Groupthink factory?

I was at a meeting in Dublin last night – publicly advertised. The Establishment’s media would have been welcome to report every word uttered had they been at all interested. They probably were but reporting it would not have served their groupthink agenda. So they were not there – because it was an Iona Institute event, addressed by one of the thorns in their side, the redoubtable John Waters.
Waters’ subject was how, in Ireland today, debate on many of the most important issues has been brought to a virtual halt.
He gave multiple illustrations of how so-called ‘liberal’ assumptions are almost entirely unquestioned and those who do question them are demonised. The result of all this, he said, was the drastic reduction of the range of opinions ‘respectable’ people are allowed to hold. If they do not hold what the ‘liberal intelligentsia’ consensus holds they are expected to be silent.
We saw this in last year’s marriage referendum in Ireland when the nearly three-quarters of a million people who voted against redefining marriage, and with it human sexuality, were practically invisible in the referendum debate. The ‘Yes’ side, Waters said, almost completely controlled the public space. The media organisations were given over to media celebrities who shamelessly campaigned for one side when their professional and civic role should have been to present a balanced account of the arguments from both sides.
In the Q and A following the lecture a speaker asked Waters whether or not we should be paying attention to the Bilderberg meeting currently in progress in Dresden. The impression given by his answer was that he considered that particular phenomenon as a symptom of our predicament rather than a cause. Head on confrontation with that kind of thing was unlikely to be productive of any useful result.
Speaking the truth, loudly and clearly, constantly, was the way to make progress. Quoting Joseph Ratzinger he said “the truth always has a future.” Go on, and be proud going on, he added.
Coincidentally, in a post this morning on the website, The Conversation, Matthew Parker, Leicester University’s Professor of Organisation and Culture raises the question of Bilderberg. Like Waters, Parker sees the whole project as just another reinforcement of ‘groupthink’. Conspiracy? Yes and no.
Conspiracy theorists give conspiracy theories a bad name, he says

Conspiracies do exist, and this is one of them. Politics, at this sort of elite level, is precisely a conspiracy in the sense that Adam Smith meant it. When these people gather once a year, they do not engage in withering self-criticism, but instead reinforce the assumptions that they collectively make about the best sort of economic and political order. This is exactly the sort of process that the psychologist Irving Janis described as “groupthink”, where dissent is marginalised and consensus amplified.
If the participants at Bilderberg really want to explore global challenges, talking to each other is the last thing that they should be doing. We already know that the powerful organise the world for us – it is common knowledge. What Bilderberg exposes is that what goes on at endless summits and conferences across the globe is a mountain of smugness that is much more frightening than anoraks muttering about the Illuminati.

Adam Smith’s astute observation was that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
But taking Waters’ approach is the best line of defence against this – the truth, boldly proclaimed. The blindness induced by the crass and irrational sentimentality which the Irish public is being served up by its politically correct establishment will be temporary. It will pass if the truth is spoken clearly and often enough, even if it is by just a few brave souls like John Waters.

Ireland is not a particularly radical country. Despite its much lauded passing of a referendum last year which opened the institution of marriage to homosexual couples, its electorate has shown itself to be a fairly conservative one. That vote was passed more on a wave of sentiment cooked up by a powerfully funded lobby and a notoriously biased media rather than by any deeply thought-out radicalism. The same electorate in a general election this year thrashed its socialist Labour Party and sent its fellow-travelling coalition partners, the Fine Gael Party, limping back into parliament. It took it longer to form a makeshift minority government than on any other occasion in the history of the state.

The frustrating thing about Ireland is that while it is at heart conservative, it is pathologically ashamed of being so. It has no popular conservative media voices, no political party which is not terrified of being called conservative, and the left-wing minority in the country have organised themselves in the media so that conservative voices are immediately either mocked or intimidated when they speak. 

A few voices are heard in the media which question this unthinking subservience to the left in Irish public opinion and one of them was heard this weekend in the Sunday Independent. This was the voice of columnist Eilis O’Hanlon writing about Ireland’s strange attitude to the United States of America.

Donald Trump is certainly an unusual presidential candidate – if he succeeds in becoming the Republican choice. His speeches and comments have on occasion, on many occasions, appeared to defy rational analysis. But that defiance bears no comparison to the irrationality of the fear and ill-boding generated by the response to his candidacy. Nowhere is this more prevalent that in Ireland.

O’Hanlon writes of the rising tide of silliness which has allowed Salon magazine to compare the growing popularity of Trump to that of Hitler in the Weimar Republic, and connects this to an artificial row in Ireland last week around whether government ministers would or should meet him when he visits his golf club at Doonbeg in Co. Clare in a few weeks. 

She is not surprised by any of this. Why not? She explains:

She writes that Richard Boyd Barrett, leftest of the leftists, speaking in the Dail on the issue, had hit on the one topic that tickles the fancy of every middle-class social justice warrior – the iniquity of the United States “war machine”. They’re as obsessed with America as Sinn Fein is with the Brits, and even they’ve toned down the rhetoric these days, having learned that it doesn’t travel outside the republican heartland. She continues:

The Left doesn’t need to bother, because, as Barrett said in the Dail: “Everybody recognises what a dangerous man Donald Trump is.”

Well, obviously not everybody, or he wouldn’t be running neck-and-neck with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the polls, but certainly everybody who matters in Irish public opinion.

People in this country have always had an innate bias towards democratic presidents, from John Kennedy onwards. If we had a vote, Hillary would be the runaway winner.

It’s still worth examining how “dangerous” Donald Trump really is, however. Taking 1993, the year that Mrs Clinton’s husband first took office, as a base, what dangerous things has Donald Trump done in the intervening years?

Let’s see. He presented The Apprentice. He bought, and later sold, the Miss Universe organisation. He built Trump Tower. He launched Trump Ice bottled water. He bought some golf courses. He was inducted into the World Wrestling Federation Hall of Fame. He appeared on Sex And The City.

In the same period, for her part, Hillary Clinton was fully supportive at her husband’s side as he launched bombing raids in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yugoslavia; as a senator, she backed war in Afghanistan and Iraq; as Secretary of State under President Obama, she pushed hard for the so-called “Afghanistan surge” and was a key mover for the failed US intervention in Libya which exacerbated the migrant tragedy in the Mediterranean.

Whether she was right or wrong to take these positions is not the point (Clinton herself later said that her support for the Iraq War was a mistake). The point is that Hillary is, by any reckoning, a hawk when it comes to military action, whereas Trump is a businessman who has never signed a single order for any action that led to bloodshed.

Yet it’s he who is called “reckless”, “dangerous”, “terrifying”, frightening”, despite also saying the US has “destabilised the Middle East”, berating the coalition forces for lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and using Libya as a warning against further action in Syria.

Many of the remarks he’s made about US foreign policy and Nato could have come from People Before Profit.

So who’s the real “warmonger” – Trump or Clinton?

Read her Sunday Independent article here.

Sister Clare Theresa Crockett, 33, the young Irish nun who died with five others in the Ecuador earthquake as she tried to lead them to safety throws a light on an Ireland which we do not see very often. Her death reveals a heroism, as her life itself did. She was the last to be dug out of the rubble after a stairwell collapsed in the school where she taught in Playa Prieta in the western province of Manabi.

“She was a superstar. Everybody loved her,” her cousin Emmet Doyle said to The Daily Mail.

She was with six Ecuadorian postulants, in the early stages of joining the order, when the disaster struck.
“She was trying to get them down the stairs and the staircase collapsed.
“She died as she lived, helping others.”

Sr Clare, from the Brandywell area of Derry city, was a nun with the Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother and taught 400 children in the Colegio Sagrada Familia school, including how to play the guitar.

Her vocation, what she did and how she lived  are portrayed in this brief video.

The five dead postulants were named by the Order as Jazmina, Mayra, Maria Augusta, Valeria and Catalina .
Two others were pulled from the rubble after their voices were heard.

Sr Clare joined the Order aged 18 and worked in Spain, the US and other parts of the world before going to Ecuador.
“Her death has shocked and saddened the entire community in Derry and further afield.”

The parish of her family, Long Tower in her native Derry, opened a book of condolence in memory of Sister Clare Crockett, on Friday night.
Father Brendan Collins C.C., quoted in The Derry Journal, said that parishioners from the Long Tower where Sister Clare lived and grew up, wanted to show their support and sympathy to the family.

Describing Sister Clare as an “inspirational young woman of the parish,” Father Brendan said the community would come together tonight at 7.30 p.m. for Mass, followed by the rosary.
“Sister Clare was well known locally and since her death people who knew her have been sharing memories and stories.
“Young people who hear of Sister Clare’s story, particularly in this modern world, can associate with her. She found real contentment in her life and she died as she lived, helping other people.”
The Derry priest encouraged as many people as possible to come to pray for Sister Clare, and her family and that her remains will be returned to her family as soon as possible.