A British citizen – which is to say, a victim of socialism – writes a letter to warn against state-provided ‘health care’. Just reading it might make you sick.

(The writer is Madeleine Westrop, who wrote Under the bed at Lambeth Palace, posted October 1, 2008.)

As it is long, we’ll be posting it in installments. 

Dear Americans,

I understand that many of you would like a Universal Healthcare System and I heard that some of you admire our National Health Service, the “NHS”, here in England.  I should say ‘sic’ when I say NHS because it is neither National (you get some medicines in some areas and not in others[1]); nor is  it healthy, nor  much of a service. 

My son has a condition which means that every now and again he will succumb to ordinary infections in an alarming way. He got tonsillitis a few days ago and, despite antibiotics, this became steadily worse until he had painful ulcers all over the back of his throat, on top of earache, fever, a runny tummy and a painful headache. We had to deal with this through our General Practitioner. In England we have to be referred for all treatment by our GPs and we are all registered with a GP practice. This was part of the original 1948 design of the sic NHS, and was a sop to the doctors who mostly opposed its setting up on the grounds that they would lose responsibility if the state controlled healthcare. The sic NHS is now a power sharing vehicle.

So,  on the coldest day of the year (minus 10, which is very cold for England), my GP said that she had done all she could for him and he must be seen by a hospital specialist in Ears, Noses and Throats.  Could I go to a private hospital just around the corner, I asked? No, I must come across town and pick up his notes and then drive to Selly Oak Hospital, go to entrance E4 and up to ward E5 where the emergency ENT doctor would be waiting for him. She  – the GP – did not know the name of the ENT doctor. I decided to forget the picking-up-notes bit. 

This is an interesting point. The National Programme for IT is meant to connect all GPs and hospitals. It is on a huge but vague billions[2] cost-overrun of  440-770%  and time overrun  of about 5 years.  I note that the Obama/Biden plan proposes a modification of existing data and reporting. You might well have the same crazy IT problems as we have. And over and above the expense, do you want the Government to know your health records?  These would include impertinent details such as your race and the fact you might have paid privately for something. The records are available to schools and social services too.  I do not know if they are available here to police or EU officials, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were. What I do know  is that the records will be inaccurate, possibly completely wrong – but that is a whole new story.

Anyway, I got to Selly Oak Hospital and actually found a last parking place (£2.90 for the first hour) and then we slithered through ice and snow all around the vast complex of buildings searching for E4, E5 or any ENT ward. The head porter, whom I met on my wanderings, denied such a place existed.  We did find some ENT type of place but the girl there with a perfectly blank face did not know if we were expected and although she said she would ask the doctor, never did. The porter passed us and suggested there was an E5 ward at another hospital, up the road. So we went to there, to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.  

 Mark Steyn writes about how ‘caring’ has destroyed Indian lives in Canada. Read the whole thing here. It says a lot that needs to be said about about welfare, aid, caring, and the whole sentimental self-indulgent  political philosophy of the liberal progressive multiculti left. 

A decade ago, Canadians and their government were "shocked" by TV images of the Innu community of Davis Inlet in Labrador, a shantytown whose inhabitants were snorting drugs, glue, gas and pretty much anything else that came their way. Having claimed to be "shocked," our rulers then claimed to "care."

So they decided to build the Innu a new town a few miles inland, with new homes with new heating systems and a new schoolhouse with all the newest accessories. The new town-Natuashish-cost taxpayers $152 million.

Two years after the resettlement of the Mushuau, let us turn to our good friends at the CBC for a progress report:

"Alcoholism and gas sniffing continue to be a problem for people living in Natuashish, two years after the Innu community was relocated from Davis Inlet. The community of about 700 has seen four suicides in the past few months, and drug and alcohol abuse is rampant, say local officials.

"Former Mushuau Chief Katie Rich says she has never seen anything like it before…Rich says children are going to school hungry because their parents are drunk or stoned…

"RCMP officers in Labrador agree with the assessment, saying alcohol-related problems in the community are worse than ever…"

At this point, let’s ask every reader who’s surprised by this to put up his or her hand.

Well, okay. You’re Western Standard readers. But let’s ask Toronto Star and Globe and Mail readers, and Maclean’s subscribers, and CBC viewers and listeners: how many of you impeccably liberal, "caring" Canadians stuffed to the gills with "da Canadian values" are truly, genuinely, honestly surprised by the results of your "caring"?

I thought as much. Now what are you going to do about it? Build another new town 10 miles down the road from Natuashish but spend $300 million this time, and then another 10 miles from that costing $600 million, and another for a billion, and another and another, secure in the knowledge that by the time you run out of vacant land in Labrador, the government will have been able to refurbish the original Davis Inlet trash heap for another two or three billion?

Gas-sniffing is not a traditional Innu activity. Before the first European settlers came, the Mushuau did not roam the tundra hunting for Chevy Silverados. That’s something the white man taught him. Or, to be more precise, the lazy, posturing Liberal establishment white man. And, if any of us propose trying anything different, the Liberal party white man and his cronies in the rotten band structure dismiss us as racist.

Remember a year or two back, when the papers were full of stories about the aggrieved alumni of residential schools? They were doing a grand job of suing Canada’s Catholic and Protestant churches into oblivion, a very small number of them for the usual excesses of randy clerics, but the overwhelming majority for the far vaguer offence of "cultural genocide." On closer inspection – which not a lot of guilt-ridden liberals could be bothered giving it – "cultural genocide" turned out to involve not genocide in the Sudanese, Rwandan or Holocaust meaning of the word but in the sense that generations of Canadian natives had been forced to learn about Queen Victoria, Shakespeare, Magna Carta, Sir Isaac Newton, etc. In other words, the kind of stuff which, back in the day when Lord Macaulay was writing his famous memo to Her Majesty’s Government on education for (east) Indians, it was felt that everyone needed to know in order to be able to function in the modern world. The (east) Indians still feel like this, which is why when you call up for tech support you wind up talking to Suresh or Rajiv.

Imagine if our own Indians had just, oh, two or three per cent of that business. Alas, they fell into the hands of a vile alliance between the ostentatious "carers" of Ottawa and a corrupt artificial form of "self-government." Residential schools aren’t "cultural genocide," but what’s happened to the Mushuau of Davis Inlet should surely qualify. They were hunters and trappers originally, like the first Frenchmen on this continent. But the pur laine Quebecer doesn’t do much trapping these days. He moved to Montreal’s village gai, settled down with a nice young MUC officer from Algeria, and has no desire to return to James Bay. The Mushuau were denied those kinds of choices. Their old culture died, but we "cared" about them so much that instead of embracing them as full, free citizens we’ve maintained them in an artificial government cocoon for four decades. The gas-sniffing adolescents of those "shocking" 1993 TV pictures are now gas-sniffing parents with wee little soon-to-be gas-sniffers of their own. And on it goes, the curse of Canadian compassion, unto to the next generation.

Consider the sums of money involved: $152 million for 700 people. That’s $217,142.85 for each man, woman or child. I’ve got a wife and three kids, so, had we been in Davis Inlet, that would have been $1,085,714.20 just for us. Imagine what you could do with that. Build a new house. Start a company. Hire some people. Invest in business opportunities. Get the kid an Ivy League education.

But the Innu don’t have to do any of these things. They don’t need to work, because the "caring" government pays them to lie around the house all day. And they don’t need to buy a house because property rights is some racist whitey racket so all the homes are communally owned. That $152-million new town was a one-off, but the regular payments aren’t so bad. In 2002, the local band council got $14 million just in federal funds. That’s $20,000 per – or, for me and my gang, a hundred grand a year to do nothing. The result is pretty much as you’d expect. Everyone cruises around in brand-new pickups on roads that go nowhere, and, although there’s no liquor outlet in Natuashish, when a town’s that flush with cash, there’s plenty of bootleggers prepared to provide the service: a 40-ounce bottle costs $300, and up to $800 on popular holidays. But, in a town where the government gives you $20,000 to do zip, it’s holiday season all year round…

 

 We greatly enjoy Ann Coulter’s wit, and share her conservatism and her contempt for the shamelessly leftist mainstream media and their toadying to Obama.  

A part of her latest column:

Months before network anchors were interrogating vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on the intricacies of foreign policy, here is how NBC’s Brian Williams mercilessly grilled presidential candidate Barack Obama: "What was it like for you last night, the part we couldn’t see, the flight to St. Paul with your wife, knowing what was awaiting?"

Twisting the knife he had just plunged into Obama, Williams followed up with what has come to be known as a "gotcha" question: "And you had to be thinking of your mother and your father." Sarah Palin was memorizing the last six kings of Swaziland for her media interviews, but Obama only needed to say something nice about his parents to be considered presidential material.

The media’s fawning over Obama knew no bounds, and yet, in the midst of the most incredible media conspiracy to turn this jug-eared clodhopper into some combination of Winston Churchill and a young Elvis, you were being a bore if you mentioned the liberal media. Oh surely we’ve exploded that old chestnut. … Look! Look, Obama just lit up another Marlboro! Geez, does smoking make you look cool, or what! Yeah, Obama!. 

Read it all here.

 Hugh Hewitt interviews Michael Oren in Townhall – an extract: 

Hewitt: In response to all of these arguments that Israel is using disproportionate force, since it’s going to be condemned for it anyway, you wrote, why shouldn’t Israel smash Hamas promptly and massively, and reap the benefits in terms of self-respect, deterrence, and a respite for its embattled citizens? Is there a calculation, is Israel holding back right now?  Oren: Well, Israel is always holding back. We have a very, very large army. We have many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of tanks and cannons and aircraft, and we’re using only a small fraction of that tonight in Gaza. We often get accused of using disproportionate force here, and that D-word appeared on the first day of the war. Force is only disproportionate if the army had achieved its goals and was still bombing Gaza. We haven’t achieved our goals yet. We have to use the requisite amount of force to try to end the bombing of our cities. And Israel also has invested very, very heavily in civil defense. It’s one of the reasons our casualties are so low. The Palestinians have not invested a dime in civil defense. They have no bomb shelters. They have no air raid sirens. And Israel probably shouldn’t be penalized for having invested so heavily in the safety of its citizens. So there’s that feeling here. Hewitt: There’s an argument made … that, look at the slaughter—you’ve got of hundreds of Palestinians versus a handful of Israelis killed. It’s got to be disproportionate. That’s from his articles. What do you respond to that?  Oren: My response is if you used that argument in World War II, America would have lost it. America had to use a massive amount of force to win the war. If it hadn’t used that force, it wouldn’t have won the war—and it was overwhelming force. There was no complaint about it, I think, among the American people at the time. The same thing is true here. We will use the amount of force that is necessary to stop rocket fire on our civilians….

1

Here’s what the 5th Dalai Lama ordered his commanders to do when putting down a rebellion in 1660:

Make the male lines like trees that have had their roots cut; make the female lines like brooks that have dried up in winter; make the children and grandchildren like eggs smashed against rocks; make the servants and followers like heaps of grass consumed by fire; make their dominion like a lamp whose oil has been exhausted; in short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.

This from a leader of that ‘nonviolent religion’ par excellence, Tibetan Buddhism? Yes, verily. They didn’t mess about, those guys, when they’d had had it up to here.

The quotation comes from an illuminating article in this month’s issue of Commentary magazine, Inventing Tibet, by Lydia Aran, in which she reveals that Tibetan Buddhism never had a tradition of nonviolence at all until the present Dalai Lama took over the idea from Ghandi, Tolstoy (from whom Ghandi got it), and Martin Luther King, Jr (who probably got it from Ghandi), and preached it along with other fashionable notions, such as concern with the environment, human rights, feminism, and ‘the rest of the amorphous agenda that informs the liberal Western conscience’.

Well worth reading, the whole thing.

 ‘Green Helmet Guy’ is still – or yet again – lugging about that same little corpse he carried for ‘fauxtographs’ after the Israeli raid on Qana in July, 2006. 

The media, such as Reuters, who love the cold-blooded mass-murderers of Hamas – including the terrorists’ main TV propaganda outlet, the BBC – are showing those old pictures, claiming this time that the poor kid was killed in the present IDF ground assault on Gaza. 

Read the full report here.

 A European socialist party actually begins to resent dhimmitude!

This from Canada Free Press:

Two weeks ago, the Netherlands’ biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch "tolerance." …

If judged on the standard scale of caution in dealing with cultural clashes and Muslims’ obligations to their new homes in Europe, the language of the Dutch position paper and Lilianne Ploumen, Labor’s chairperson, was  exceptional.

The paper said: "The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance."

Government and politicians had too long failed to acknowledge the feelings of "loss and estrangement" felt by Dutch society facing parallel communities that disregard its language, laws and customs.

From Cee Gee, who reviewed Richard Dawkins’s bad book on atheism for us (The God Delusion), we have received the following. We post it with a sigh for what it proves – that atheists can be as silly as believers. 

Atheists in Britain have placed posters on 800 buses which read: THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.

What a silly, woolly-headed muddle. What a waste of space. Not thought-provoking, merely provoking. Why "probably"? Why should God’s probable non-existence be grounds to stop worrying? Why should one stop worrying? Why should worrying preclude enjoyment of life? Are atheists happy chappies? Is the selling point of atheism its worry-free aspect, like maid service? 

Perhaps British atheists chose vapidity because of fears of outrage from adherents of the religion of peace, among others.

 

We invite readers to present alternative two-liners to advertise atheism in Britain, or elsewhere. Here are a few to start the ball rolling:

 

THERE’ S NO GOD. BUT SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS ARE WATCHING YOU. (Britain)

THERE’S NO GOD, SO THERE IS NO POINT IN BLOWING UP THIS BUS. (Britain)

NO GODS ALLOWED ON THIS BUS, EXCEPT FOR THE BLIND.

 Reuters reports:

By day, Awad al-Qiq was a respected science teacher and headmaster at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip. By night, Palestinian militants say, he built rockets for Islamic Jihad.

The Israeli air strike that killed the 33-year-old last week also laid bare his apparent double life and embarrassed a U.N. agency which has long had to rebuff Israeli accusations that it has aided and abetted guerrillas fighting the Jewish state.

In interviews with Reuters, students and colleagues, as well as U.N. officials, denied any knowledge of Qiq’s work with explosives. And his family denied he had any militant links at all, despite a profusion of Islamic Jihad posters at his home.

But militant leaders allied to the enclave’s ruling Hamas group hailed him as a martyr who led Islamic Jihad’s "engineering unit" – its bomb makers. They fired a salvo of improvised rockets into Israel in response to his death.

Qiq’s body was wrapped in an Islamic Jihad flag at his funeral, pictorial posters in his honour still bedeck his family home this week, and a handwritten notice posted on the metal gate at the entrance to the school declared that Qiq, "the chief leader of the engineering unit", would now find "paradise".

That poster was removed soon after Reuters visited the Rafah Prep Boys School, run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. Staff there said on Monday that UNRWA officials had told them not to discuss Qiq’s activities.

No one from the United Nations attended the funeral or has paid their respects to the family, relatives said, adding that Qiq’s widow and five children had heard nothing about a pension.

Spokesman Christopher Gunness said UNRWA, which spelled its teacher’s surname al-Geeg, was looking into the matter.

"We have a zero-tolerance policy towards politics and militant activities in our schools. Obviously, we are not the thought police and we cannot police people’s minds," he said.

To my certain personal knowledge it is a blatant lie that UNWRA does not ‘tolerate’ political activity in its schools. The last time I entered an UNRWA school evidence of its support for anti-Israel activity could not have been more evident, in text books, exercise books, posters, and other instruction materials. 

The Arabs have deliberately kept generations of their fellow Arabs, the ‘Palestinians’, in a condition of dependency, without ‘human rights’  or civil rights as a reproach to the conscience of Israelis and Westerners – having no conscience whatsoever themselves. And the United Nations has assisted them in this, with the creation and perpetuation of UNRWA, and so have the Western powers. Of course the Gazans  could have done more for themselves. When they were left functioning greenhouses worth billions of dollars by the departing Israelis, they preferred to smash them rather than use them. And it is not to be forgotten that they voted for Hamas to govern them. 

 J.G.Thayer writes on Commentary’s ‘contentions’ website:

As Israel continues its systemic dismantling of Hamas’s implements of terror (missiles, rockets, and Hamas operatives), we are treated once again to the standard conventional wisdom: this will drive Hamas to new heights of fury, Israel is doing precisely what Hamas wants, and this will merely inflame the Arab street.

Let’s take a look at those charges.

1) This will drive Hamas to new heights of fury. Is this even possible? Hamas  is an avowed terrorist organization that has used suicide bombers, rockets, mortars, snipers, kidnapping, and torture. It has frequently turned those tactics against fellow Palestinians as well as against Israel. Can they get much more furious?

2) Israel is doing precisely what Hamas wants them to do. No, folks, that’s called “spin.”  Hamas is NOT going to come out and say “Israel is succesfully visiting upon us overwhelming punishment, achieving a good number of its aims and taking out our important leaders.” Just before the attacks, Hamas was crowing about Israel’s ineffectiveness and how they had paralyzed the Jewish state with their rocket attacks.

Quite frankly, Hamas’s stated opinion of Israel’s response is utterly irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how things play out in the aftermath. If Hamas is weakened to the point where further attacks are lessened or eliminated, and Hamas’s grip on power is eased or destroyed, then the operation will be a success for Israel. That is not how it will be spun, of course, but that’s the objective reality.

3)  This will merely inflame the Arab street. It very well might., but one has to ask, “so what?”

“Inflamed” is a good description of the Arab street as is. They were “inflamed” over the Mohammed cartoons, they were “inflamed” over the bogus “Koran in a toilet” story Newsweekpeddled, they were “inflamed” over Theo Van Gogh’s film, they were “inflamed” over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they were “inflamed” by a whole host of  things. One time I distinctly remember the Arab street being happy instead of “inflamed” was on 9/11, when we saw images of people rejoicing and literally dancing in the streets.  So it seems that “inflaming the Arab street” might be a good indicator that you’re doing something right.

So far Israel has seriously degraded Hamas’s weapons, leadership, and infrastructure and trisected the Gaza Strip in its drive to cripple the terrorist group. Hamas has lost hundreds of fighters and tremendous stockpiles of weapons. Its ability to wage war against Israel is seriously impaired. That is the only result Israel need note.