Forget planes and cars: beginner’s guide to travelling by bike
Courtney Cervantes, lonelyplanet.comEver thought that self-powered metal thing in your garage – aka your bike – could take you around the world? Because it can! You don’t have to be a world-class athlete to go from strolling through your neighbourhood to pedalling the roads of…
The mechanism of such neutralisation was best formulated back in 1938 by Robert Brasillach, the French fascist intellectual, who saw himself as a “moderate” antisemite and invented the formula of reasonable antisemitism. “We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; … We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organise any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual antisemitism is to organise a reasonable antisemitism.”
Richard Dawkins has contacted the Guardian to strongly deny that he compared Roman Catholics to Nazis, rather he said that Hitler was a Roman Catholic. Here is a longer version of his speech, which has been edited by the Guardian subject to normal editorial constraints.
Should Joseph Ratzinger have been welcomed with all the pomp and ceremony due to a head of state? No. As Geoffrey Robertson has shown in The Case of the Pope, the Holy See’s claim to statehood is founded on a Faustian deal in which Benito Mussolini handed over 1.2 square miles of central Rome in exchange for church support of his fascist regime. Our government chose the occasion of the pope’s visit to announce their intention to “do God”. As a friend remarked to me, presumably we should expect the imminent handover of Hyde Park to the Vatican, to clinch the deal?
Should Ratzinger, then, be welcomed as the head of a church? By all means, if individual Catholics wish to overlook his many transgressions and lay out the red carpet for his designer red shoes, let them do so. But don’t ask the rest of us to pay. Don’t ask the British taxpayer to subsidise the propaganda mission of an institution whose wealth is measured in the tens of billions: wealth for which the phrase “ill-gotten” might have been specifically coined. And spare us the nauseating spectacle of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and assorted lord lieutenants and other dignitaries cringing and fawning sycophantically all over him as though he were somebody we should respect.
