UN jurist Geoffrey Robertson QC wants to drag Pope Benedict before the International Criminal Court for crimes against materialist ideology, bringing the era of '1984' ever closer

Geoffrey Robertson has come out. And I am glad.

I am the same age as Geoffrey Robertson, merely two months separating us, he born in September 1946, I in July 1946. He grew up in Eastwood, a middle class suburb of Sydney, I in Lane Cove hardly five miles away, just the suburb of Ryde separating Eastwood and Lane Cove. He probably attended a primary school in Eastwood, after which came Epping High School. I attended St Michael's convent school in Lane Cove to grade 2, then St Pius X Chatswood to grade 6, St Mary's Towers Seminary to 4th Year. I spent my final year at St Ignatius Riverview. He went on to Sydney University Law School; I enrolled in the Arts Faculty at Sydney University.

It is possible that our paths crossed during this time, even probable, especially during the Sydney University days. Of course, we did not know each other - and were not likely to. If we had ever met he would not have wasted a dismissive sneer on me. You see, we were on opposite political teams - if it's necessary to point that out. Most grievously for someone whose record shows a deep anti-clericalism, I was one of those hated Catholics.

Although I never knew Robertson, I knew the radical leftist groups he was at home in. He shared their feverish contempt for Catholics and the Catholic Church. Their swaggering loudmouth bigotry was exemplary for their fellow students, many of whom strove to emulate their masters, turning that into a life-long task. Personal experience. I was a very green eighteen-year-old in 1964 compared to the precocious and cynical worldliness of the Sydney University and the University of New South Wales radicals, but I was not so green that I did not see their monstrous hypocrisy and leftist fascism.

The first close view I had of their political nastiness, and really my political awakening, came in the first half in1964. I was present at perhaps Australia's first riotous student demonstration, which raged outside the American Consulate in Sydney in May that year. Totally unprepared for what happened, I thought I saw some evil spirit moving through the rioting crowd as it surged this way and that, sparking spot brawls with the police. It is more than likely Robertson was in the thick of the radicals' action. Later he defended some of those leftist mates in a famous obscenity trial in London.

Robertson was obviously a natural from the beginning in manipulating law and legislation to throw a silk moral cloak over the nastiness and grossness of human inclinations. Freedom of speech! We know what that means for Robertson and his hypocrite mates, don't we? We have fifty years experience. We also have fifty years experience of the radicals' idea of human rights. Just last week the fascist-leftist Labor Government in Victoria passed legislation that selectively denies the fundamental rights of association and religious belief to Christians. These are Robertson's mates in spirit. In fact, it's more than likely that the leftist fascists who enjoy a majority in the Victorian houses of parliament are disciples of Robertson's, many no doubt attending his indoctrination sessions when he condescends to return to the country of his birth.

Our Epping High radical went from strength to strength on a road that took him to the accursed mother country where he acquired further academic qualifications in law - and a toffy British accent. He needed to suppress his Aussie suburban accent in order to merge with the English upper-class. In the meantime, I, insisting on a full expression of my youthful immaturity, made a total mess of my life (including studies) for several years until I met a Dutch girl. We got married and sixteen months later went to Holland where we lived for nearly three years.

Robertson remained in England, the suburban streets of Eastwood drifting no doubt into a past that was better forgotten - just the sort of streets Barry Humphries satirised. Wouldn't want the new best friends to know about that, would he? It appears he also remained the gay bachelor until 1990 when he and well-known Australian author Kathy Lette broke up Lette's marriage to get together. Deep down you can take the boy out of Epping High but you can't take Epping High out of the boy. I fear that Lette's equally well-known grubby vulgar behaviour has increased the furtive whisperings about Australians behind upper-class English hands. As a helplessly brainwashed Catholic boy I was already married twenty years in 1990.

I always think it's an odd thing that through the years I remained alert to the reported antics of the leftist Australian ex-pats in Britain, including Robertson. I suppose it was the ever sceptical view I took of their successes, seeing in them confirmation of my views about leftist ideas and behaviour - and the posturing hypocrisy. I had the feeling I was the only one who found Robertson's popular 'Hypotheticals' on ABC TV contrived and manipulated. His dramatic exit after each program, meant to give the impression that he had cleverly led his subjects into confusion and self-contradiction, was laughable. What a fantasy world the Left live in.

I suppose I should thank Robertson and those other leftist republican expats who settled in the mother country. They sharpened my critical view of their ideas, helping me to understand my natural moral and political conservatism. When eventually I took up university studies again - I had reached the required maturity, I thought - I completed a major in Dutch language and literature at Melbourne University. That enables me to be daily entertained (on satellite) by the hypocrisy and ideological prejudice of Robertson's mates across the Channel in the low countries. I then transferred to La Trobe University because of their philosophy department where I progressed through to a Masters degree in philosophy with a thesis on the epistemological foundations of Edmund Burke's thought.

Now I understood the theoretical underpinnings of people like Robertson and the limits of reason, which was the aim in taking up the formal study of philosophy. Indeed, it is likely I can explain materialist metaphysics and its political outcrop of atheistic materialism better than he can. And this is just the point of this biographical narrative. Prejudice and hypocrisy behind impressive academic jargon. You see, people like Robertson and his bosom atheistic mates Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens preach their political credo with the fervour of religious faith. They have not the slightest doubt that their atheistic materialism is true and that all knowledge comes from sense perception. It is likely, if one listens to the crass unquestioning manner of stating their political views, that they would not explain it this way. It is simply a vague but intense belief, couched in beguiling platitudes, that they are preaching the truth - and that those deviating from the truth are foolish and ignorant. Worse, those deviating from the dogma of materialism and have power and influence in the community have the status of criminals.

This is really what the ferocious media attack on the Pope is all about. This is the reason that Robertson, heading the triumvirate of Robertson-Dawkins-Hitchens, is manoeuvring to bring Pope Benedict 'to trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC) for "crimes against humanity".' It is not because the Pope is a protector of clerical 'paedophiles'. If it were, the super-sanctimonious Robertson would be on to the academics who openly attempt to justify cross-generational relationships. He would thunderously denounce and bring before the courts associations like the North America Man/Boy Love Association. But he does not.

No, it is because the Pope is the strongest proponent of the moral and political views that Robertson & Co consider inimical to mankind and stand in the way of mankind's progression to perfection. Even worse, this Pope of the criminal ideas heads up the only institution in the world that is holding up the complete victory of the Enlightenment project. He must be crushed, he must be destroyed.

The problem - I mean the theoretical problem - is that Robertson's philosophical beliefs are based on a fallacy: scientism. (I will never tire of pointing this out.) Their political system has its own necessary faith at its core which generates the string of dogma that they want to impose on society. How far we have come from the Millian liberalism that had some vogue in the Sixties!

Robertson's sucking up to the English upper-class was, for reasons of utility, merely temporary. Social approval and influence are important for professional reasons. His real purpose was to rise in the political class that has come to dominate the Western World. It is the class that guards and promotes the heritage of Enlightenment materialism, the same class that violently took power in Russia to set up the Soviet Union. The fundamental materialism is the same; only the political working out of that materialism diverges. Robertson and his mates would say that the Soviets got the actual implementation wrong. The theory was right, the praxis wrong. Robertson possesses the secret - the Seventh Ring - that will get everything right and perfect government and protect human rights. It is an unfortunate but necessary step to eliminate those foolish and deluded people who stand in the way of the dictates of the Seventh Ring. Those engaged in the propaganda of delusion are to be destroyed. No mercy, no qualms. The Promised Land of 1984 is coming ever closer.

We political conservatives who deny the possibility of perfecting society because of man's limited reasoning powers and his essential moral fallibility - all empirically observable - are relegated to the lowest political class. If we speak up too much, the dominant class moves immediately to disqualify us with abuse, slander, ridicule and lies. Robertson sits at the top of the dominant class. His undertaking to bring the Pope before the International Criminal Court has laid bare his purpose and ideological presuppositions. It is important - and instructive - to all concerned about our decaying Western Civilisation to know where loud and influential voices such as Robertson's stand.

Robertson has come a long way from that street in Eastwood and a time that was just about the opposite of the time and world he now inhabits. It was a place and time in Sydney that gave me the happiest of childhoods. I would not exchange that for a thousand of the human rights utopias Robertson and his mates promise - theoretically.

The Pope must answer for crimes against humanity

UN jurist calls for British government to detain Pope Benedict

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com