Bartholomew's Notes

From the Daily Mail:

A branch of the Freemasons secret society is being formed by members of the Royal Household and police who protect the Royal Family.

And their decision to call it The Royal Household Lodge has put them on a collision course with Buckingham Palace – as has their plan to co-opt the royal cipher – EIIR – for their regalia, to underline their connection to the Queen.

…Author and broadcaster Martin Short, whose book Inside The Brotherhood exposed Masonic practices in the UK, said: “It’s a catastrophic time to start such a lodge, given all the problems facing the Royal Family at present.

“The Royal Family is desperately trying to prove it is modernising – in PR terms, this is bad news for them.”

As it happens, I read Inside the Brotherhood (1989) not long back – although it is packaged by the publisher as a sensationalist exposé and some of the chapter titles tend toward the lurid, in fact on the whole the book avoids conspiracy-mongering and where it explores abuses these are seen more as due to the complacency and institutional failings of an unaccountable leadership rather than as the outworking of some sinister grand design (at least, as regards British Freemasonry: the book also covers the Italian P2 business). Given what we now know about how institutions work when they are not under public scrutiny, this is quite believable.

Members of the royal family have been involved with Freemasonry for a long time, and today the “Grand Master” is the Duke of Kent, a cousin of the Queen – Prince Philip went through some Masonic initiations to please his father-in-law, but he has shown no interest since (The back of St James’s Palace, by the way, is just over the road from one of the main Masonic centres in London: Mark Masons’ Hall, a grand but much more discreet building than the headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of England near Covent Garden. Mark Masons’ Hall has featured on this blog before, as the venue for the right-wing Right Now! conferences).

I’ve actually met a few Masons over the years, and it’s clear that for them the organisation is a harmless social club with a strong civic conscience. However, one can also appreciate the concerns of Palace staff quoted by the Mail:

Non-members in Royal service are said to be fearful they will be overlooked for prestigious promotions and left unsupported in any below-stairs clashes.

…A Palace insider said: “There’s a lot of consternation and rightly so. People fear a lot of business will now be conducted behind closed doors so that those who don’t sign up to Freemasonry can’t have any effect on it.

“They are concerned that Masons will be preferred and those who aren’t Masons will be written out of the script.

“Backstairs life is already complicated enough – there are all sorts of allegiances and cliques and cabals. People fall in and out of favour and there’s a lot of whispering in ears…”

This is surely the main problem with a group which has been dubbed “the mafia of the mediocre”: not that it’s a grand conspiracy, but that when based around a place of employment a lodge constitutes a clique which undermines the measures that modern workplaces have put in place to counteract the all-too-human tendency to favouritism. The fact that women are excluded from Freemasonry (aside from some obscure affiliates) makes such lodges particularly undesirable, and distasteful.

Of course, the ideal is that a Freemason is interested in the pursuit of virtue rather than rank or status; Freemasonry purports to be a spiritual journey, and the symbols and rituals are supposedly designed to make an initiate aware of human imperfectability in relation to God. However, whether or not Masonry is sometimes abused for worldly advancement, one has to wonder about the attitude that is actually fostered by the organisation; it seems to me that some Masons revel in grand titles before and weird letters after their names, and in membership of exalted Masonic “Orders”, and one wonders how often such titles and hierarchies are actually substitutes for true inner maturity of character (I can think of some examples). One Christian criticism of Freemasonry is that some of the Masonic declarations, which gloat over secret knowledge unknown to outsiders, go against Christian ideals.

Freemasonry is, though, a fascinating subject and the pseudo-arcane rituals and preposterous mythology are fun in a “Dungeons and Dragons” kind of way. And while rejecting conspiracy theory, it is the case that certain lodges act as networks for individuals with particular interests, and so are worth keeping an eye on (just why, for instance, were the Right Now! conferences held in Mark Mason Hall?).

Despite Christian critiques of Freemasonry – which range from fundamentalist conspiracy theories through to more considered theological and ethical objections – Christian Freemasons see no conflict, and Freemasonry enjoys some support within the Church of England: Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher was an enthusiast, and there are services of thanksgiving in Canterbury Cathedral. Short’s book mentions a particularly exclusive lodge, the Kaiser-I-Hind Lodge (pp. 374, 571 in 1989 edition), which had as a member the secretary-general of the General Synod.

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A characteristically elegant piece by Jeff Sharlet puts the questions about religion that journalists ought to be asking the current crop of US presidential candidates:

Let’s take their faith seriously, as seriously as we take their foreign policy platforms and their health care plans. Let’s ask the toughest questions we can. Not, “Is Obama secretly a Muslim?”; that’s a stupid question. Rather, let’s quiz McCain on his new Baptist credentials, ask Hillary why she rejects the social gospel, demand that Obama explain how, exactly, he will be “guided by prayer” in the oval office, as he boasted in a mailer to South Carolina voters. All three present their Christianity as essential to their political identities. Great; let’s find out what they know about their Christianity. I propose this not as a boost to Hillary, who’s by far the most theologically literate, nor as a slam on McCain, who may not actually know that Baptists are supposed to have been, you know, baptized. Rather, I simply want to know what they know. How about a debate in which Hillary and Obama each explain how Revelation will help them make decisions?

Such questioning is unlikely to be edifying or enlightening, but previous use of this strategy has proven to be fun to watch:

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With Gordon Brown paying tribute to Rev Ian Paisley’s “huge contribution to political life in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom”, this YouTube video reminds us of his contribution to political life in Europe:

Of course, the above bit of theatre is just one of the more clownish incidents in a long and ignoble history of religious bigotry and political extremism, which on the whole was not particularly funny. I’m sure Paisley’s retirement will unleash a tidal wave of anecdotes and analysis; Oliver Kamm notes one incident which shows us Paisley’s true character. Browsing through Martin Dillon’s God and the Gun is also instructive, and the book includes a discussion of one interesting association (p.220, date typo fixed):

Paisley…attended the launch of Ulster Resistance, at a secret paramilitary display in November 198[6] after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Several days beforehand, Paisley informed me that he could not undertake a broadcast at a scheduled time because he was due to attend a prayer meeting. The ‘prayer meeting’, in the Ulster Hall in Belfast, was in fact a paramilitary rally to launch Ulster Resistance with Paisley on the platform wearing a red beret. Ulster Resistance was later involved with the UFF/UVF in arms procurement when Paisley was no longer associated with it.

(The later arms procurement involved plotting in South Africa and arrests in Paris.)

Some months ago, Christopher Hitchens wrote a typically polemical piece, in which he explained that:

The British laws of libel forbid me to tell what I heard when I was a young reporter in the pubs and back streets of Belfast, but I’ll put it like this: Both Paisley and [Gerry] Adams know very well of things that happened that should never have happened. And both of them, in order to arrive at that smug power-sharing press conference, have had to arrange to seem adequately uninformed about such horrid past events. Both have been photographed carrying coffins at political funerals—funerals that were at one time the main cultural activity in each of their “communities.” One day, their private role in filling those coffins will be fully exposed. In the meantime, they are the recognized and designated peacemakers.

In the USA, Paisley was close to Bob Jones; a 2000 report from Jewish World Review reminds us of the details:

In 1966, two days after Paisley was released from prison [Paisley had refused to pay a fine for a public order charge – RB], Jones traveled to Northern Ireland to give Paisley an honorary degree from Bob Jones University. (Others who received Bob Jones honorary degrees around the same time were George Wallace, Strom Thurmond and Lester Maddox.)

…Paisley has made more than 50 trips to speak at Bob Jones University. On a 1981 trip, Paisley gave the opening prayer in the South Carolina House of Representatives. Catholics were outraged.

…Partly out of embarrassment, the administration decided to deny the incendiary Paisley a visa in 1982. Angry over this denial, Bob Jones Jr. called on G-d to smite Secretary of State Alexander Haig “hip and thigh, bone and marrow, heart and lungs.” Jones charged that the action by Haig, a Catholic, was “absolutely nothing but Catholic bigotry,” and for good measure he called Pope John Paul a “perfect example of anti-Christ.”

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(Minor correction added: see comments)

Oliver Kamm reports that Neil Clark has complained about him to the police:

Yesterday morning I got a telephone call from a bewildered gentleman at Abingdon Police Station saying he had received a complaint from a Mr Neil Clark. Mr Clark…is the author of such essays as “Milosevic, Prisoner of Conscience” and (regarding the Iraqi interpreters in fear of their lives) “Keep these Quislings Out”. He is also an imaginative theorist of global conspiracy…I learned from my interlocutor at Abingdon Police Station that Mr Clark was upset about disobliging references to him on the World Wide Web.

The police, who are obliged to investigate these kinds of complaints (Kamm stresses that there is nothing sinister in the police phoning him), appear to have concluded that there isn’t any case to answer.

Kamm has attacked Clark’s journalistic competence and honesty on a number of occasions; Clark believes this is sour grapes because he once wrote a critical review of a book Kamm had written. Since then, Clark has claimed there is a campaign of persecution against him, waged by “neo-cons” because of his anti-war views:

The perpetrators of this activity have a clear aim: to discredit me in the eyes of those who employ me and prevent me from earning my living as a journalist. They are also perhaps hoping that in the light of their constant, malicious attacks, I will decide that in order to have a ‘quiet life’, I will quit journalism. They could not be more wrong. Unlike them, my conscience is clear. The malicious attacks have only energised me and motivated me to work even harder to expose the lies and deceit which underpin the neo-con war machine.

Apparently Clark takes the view that while he has the right to publish controversial essays, any critical response is an attack on his free speech of a magnitude which should be compared (inevitably) with “Nazi Germany”. Here he is back in November at the Guardian:

Anyone who deviated from the official party line – as laid down by a self-appointed uber elite of British bloggers – faced a cyberspace lynch mob, more in keeping with Nazi Germany than a country which is supposed to pride itself on its support for free speech.

For the self-appointed uber elite of British political bloggers, the fact that someone, not of their number, and who did defy their three line-whip on the Iraqi interpreters issue – was nominated – and then won, in a free public vote, the title of “Best UK Blog” in the most prestigious prize in blogging, is too much to bear.

Sunny Hundal called my victory in the 2007 Weblog awards “bizarre”. Sunny has just started a blog which claims to be keen on democracy, yet he clearly doesn’t like it when people vote for someone whose views he does not approve of.

Clark at one point also issued a libel writ against Kamm, which was struck out by the court. Kamm now observes:

Possibly for this reason, after a sobering encounter with a leading libel lawyer whom I had retained for my defence and who rambunctiously explained to Mr Clark that his conduct represented an abuse of the legal process, he now prefers to waste police time at public expense.

Kamm has shrugged off Clark’s latest antics, and suggests that Clark’s writings are actions are “pathological”. While regretting the distress he has had to cause a troubled soul, he also makes the obvious point:

If you make your opinions public, then public scrutiny is what you will get (if you’re lucky).

While Clark is so far the only British blogger to have issued a libel writ against another blogger, he is not the only one to have made libel threats: as I’ve noted previously, the “libertarian” blogger Paul Staines has on more than one occasion made threats against bloggers (including, in one instance, demanding that the Liberal Conspiracy website remove a hyperlink to critical material, which is an area of British libel law not yet completely clear). Most recently, he roped in a blogger-solicitor ally named Donal Blaney in an attempt to make Tim Ireland reveal his home address.

The only case I’m aware of which comes close to Clark’s latest strategy against Kamm is a 2006 complaint to the police which the right-wing activist Mike Keith Smith made against a certain Ed Chilvers following an altercation on a discussion forum. The complaint was for “malicious communication”, but, according to Chilvers here, after making inquiries the investigating detective constable declined to proceed. As it happens, Clark was initially in part inspired to bring his libel action against Kamm by Smith’s victory in case he had brought against someone else.

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