Only by reading some of the letters published on this page can one discover how many disagreeable fools read this newspaper. How to get rid of them, asks Kevin Myers
One way might be to put up its cover-price, but then lots of decent poor people would suffer. Another is to insist on an IQ test before purchase. The third is a sneer-test. If witless, morally superior sneering comes naturally to you, particularly at the expense of the US and Britain, then you should be barred from buying this newspaper or writing to Madam.
I'm not talking about people opposed to US policy. They, after all, are clearly in the majority. I'm talking about those who seem to rejoice in American and British discomfort. As for the war, I am in a rapidly dwindling minority who still backs the coalition. Soon we will be able to fit in phone box. Next, I might be phoning alone: but I will be there.
However, regardless of all else, we are all on the move. Do you understand this? The shots in Sarajevo have been fired yet again. An old order has perished, and God knows what awaits us now.
To be sure, Pat Rabbitte is not one of the professional US-ophobic sneerers described above. Indeed, I rather admire him as one of the few genuine conviction-politicians in the Dáil, though I invariably disagree with him. He recently and predictably condemned US foreign policy towards Iraq with the ritual condemnation of Government "facilitation", which presumably means Shannon. However, he did not say what the Government could or should do to thwart US policy; perhaps because he realises there is nothing else we can do.
So is that it? We're going to clobber the mighty elephant that is the US with the blade of grass that is Shannon, and thereby bring US foreign policy to its pachydermal knees? Or are we going to wake up, to accept that history is being made, right now, and that it's time for us to smell the breeze and work out where our national interests lie?
Do we want to align ourselves with Germany and France? The first declared that it would oppose a US-led war against Iraq, regardless of whether or not it was authorised by the UN. The worthless worm Chirac declared that France would veto a second motion against Iraq in the security council, regardless of the circumstances. Both countries objectively thus aligned themselves with Saddam. And France's foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, has said he has no preference as to who wins this tragic war.
Thus this new Frankish alliance is unable to detect a difference between the US, the world's greatest democracy and Iraq, its most bloodthirsty tyranny. I wonder: is it coincidental that the Frankish states are slaves to statism, with high taxes, large bureaucracies and apparently unshakeable stagnation? Moreover, do we actually want to ally ourselves with such an empire? Maybe you do. I don't.
Pat Rabbitte is right when he identified a powerful cabal of powerful US government foreign policy advisers. They are revolutionaries, and like generations of revolutionaries before them, most of them - Perle, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Dobriansky - are Jewish. No doubt the millennial tradition in Judaism is partly responsible for this.
Whatever the reason, I instinctively dislike revolutions: they are nasty, dangerous things. But this revolution is now underway, and since we are powerless to stop it, the question must be: which side of the revolution are we to be on?
Pat Rabbitte wrote of the revolutionaries' agenda: "There is nothing here about commitment to multilateralism, to the UN, to the principles of international law, to the institutions and habits of global governance, and so." Spot on. The very nub of the matter. The cabal knows a dead body when it sees one. Multilateralism, the UN, "international law" - whatever that was - and "global governance" - whatever that was also: they all died with the Muslims of Srebenice and Kosovo, they expired in the hecatombs of Rwanda, they perished in the abject failure to make Saddam comply with countless UN resolutions. They were finished off when Germany said it would oppose any UN vote authorising war on Iraq, no matter what, and when France insisted it would veto war, no matter what.
It's now clear that what kept the UN together was the dynamic of the USSR-US confrontation. And it's no coincidence that the former subject territories of the Soviet Union are now aligning with the US: nor that the fault-line across the world seems to include in the one camp the prime democratic victors of the second World War, countries which have the English language, common law and democracy in common.
Maybe that is not the true fault-line in the shifting of these tectonic plates: maybe another, unsuspected one might soon emerge.
But, regardless, the old order is as dead as the Hapsburg Empire. The United Nations, where Libya heads the Committee on Human Rights, and Iraq is in charge of the Global Disarmament Committee, is now just a few big buildings and some very large expense accounts.
The European Union as a political project is also now dead as doornails.
Indeed, it is hard to say what international institutions will survive the present subterranean collisions. So letter-writers can sneer as the tectonic plates slide over the globe, throwing up new mountain ranges, and laying low old empires; much as Mrs Mulcahy in Dingle has a low opinion of the Antarctic, and Lord above, you should hear her on Halley's Comet.