All I want for Christmas...

Is John Kampfner's "Freedom for Sale: How we Made Money and Lost Our Liberty". Why?

My new book tackles the issue head on. I look at eight countries, four notionally authoritarian – Singapore, China, Russia and the UAE – and four notionally democratic, India, Italy, the UK and the United States. My central thesis is that people around the world, whatever their different cultures or circumstances, have been willing over the past 20 years of globalised glut to trade certain freedoms in return for the promise of either prosperity or security. We have elevated private freedoms, especially the freedom to earn and spend money, over public freedoms, such as democratic participation and accountability and free expression. I call the thirst for material comfort the ultimate anaesthetic for the brain.

(John Kampfner: Independent "Liberal values have never been more important - or less popular")

I've always said the difference between the British govenment and the Chinese government is that the Chinese government is more honest about its goals. I suppose we'll see what Mr. Kampfner thinks about it.

Fascism and Anti-Fascism

The entire world has moved a little towards the right, in the Middle East with women's rights, in the US with the various Christian movements "healing" homosexuals or promoting abstinance over condoms. In the recent European Union Parilament election, a number of far-right groups were voted in, including the British National Party, the BNP.

On paper, the BNP opposes immigration, yet is known throughout the UK as being racist. While the BNP rejects the term racist, it has not stopped people from applying the word to them.

Britain seems to think that they have Freedom of Speech. Ask any everyday Briton if they have freedom of speech, and they'll say yes. On bulliten boards and newspaper editorial pages expect to see it brandied about like a bronze star in a room full of vets. What with state-run BBC and the proliferation of "red-top" tabloid "newspapers", this can be debated in the first. The BNP, however, brings out an entirely different side.

The BNP recently had a national conference in Derbyshire (the middle of England, symbolic as Kansas is). This made people mad. And when people get mad, apparently they protest.

"We will not be intimidated" says Red White and Blue Organisers (Belper News)

Arrests as BNP Protesters Gather (Press Association)

Handful of protesters arrested at 1,500-strong rally against annual Red, White and Blue gathering in Derbyshire village (Guardian)

Protesters arrested at BNP rally: A total of 19 people have been arrested after around 1,500 anti-fascist demonstrators joined a protest march near the site of a BNP festival. (Telegraph)

They've even stopped an American from entering the UK to join in the "festivities". They called him "extremist" and "white supremcist".

An extreme group is voted into office, and then holds a national conference exercising their "freedom of speech" which attracts a large number of violent people protesting against fascism, defined as "A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship". Sounds like the General Characteristics of Fascism seem to apply to many people.