the GPO building, a site of almost totemic significance in modern Irish history before the Gardai intervened (http://www.rte.ie/ ). The marchers were accompanied by a Loyalist pipe band, according to the estimable blog Slugger O'Toole (http://www.sluggerotoole.com/ ). This last piece of information is breath-taking.
STOP PRESS: In a staggering display of journalistic insularity, the BBC fails to mention the Dublin riots as one of its lead items.