The Judge RANTS!
Date: 15/02/09
And Yet More...
I swear I didn't deliberately go looking for it, but I've found further examples of what I was going on about last time.
This time it comes from the right and its self-styled 'libertarians' at a blog called Devil's Kitchen (no, I'm not going to provide a link - sod 'em).
First up is a translation of an article in the Welsh-language magazine Barn by one Rhys Williams. Williams is the Labour Party's candidate for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr in next year's imperial parliament elections. He's trying to overturn the substantial majority held by Plaid's Adam Price. As the election will be fought against the background of his party's catastrophic sucking-up to the rich and powerful and the increasing encroachment of the Secret State on every aspect of our lives, he hasn't really got a cat in hell's chance. Except that Carmarthen has long been - electorally - an odd place, and that Labour's tactics when they've been trying to regain it in the past have consisted solely of using the language issue to divide people. That this has worked more than once may be indicative of a fundamental flaw in the character of the people of that area; it's certainly indicative of a complete lack of scruple on the part of Labour, but that shouldn't come as a surprise.
Anyway, Williams follows on from the <ironic mode> noble <ironic mode off> traditions of his predecessors Roger 'The Cottager' Thomas and Dr Alan Wynne 'Irritating Squeak' Williams. So we have:
"I have...little patience for those who...mourn the decline of the Welsh language"
"...hypocritical self-pitying Welsh speakers."
"...small important people...use the language either to keep others out or to keep them in their place."
"...the ethos of the Freemasons is rampant..."
"...these Welsh people, collectively, use the Welsh language as a weapon...to make them second class citizens"
And so on, blah blah, yadda yadda. Nothing new here - just a Labour hack giving his prejudices free rein and waiting for people who actually do know what they're talking about to jump on him so he can proclaim his impending martyrdom.
The translation appears on Devil's Kitchen under the byline of one Simon Dyda (I'm sure it's not a pseudonym - his profile states that he has Polish ancestry), and is provided without any comment from him. That has not, as you would expect, precluded the regular readers of the blog (most if not all of whom are presumably on the libertarian right, otherwise they probably wouldn't be reading it) from remarking on it. A brief selection of their broad-minded musings follows:
"I regularly wonder why public money is wasted on supporting television and radio services for several languages (Welsh, the Gaelics, etc.) which have no utility as current mediums of communication..." ("Chris") [emphasis his]
"...petty minded, self-satisfied and self-righteous welsh nationals...you can't raise the money to run your little self-indulgence without financial input from the largest cash contributors - the English." (Anonymous)
"...smug hick children strutting and clucking 'round the Bay in a bubble of self satisfaction as they get their snouts in the trough of public sector non-jobs. Parasitic fucks feeding off the nipple of the English tax payer." ("pond life" - no, really)
"I am no supporter of this Elitism...the language is used as a stick against the 79% of the population who don't speak it - I don't see any future for it...I think the best thing that could happen to the Welsh language is that it is killed by an influx of business." (Deceangeli)
"Roll on 2013 when the EU grants to Wales disappear!" (Anonymous - presumably a different one)
A brief comment if you're in any doubt as to the viciousness of all this: replace the word 'Welsh' with the word 'Jew', the word 'black' or even the word 'homosexual', and see how comfortable you feel with that.
That's not the end of it, though. Following a link within the site, I find an article written by the pseudonymous 'Devil's Kitchen' itself. Things don't start promisingly, as the piece is entitled:
"Welsh is a piss poor language"
It doesn't improve, alas. The spark which set Mr/Ms Kitchen off was an interview with a Big Brother contestant. OK, hardly high-octane intellectual content, but Kitchen goes on to castigate the language on the grounds that the interviewee couldn't speak it very well and peppered her sentences with English words. How shocking! Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that she was trying to hold a conversation in her second language, Kitchie-poos nonetheless concludes:
"...what a piss-poor, half-arsed language Welsh is...[S]ee how many English words you can spot being lobbed in to make up for the deficiencies of Welsh."
It's not her native language, cunt! How's your French, Kitchy? Your German? Japanese? Navaho?
And then, of course, there are the comments. Sixty-odd of them. Most of them of the standard you would expect, viz.:
"Most welsh people I know think that this obstinate idea to make people learn welsh is silly, especially when people should be learning languages which will help them." ("Trixy")
"I thought it was just that the Welsh language didn't have words for modern things like 'lingerie'...and 'confidence'...and 'job'...." ("The Kusabi")
"Wales was never a country. Read your history books. It's just a county of England, like Yorkshire...I found myself wondering this morning whether it isn't the EU responsible in part for all this nationalism from worthless proto-countries which couldn't possibly support themselves. The EU gives money to regions with dead languages..." ("Soddball")
"...the giant fucking con that is the Welsh language.
All designed to keep a small group of pointless cunts in jobs...a subsidized club for the children of Welsh language teachers." ("Brian Ashton")
"Welsh is kept alive by a fucking pathetic bunch of inbred cunts who use it as a bizarre sort of old boys club." ("Keatonmask", who goes on to say that he loves Wales and he's proud to be Welsh. Glad you put us straight, butt...)
"...the left's non-stop promotion of extreme nationalism in the Celtic nations...strains of victimhood mixed with attention-seeking hypersensitivity" (Anonymous) (The Left? See my opening remarks. But then, it's a long time since Brit Labour could call itself 'left' without having to use a fire blanket on its nether garments...)
"the funding and supprt for the Welsh language (and the Cornish language) comes from EU satellite organisations and is designed to assist in breaking up the UK." ("Newmania" - who is a notorious troll at Liberal Conspiracy as well)
"...and all my kids had to learn it at school - which was a complete waste of time." ("pedantic git")
"...i`ve figured the locals know when you can`t speak welsh because whenever english walk into a shop they change straight to welsh...sign of ignorance." (another Anonymous - and I was wondering how long we'd have to wait for that one to pop up again)
"...if Welsh is not your first language in school your treated like some second class citizen...when you`ve been treated as i have here in Wales it makes you kind of bitter." (anonymous - in fact, the same one as last time.)
So there we have it. The same load of old balls that we've had hurled at us by the 'intellectuals' of the so-called Left also comes our way from the hard right.
(I've long considered what passes for 'libertarianism' in the Anglo-Saxon world as being fundamentally risible. It is the obverse side of the same dud coin as anarchism, but whereas it is possible to be a peaceable anarchist, 'libertarianism' seems to be nothing more than a cover story by which people who are sufficiently deluded to believe not only that the world is 'every man for himself', but that that is how it should be, can hide the savagery behind that view. It's neo-con capitalism with extra assault rifles, that's all.)
OK, so that's the 'left' and the right who think that our native language and culture are useless and should be left to rot: the former because they think that national identity stands in the way of the one-world all-together (and, of course, English-speaking) utopia they wish for in their most febrile dreams; the latter because they perceive it to have 'no commercial potential' and some public money gets spent on it - money which could better be used on such life-enhancing projects such as bailing out crooked bankers and covering the south east of England with runways.
Now, are there any 'liberals' passing through who want to take a swing at it as well? After all, we might as well collect the whole set... 
