RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/07/31/britain-cannot-shirk-fight-against-rogue-states/

Now that Boris Johnson has made wholesale changes to the ministerial team whose primary duty is the defence of the realm, it is vital that it results in a radical new approach in the way British foreign policy is conducted. Far too often under Theresa May’s premiership, the defining characteristics of Britain’s engagement with the outside world were prevarication and hesitancy.

About the only time Britain made a firm stand was in the aftermath of the Salisbury poisoning, when not even the risk-averse Mrs May could avoid putting in place robust measures to punish Russia for its involvement in the worst chemical weapons attack on European soil since World War Two.

That said, Mrs May’s dire threats to crack down on Russian activity in Britain have made little impact, to the extent that Russia’s intelligence agencies are now busily rebuilding the spy networks that were dismantled in the wake of the Salisbury attack.

So there is a pressing need for Mr Johnson’s new ministerial team to adopt a more assertive approach if Britain is to reclaim its rightful place at the heart of world affairs, as well as making sure we are better equipped to defend ourselves.

Mr Johnson made encouraging noises during the Conservative leadership contest that he took a serious interest in such issues. He wrote to Dr Julian Lewis, the chair of the Defence Select Committee, that “for too long we have asked the armed forces to do too much with too little resource”, and pledged “that we will exceed the minimum 2 per cent Nato spending target”. His decision to visit the Faslane nuclear base, home to the Trident nuclear deterrent, as one of his first acts as prime minister sent a clear signal of his personal support for the military.

Insights from Quadrant https://quadrant.org.au/

Predictably, but not less galling for being so, an upcoming gathering of conservatives in Sydney, the CPAC conference, has come under attack for — yes, you guessed it! — homophobia, Islamophobia, gynophobia and assorted etceteraphobias, which is the way the Left rolls whenever those with non-progressive perspectives attempt to air their views, even if only among themselves. It works like this: some diligent elf at GetUp! or a piece of human office equipment in a Labor/Greens backroom picks over the listed speakers, googles “name” + “critics”, and quickly finds what others have said by way of denunciation.

This information is then shopped to hack reporters along with the demand that the targeted individual be denied entry to the country. If all the pieces click, the event will be besieged by the feral and violent Left — as has happened to Geert Wilders, Milo Yiannopoulos, Jordan Peterson, Bettina Arndt, the Australian Christian Lobby and any number of others — eager to implement Saul Alinsky’s advice:

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

With the CPAC conference now mere days away, you just knew a dose of Alinsky’s devious medicine was about to be injected into the body politic. Well today it happened, trumpeted with homepage coverage by the ABC, SBS, and Nine newspapers , we read that failed premier, failed federal byelection candidate and camera-ready Sussex Street sweetheart Kristina Keneally has demanded that CPAC speaker Raheem Kassam be denied a visa.

“We should not allow career bigots — a person who spreads hate speech about Muslims, about women, about gay and lesbian people — to enter our country with the express intent of undermining equality,” Senator Keneally said on Tuesday.

Q: What must one do to qualify as a “career bigot”? A: Utter that which is true but must never be said about those high in  the hierarchy of contemporary victimology. Islam, for instance, which Kaseem described to a BBC interviewer as “a fascistic and totalitarian ideology” — an observation which enjoys the distinction of being entirely true.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/07/inside-north-korea-the-land-where-lies-are-king/

My tour guide, Mr Li, asks “Is Australia divided into a North and South as well?”. Resisting the urge to make a joke about the Northern Territory, I tell him that it is not. These were the type of naïve, yet always cordially couched questions about everyday Australian banalities that I fielded during my visit to North Korea, a nation of 23 million prisoners – physically and psychologically. But it is important to separate the regime from the perpetually violated – yet often still jovial, and always inquisitive – people who have the misfortune of living in the last truly rogue state.

Arid land, emaciated husks of livestock (their owners not dissimilar), and a myriad other abject miseries fly past the window of the 17:27 to Pyongyang. Local farmers stare wide-eyed, some wave at perhaps the first foreign person they have ever seen.

“Thirty minutes until arrival”.

The “city of flat soil”, the literal translation of Pyongyang, is by far the most gentrified in the nation, yet the bleak hopelessness which defines rural life doesn’t ebb when you arrive on urban ground; it is simply traded for an existence – perhaps even crueller – among total artificiality, a state of limbo in which one knows they are imprisoned while acquiescing with their captors, lest they be sent to one of the North’s notorious ‘aquariums’. Pyongyang is only for those who are, relatively speaking, in on the joke – those who know that the outside world at least exists; those who know that Kim Jong Il didn’t, in fact, hit eleven holes-in-one the first time he picked up a golf club. These are mostly political elites, families with a history of loyalty to the regime, and polyglot tour guides, Mr. Li included.

Outside residents are prevented from travelling anywhere near the capital by checkpoints littered along the inbound roads. From afar, Pyongyang almost passes as an average city, mutatis mutandis. Pastel-shaded apartment buildings occupy the outskirts of the city, dated — but not offensively so — glass structures cast shadows over downtown, and spotless public squares are plentiful.