The Politics of Dancing

It would seem from a number of independent reports that the troop surge in Iraq has proved successful and certainly in a a number of formerly unsafe areas there is now a degree of stability only dreamt about even a year ago. Now the acid test, ask someone in the so called 'Stop The War Coalition' the following question, taking it as read that you opposed the original invasion, are you pleased about this? Stand back and wait for the torrent of weasel words and prevarications. Then ask yourself what really motivates these people.

Freedom of speech is uncomfortable; it should make someone somewhere feel uneasy. This includes woolly liberals. Last week a man was arrested at Heathrow airport in transit to the Middle East on a German extradition warrant. His crime representing not what he has done but what he thinks and writes for he is a holocaust denier. Now I know very little about the man, but I know something of 20th Century history. It is still extraordinarily difficult to place the mass murder, the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population into any kind of meaningful perspective. For someone to set out to deny the reality of recorded mass murder, the Nazis were after all extraordinarily thorough statisticians, strikes one as about as odious a position as it is possible to imagine. At best these grubby little people are reduced to quarrelling about numbers. The Nuremberg laws are an established fact, the Einsatzgruppe a historical reality, the existence of Bergen Belson and Auschwitz undisputed. So the quest