Byzantine Blog

It’s Official: Neil Clark’s is the Best UK Blog!

With a huge lead of over 400 votes (1,116 over the second-placed blog with 697 votes) and more than a quarter of total votes (26.3% — every fourth vote of all the votes gathered by the ten finalists went to Neil’s blog), Neil Clark has decisively won the 2007 Weblog competition in the category of UK blogs.

Our wholehearted congratulations: the best man did win!

I also wish to thank all of you who supported such a valiant man, an honest British journalist and exceptional political commentator staunchly defending the principles and plain old truth in the sea of slime, stinky career propagandists with no backbone, no morals and no scruples, who would sell their own mothers for a moment in the limelight, even if their stage gets set in the ninth circle of hell.

The True Misery

Perhaps the best way to understand how truly miserable, malevolent and pathetic these poor creatures are, is to look at how some of them behaved towards their fellow competitor while the polls were still open, the voting was underway and getting more heated.

Pub Philosopher begged his readers to vote for anyone except Neil Clark (“If you don’t want to vote for this blog, vote for any of the others apart from Neil Clark”), while the satanic worshiper from “The Devil’s Kitchen” went into fits over the fact Neil kept reminding his visitors that the competition is ongoing and they can vote each day. However, the same satanist rushed to endorse the pal-blogger’s repeated urgings to vote for everyone and anyone else so that Neil doesn’t even get close to winning. Here’s the kind of advice he backed and recommended to his readers:

“Vote for anyone with a greater share of the vote than Neil Clark, for God’s sake. Keep the bugger out of second place. [...] (Vote now and vote daily — do your bit to keep him in his box.) [...] So vote for Kickette if you like, but keep the bastard Clark out.”

Needless to say, both the Pub Philosopher and the Devil’s Kitchen were left in a cloud of dust, with the Pub Philosopher ending at the very bottom of the list. Given their “sportsmanship” and the amounts of ill-will and envy that would make even the Paris runaway blush, I’d say it’s comforting to know so many people follow their subconscious ramblings and (mis)directions. The hissing and sneering from the other UK blogs will be left out — they weren’t even nominated in any of the categories, so who cares!

Why Most People Cringe at the Very Thought of Exposing the SKamm’s True Face

To properly celebrate the occasion, I’ll give you the excerpt of the Best UK Blogger’s now historic review of one the most boring, disingenuous and dishonest books ever written — “Anti-Totalitarianism” by Oliver Kamm — UK’s Queen of Arrogance and Flatulence and Warmonger Extraordinaire.

Clark’s review was published by The Daily Telegraph on the last day of December 2005, and the very fact he dared to expose the SKamm as a hypocrite and a double-faced elite propagandist hiding behind the mask of journalism has opened the floodgates of the most malignant poison the Kamm Groupies have been pouring over Neil’s head for the past two years.

A year ago, Neil wrote:

“[...] Little did I know when I filed my copy, that writing a critical review of Kamm's book, would subject me to a year-long campaign of vilification and character assassination.

“An email, written under an alias and cced to Kamm, was sent to one of my commissioning editors, repeating malicious libels which Kamm made on his blog, just one day after my review appeared. Kamm's webblog entry was written not just for the benefit of his readers, but also to newspaper editors who employ me.

“Faced with what any impartial observer would agree was a malicious campaign to jeopardise my career, I had no option but to take legal action, and brought a case for defamation against Kamm in the County Court in April. But as the defendant (Kamm) did not give his consent to the case being heard there, the court dismissed the action. The only reason why I did not bring a High Court action at the time was financial: unlike Kamm, I am not the founder of a Jermyn Street-based financial services company which started with $1bn of assets.

“Kamm and his supporters have continued to hound me [...]”

A Healthy Serving of the Primordial (Hot) Paprika Goulash

Excerpts from the book review by Neil Clark, The Daily Telegraph

Did neo-conservatism meet its end in 2005? The collapse of the levées in New Orleans, and its exposure of President Bush's policy of paying for wars of intervention abroad by cutting back on public provision at home, led many thinkers to believe that it had.

Douglas Murray and Oliver Kamm are not among them. For these two young British writers, neo-conservatism is not only still alive and kicking - its finest hour is yet to come.

[...] In trying to put the "Left-wing" case for war against Iraq, Oliver Kamm is equally unconvincing. Having told us how the principle of deterrence worked so well during the Cold War, he fails to explain adequately why the deterrence of Saddam, which Secretary of State Colin Powell had been lauding only months before September 11, could not have continued.

Kamm has fun baiting the woolly minded peace activists of the 1930s, and the supporters of unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, but is on much shakier ground when portraying those who opposed the invasion of secular, Ba'athist Iraq as apologists for Islamo-fascism. In fact, it is the neo-cons themselves who have a track record of siding with Islamic extremists, whether in Afghanistan in the 1980s or in the Balkans a decade later.

Similarly, while lambasting the "amoral quietism" of the Major government in its non-intervention policy in Bosnia, Kamm fails to remind readers that the Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic - whose separatist cause neo-conservatives enthusiastically championed - not only wrote that "the most important lesson from the Koran is the impossibility of any connection between Islamic and non-Islamic systems", but also recruited for an SS division in the Second World War.

It is difficult to think of a man for whom the term "Islamo-fascist" could be more appropriate, yet that didn't stop the arch-neo-con Richard Perle from acting as an adviser to Izetbegovic's delegation at the Dayton Peace Conference in 1995.

On the issue of terrorism, there are double standards too. Terrorists, according to both Murray and Kamm, should be condemned wherever they are found - but not, it seems, if they are the gun-runners, drug-smugglers and civilian-murderers of the Kosovo Liberation Army, on whose side Nato acted, with strong neo-con approval, as an armed proxy in the war against Serbia in 1999.

[...] If neo-cons really want us to take their ideas more seriously, a little more consistency - and honesty - is surely called for.

Congratulations, dear Neil, and many more exceptional articles and honest reviews in the years to come!