MooseRacer

Anyone else watch this last night? An interesting program. The guy's compassion and sense of humour shone through as usual - for an 84yr old the man's a star

I would have like him to be pressed on his earlier support of terrorism, as his answer to questions over his promoting the use of it in the ANC's struggle were only met with the reply that they never actually practised terrorism.

Had a good cringe at Richard Attenborough - came across as an **** licking idiot, why was he whispering all the time for god's sake?

Other than that a good program and I look forward to next week's episode.

unclebuck

This might shed some light....

JONATHAN MEADES on the inevitability of radicals becoming respectable

TODAY’S FREEDOM FIGHTER IS TOMORROW’S MAN IN A SUIT

Today’s balaclava’d terrorist movement or - should you approve the cause propagated by its particular bullets and bombs - freedom-fighting revolutionary organisation is tomorrow’s party of besuited statesmen. This follows as the night the day, the imago the chrysalis, the lorrydriver’s crutch the bender.

It is the way of the world, this way that orthodoxies with their gamut of certainties are overthrown by new orthodoxies and their certainties which in turn are pushed aside by the next wave. There is no quarter of human endeavour or thought that is impervious to fashion. The sacred analogue of the armed struggle’s mutation into a body supposedly fit for governance is the cult that becomes a religious denomination.

Cult is an ugly little world whether employed adjectivally in such locutions as
"cult thrash metal band Rectal Haemorrhage’ and
"cult writer’ (i.e. writer with phenomenally poor sales) or, in something closer to the older sense, to signify a congregation of deluded losers being ripped off by a wackily dressed chancer who has proclaimed his divinity, his visions, his freedom of their bank accounts. It is this sort of cult : occluded, aggressively proselytising, fervid in its devotion to its own arcana, routinely denounced and thus fuelled by its collective paranoia : that France is currently pushing through legislation to extinguish. This is good news.

This is also bad news. As founder, not to mention First Magnificence, Primal Purifier and Focalising Omni-et-Ubi of The Asterean Tabernacle Of Didodidi, I am affronted by the possible curtailment of countless precious freedoms. I am talking, of course, of my freedom to include Fnan Martin Bashir The Confessor and Fnan Henri Paul The Conductor To The Highest Plane among the Nine Skeljns (prophets). No other branch of Didodidism : impostors all : thus acknowledges them. No other’s iconography incorporates the Dodo or Dido or Idi. No other celebrates the eucharist with a small green salad without dressing and not eating it. And what of my freedom to enjoy charitable status, to look forward in my dotage to drooling didistically on Thought For The Day. What about my merchandising opportunities?

As for the good news. Well, it’s not that good. I, like just about anyone of the babyboom generation, have lost friends - mostly, thankfully, temporarily - to cults far more pernicious than my own: Scientology, the Process, SWP, IM, EST, New Voodoo, the Scottish aberration called New Labour. Now, should Ol’ Blind Lemon Blunkett hear of the French initiative and be
"minded’ to ape it (though maybe it was only his predeccessor who was
"minded’) he ought to note just what an extraordinary cross-party consensus of French deputies has done - there was but a single dissenter, a boondocksman from peninsular Britanny. These people have decided - and such people only decide in their wisdom : that a cult is a sect is a cult is a sect...

How dare they? At the Citroen Church of Andre the Hydraulicist : I came close to buying an SM the other day - we recall what happened to the Panhardois, how we saw them off because they persistently failed to renew themselves. And as for the Simcadins - swallowed up by General Motors. When the French socialist deputy Philippe Vuilque spoke he appropriated what he opportunistically believed was the tongue of Jose Bove: ’The US administration is clap-infected by Scientology.’ Thus, cults are yet a further syphilitic American import: the McDos of the soul. Dumping manure in fast-food dumps is an admirable thing. Excising a levy on anglophone, i.e. Hollywood movies, is another : and that money goes straight to the native film industry so that it can mimic the Hollywood of the day before yesterday. But ascribing the bent to cultism to poor Dubya is simply wrongheaded. I mean, would that naif ****wit ever countenance anything in which money came merely a close second?

France’s de jure secularism is admirable. So too is its tolerance of woolheads who believe their belief. The other day I made my frequent pilgrimage (inapposite word) to Notre Dame de Fourviere in Lyon. Not out of some mariolatrous urge : I don’t own one pietistic instinct : but because of a perverse taste for architectural grossness which is also quenched by Vanbrugh (not Hawksmoor), Galilei, the Brussels Palace of Justice, early Stirling, Bofil in easternmost Paris. There, at this ludicrous basilica, was gathered all of Lyon’s Portuguese population. Swarming doesn’t start to get it. Beerguts, hobbleskirts, janitor overalls, wimples : the lot. Ten men carrying a paliasse with a two metre high virgin on top. I know: had the virgin been Ann Widdecombe it would have taken twelve men (I’m not that cruel).

What was this if not the public display of a cult?

But does the Church of Rome count as a cult? Well, no, apparently not.

So it’s ok then to believe in that load of established dreck but not in, say, the dictum of The Expiatory Temple of Colonic Irrigation. Sniff it, Mr Blunkett.

MooseRacer

should keep me quiet for a while UB

unclebuck

lol