We're cheering on a football crowd with AK-47s, who could be worse than Gaddafi



The moment has come to admit that I loathe the Arab Spring and almost everything about it.

It looks to me pretty much like a football crowd armed with AK-47s and bazookas, with the added ingredient of Islamic militancy. Why am I expected to like it?

For we are all supposed to approve of it. Every media outlet, every politician, every church pulpit, treats it as an unmixed Good Thing.



Gunfire: From celebratory shots to random firing, the battles raged and were terrifying

Not me. I look at these wild characters in baseball caps and tracksuit bottoms blasting ammunition into the sky (often killing or injuring innocents far away, but they don’t care) and I am mainly thankful that they are a long way off.

I suppose it is possible that this lot will miraculously create a law-governed democracy with freedom of speech and conscience. But I somehow shan’t be surprised if they don’t.

Just because existing regimes are bad, it does not follow that their replacements will be any better. The world has known this since the French Revolution of 1789, when bliss and joy turned to mass murder and dictatorship in a matter of months.

The test of any revolution comes not as the tyrant falls, but two or three years later, when the new rulers have shown us what they are really like. Power can be given (not often) or taken, and shared out in different ways. But it never ceases to exist.



Libyan rebels seize boxes of ammunition hidden underground by Kadhafi's forces in the al-Maser forest

Egypt’s upheaval has already begun to go bad. Libya’s has been plastered with danger signs from the start. The anti-Gaddafi rebels are an incompetent and fractious mess. They have already murdered one of their own leaders.

And – I think it very wrong that this aspect is played down so much – their victory would never have happened without Nato providing them with an air force, as it did for the equally suspect Kosovo Liberation Army in the early days of Blair.

We have given them the military gifts of cool self-discipline, long training and competence which we ought to reserve for ourselves and for protecting our own freedom and independence. If they don’t possess them, I don’t think they deserve to rule a country.

Doomed leader: Gaddafi

The official pretext, that we are ‘intervening to protect civilians’, is lying hogwash and should be laughed at every time it is used. In the past few days – according to reliable reports – Libya’s rebels have been guilty of indiscriminate shooting into civilian areas and the brutal and arbitrary arrests of suspected opponents.

It is false to claim, as some instantly will, that by saying this I am defending Colonel Gaddafi. I am not. He is indefensible.



The questions are these: Will what follows be better? Will the burned, bandaged bodies, the crammed morgues and the hospital wards full of stench, screams and groans have been worthwhile? Were we right to take sides?

See you in Tripoli: Libyan rebels gather at the Bab al-Aziziya compound

Here are some problems for the cheerleaders of this event, most of them modern Left- liberals. The savage regimes that are now falling are the direct result of the destruction of the empires of Europe. America, which encouraged this, quietly hung on to its own large land empire. So did the USSR.

Fallen: The golden fist has been pulled down

These campaigners for ‘colonial freedom’ argued – I recall them doing it – that it didn’t matter what sort of regimes arose when independence came. What mattered was that they would be free from us. That ‘freedom’ led directly to Colonel Gaddafi.

True, Europe’s empires were often violent and cruel, though ours was generally better than the others. And they were frequently corrupt, though again ours was cleaner than the ¬others. But their misdeeds were petty set beside those of most of the newly ‘free’ countries of Africa and the Middle East.

Now it is the very same Left-liberals who are most set on using bombs and sanctions to overthrow the states they were so keen on. How strange that, more than half a century after the Suez bungle finished us as a Mediterranean power, British military force is now in action again in North Africa, bolstering a farcical yet sinister army in pick-up trucks whose aims we don’t even know.

Violence and bad language – is that really the best we can offer children of 12?



I was beguiled into seeing the new film Super 8 by enthusiastic reviews. It was suggested that it was the new ‘ET’, a rite- of-passage drama about an unhappy boy discovering important truths through contact with an alien.

I really should have known better. I should also have known that a ‘12A’ rating doesn’t mean what someone of my generation might think it means.

Littered with the s-word: Kyle Chandler and Joel Courtney on Super 8

Super 8 seemed to me to be needlessly violent, frightening and noisy, with many moments at which a 12-year-old might want to hide behind the seat or look away.



Even the train crash was overdone, while being less impressive than the better and more believable one in The Fugitive. There’s also a scene that makes a joke out of the brain-wrecking, indeed life-wrecking drug cannabis, probably more dangerous to teenagers than to any other part of the population.

Its rating only emphasises the complete uselessness of our film classification system, which seems to think that really rather young children should be able to see ‘moderate violence’, ‘occasional’ gore, ‘brief indications’ of sexual violence and ‘disturbing sequences’ and hear the f-word spoken, provided these things are not frequent or sustained.

The s-word, used like punctuation in Super 8, is apparently unrestricted now.

‘Infrequent use of very mild bad language’, as they call it, is now permitted even by the rare ‘U’ classification. I know the s-word also appears in ET, and I think it shouldn’t. Plenty of children are still brought up not to use it.

And ‘realism’ – usually advanced as the case for this sort of thing – isn’t an argument in a film in which an alien comes to stay in a suburban house.

Like, hello? If we can be unrealistic about a telepathic extraterrestrial in the wardrobe, and airborne pushbikes, then we can be unrealistic about the s-word, too, can’t we?



Good clean fun: E.T was released in 1982

But even with this fault, ET is a far gentler and more appealing film – and a far better one – than Super 8. And it is sad that in the 20-odd years between them, our idea of what it is suitable for children to see and hear has changed so much.



The education con is collapsing at last



Britain's disastrous education establishment are at last being found out. They said history was being properly taught, but the truth is now revealed – fewer than 30 per cent of comprehensive pupils in England and Wales study it at all.



They say the GCSE is a good exam. But now a distinguished private school head has confessed (after years of pretending otherwise) that it is ‘the worst exam of its kind in the world’.

