Opus Diaboli

In recent days, two criminals convicted of serious offences have been released from jail on ‘compassionate grounds’, here’s a recap.

On August 6, Ronnie Biggs was released from jail.  Biggs was the last of the Great Train Robbers to face justice having spent 30 years on the run after being jailed for his part in a £2.3 million robbery in which a man was seriously injured and later died.

Biggs, who has never shown a flicker of remorse for his crime, only returned to ‘justice’ in 2001 when he became old, sick and needed to avail himself of the UK’s unlimited free healthcare (Sarah Palin just sat up in her chair).

On his release, Biggs showed his contempt for the system that had showed him compassion by issuing a sneering statement.

Later this week, the only person to be convicted of the mass murder of 230 people in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988, was also released on ‘compassionate grounds’ to receive a hero’s welcome in Libya.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, had served around two weeks in jail for each person he killed.

The Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond has justified his decision against a backdrop  of vigorous handwashing by Gordon Brown, and in essence has said that the Scottish Parliament was right to show compassion.

Salmond, then sneered at the US justice system for not having a ‘compassionate release’ policy, making all too clear the motivation of all of those involved in this decision: the strong desire to appear to be more moral than others.

By being compassionate to the likes of Al Megrahi and Biggs,  Salmond and Justice Secretary Jack Straw feel they have shown  themselves to be better than them.  They also show that they believe themselves to be better people than those that grieve for the victims of  their crimes, and cannot ‘forgive and forget’.

This insidious desire to wear the good guy badge, to show compassion for those that commit crimes and to wag the finger at victims who seek to have their aggressors  punished, is not only repugnant in it sanctimoniousness, it has a deeply corrosive effect on civic life.

There has been an ugly rash of vigilante crimes recently, where alleged  sex offenders have been killed in mob attacks:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1725630.stm

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Paedophile-Named-By-The-Sun-As-Andrew-Cunningham-Stabbed-To-Death-In-Caravan-In-South-London/Article/200812215177959

These kinds of incidents happen because the general public no longer trust the police and courts to deliver real justice, and know that sexual offenders often receive light sentences.  The temptation to claim natural justice when people are told  with a straight face that the justice system is ‘not about punishment’ becomes overwhelming.

Justice,  in the real sense of the term, means getting what you deserve, and is supposed to create a system of controlled societal  revenge.  By knowing that criminals are punished, we put faith in the system to punish those that wrong us, instead of picking up a pickaxe handle and settling matters on our own.

When ‘justice’ becomes about ‘compassion’ and ‘rehabilitation’ instead of making criminals make amends for their wrongs, or when criminals are just an  opportunity for politicians to show how progressive and liberal they are,  then the public will lose faith.

Neither can the effect of deterrent be ignored. Violent robbery is rocketing in the UK. Ronnie Biggs was an unrepentant and violent robber, and there was a great deal of public good to be done by showing the young wannabe thugs who idolise Biggs as a hero, that the penalty for a life of crime is dying  in a lonely prison hospital bed.

If  those who pardoned the foul Ronnie Biggs or the mass-murderer Al Megrahi really want to show how strong and unassailable their sense of right and wrong is… a test will be coming soon.  The Moors Murderer Ian Brady is an elderly and sick man… will they deny a child murderer  the same compassion they have so readily given a man convicted of the murder of 270 men, women and children?

The UK’s National Health System (NHS) has been used as a political football this week, so I thought I’d make a few points addressed to friends in the US, to  counter some of the BS that’s been thrown around.

1)  Yes, the NHS is socialism in action. People pay taxes so that all can have healthcare.  ALL.  Yes, ALL.  Americans will have to accept that their taxes will go up.  They will have to accept that they are not just paying extra taxes for their own healthcare, they will  be paying for everyone’s healthcare. Illegal immigrants that fetch up at emergency rooms, people working on minimum wage below the tax threshold, the elderly and the children of the feckless, taxpayers will pay for all of it, and the burden will fall hardest on the middle classes.

2) Taxes will go up.  Everyone’s taxes will go up, including the pool boy, the maid and the people who make and bring you food in restaurants.  Higher taxes will push wages up and the US will have to either get used to not having as much cheap labour as it presently does, or paying more for it.

3) Expect the medical profession to get very moral and sanctimonious about how your money is spent.  Those doctors who today won’t give you a bandaid unless you have a credit card, once they are in the pay of the state will suddenly come out with “how dare you tell the medical profession who it can and can’t treat… we’ll treat illegal immigrants if we want… Hypocratic oath….”  The NHS has caused a phenomenon called ‘health tourism’ in the UK.  Because NHS staff refuse to do the work of  ‘immigration officials’.  They won’t check that people who present at hospitals are UK citizens and actually entitled to free treatment.  We have no idea how much this costs us… because the NHS will not measure it.

4)  When my father died of cancer, he received the best possible care imaginable. With all the money in the world, I could not have bought better treatment, and it did not cost me one cent.

5) If my father had had Alzheimer’s, I would have had to fight to get him the care he needed to die with dignity.  Cancer is an emotive disease and attracts a lot of political attention.  Alzheimer’s isn’t.  When the state pays for your health, it will become a political football.

6) Some medical treatment IS rationed in the UK.  There are long waiting lists for many routine treatments such as hip replacements.  Some people lose their sight because of waiting too long for routine treatment for Macular Degeneration.  If you have money you can jump the queue, but remember, you have already paid for your healthcare once through higher taxes, so you’re not going to have as much wealth and savings as you do now.

7) If you have a serious road accident in the UK, you will get extremely high quality treatment extremely fast.  Probably as good as anywhere.  If you tear up your hand with a power tool or have some other mid-ranking accident, you might spend half a day at the emergency room waiting to get it stitched.

8) The NHS  was introduced 60 years ago when antibiotics were still a novelty.  At that time if you got sick, you went to hospital.  You might have an operation… you might not… and you would either get better or you would die.  There simply wasn’t the range of expensive drugs and other interventions that are available now, but the NHS has not been able to change and reflect that because ‘free healthcare’ has become a political sacred cow.

There are other state healthcare systems in the world.  The choice is not between the iniquities of the current US healthcare system and the iniquities of the NHS.  You could have a system like the one in the Netherlands, Sweden, or even Canada.

9)  No system is perfect, and there is no such thing as FREE healthcare.  Someone always pays for it somewhere.

The new edition of Satan’s Manifest is available to download free from here: http://www.satanism-today.com/II_I.pdf

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Julian Karswell

Create Your Badge

Christian Aid is currently spending an obscene amount of money on a multimedia campaign to tell us that world poverty can be ended.

Just one of the adverts they have put in the media  this weekend is a two-page advert in the Saturday August 1 Telegraph magazine (p19, 21) that cost around £67,000 (based on Telegraph rate card).

You can visualise this sum of money by imagining 6,700 people giving £10 to Christian Aid thinking it would be buying a water pump in the Sudan only to find that their money has been wasted on a facile campaign that even a sanctimonious adolescent hung up on Bob Geldof would find short on substance.

There is one good reason why we cannot ever eradicate poverty and I’ll give that last (so you can skip to the bottom if you want to save time), but here are Christian Aid’s ten reasons why poverty can be ended.

1) 500 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 25 years.
Yes, but that is only 20 million people a year. How many billions has that cost us each year in terms foreign aid projects? Would it not have been cheaper just to write these people a cheque?  And another thing, ‘lifted out of poverty’ sounds very much like a New Labour phrase.  Just how closely do you want to be linked to this corrupt and failing government?

2) Over 70% of us think that poverty eradication is important
More than 70% of us think that world peace is ‘important’ and just look at the shape of this place.

3) World leaders agree that financial structures that exacerbate poverty must change.
So what’s the problem then?  It sounds like our world leaders have things in hand.

4) Almost 190 countries have signed up to halve extreme poverty by 2015
See above

5)  It’s a big task, but no bigger than ending slavery and putting a man on the moon.
Slavery ended?  The good news has not trickled down to North Africa yet.  And we haven’t had a man walk on the moon in more than 35 years.

6) A fair deal at this year’s climate change summit could save 250 million people in Africa from poverty by 2020.
If you lent me £10 I could put it on a horse and I could pay you back double when I win.  Show me the figures.
Also, that’s less than 25 million people a year and at what is this ‘fair deal’ going to cost the people who have to actually pay for it?  Poverty isn’t going to be ended by any climate summit.

7) People created poverty and the systems that hold it in place, people can end it.
Yes.  The systems that create poverty are largely caused by inefficiency and corruption in developing countries.  Until the peoplewho live in those countries stop accepting that, no amount of foreign aid is going to make any lasting change.

8) If multinational companies paid a fair amount tax, developing countries would receive an extra $160bn a year.
Show me the figures.  If countries ensured that multinational companies paid a ‘fair’ amount of tax, would it be right and moral for those countries to give all of that revenue away to other sovereign nations?  Do they not have their own healthcare and education responsibilities to their citizens?  Do they not have moral duty to ensure that their citizens’ own tax burden be lightened if revenues increase?
And if $160bn was pumped into the developing world, would it end world poverty?  Or would it just cause a leap in sales of Rolexs, Mercs, Learjets and uniforms with a lot of gold braid on them?

9)  More than  $110bn of the world’s poorest nations’ debt has already been cancelled.
By cancelled, you mean that someone, somewhere else has paid for it. It has been absorbed by tax payers and by shareholders.  And has that done how much to end  poverty? If proper governance is not in place, cancelling debt just helps keep bad leaders in power.

10) The United Nations Secretary-General has categorically stated that this can happen.
Why didn’t you say before?  We need only sit back and wait for poverty to be ended… after all it’s not as if the UN is just a pointless talking shop that couldn’t organise a box of pencils.

And finally…

Some agencies define poverty as living on $2 a day.  In the UK, everyone in the lower 40% of the earning bracket is considered to be in poverty. Some of those in ‘poverty’ in the UK would qualify as in the comfortable middle classes in other countries.  And as societies develop, our ideas of what constitutes poverty change. Within living memory, children in the UK were defined as being in poverty because they did not have proper food, clothing or access to healthcare or education.  Now children are considered to be ‘deprived’ if they live in a household that can’t afford branded trainers for them (they’ll be vulnerable to bullying) and broadband (they will be socially excluded).
If we raised the quality of life of those on $2 a day to $5… guess what?  $5 a day would become the new baseline of poverty.

We can never end poverty because… the poor are always with us.