The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Passage to India

10.3.07 @ 12:01AM

WHY NOT ITS FINEST HOUR?
Re: Hal G.P. Colebatch's Cameron's Carbon Conservatism:

I never thought of carbon offsets this way before, but I now have this Monty Pythonesque image of the Great White British Conservative Party Leader journeying to India on an airplane, with legions of poor persons in the Commonwealth Countries furiously pedaling irrigation pumps to supply the energy input to move this jet to cross the sky. It puts any project performed in the ancient world with slave labor to shame.
-- Paul Milenkovic
Madison, Wisconsin

Mr. H.G.P. Colebatch provides invaluable perspectives on the Old Empire, and especially the Great Britain of (some of) my ancestors. He writes of the social breakdown now underway in England.

Mr. C's description of the so-called "Conservatives" in Britain today suggests that Labour and the Social Democrats will win another five-year lease to control the government. Sigh. Current Tories make our domestic Republican Party look like the Rock of Gibraltar (hmm, another bit of Empire to be trashed...).

I urge my conservative friends here in the U.S. Midwest: don't slam the door to immigrants. Soon we must welcome to America the next giant wave: a huge flow of European refugees, from our Old Countries lost to the Mohammedan tide that the 20th-century Europeans started but would not stop. Mr. C notes the huge outflow of people already occurring from Britain. Our cousins "vote with their feet," against the Mohammedan slave society they see advancing behind the veil of social leftism.

One thought -- if anyone in the British National Party entertains any notion of "going mainstream," now is the hour to act. Labour and Social Democrats have sold Britain to Europe. The Conservatives forfeit the contest without fighting. Who's left to speak for the (now-dwindling) descendants of Old Britain? Who can inherit the mantle of Cromwell...Pitt...Lloyd George...Churchill...?

May our gracious God grant that Britain's coming history not track that of the Fatherland of some others of my ancestors. Should Mohammedans seize control of the British government we may expect hard totalitarian nightmare to replace the soft secular socialism now ruining the land. Recall the horrid, post-Wilhelmine, let-it-all-hang-out decadence of secularized Germany under the Social Democrats. Germany suffered three horrendous economic and social crashes (1918-19, 1923-24, 1930 on) in a dozen years. Numerous Nietzschean political factions took advantage of the Weimar government's, and society's, shock and lack of will to survive. How did the increasingly desperate Germans deal with the social disorder in their streets, and the growing and varied threats of totalitarian socialism? With emigration--and appeasement. "Let's try to tame the beast. Give that Austrian painter some responsibility and see! He calls for a New Order! He'll drop all those silly overheated rants against the Jews and the Church once he actually has to govern..."

"Finis Germanae" (Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, 1944). Thirty years hence, will anyone then residing in Britain possess even a notion why 1940 remains its "finest hour"?
-- Dave Hanson
Fayette, Iowa

Australian spelunker and policy guru Hal Colebatch is incensed at Conservative Party Leader David Cameron contributing "to a large carbon-offset company, Climate Care, which does things like supplying treadle pumps -- treadmill-type devices-- to Third World villages rather than have them use diesel pumps," in order to undo the CO2 of the turbojet engines that lofted him to an event in still-agrarian India.

This suggests an appropriate energy bonanza in the offing, as energy efficiency in appropriate technology is paramount in curbing CO2. While paddlewheel pumps are ideally matched to the needs of irrigating rice paddies, human treadmill performance falls off direly at turbojet turning rates. Thus to minimize CO2 emissions in connection with environmental diplomacy, the international climate change conference circuit and Eco-Rock concert jet setting, participants in all of the above should transfer their transportation needs to specially retrofitted human powered paddle boats, possibly drawn from the Irawaddy Flotilla, as nobody is going to Burma these days anyway.

Propelled at a sensible 1 1/2 knots by the efforts of several hundred Third World pedestrians glad of such gainful employment , this Great Green Fleet could transport Mr. Gore's cohort from Hollywood to Stockholm or Cannes in six months flat, and whisk the entire International Panel on Climate Change from its venues to its labs and back in under 1,000, for the first time allowing all participants ample deck chair time to read the last edition of their vital work.

Most importantly, it will allow readers writers and editors of journals as diverse as the Nation and the Weekly Standard who now assemble offshore for a hopelessly brief cruise-ship week each year to apply themselves to the formulation of policy in adequate depth. Think how the political environment might be transformed were they to remain outside the 12-mile limit for a minimum of 52 weeks a year?

Move over, Churchill, this fellow Cameron may be on to something.
-- Russell Seitz
Cambridge, Massachusetts

I think about the Britain I once knew as a kid when I read Hal Colebatch's "Cameron's Carbon Conservatism" and feel so sad. I hate to think what my father and all those people's other "fathers" and "grandfathers" would say knowing that spineless, clueless and useless politicians have all but wiped out their sacrifices from previous decades. What an abuse of power and trust they illustrate in their behavior, thinking and actions. If the situation wasn't so depressing, it would be laughable that the current crop of 'leaders' across all parties in that once great country have the arrogance to think they are worth the jot. I mourn for the Britain I used to know and love and felt proud of. The politicians "running" the place are not worth the air they breathe, nor the air time they receive.
-- G. Constable
Sydney, Australia

A JOHN WAYNE SYMPHONY
Re: Larry Thornberry's Listen to This, Pilgrim:

Letter to the Editor

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