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Ĉmeric
03-05-2009, 04:18 AM
Kennedy, Knight of the British Empire

The Kennedy dynasty has been called Camelot. But today, Senator Edward M. Kennedy became a knight.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown bestowed the distinction from the Queen on the ailing Mr. Kennedy during his address to a joint session of Congress this morning.

Mr. Brown described “Sir Edward Kennedy” as “one of your most distinguished senators, known in every continent, and a great friend.” He hailed the work of the Massachusetts Democrat on bringing peace to Northern Ireland and expanding access to healthcare and education.

“And for all those things, we owe a great debt to the life and courage of, Senator Edward Kennedy,” Mr. Brown said.

Mr. Brown said he called Mr. Kennedy to inform him of the honor Tuesday evening. Mr. Kennedy, who has spent the bulk of the winter working and recuperating at a rented home in Miami, did not attend the speech. He is expected to return to Washington by this weekend, and will be feted at a belated birthday tribute at the Kennedy Center Sunday.

“This honor is moving and personal,” Mr. Kennedy said Wednesday in a statement, “A reflection not only of my public life, but of things that profoundly matter to me as an individual. I accept this honor in the spirit in which it is given, with a continuing commitment to be a voice for the voiceless and for the shared ideals of freedom and fairness which are so fundamental to the character of our two countries.”

The Times of London explains that Mr. Kennedy cannot actually go by “Sir Ted,” because he is not a British subject, but rather he will have “K.B.E.,” for “Knight of the British Empire,” after his name.


http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/kennedy-knight-of-the-british-empire/?hp

Just why is he getting this honor?



Sir Ted Kennedy? The Queen will be pleased

The Queen has had to put up with a lot from this government – what with it virtually bankrupting the country, disregarding the countryside and sending her beloved armed forces off to fight in more wars than even the great Winston Churchill managed. But surely today's knighthood for Senator Ted Kennedy involves the gratuitous adding of insult to injury?

http://wa2.images.onesite.com/blogs.telegraph.co.uk/user/iain_martin/adams-kennedy.jpg?v=80000

Kennedy is gravely ill, which is terrible for him and his family. But just because he is close to death and a very good friend of Gordon Brown's is no reason to give him an honorary knighthood.

The Troubles should exclude the possibility: he gave succour, as others did in his family, to the Republican movement at a time when its representatives were murdering children with bombs in British town centres and killing British servicemen. Famously, one of those killed was Lord Mountbatten, uncle of the Duke of Edinburgh and mentor to the current Prince of Wales. Gerry Adams, Kennedy's friend, had this to say on the subject:

'The IRA gave clear reasons for the execution. I think it is unfortunate that anyone has to be killed, but the furor created by Mountbatten's death showed up the hypocritical attitude of the media establishment. As a member of the House of Lords, Mountbatten was an emotional figure in both British and Irish politics. What the IRA did to him is what Mountbatten had been doing all his life to other people; and with his war record I don't think he could have objected to dying in what was clearly a war situation. He knew the danger involved in coming to this country. In my opinion, the IRA achieved its objective: people started paying attention to what was happening in Ireland."

Thank goodness the bombings here and in Ulster are over; and even if the peace which has replaced the Troubles is imperfect at least it is peace. But what possible claim can Kennedy have on an honour from the British state? The answer seems to be that in some vague way he encouraged the murderers to stop murdering. Did he? We’ll have to wait for the full historical record. But shouldn’t that have been what any democratic politician of influence worthy of the name would argue for as a matter of course? It shouldn’t command a special prize from our monarch.

Ĉmeric
03-05-2009, 04:29 AM
http://www.smokymtnmaxx.com/sitestuff/ted-kennedy.jpg
http://naughtrelevant.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/fat-ted-kennedy.jpg
http://guntotingliberal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/osamaobama2.jpg
http://www.tinyvital.com/images/blogmisc/TedKennedyPlans.jpg

Beorn
03-05-2009, 03:16 PM
You can take comfort in the knowledge that titles are doled out by Buckingham palace these days, as if they were cakes at a tea-party.

stormlord
03-05-2009, 05:00 PM
and with his war record I don't think he could have objected to dying in what was clearly a war situation.

how about the two fifteen year old boys, one of whom was Irish, and the 83 year old woman who were with him, could he object to that Adams, you fucking coward? GRRR! Just shows how pathetically neutered our security forces have become that they havn't offed that little prick; when it came to Ireland they used to know how to get the job done.

Beorn
03-07-2009, 01:38 AM
Why do we honour those who loathe Britain? (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1160129/STEPHEN-GLOVER-Why-honour-loathe-Britain.html)


Twice this week I have been reminded of a peculiar quality of the British. We love to praise, honour and reward those who don't really like us - who may indeed hate us.
While Gordon Brown was sweet-talking the Americans, it was announced that an honorary knighthood is being conferred on 77-year-old Senator Edward Kennedy, who is seriously ill with a brain tumour.
One might suppose that Mr Kennedy - who was notoriously involved in the terrible death of Mary Jo Kopechne - was an old friend of this country. But he isn't.


During the Seventies he portrayed the British role in Northern Ireland as one of virtual occupation, and even suggested that the majority Protestant population be encouraged to 'return' to Britain.
He is certainly a chip off the old block. His father, Joe, was an arch appeaser while he was American ambassador to London during the early days of World War II, believing that Hitler was bound to win, and that 'democracy was finished' here.

Ted Kennedy is a rare visitor to our shores and probably doesn't think about us very much.
I have been even more struck by the row concerning the 91-year-old historian Eric Hobsbawm, who has lived in this country since 1933.

Mr Hobsbawm is upset because he has been denied access to his own MI5 file, which he had applied to see under the Data Protection Act. This refusal has been described in various quarters as an outrage - further proof, if any were needed, that we live in a police state.
Listening to the row as it has been explained on the BBC, or reading about it in our more progressive newspapers, one might suppose that Mr Hobsbawm was a kindly old gentleman who would never harm a flea.

A panegyric by Seumas Milne in The Guardian newspaper called him Britain's 'greatest living historian'. He is almost invariably so described.
Mr Milne reminded his readers that his hero is a Companion of Honour. Only 45 Britons hold this distinguished award, whose motto is: 'In action faithful and in honour clear.'
How could MI5 possibly keep a file from such a man? Why, indeed, had it opened one in the first place? In a long list of virtues, Mr Milne mentioned that Mr Hobsbawm is also a 'veteran of the last mass anti-Nazi demonstration in Berlin before Hitler came to power in 1933'.
So he is not only a Companion of Honour, a member of the British Academy and, yes, this country's greatest living historian. He has also personally grappled with the Fascists.

And this brilliant and saintly man is being denied his rights by MI5 which, Mr Milne informs us, has been involved in ' antidemocratic skulduggery' in the past 'against non-violent political movements'.
It all sounds a very bad business. One is almost ashamed to be British. And yet the truth about Mr Hobsbawm is almost the exact opposite of what has been stated.

For most of his adult life Mr Hobsbawm supported the Soviet Union, whose methods made MI5 look like a bunch of amateurs.
It is not even true that he always opposed fascism. In 1939 he co-wrote a pamphlet justifying, from a communist standpoint, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
Only after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 did the Nazis revert to being the bad guys.

Eric Hobsbawm joined the Communist Party in 1936 and remained a member for some 50 years. As an intelligent young man with a social conscience in that deeply troubled decade, he did not have to become a communist. He could have been a social democrat, but he chose Joseph Stalin instead, and stuck with him.

He either turned a blind eye to Soviet atrocities, or justified them. He defended, albeit with some hand-wringing, the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956. He deprecated Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's totalitarian methods. Long after decent fellow communists had disowned Soviet communism, Mr Hobsbawm refused to condemn it.

In his book On History, published in 1997, he wrote: 'Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even minimal, use of force was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.' Somehow, he had forgotten about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The British security services would have been criminally irresponsible not to have kept copious records on Eric Hobsbawm. Although there is no evidence that he ever worked directly for the Soviet Union, he continued to justify and defend it throughout the several decades when it was this country's enemy.

You don't need an MI5 file to know any of this. Hobsbawm admits to much of it in his 2002 autobiography, Interesting Times, in which he shows little affection for his adopted country despite the wonderful opportunities he has been offered here.
He came to Britain after the deaths of his father, a British citizen, and his mother, in Vienna.
At one point he writes with chilling, and repulsive, detachment: 'I refused all contact with the suburban petty bourgeoisie, which I naturally regarded with contempt.'

There are other self-incriminating writings and public statements. Most shocking among them, perhaps, was his response to a question put to him on BBC2's Late Show by Michael Ignatieff in 1994.
Asked whether 'the radiant tomorrow' promised by Stalin would have justified 'the loss of 15 to 20 million people', Mr Hobsbawm simply replied: 'Yes.'
The old Soviet sympathiser is honest in one sense. He does not attempt to deny his past beliefs and affiliations.

To a large extent he does not even repudiate them now. He has never apologised for having championed one of the nastiest regimes in human history - one that rivalled Nazi Germany in its brutality, and in some respects surpassed it.
There is obviously nothing wrong with historians holding Left-wing views - so long as they do not try to outlaw fellow historians who have Right-wing ones.

The objection to Eric Hobsbawm is not that he is Left-wing. It is that he plumped for Stalin when there were already ample reports in the West of the millions of people annihilated in the Terror.
It is that he stuck with Soviet communism long after World War II, and would not condemn it even when the Hungarian revolution was savagely crushed.
Yet despite all this - despite his well-publicised support for an inhumane regime - he is widely treated as a grand, as well as a delightful, old man, whose views deserve to be venerated.

I do not particularly have in mind journalists such as Seumas Milne, an intellectual Wykehamist Left-winger who might himself have walked out of the Thirties, and shares many of Hobsbawm's political beliefs. I am thinking more of the mildly Leftist or supposedly 'liberal' types who work for our progressive newspapers and the BBC.

Billed as Britain's greatest living historian, an accolade with which many of his peers would quarrel, Hobsbawm is feted by the BBC.
A few months ago he was accorded a lengthy interview on Radio 4's Today programme. He was allowed to maunder on about the 'incredibly unstable' nature of modern capitalism and, encouraged by a reverential Ed Stourton, digressed on to the failures of globalisation which Karl Marx had predicted.
Stourton, in awe, dared not ask the obvious question, which was whether, for all its imperfections and recent excesses, global capitalism does not produce a lot more wealth for many more people than Soviet communism ever did - as well as, incidentally, respecting the rule of law.

Nor did he think of asking why Hobsbawm had been such an indefatigable supporter of that benighted regime.
Why do liberal-minded journalists who would normally abhor the excesses of Soviet communism spare a man who was associated with them - and not only spare but often venerate him?
Ignorance cannot be the explanation, as Mr Hobsbawm's views are so well known. It cannot be a result of good manners, since they would not be polite to a historian who had defended fascism.
The fact is that, however much these liberals may deprecate Soviet communism, they can't help indulging its apologists.

There is a lack of imagination on the part of these enlightened media folk, who cannot easily conceive of how a kindly looking and apparently civilised gentleman could really have supported a monster like Stalin.
He has described himself as 'an accepted member of the official British cultural establishment', and that is how he appears.

This gentle-seeming, ruminative soul has been a determined servant of the communist cause until recent times. No one doubts he is a considerable historian - if he were not, he would not have been so powerful a figure.
Marxist analysis is fundamental to his work. For example, Primitive Rebels, published in 1959, presents 19th-century Sicilian bandits as victims of an oppressive civilisation.

In The Age Of Extremes (1994), he is sometimes not so much the Marxist historian at work as the Soviet one. He underplays the Soviet attack on Finland in 1939 and 1940 (which he had defended at the time in a pamphlet) with the observation that it 'pushed the Russian frontiers a little further away from Leningrad'.

Hobsbawm omits any reference in this book to the massacre by Soviet secret police of more than 4,000 Polish soldiers at Katyn in 1940. He describes the suppression of the Warsaw uprising in 1944 as 'the penalty of premature uprisings', without mentioning that Stalin left the bourgeois Polish Home Army to its fate.
The cause has also been promoted during his long career in academe. In the history department of Birkbeck College, London, which he dominated for many years, Hobsbawm cultivated a nest of Leftists. He remains President of Birkbeck.

One protege there was Mark Mazower, now a Left-wing professor of history at Columbia University in New York. Another close colleague was the similarly inclined Richard Evans, who has gone on to become regius professor of history at Cambridge.
With Richard Evans and Sir Keith Thomas, a former president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Hobsbawm has been a leading light behind the annual Wolfson History Prize.
As a member of the British Academy since 1976, he has been influential in its distribution of awards and research grants to historians.

It is a two-way process, and honours and prizes have been showered upon him. In 2003 he won the Balzan Prize for European History, worth one million Swiss francs or, at the then exchange rate, £500,000. The Leftist Sir Keith Thomas is on the board that gave him the prize.
Whether or not Eric Hobsbawm is 'Britain's leading historian', he is undoubtedly one of its most influential in terms of patronage.
His colleagues are aware of his record as a long-term Soviet apologist and yet, far from impeding him, it seems only to have propelled him towards greater success and eminence.

In 1998, Tony Blair - in what one can only presume was a desperate attempt to promote someone from the Left - made him a Companion of Honour. Or was it simply a reward for the work Hobsbawm's daughter Julia did in helping New Labour's PR campaign?

One may wonder why Hobsbawm should seek an honour from a country for which he has never shown much affection, and whose interests he undermined during the Cold War through his support for the Soviet Union.
I suppose that in his mind it must represent a final victory.
Like one of those deep-sea fish which blends into the background so as to become indistinguishable to predators and prey alike, Eric Hobsbawm has so adapted to the customs and conventions of the British Establishment that he appears to have become part of it.
But in his heart he probably retains a detachment, as well as a sense of disbelief that his adopted country should be so unconcerned about his past allegiances.

His demand to see his MI5 file is an amazing piece of chutzpah. He is in effect suggesting that the security services had no right to keep tabs on him.

The people who are supposedly charged with defending the safety of this realm are represented as dangerous outsiders while he, who endorsed this country's enemy, is a persecuted victim.

It would be as pointless to demand that he be stripped of his Companion of Honour as it would be to ask Gordon Brown to think again about Senator Kennedy's honorary knighthood. New Labour has embraced both these ghastly men with open eyes.
Let's hope, though, that MI5 is not as indulgent and muddle-headed as the rest of the British Establishment, and that when the file is eventually released it will judge Eric Hobsbawm for what he has been - a man who excused or ignored the worst human cruelties ever perpetrated by man and, in his heart at least, betrayed the country that has nurtured him.