Anatomy of Culture

Hitler's melting pot

2010-11-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

During his early years in public life, Hitler made no secret of his ultimate intentions should the Nazi party come to power: in Mein Kampf, originally published in 1925, he explained that the Germans must colonize the east in order to gain Lebensraum, or living-space for the country’s burgeoning population.

Somehow, though, most everyone refused to take Hitler seriously, even after he began carrying out the plans he had set in print years before: not only the conquest of eastern Europe, but also the “elimination” of the Jews from his Nazi empire. In the War of the World, Niall Ferguson remarks as to how the ultra-paranoid Stalin trusted no man but one — Hitler, who was in turn the only man who ever had the power to betray “the man of steel.” But the invasion of the USSR in June, 1941 was a surprise to very few but Stalin himself. Mere weeks before the invasion commenced, one of his spies in Germany wrote an urgent message to Soviet intelligence, warning Stalin of what was imminent. Stalin’s response was to condemn the spy as one “who should be sent to his fucking mother.”

The Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 (which touched off World War II) and of the Soviet Union two years later, did not come without ironies, though. One of these was that, after the Nazis had indeed conquered a great deal of living-space into which the German population could expand, very few Germans were actually interested in moving east. Those few who did were not the simple, sturdy peasant-farmers of Nazi ideals, but opportunists seeking to make easy money off the slave-labour of conquered Jews, Poles and Russians (men such as Oskar Schindler, the famed eventual saviour of several thousand Jews). The Nazi overlords of Poland eventually had to resettle ethnic Germans that had been living for centuries in Russian territory, in occupied Poland; instead of Germans moving east, it was Germans moving west, in closer proximity to the original Fatherland (thus giving the lie to the Nazis’ obsession with Lebensraum).

But, as Ferguson points out, the eastern Germans were often unsuitably Slavonic in culture, language, even in their appearance; but many of the “inferior” Poles were had blonde haired and blue eye. The conclusion drawn from this, was that “Aryans” outside the Reich, had been breeding with the inferior races, and it was up to the Nazis to “rescue” these bloodlines from total corruption. Accordingly, functionaries were organized and sent to the Polish “protectorate” in order to determine the racial fitness of the Slavic population according to a fourfold system of classification: those placed in the “A” category were deemed acceptably Aryan genetic endowment, and thus made eligible for “re-education” as Germans, or if children, deportation back to Germany, where they would be raised among Aryan families; the unfortunate people designated as “D”, were to be immediately shipped off for slave labour or extermination at one of the many camps established by the Nazis throughout their empire.

According to conventional understanding, “fascist” is a synonym for “ultra-nationalist”. This is true, to a great extent, for the original Italian Fascists. But, in spite of their name, the National Socialists were no more nationalists than they were socialists. They were collectivists, but their collective focus was on race, not nation. For this reason, the Nazis found it easy to collaborate with, and find collaborators among, the populations of the countries they conquered, or otherwise became “allied” with. Ferguson writes, “...the more the Germans relied on foreign allies and collaborators the more multiethnic their empire necessarily became. The first symptom of this unintended transformation was the changing complexion of Hitler's armed forces. The army that invaded the Soviet Union included 600,000 Croats, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks and Spaniards. In addition to fighting alongside troops from allied countries, German soldiers also increasingly saw foreigners wearing German uniforms. Franco had declined to join Hitler's war in the West, but he permitted the formation of a Spanish 'Blue Division' (named after the blue shirts of its Falangist volunteers) to fight against the Soviet Union; it served with distinction ... French volunteers also fought, in the Legion des Volontaires Francais contre le Bolchevisme, as part of a Wehrmacht infantry division. Other foreigners generally wore the uniform of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the SS, a reflection of Himmler's enthusiasm for broadening the available pool of 'Nordic' blood, as well as the Wehrmacht's reluctance to surrender large numbers of Germans of military age to the SS.” (Ferguson, The War of the World, London: Allen Unwin, page 457-458).

Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader and chief racial theorist of the Nazi regime, explained why, near to the end of the Second World War, his organization included more non-Germans than Germans in its ranks: “Every SS officer, regardless of nationality. . . must look to the whole living space of the family of German nations [Himmler specified the German, Dutch, Flemish, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Baltic nations]. To combine all these nations into one big family is the most important task at present. It is natural in this process that the German nation, as the largest and strongest, must assume the leading role. [But] this unification has to take place on the principle of equality... [Later] this family... has to take on the mission to include all Roman nations, and then the Slavic nations, because they, too, are of the white race. It is only through unification of the white race that Western culture can be saved from the danger of the yellow race. At the present time, the Waffen-SS is leading in this respect because its organization is based on equality. The Waffen-SS comprises not only German, Roman and Slavic but even Islamic units ... fighting in close togetherness.” (Quoted in Ferguson, page 459).

Years ago, I proposed that the National Socialist party had to focus on race, as instrument of cohesion, just because “Germans” had a very weak sense of national belonging. In fact, as Ferguson points out, many key Nazis were not of German birth at all: the Austrian Hitler, of course, but also Alfred Rosenberg, the party “philosopher”, and several others.

And, in an entry earlier this year, I wrote as to how modern European empires, uniquely in world history, sought to make separation of races a key part of the ruling strategy. The Nazis were the most thorough about this, but were hardly unique: it was a policy pursued previously by the British, Dutch, Belgian and French empires, as well. What I didn’t mention was that the European empires pursued this policy, just because they understood that race mixing was an inevitable part of imperial conquest.

But, in fact, even the Nazis were unsuccessful in their policies of total racial separatism. Ferguson writes that, “even as Nazi racial experts engaged in the laborious racial classification of Poles and Czechs, the very tendency they wished to eradicate — miscegenation — was continuing. Indeed, the chaos caused by war and forced resettlement positively increased the sexual contact between Germans and non-Germans. On March 8, 1940, new police regulations had to be issued for Polish workers in Germany, the seventh of which specified bluntly that `anyone who has sexual intercourse with a German man or woman, or approaches them in any other improper manner’ would be liable to the death penalty (later specified as death by hanging).” (Ferguson, page 461)

Ferguson also sheds light as to why so many ordinary German soldiers chose duty in helping to slaughtering Jews during the Holocaust. Aside from ethnic hatred, and the inability to ignore direct orders, there was the motive of self-preservation. By the time the extermination of the Jews got going in earnest, by 1942, the Russo-German war had commenced. At the Eastern front, for the first time, Wehrmacht troops were encountering high rates of mortality in combat. It was considered a privilege to be assigned to the duties of executioner to men, women and children, all of them civilians who didn’t have the means to fight back; this became all the more true, as the war continued on, and the German army became bogged down in the hellish snow and wind of three Russian winters. Aside from the inconvenience of having to murder, direct participation in the Holocaust was very profitable, with much opportunity to steal the belongings of those who were being killed.

"...When Christianity conquered Rome..."

2010-09-25T17:43:00.000-07:00

I was channel-surfing yesterday evening.

I came upon the Channel News Network. I’ve long viewed twenty-four news as a wasteland, but I went ahead and watched for a few minutes. In transmission was the programme hosted by Anderson Cooper, who is the great-great-grandson of nineteenth-century shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. At discussion was a “controversial” advertisement for a Republican candidate for U.S. congressional elections this November. The subject of the ad was a mosque to be built nearby the site of the former World Trade Centre in New York city, destroyed by Islamic fascists in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The ad portrayed the proposed temple as “victory mosque” that, over the centuries, Muslims have built in lands that have been conquered from other religions (such as the mosque that once resided on the former Hagia Sophia Orthodox church in the former Constantinople, now Istanbul — the site was converted into a museum by the Ataturk regime).

This so-called “ground-zero mosque” became an issue over the summer, with public-opinion polls showing that a majority of Americans are against an Islamic temple being built so near where the World Trade Centre stood. My own view is that, as a believer in liberty above all, law-abiding Muslims should be able to build a mosque anywhere they wish, be it two blocks from the old WTC, right across the street from there, or on the site itself, if they were able to purchase the deed (the real scandal in this whole affair, as some pointed out at the outset, is that nearly a decade following the 9/11 attacks, construction has yet to commence on the proposed “Freedom Tower” development, where the twin towers once stood). As to whether Muslims ought to build a shrine is a matter of indifference compared to their absolute right to do so.

The American over-class, as apparently represented by the likes of Anderson Cooper, have rather stronger views on the matter: received opinion holds that Muslims not only have the right to build a mosque near the site of the September 11 mass-murders, but that everyone ought to be in favour of it, lest they be “intolerant” of Islam. One wonders, though, if this same view would hold if, for example, avowedly anti-abortion Catholics or Pentecostals were to construct a “religious centre” across the street from the site of an abortion clinic where doctors and other practitioners of premature infanticide had been murdered by fanatic anti-abortionists.

To dispense with the hypothetical, there was a similar controversy in Poland a number of years ago, when an order of Catholic nuns had planned to build a retreat nearby the Auschwitz death-factory, responsible for the murder for the systematic murder of as many as one million Jews during the Holocaust. The Enlightened believed that it was distasteful for the nuns to do so, though as far as I know, no one believed that the religious order was directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of Jews in Auschwitz or anywhere else.

The Republican party, after being shut out of power following the elections in 2006 and ‘08, seem poised to retake the House of Representatives (but not the Senate) in the November mid-term vote. CNN and other mainstream news-services are trying their best to prevent this from happening, by portraying the Republican party as “racist” and “intolerant”, and beholden to the “tea-party” demonstrators. Accordingly, Cooper’s guest on the programme last evening was the candidate who aired the “victory mosque” ad in her North Carolina constituency.

One of Cooper’s questions to the candidate, who is apparently Catholic, was to state that Islam differs in no way in from other religions in building shrines over the temples of vanquished faiths. This was an admission, I take it, that it cannot be denied Islam engages in this practice. It is the same tact that mainstream news organizations take in response to Islamic-fascist terrorism: “Sure, there’s terrorists among Muslims, but you can’t deny that Christians murder abortion doctors...”

Cooper’s “example” in reference to this assertion, was to say that, when “Christianity conquered Rome, weren’t pagan shrines replaced with Christians ones...” The candidate tried her best to parry such an inane question, but evidently wasn’t informed enough in history to demonstrate what an empty suit Cooper must be in making this statement. (The video can be viewed here.)

To wit: Christianity did not conquer Rome, as Cooper seems to believe, in war. After many centuries of persecution, in the early fourth-century of the calendar the Roman emperor Constantine declared official tolerance in regard to those practising Christianity, some years before he declared it the official religion of the empire itself. Thus it was that many pagan shrines in Rome (such as the Pantheon) and throughout the empire were converted into Christian churches (although the Pantheon didn’t become a Roman Catholic cathedral until centuries after the collapse of the empire itself). The remaining pagans of the Roman realm were thus displaced, though in fact the official gods of the Romans had long ceased to be worshipped by most of the imperial population, who in turn had become faithful to many renegade “mystery cults”, of which Christianity was only one of many, though probably the most popular. It was the abandonment of the traditional pantheon by most Roman citizens, that prompted their rulers to adopt Christianity as a “binding” mechanism in the first place.

But this is very far from an invasion by alien religionists and their utter destruction of holy sites (in many cases, when Muslims conquered lands throughout eastern and southeastern Asia, north Africa and southern Europe), or in the case of Hagia Sophia, their conversion into mosques. More to the point, though, it is irrelevant. Even accepting Cooper’s wrongful premise, it is irrelevant. Pagan shrines were converted to Christianity during classical times. Can Cooper come up with an example, say in the last four hundred years, when Christian “invaders” turned any the temple of any other religion into a church?

This is one of the reasons why I stopped watching the news, or reading the newspaper in the first place, the bland conformity of viewpoints expressed therein, almost always skewed to the left. This is demonstrated in the web-log on the website of Cooper’s CNN programme, almost all the entries of which are devoted to skewering some or another Republican or conservative. Can it really be the case that only Republicans are engaging in controversy?

Some conspiracy narratives

2010-09-12T13:34:00.001-07:00

Last evening, I watched a programme on the Discovery network, called Science and Conspiracy, which subjected the various claims that the September 11 attacks were the result of a “false flag” or “inside job” conspiracy, to experimental scrutiny. One of the allegations is that the U.S. Defence department headquarters in Washington — known universally as the Pentagon — was not struck by an airplane, but instead, was attacked by a missile. Heretofore, my understanding of this “theory”, was that the damage to the building was not significant enough to have been hit by a jet airplane travelling at several hundred miles an hour. However, at least according to three “9/11 truth movement” members interviewed for the show, the accusation is instead that the destruction to the Pentagon was too much to have been caused by an airplane. The programme showed a re-enactment both a strike by a winged aircraft, and a missile, which demonstrated that the damage to the building was consistent with... well, with what actually happened, an airplane striking the building.

Of course, the truth-movement “experts” on hand (which included two architects, as well as the director of Loose Change, a 9/11 conspiracy film) always found a reason to reject the findings. What I found significant was that, when presented with the experimental evidence, their statements were a great deal more equivocal than they usually are, in regard to the “evidence” for conspiracy. Thus, one of the architects, in speaking about the damage to the Pentagon facade, as seen in photographs just minutes after the airplane hit, said “you can’t tell one way or the other whether it was hit by an airplane...”. The Loose Change filmmaker, even admitted that many who were nearby the Pentagon on September 11, witnessed an airplane approaching the building, “but we can’t be sure from these statements, that the airplane actually hit the building...”

Naturally, when these experts, and others interviewed for the movie, were asked to provide their own scenario for what really happened on 9/11, they all deferred to the line that, “Well, we can’t know the truth until a government body is given full subpoena power, including the power to jail officials, to investigate the events of September 11.” This didn’t stop one of the architects from claiming that he and his colleagues have “proven that this was a false flag operation...”, meaning that it was actually carried out by U.S. government, who in turn blamed Arab terrorists for the attacks.

In any case, the “inside job” scenario that I am most familiar with, and which was presented on the Science and Conspiracy show, proceeds like this: each of the four airplanes supposedly commandeered as missiles on September 11, ‘01, were instead intercepted by U.S. military aircraft; remote-controlled jets rendered to appear like civilian aircraft, were substituted for them, while the actual aircraft were escorted to a secret military base; the remote-controlled jets were then crashed into the World Trade Centre towers, and the Pentagon (although wait, what happened to the missile that was supposed to crash into the latter structure?); but because the collision of the airplanes was not sufficient in itself to cause the collapse of the twin towers, explosive charges installed in the beams of the World Trade Centre previously, were detonated, thus causing both the towers to fall; meanwhile, back at that secret military base, the passengers from the three planes that were later said to have crashed into the towers and the Pentagon, were herded onto the remaining aircraft, which took off again, and was then shot down over the Pennsylvania countryside (presumably, this aircraft was remote-controlled too; or piloted by U.S. military pilots who didn’t know they were to be shot down, or...); the phone calls placed by the flight-attendants to their employers, and the passengers to their loved ones, aboard the doomed flights (as well as transmissions made by the terrorist pilots), were faked.

All of this is, of course, ludicrous on its face. Given the fact that such an operation would require (as the Discovery-network programme pointed out) the participation of thousands of people, there no point even in stating that no evidence exists to support any of this — no evidence of other aircraft in the sky; no evidence of the real aircraft being intercepted by military aircraft; no evidence that phone calls were faked; no evidence that anyone wired the World Trade Centre towers with explosives prior to the 9/11 attacks; no evidence of a missile attacking the Pentagon, and so on (in contrast, of course, to the literal mountain of evidence which supports, well, what actually happened that day). It is just a story told by conspiracy-narrators to justify their own belief that somehow, the “official story” isn’t the correct one.

This is key. Another word for “conspiracy” is “plot”, and “plot” is also another word for “story.” Conspiracy narratives (I must stress again that the 9/11 “inside job” allegations never rise to the level of theory) seek to give shape to messy reality, providing an “arc” for events, instead of the randomness of reality. It is simply that reality, when conveyed in story form, is too incredible to be believed, which is why movies, programmes and novels that are “based on a true story”, always change the details to make them more believable. Paradoxically, conspiracy narratives almost always render events far more complicated than they actually are. Such narratives render actual events into mythology (the word “myth” coming from the Greek for “story”).

The Science and Conspiracy show interviewed David Aaronovitch, a British journalist and author of Voodoo Histories, a copy of which I now have on hold at the public library, which examines conspiracy “theories”. Aaronovitch refers to the narrative function of allegations of conspiracy in regard to the September 11 attacks, and also makes an analogy with a previous event that I had not heard before. Immediately after 9/11, the attacks on New York city and Washington were compared to Pearl Harbour, just short of sixty years before.

The September 11 terrorist assaults were more nefarious, than Pearl Harbour, in fact, for being more deadly (almost three thousand killed, versus two-thousand), and for involving primarily civilian instead of military targets. However, the parallel goes further in respect to the fact that, following Pearl Harbour, anti-war forces went so far as to alleged that the Roosevelt government conspired to allow the Japanese attack to proceed, just to get the U.S. into World War II (not to my knowledge, though, was the U.S. military accused of running a “false-flag” operation involving American forces attacking an American military base, though a “soft” 9/11 conspiracy narrative has it that the Bush government had foreknowledge of the attacks, but let them go ahead in order to get the country involved in a war in the Middle Eastern, ostensibly in turn to seize the area’s oil wealth). The main difference was that, in the case of Pearl Harbour, the anti-war movement was on the political right, while the 9/11 “inside job/let-it-happen” folks are on the left (though some rightists have joined up with them).

The idea that Roosevelt knew about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, and allowed it to go ahead to get the U.S. into World War II, endured long after the end of the war, and indeed, in spite of any evidence supporting the allegation. In my childhood, when I went with my parents visit my grandmother each week for Sunday dinner, I would flip through a book they owned entitled I Remember, Do You? This work of nostalgia included old photographs of the U.S. from the 1920s to the nineteen-fifteens, with a short text describing major trends and events of the era (such as the stock-market crash and Depression, World War II, the Eisenhower administration, and so on). One of the longer passages was titled (if I recall correctly) “Pearl Harbor: The Surprise Attack That Wasn’t a Surprise”, and went on to detail all the allegations that were made after Pearl Harbour that the Roosevelt government knew exactly what was about to occur on December 7, 1941, and let it go ahead anyway. I Remember, Do You? was published during the 1970s.

A sombre anniversary, and reason for hope

2010-09-11T06:16:00.000-07:00

Where I live, the day is shaping up to be just like that fateful morning nine years ago: warm and clear, without a cloud in the sky.

Mohamed Atta, the reputed mastermind of the simultaneous attacks that destroyed the Twin Towers in New York city, damaged the Pentagon in Washington, and nearly obliterated the White House or Congress (but for the intercession of the last passengers on the last flight, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania), had just passed his thirty-second birthday, when he commenced the day’s events by apparently steering the American Airlines jet into the north tower of the World Trade Centre.

Last evening, the History cable channel broadcast a re-enactment of the “last journey of flight 111", which Atta and his conspirators seized control on 9/11. Prior to that programme, was another one on 9/11 conspiracy narratives, which I only caught the end of. In the period after September 11, 2001, I was naive enough to consider it impossible for anyone to believe that the attacks were result of an “inside job” (for, of course, 9/11 was the result of a conspiracy).

The first such narrative I encountered was sometime during 2002. These threatened to go mainstream by about 2005 and ‘06. I am pleased though, that such conspiracy fables are being relegated to the fringes, where they belong. On the programme last evening, for example, one of these fabulists was interviewed. This individual defended himself against charges that he was a lunatic, by reference to Galileo Galilei, who, the fabulist claimed, “was persecuted for believing the world was round when everyone else believed it was flat. However, a few years after his death, everyone came to believe as he did, that the world was round.”

I think something similar has happened with the Kennedy assassination conspiracy narratives, which were widely believed at one time (indeed, such “theories” were accepted by a U.S. congressional committee), but have also been relegated to fringe. I view this as a triumph for the value of free inquiry and debate. The over-class has for many years — just like all elites do — derided liberty of speech, hiding behind the excuse that “hate” speech is harmful to “vulnerable” parts of society. In reality, of course, they want no one to debate the policies and programmes they wish to impose on the rest of us.

I came to despise the conspiracy fabulists both of the 9/11 and Kennedy-assassination school, and how they came to affect public debate. But as one of those people that the over-class labels a “free-speech absolutist” (that is, someone who actually believes in freedom of speech), I never felt moved to call for these sorts of ideas to be proscribed. And, in spite of the delusions shared by many of the fabulists, that both November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001, initiated a “fascist takeover”, the conspiracy-narrators were allowed to say what they wanted. Guess what happened? They and their “theories”, by being openly debated, were proven to be lacking.

My summer in purgatory... and a rant and a half

2010-09-05T06:27:00.001-07:00

This Labour day weekend, I make my first post in more than three months.

Given that, soon after my last post, I:

1. Lost my job
2. Lost my marriage
3. Had to move to a dumpy apartment house, after living for thirteen years in a single family home...

I just didn't feel like blogging too damn much. Besides, I had to:

1. Find a job
2. Find a girlfriend
3. Be a part-time father to my young one, herself hurt and confused by the collapse of her parents' marriage..

Well, I've now found a job. Not a very good one, but this being without work was driving me nuts. Besides, I absolutely despised my last job. Hopefully, this one will be better...

I haven't found a girlfriend as yet.

I'm doing pretty all right being a father, I guess, nursing my daughter through the heartache of losing a full-time parent...

Now for the blogging matter at hand:

This morning, I came across an article by Dan Gardiner, editorial writer of the Ottawa Citizen.

What to say about Gardiner?

Once, when the Lord Beaverblack regime owned the Citizen and other (formerly) Southam newspapers, he toed the `right-wing' editorial line...

Then, when Conrad Black sold off his interests to the decidedly more Liberal-friendly Canwest concern (and no, folks, the Aspers weren't secret Ziocons, get that out of your head right now...)

And he went off to Osgoode Hall law school in Toronto...

and who knows what else, Gardiner has never wasted an opportunity to take a swipe at conservatives, or `conservatives', because any resemblance between conservatives who actually exist, and conservatives as they are depicted in Gardiner's thrice-weekly columns, is pure coincidental...

Like in the column of yesterday, or the day before, or sometime recently.

The premise of the piece is that `conservatives' believe that the Russians deserve what they get at the hands of Islamist Chechens, for some reason... but any notion put forward by himself or other newspaper columnists at his august publication, or many other periodicals and newspapers that the West deserves what it gets from Islam, because of `what we do' in the Middle East, is unpatriotic, pro-Islamist and just plain evil.

To `prove' his point, he quotes a passing comment between two American conservatives... and nothing else.

Such is the level of argumentation that Gardiner usually engages in, in his grand indictment of `conservatism.'

It isn't quite at the level of Keith Olberman. But it's still crap.

I must say that I've never encountered any conservative who held on to the belief that the Russian regime has it coming at the hands of Islamist, in Chechnya, or elsewhere.

I must say, that, I don't think there's any reason to panic, in regard to the arrest of three or four people in Canada, who were apparently planning attacks on Canadian targets and Canadians, and who might have links to international terrorism (innocent until proven otherwise, let's see the government's case etc etc etc).

I don't think all Muslims are bent on waging war with the rest: if Islam is not assuredly a `religion of peace', it is not just a religion of war, either...

But I am royally sick of those, whether they include Gardiner or not, who never lose an opportunity to excuse the violence perpetrated by Muslims against not only apostates and atheist, but other Muslims too:

In response, in the comments section, I posted the following rant:

Like most of Gardiner's columns since his return from Osgoode Hall, it is eloquent but entirely lacking in logic.

First, the premise: Do all `conservatives' think the Russians had it coming due to their, I dunno, complete and utter destruction of Chechnya's capital city in the 1990s - bec. of what Kristol and Bennet *apparently* think? Is Gardiner really that lacking in logic, or is he just trying to make a weak point, which he knows he'll get away with, given the political pov of the Ottawa Citizen?

Next, all you have to do is peruse the comments here and in most other DG columns on this very subject, in order to see that many in the West seek to defend Islam, no matter what its adherents do in their name, and blame the West for events like 9/11 (and much else), again, regardless of the facts.

Like the commenter `Art Campbell' in this thread and at least one other...

Last, this whole argument could be elucidated by reference to the actual facts of US and Western involvement in the Middle East, in contrast to the behaviour of the Soviet Union, and its successor regimes, toward Muslims.

The first Gulf War (or the second one, as the Iran-Iraq war was the original `Gulf War') in 1991 saw the U.S. - and many other countries, in the West and elsewhere - move against Iraq in favour of a very conservative Islamic regime, in Kuwait, against a secular regime in Iraq (remember, Iraqi war opponents, the Hussein govt `couldn't have anything to do with Al-Qaeda, bec the latter was "fundamentalist" the former "secular"'?).

Further, the Gulf-War alliance (approved by the UN Sec Council, let's not forget too), acted so that an even more reactionary, Islamic regime, in Saudi Arabia, would not become either a colony or a suzerainty of Iraq - that secular anti-Islamist regime, again let us recall.

Whether in 1991, the U.S. and the rest of the civilized world was motivated merely `for oil', as the slogan went, is irrelevant to how the GW alliance actually restored and maintained conservative/reactionary Islamic regimes in defence of secular, anti-Islamist Iraq.

Just exactly why the Gulf War of 1991 should become a recruiting method for Islamic fascism, is quite beyond me.

But what about DG’s point, about `U.S. troops being stationed on “holy” Saudi soil…’?

Yes. U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia – on bases on which U.S. troops were severely restricted from leaving, and where Bibles or other non-Islamic religious material, alcohol, skin magazines were banned (remember, this is on the American bases).

That’s surely some defilement of the “holy shrines” of Islam…

I’m sure that DG and Art Campbell, and many others, could offer other excuses as to why Islamists would seek to attack Western countries that they couldn’t spell before, like Canada… er, sorry, to delve into the sociological reasons why young Muslims – like a medical doctor who largely grew up in Canada, was at least partly educated here, and even appeared on `Canadian Idol’ – would seek to attack Canada and Canadians – without God forbid! seeking to justify such actions! What do you think of me my goodness!?!?

Like the overthrowing of a `democratic’ leader of Iran in 1953 (who was seeking to consolidate his own power regardless of democratic niceties, and who himself was as big an enemy of traditional Islam as Saddam Hussein of Iraq)

Or the attacks against the Hussein regime itself, in the period between 1991 and 2003 – that is against a secular Arab regime that was an enemy of Al-Qaeda (remember Dan and Art?); or the same overthrow of this anti-Islamist regime in ’03, which finally liberated the Shia of Iraq to exist without the domination of the Sunni population, to form `fundamentalist’ religious parties and the like…

You can see how that would inspire the Islamists to hate the U.S., to attack the
U.S. almost ten years ago… before the invasion of either Iraq and Afghanistan…
There are other casus belli that the Islamists can latch onto, in order to blame the West.

Like for example, how Western countries interceded in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, in Bosnia in 95 and in Kosovo in 1999, to rescue largely Muslim populations from largely Christian ones (but we didn’t terror-bomb Serbia quickly enough, you see…)

The same conflict in which the successor Soviet regime was adamantly in support of the Christians crushing, raping, murdering the Muslims…

The Soviets and their successors were so amiable to global Islam in so many other ways, too.

Like, from 1917 to 1991, how Russians maintained their colonies in Islamic countries of Central Asian, aggressively crushing the Islamic religious, imprisoning, persecuting, murdering the Islamic leadership.

Like in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, attempting to crush a conservative / reactionary Islamic insurgency against a secular, Communist regime…
Or from 1968 to 1991, when the Soviet Union was one of the main suppliers of arms and other materiel to the secular regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq (during which period Hussein’s `allies’ had no diplomatic relations with Iraq, until 1984, and sold him one percent of his weaponry, according to a Swedish think tank), who was (let us recall again) anti-Islam…

Or let us not forget Chechnya, where the Russians were responsible for liberating the capital city from its buildings, roads, much of its people…
And this is why, of course, the Russians are held up as a symbol of anti-Islamic recruiting throughout the world… just like the Americans and the rest of the democratic west are not…

Errr…

From all this, you might be tempted to think that the Islamists are determined to attack the West, while avoiding the Russians, because we’re democratic, liberal, secular, tolerant… decadent to them of course… you know, attack just because of what we are, and not what we do…

But then, only those yucky, déclassé `conservatives’ would think such a thing, right Dan and Art?

How Star Wars got Lost

2010-05-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

Last evening was the second-last episode of the Lost series, which began in the autumn of 2004.

A few thoughts: the programme is one of the most violent ever presented, or at least, that I have seen recently. Last night’s show, for example, featured a woman dying after having her throat cut, right before a second character is shot to death. Last week’s segment revealed more about the mysterious Jacob, and his unnamed twin brother, who were born from a shipwreck survivor who washed up on the island, was rescued by a woman already living there, who in turn murders the new mother by bashing her head in with a rock. This woman then raises the twins as her own.

I was reminded of the Norse pagan creation story, of the chief goddess giving birth to the Nordic race by having twins, one of whom is fair-haired, the other swarthy. In Lost, Jacob is shown to be fair in appearance, while his twin, if not swarthy, is much darker complected. It seems that the unnamed twin was rendered into the “smoke monster” that has harassed and murdered the plane-wrecked survivors, and many others, throughout the course of the series, when Jacob pushed him into the cave from which emanated a bright light of unknown origin. After which, the light was extinguished and the smoke monster came flying out of the cave.

The significance of this, I’m not certain. However, the producers and cast of Lost recently held a party to mark the end of the series. They were sent a revealing note by George Lucas, creator and director of the Star Wars “saga”.

It read as follows: “Congratulations on pulling off an amazing show. Don't tell anyone ... but when Star Wars first came out, I didn't know where it was going either. The trick is to pretend you've planned the whole thing out in advance. Throw in some father issues and references to other stories — let's call them homages — and you've got a series.” This is what many people, including me, suspected all along about Star Wars.

The Star Wars “saga” ultimately failed, becasue there was, in fact, no story to tell. The Star Wars universe was not a place, but a device, which allowed George Lucas to meld together several genres — the western, the war movie, the medieval romance, the pirate flick, and the samurai film — to create an exciting adventure with the first installment in 1977. Though set in the distant past, the far-away galaxy possessed super-futuristic hardware, inspired in turn by Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon serials of the 1940s. This allowed the characters to seamlessly hop between genres. Thus, Luke Skywalker and company could engage in a gun (“laser”) battle in keeping with the old western; later, Skywalker could take on Darth Vader with a sword made out of light, as befits a medieval epic; afterward, our heroes could engage the forces of the evil galactic empire in World War II-style space dogfights. Courtesy faster-than-light travel, the characters could speed to any planet as befitting the genre: either a “desert” planet, or a “forest” planet, or an artificial planetoid to stand in for the villain’s castle. It was this melding of genres which made the original Star Wars so exciting, even if, as one critic put it at the time, it was really “bubble-gum for the mind.”

Be that as it may, it was certainly good-tasting bubble-gum — and relatively long-lasting, too. The premise had enough promise for two separate movies, but that’s it. The first sequel, the Empire Strikes Back, Lucas wisely handed over filmmaking duties to hired guns. Even here, however, the saga necessarily fell back onto melodrama — “I’m your father, Luke.” The third film in the original series had all the action, without the spirit. The three prequels, released around the turn of the century, and detailing the transformation of Luke Skywalker’s father into Darth Vader, the chief villain of the series, were at times just mediocre, and often, abysmal. Even a children’s programme joked about how the Phantom Menace was “half-baked.” One reviewer called it “the Phantom movie,” which is precisely what it was. Perhaps a more skilled screenwriter could have penned something more exciting and interesting. It is more so that Lucas attempted to stretch a device — sci-fi hardware subsuming multiple themes and genres — into a saga, and it didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, work.

Hatfields vs McCoys / Private vs Public

2010-05-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

In barbarian society, the public is not a space for largely anonymous contact and communication between myriad private actors. Barbarians usually exist in settled communities, but have not developed civilization, society based in towns and cities. Public space there is enfeebled not only by the basic lack of infrastructure. The endurance of clannish social patterns, serves to reinforce the basic of lack of public space, which in turn serves as an arena where social conflicts are played out. Author Malcolm Gladwell quotes an ethnographer who declares that, “Quarrels are necessarily public. They may occur in the coffee shop, village square, or most frequently on a grazing boundary...” (J.K. Campbell, “Honour and the Devil,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, J.G. Peristiany, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, no page number cited in Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success , New York, Boston and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2008, p. 167.)

The lack of public or political authority in barbarian society, means that individuals must depend for their security upon their own kin and clan. Each moiety, in turn, must be wiling to take to violence if, even symbolically, another group transgresses upon itself. This is, of course, wrapped up in the concept of “honour”, through which social behaviour is regulated by adherence to group norms, and where disputes are settled by violence, when these norms are offended.

It is a mistake to consider barbarism as a “phase” between savagery (nomadic hunting and gathering) and civilization (urban-based society). Barbarian society reaches stasis, precisely because the level of public violence precludes the development of infrastructure and authority which makes civilization possible.

Barbarism is usually overcome by two paradoxical routes: the conquest and literal housebreaking of barbarians by a neighbouring civilized society, or the barbarian conquest of an urban culture. This is what brought classical civilization to a protracted end, at least in western Europe, as the hordes of Germans, Goths and other barbarians overran the decayed Roman empire. However, within a few centuries, the descendants of these barbarians gathered around the remnants of the empire (notably, the Catholic church, the organization of which was patterned directly upon the administrative reforms of the anti-Christian imperator Diocletian), forming the civilization known as the Middle Ages. It was a process interrupted by the appearance in the eighth century of the Norse, or Vikings, the barbarians who laid waste to much of northern Europe and the British isles during the next several hundred years — but who also traded and explored far wide, from the eastern Mediterranean to Greenland, Newfoundland and perhaps the mainland of North America itself.

It wasn’t long, either, before the Norse were civilized as well, establishing the Danelaw and Danegeld in Britain, as well as various suzerainties in continental Europe. By the time William the Conqueror successfully invaded Britain in 1066, the duke of Normandy, a descendent of Vikings, had been part of long line of French-speaking cavaliers. Prior to their invasions, the Norse were a relatively unknown, and apparently not especially aggressive, farming and pastoral society, without much in the way of established authority or civic life, still living in tribal bands. Historian Gwyn Jones writes, “In early times Denmark was at best a loose and straining confederation; considerable tracts of inland Norway by reason of their inaccessibility were ore or less permanently divorced from the polices of the Trongelag, Rogaland, and the Vik; and large regions of Sweden, notably Vastergotland, Ostertogland, and Uppland, were held apart by dense forests. The trend to separatism was marked to the end of the Viking Age. Farmer communities, remote and inward-looking, and resistant to change, persisted throughout Harald Hardradi’s time in Norway and Onund Jacob’s in Sweden; and the old viking aristocracy, blest with estates, privileges, and ships, was slow to break up. No king in the north could survive except by force. In sounds less flattering to described Godfred the Dane, Olaf Tryggvason, Svein Forkbeard, and Eirik the Victorious as mere top-dogs in their separate domains, but it falls short of libel. Their almost-peers were a hard-jawed packed. Such was the nature of the northern realms.” (Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings. 2nd. ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; paperback ed., 2001, pp. 66-67).

It appears that overpopulation of the European northlands forced the “surplus” — consisting mainly of young adult males — to sally forth and steal what they could not earn. It is significant that the Viking Age came to an end, in the eleventh century, coincident with the formation of three recognizable Scandinavian kingdoms — Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

The other kind of civilizing process, where a relatively developed, urban society, with established government, comes to dominate a barbarian population, occurred with the extension of royal authority in London, to the entire of the British isles during the early-modern period. At that time, Scotland especially was home to a very backward and factious population of clans of Irish derivation, the people known today as the Scots-Irish. The civilizing of the highland Scots clans occurred with the Clearances, the dispossession of thousands of peasants so to enclose land for cash farming. A significant number of the estranged emigrated, during the eighteenth century, to North America. The remainder were forced to migrate to the cities of Caledonia, where Scots Gaelic disappeared for good, along with most of the customs of the highland Irish, as these Irish were assimilated into the Scots English mainstream, which had long been situated in the country’s burghs. In Scotland, the civilizing process was quite successful, with the Scots becoming leading pioneers of the Enlightenment.

But the clannish and honour-based society of the Scots-Irish persisted amongst those who had emigrated to America, finding a home in the backhills of the southeast, the Appalachian and the Blue Ridge mountains in particular. These places were the home, of course, to the many blood feuds that erupted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notably that among the Hatfields and McCoys. Famously, the disputes arose over no substantive injury. Instead, symbolic acts (such as the accusation of cheating at cards, in one lesser known feud) were nearly always behind the vigilante skirmishes that affected so many of the counties of Appalachia. The American southeast generally — the area known as Dixieland — was characterized until recently by the impoverishment of the public, and by the clannish “good ol’ boy” rule. It was a culture that came to encompass the African slaves and their descendants, identified in the twentieth century with the “ghetto” ethos of the American inner cities. In these places, the public has been turned into the “turfs” of various street gangs, the intramural warfare of which makes these areas as bloody as the highlands of early-modern Scotland.

How are factious barbarians, so committed to blood feud, able to achieve the unity necessary to invade and conquer civilized societies? It is frequently the advent of what Max Weber called charismatic leadership. Charisma, alike with tribal-kinship organization, is highly personal and informal. But as with “legitimate” government (based, that is, on formal laws and institutions), charisma inspires loyalty and action beyond immediate kin and patriarchal relations. Instead, the charismatic leader, who comes as often as not from the lower ranks, inspires others entirely on the basis of personal magnetism, sagacity and prowess. He may become the “father-figure” of his barbarian nation (with the rare female charismatic leaders, such as Jeanne D’Arc, becoming “mothers” of their people), but even so, his leadership serves to undermine the traditional loyalties of kin and village in favour of “something bigger.” It is this grandiosity, again based in a person, not institutions, which often paves the way for institutional or (in Weberian terms, “legitimate”) government.

But here is the truth in the saying, “men make history.” It is by no means inevitable that a charismatic leader should arise amongst the ranks of barbarians, to unite the latter in common purpose. And, even if this should occur, there is no certainty that the charismatic will take the necessary steps to institutionalize impersonal rule as a legacy. And yet, it does take the will of the charismatic to bring about civilized existence into being: civilization doesn’t just evolve “on its own.”

Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors

2010-04-28T06:11:00.000-07:00

One of the peculiarities of the modern European pursuit of empire, was the attention given to racial differences between the conqueror and the conquered. The Latin-speakers of ancient Italy were entirely indifferent to the racial background of the many peoples they subjugated. Very quickly, the Romans would incorporate the elites of the conquered into their own upper class as part of the "divide-and-rule" strategy. Many Roman emperors were descendants of those whom the Romans had conquered, decades or centuries earlier. The Greeks had little respect for anyone not Hellenic, dismissing them all as "barbarians." But this wasn't based upon racial hatred. They believed those not using the Greek tongue were culturally, not biologically, deficient. Alexander the Great quickly adopted the customs of the many cultures he conquered. Similarly, many Latin-speakers of the Roman empire incorporated many traditions of the eastern dominions (including the Christian God). Similarly, the Latins of Roman Britain were strongly influenced by the Celtic society that had existed there previously.

This pattern held for eastern civilizations as well. The Mughal empire, established upon the Indian subcontinent by Persianized Mongol-Turks in the sixteenth century, had imposed Islam upon there (with Hindus and other religious groups reduced to second-class status). However, by the time of the accession of the British raj in the 1850s, the Mughals themselves, and the Indian Muslim population generally, were indistinguishable racially from Hindu India. Chinese civilization, meanwhile, has been repeatedly overcome by barbarian invasions, since long before the birth of Christ (including a Mongol invasion). Again and again, however, the invaders adopted the Han culture that existed previously, and became "racially" Chinese as well.

This pattern held during the European Middle Ages, and afterward as well. The Franks were a Germanic tribe that conquered post-Roman Gaul in the seventh century, and which placed the ancestors of Charlemagne upon the throne of the land that came to be known as France. As with previous conquerors, though, it wasn't long before the Germanic Franks became Latinized, giving their name to the novel language that developed from the merger of their dialect with that of Latin-speakers of Gaul. A couple of centuries earlier, different Germanic tribes, led by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, had invaded post-Roman Britain. Unlike the Franks, the Anglo-Saxon-Jutes completely displaced the Romano-Celtic culture that had existed beforehand. But DNA analysis of the present-day British population has revealed that its genetic profile is more consistent not with Germans, French or Norse, but residents of the present-day Basque lands in Spain. Evidently, the Anglo-Saxons at least, displaced the culture of the Romano-Celts, but merged genetically with the native population.

The Nazis took much of their inspiration for the Aryan myth, from Norse legends, as they were retold in the operas of Richard Wagner. But the idea of the "purebred" Norseman is itself contradicted by the pagan religion known to the Scandinavians, before they converted to Christianity. According to Gwyn Jones, in his history of the Vikings, Norse creation tells of the mother-goddess giving birth to twins, whence all Norsewomen and men were descended. One twin had blonde hair and blue eyes; the other was swarthy, with dark hair and brown eyes. This indicates better than anything that the Norse, far from being pure anything, had their origins in at least two separate races.

The practice of conquerors merging racially with the conquered, continued well into modernity. The trans-Atlantic African slave-trade originated among the Portugese in the fifteenth century. The word "nigger" comes from the Portugese word for "black", but it doesn't appear as though African slavery at this time was justified on the grounds that black Africans were of a separate race or a kind of sub-human. Instead, it was acceptable to enslave Africans because they were heathens and not Christians. European involvement in the slave trade, beginning in the Middle Ages, was not originally race-specific at all. The term "slave" is, in fact, an eponym, named after the Slavs who, at first, consisted of the vast majority of the Mediterranean slave trade. It was considered acceptable, after the turn of the second millennium, to enslave Orthodox Christians (as most Slavic people were) because the Catholic Church had excommunicated all Orthodox believers. Only when Catholicism and Orthodoxy patched up their relations, following the Crusades, did European slave-traders turn elsewhere — to Africa — for slaves.

The Portugese and Spanish empires were accomplished, in Asia, Africa and in especially in South America, with great violence and cruelty directed at the native populations. Such was always the case, though. What was absent in the formation of these empires, was a sense that the native populations were in some way biologically inferior to the Hispanic Europeans. They were, to the conquerors, heathens who (like the Africans) deserved to be enslaved in order that they brought the light of Christianity to them. Yet, once subjugation had been completed, the Latin European overlords entered into the time-tested pattern of mixing with the conquered. Today, virtually all Latin American countries have a majority people from mixed-race — or mestizo — background (or at least, a significant minority thereof). One country
even named itself in honour of this race-mixing: Mexico [correction: see comment below]. The French empire in North America was, too, characterized by a high amount of race-mixing, creating the metis (French and Indians) and the creole (Africans and French).

As for the African slave-trade itself, there is a paradox in relation to this. The height of the trans-Atlantic trade, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, occurred before Africa was actually conquered by the European powers. During this period, slaves were acquired not through the conquest of native societies by Europeans. Instead, the losers of conflicts between rival African kingdoms, and between black Africans and (largely) Arab Muslims, would be sold to Europeans at trading outposts on the west coast of the continent. The beginning of the end of African slavery, came when Europe began to take formal control of the "dark continent." Thus, in 1804, the British empire banned the slave trade: it used the Royal Navy to enforce the ban, which was strenuously opposed by the African and Islamic potentates that profited so handsomely from it.

By 1834, as British colonization of Africa progressed even further, the British outlawed slavery entirely, in all of its territories. Later, when the Europeans had taken complete control of Africa, slavery had been eliminated there for the first time in centuries, if ever.

What's more, African slavery in the United States was accompanied by at least some degree of miscegenation. Genetic analysis of the descendants of Sally Hemmings, a slave to Thomas Jefferson, showed that they shared a family link with those of the legitimate Jefferson lineage. The conclusion drawn from this was that Hemmings and Jefferson had children together (although this is disputed; some believe instead that Hemmings was descended from an illicit union between her ancestor and a relative of Jefferson's — it is in fact irrelevant for our purposes what was actually the case). Julian Bond, the civil rights leader who, in spite of his dark complexion has very European facial features, recounted a story he'd been told about his grandfather, who was named James Bond. Years after the abolition of slavery in 1863, James Bond had travelled to visit the white plantation family that had owned him and his parents. There, he was greeted as an honoured guest, according to Julian Bond. After being given dinner and evening's company, James Bond was conducted by the former slaveholder to the train station for the journey home. As the older white man parted from his former slave at the station, James Bond turned to him and said, "Thank you, father."

The miscegenation between conquered and conqueror, continued with the early years of British rule in India. Until the Sepoy rebellion in 1857, the subcontinent was ruled by the East India company, under charter from the British Crown. Commencing in earnest during the eighteenth century, East India company officials, largely men, became increasingly comfortable with adopting the customs, traditions, even the dress, of the Indian native population — this included marrying women from the subcontinent. One such official, Sir William Jones, a philologist who was appointed a magistrate to oversee company business in Indian in the 1780s, studied the ancient linguistic ancestor of Hindi, called Sanskrit. Jones proposed that Sanskrit and all its derivates, were part of the same linguistic group that included all the European languages. Encompassing about one-third of humanity, this family of languages was later to be known as the Indo-European linguistic group.

After the British government took direct control of India, this race mixing came to an abrupt end. No longer were British officials to mate with Indians. Instead, the new raj governed as a class of race overlords, living and working completely separately from the Indian population, excepting those fortunate enough to be servants and minor administrators in the homes and businesses of the white rulers. Not coincidentally, this change occurred as racial ideas began to take serious hold on the European educated imagination. Thereafter, European empires dismissed the time-honoured practice of mixing racially with their conquered peoples in order to create a novel sort of civilization (as occurred in, for example, Latin American). Instead, the European imperial rulers were, by law and by custom, to keep aloof of the native population, who were officially considered of a race inferior to the whites.

The scholarly work of William Jones, uncovering the common roots of English and Hindi as Indo-European languages, also provided the foundation for a less helpful set of ideas that were, by the twentieth century, to prove disastrous to Europe and to much of the rest of humanity, too. Translations of Sanskrit writings revealed that, some time around 1700 before the Christian calendar, an Indo-European nomadic people known as the Aryans, had invaded the Indian subcontinent, subduing the Indus valley civilization that existed there. The term "Aryan" demonstrates, incidentally, how Sanskrit is part of the same language family as the European languages. The term means, "greater" or "noble", and is a cognate of "aristocracy."

There is no information as to how the Aryans appeared, whether they were light-skinned in contrast to the dark-skinned Indus valley peoples. Regardless, we know they conformed to the historical pattern of conquered mixing racially with the conquered. But a German pioneer in the field of archaeology, Gustaf Kossinna (1858-1931), argued that the Aryans were the predecessors of the Nordic race of Europe, which included the Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch, English and so on. The Aryan theory, so essential to Nazi ideology, was in fact widely believed among Germans from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Nazi regime in 1945 (and probably by many thereafter, too). Indeed, it seems that scientific-racist theories were the more popular in Germany than France or Britain, and in this, there is yet another paradox.

In contrast to both Britain and France, Germany never had much of a colonial overseas empire (they didn't have one at all until the late nineteenth century). There were no (to use an anachronistic term) "visible" minorities in Germany; Germans were not involved very much in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As for Germany's overseas colonies, they were restricted to windswept South West Africa (present-day Namibia) and a couple of other barren places here and there (the lack of an overseas empire was one of the beefs that the German empire had with France and Britain, and fuelled calls for an European-based lebensraum, or "living space", by Hitler and many other German politicians of the Weimar republic). The focus of pre-Nazi German racial obsession and hostility was not on skin colour, but ethnicity: that is, upon Jewish Europeans primarily, and secondarily upon Slavic peoples. Both of these were considered races different from the Aryan, although of course European Jews and Slavic nations were "Caucasian" in background (ie., they had white skin too).

German hostility toward Jews goes back a long way, centuries before Hitler, to one of the first truly pan-German figures, Martin Luther, who denounced Jews and directed his followers to aggress against them. But the term "anti-Semitism" is a misnomer when applied to Luther and other Jew-haters prior to the nineteenth century. For the Jew-hatred that was manifested by Luther and many other Germans of the time, as well other Christian Europeans during late-medieval and early-modern times, had its roots in the schism between Christianity and Judaism over the divinity of Jesus. Christians then weren't focussed on a biological disparity between themselves and Jews: if members of the latter group chose to convert to Christianity, then they would thereby be safe from the threat of pogrom. This was what was different from Jew-hatred of the old type, and that which emerged among Germans (and other Europeans) the nineteenth century: to that latter, there was nothing redeemable about the Jews.

Their badness wasn't due to disbelief in the divine status of Jesus; even if the Jew converted to Christianity, he was, to the modern anti-Semite, bad because he was racially inferior. It didn't matter, either, if the Jew gave up his religion and behaved like a "real" German: he was essentially, biologically a menace and thus shouldn't mix with Germans of the Aryan race at all.

When, during the Nazi era, the Germans invaded most of Europe, they behaved according to their racist beliefs. The Slavic countries to the east of Third Reich, were far more brutally subjugated than were the western European countries such as Holland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and so on, the people of which the Nazis believed were part of the same race as themselves. Poland, for example, suffered more than two million civilian deaths during the Nazi occupation. Denmark lost 1,000 civilians because of the Nazi invasion. In Scandinavia and the other Western European countries, the Nazis sought collaborators among the vanquished elite — and found very many who were willing to collaborate with them. There were collaborators in the Slavic countries as well. But the Nazis had no intention of sharing power with — or even allowing to survive — a vast mongrel population. On the other hand, if Nazi Germany had won the war, there is no reason to believe that the ruling elites of Western Europe would not have been wholly or partially Nazified or even Germanized.

The genocidal actions of the Nazis were the logical conclusion of the race-based policies pursued, with more moderate tools, in the empires of all the other European countries. Far from being a throwback to ancient or tribal passions, racism is an ultra-modern theory. Its defiance of time-honoured methods of subjugation (wherein the conquered and conqueror ultimately merge culturally and socially) occurred because of the progress of science, in particular because of the new understanding of mechanics of life itself. By the mid-nineteenth century, virtually all educated Europeans accepted that life came about because of natural, and not miraculous, processes. Life was, moreover, understood to have evolved, or changed from one state to another. This simply had to be the case, given the newly-emergent fossil record showed evidence of life that existed once, long ago, and no longer did (or no longer did so in a present form). Scientists remained uncertain as to how exactly this occurred (until the publication in 1859 of Darwin's theory of natural selection upon variation).

Long before the Origin of Species, however, systematic principles for animal and plant domestication and breeding had been established. And, decades prior to eugenics being formalized into a scientific discipline (by Charles Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton) near the close of the nineteenth century, theories of plant and animal breeding were being applied to the social sciences. Two of the most popular nineteenth-century race theorists in Germany (ironically enough) were a Frenchman, Count de Gobineau, and an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (the latter was ultimately Germanized, marrying the daughter of the late composer Richard Wagner). Both authors exalted the Aryans or German as the superior race to all others, and asserted that nothing great occurred without Aryan input.

As for eugenics, the Nazis also took its principles to their logical conclusion — the active culling of inferior humans to ensure the purebred vitality of the herd. The necessity of such culling was the consensus view of most educated adults decades before the Nazis came to power, though. Eugenics advocates such as Winston Churchill and Maynard Keynes had no intention to be so extreme; they would only countenance forced sterilization, if and when voluntary sterilization of defectives could not be achieved. In any case, eugenics in particular, and racism generally, were by-products of scientific knowledge. The fact that they are now widely discredited, makes them no less examples of scientific research, than other theories once widely accepted, but thereafter abandoned as empirically without foundation.

It was the Nazi commitment to racism which, above all, rendered German fascism so different in kind from the true reactionary views and politics of the Prussian elite. The Polish scholar on the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman, observed (in Modernity and the Holocaust, Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 44), "Modern culture is a garden culture. It defines itself as the design for an ideal life and a perfect arrangement of human conditions. It constructs its own identity out of distrust of nature. In fact, it defines itself and nature, and the distinction between them, through its endemic distrust of spontaneity and its longing for a better, and necessarily artificial, order. Apart from the overall plan, the artificial order of the garden needs tools and raw materials. It also needs defence - against the unrelenting danger of what is obviously, a disorder

Happy Earth day...

2010-04-22T08:12:00.001-07:00

In order to mark Earth Day today, my daughter’s school requested that parents ensure their children’s lunches do not include any litter: everything must be in a recyclable container.

I was quite the environmentalist as a young adult, but now I don’t give a shit about Earth Day or environmentalism at all. Nature should be protected from undue and unnecessarily damage to its eco-systems: everyone is agreed upon that by now, and I’m not sure how many had an opinion against such a notion, prior to recent times. To my mind, modern environmentalism has become a pagan cult, at best; at worst, it is a cult, still, but a misanthropic death-cult that sees human beings as a cancer or parasite upon the face of the earth.

On the other hand, I cannot conceive of the tools of civilization that environmentalists deride so much, as being other than achievement. Plastic, for example, I view as about the greatest thing since sliced-bread (which, in fact, is less great than many things, and certainly, less so than plastic). More pragmatically, though, the ideas and theories that have supported environmentalism have been proven wrong, again and again.

In the 1970s, and for long after, the environmental movement was quite taken with the notions of overpopulation and resource depletion. “By 1980,” it was said, “much of Africa and Asia will be starving, and supplies of basic commodities such as crude oil, copper and what have you, will be exhausted.” But, when 1980 approached, environmentalist doomsayers simply brought the timetable forward: “by 1985...”, and then it was, by “by 1990,” and so on.

However, during the 1990s, environmentalists switched the focus of their predictions of apocalypse from overpopulation and resource depletion, to the “greenhouse effect”, or as it became known then, “global warming” (this is before yet another term was invented, to account for the lack of global warming — “climate change”). As someone who believes that, in fact, human activity is having at least some influence upon the climate, I came to believe long ago that environmentalists were using global warming to make assertions about the present and future climate, that were nowhere justified by the scientific research available. “Global warming” became a political cudgel to bash those who didn’t keep in lockstep with the environmentalist agenda: those questioning it were maligned and stigmatized without even the courtesy of having their arguments fairly reviewed and refuted. This is, as a said, the behaviour of a cult, not a secular, liberal political movement.

But again, the predicted warming of the climate has not transpired since 1995, at the latest, according to an admission by the former director of the climate research unit at East Anglia university in the U.K., in the Times of London some time ago. Even now, though, environmentalists and their many supporters in the news media continue to tout climate change as though the East Anglia researchers were not shown to be engaging in anti-scientific practices in order to get the “right” answers about climate change (ie., that the earth is warming up) and which forced the resignation of the director just mentioned above.

Given the fact that climate change ideology has long become dogma to the transnationalist elite, I cannot accept that their real interest in promoting climate apocalypse is to prevent global warming, rather than to control the little people. After all, this same elite (which by now includes para-governmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace) exhausts thousands of tons of carbon dioxide not only when jetting to one international conference after another on climate change; but the conferences themselves emit far more carbon than do millions of ordinary people.

Environmentalism did not originate as a political movement in the 1960s, as is usually assumed. In fact, it was the National Socialist German Workers party which introduced pioneering regulations and laws to protect the environment from human activity. This is one of the ways in which the Nazi economy was far from being “laissez-faire” (another was the Nazis effort to stamp out tobacco smoking). Ernst Lehmann, a German botany professor, stated in a book published in Munich in 1934, “We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought.”

Historian Peter Staudenmaierm writes that concern for the environment among the Germans, goes back long before the birth of Adolf Hitler in 1889. In fact, environmentalism was one of the pillars of reaction against capitalism, industrialism and democracy in the German lands (which were not unified until 1871) after the collapse of the Buonapartiste regime. He writes, “In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term 'ecology' and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment. Haeckel was also the chief popularizer of Darwin and evolutionary theory for the German speaking world, and developed a peculiar sort of social darwinist philosophy he called 'monism.' The German Monist League he founded combined scientifically based ecological holism with völkisch social views. Haeckel believed in nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics.” Haeckel lived into the post-World War I era, in fact, and became involved in the secret-society movements that provided the foundation of the Nazi party, itself a “secret society in broad daylight.”

Staudenmaiern observes, “The pioneer of scientific ecology, along with his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille, profoundly shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of environmentalists by embedding concern for the natural world in a tightly woven web of regressive social themes. From its very beginnings, then, ecology was bound up in an intensely reactionary political framework.”

The “granola-crunchers” of the contemporary environmental movement seem a long way off from the Brownshirts and the SS. But Staudenmaiern make the case that for the pre-Nazi environmentalists at least, a pristine environment was closely linked to racial purity: Ludwig Woltmann, a student of Haeckel, “took a negative attitude toward modern industrialism. He claimed that the change from an agrarian to an industrial society had hastened the decline of the race. In contrast to nature, which engendered the harmonic forms of Germanism, there were the big cities, diabolical and inorganic, destroying the virtues of the race.” Today’s environmentalists adhere to no racial theories. Rhetorically, at least, environmentalists look down on modern Occidental society, and axiomatically praise the non-Western world for its supposed living in “harmony with nature.” But it is easy to detect among the more ardent of environmentalists at least, a disdain for human beings that, while not connected to a racial ideology, is not altogether different from the anti-Enlightened, reactionary ideas whence Nazism came.

There are other parallels as well. Modern environmentalism is the direct offspring of the 1960s counterculture. It is, in some ways, a fusion of the hippie “back to nature” ethic with the left-wing anti-war activism of university campuses from that era. The hippie movement of the sixties, was itself foreshadowed in Germany in the early decades of the twentieth century. Staudenmaiern writes of the Wandervögel, the “wandering spirits” who were “a hodge podge of countercultural elements, blending neo Romanticism, Eastern philosophies, nature mysticism, hostility to reason, and a strong communal impulse in a confused but no less ardent search for authentic, non alienated social relations. Their back to the land emphasis spurred a passionate sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it suffered. They have been aptly characterized as 'right wing hippies,' for although some sectors of the movement gravitated toward various forms of emancipatory politics (though usually shedding their environmentalist trappings in the process), most of the Wandervöge were eventually absorbed by the Nazis.”

There is, on the other hand, a more direct intellectual link between Nazism and contemporary environmentalism: philosopher Martin Heidegger, who in spite of his status as an enthusiastic Nazi party member and idolizer of Hitler, is a main influence on the contemporary environmental movement with books such as the (completely unreadable) Question Concerning Technology. In any case, Staudenmaiern observes that “Drawing on the heritage of Arndt, Riehl, Haeckel, and others (all of whom were honored between 1933 and 1945 as forebears of triumphant National Socialism), the Nazi movement's incorporation of environmentalist themes was a crucial factor in its rise to popularity and state power.”

Nazi Germany was the first jurisdiction anywhere to establish a government agency especially for the protection of the environment. Staudenmaiern states that the Nazis’ commitment to nature protection was not merely rhetorical, but came from “firmly held beliefs and, indeed, practices at the very top of the Nazi hierarchy which are today conventionally associated with ecological attitudes. Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green utopian, discussing authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring `water, winds and tides’ as the energy path of the future.” Staudenmaiern notes that, “Even in the midst of war, Nazi leaders maintained their commitment to ecological ideals which were, for them, an essential element of racial rejuvenation.” He quotes a decree from SS leader Heinrich Himmler, issued in 1942, in regard to recently conquered Poland: “The peasant of our racial stock has always carefully endeavored to increase the natural powers of the soil, plants, and animals, and to preserve the balance of the whole of nature. For him, respect for divine creation is the measure of all culture. If, therefore, the new Lebensräume (living spaces) are to become a homeland for our settlers, the planned arrangement of the landscape to keep it close to nature is a decisive prerequisite. It is one of the bases for fortifying the German Volk.”

Staudenmaiern says that while it has been the tendency of observers to view “the agrarian and romantic moments in Nazi ideology and policy [as being] in constant tension with, if not in flat contradiction to, the technocratic industrialist thrust of the Third Reich's rapid modernization.” But, he says, “What is not often remarked is that even these modernizing tendencies had a significant ecological component.” Walther Darré, who was the Nazi Minister of Agriculture between 1933 and ‘42, “worked to install environmentally sensitive principles as the very basis of the Third Reich's agricultural policy. Even in its most productivist phases, these precepts remained emblematic of Nazi doctrine. When the `Battle for Production' (a scheme to boost the productivity of the agricultural sector) was proclaimed at the second Reich Farmers Congress in 1934, the very first point in the program read `Keep the soil healthy!' But Darré's most important innovation was the introduction on a large scale of organic farming methods, significantly labeled `lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise,' or farming according to the laws of life. The term points up yet again the natural order ideology which underlies so much reactionary ecological thought.”

Darré’s environmentalist philosophy proved influential on the post-war “green” movement that emerged in Germany after the student protests there in the 1960s. Modern German Green-party members and thinkers ignore or downplay Darré’s association with the Nazis, but Staudenmaiern notes, “Darré's published writings alone, dating back to the early twenties, are enough to indict him as a rabidly racist and jingoist ideologue particularly prone to a vulgar and hateful antisemitism (he spoke of Jews, revealingly, as `weeds’). His decade long tenure as a loyal servant and, moreover, architect of the Nazi state demonstrates his dedication to Hitler's deranged cause. One account even claims that it was Darré who convinced Hitler and Himmler of the necessity of exterminating the Jews and Slavs.”

Meanwhile, Fritz Todt, an engineer and a very powerful minister of infrastructure in the Nazi regime prior to his death (in a plane crash) in 1942, was responsible for the construction of the autobahn, or national system of highways (that was in fact already in advanced planning prior to the Nazis coming to power). Due to his efforts, says Staudenmaiern, “one of the largest building enterprises undertaken in this century” was carried to with maximum “sensitivity” to the environment: “The ecological aspects of this approach to construction went well beyond an emphasis on harmonious adaptation to the natural surroundings for aesthetic reasons; Todt also established strict criteria for respecting wetlands, forests and ecologically sensitive areas. ... these environmentalist concerns were inseparably bound to a völkisch nationalist outlook. Todt himself expressed this connection succinctly: `The fulfillment of mere transportation purposes is not the final aim of German highway construction. The German highway must be an expression of its surrounding landscape and an expression of the German essence.’”

Who cares about Tea Parties?

2010-04-19T06:55:00.000-07:00

I haven’t commented on the “tea party” protests that cropped up during the first year of Barack Obama’s reign as U.S. president in 2009. The tea-party people are united in their opposition to the president’s social democratic agenda, mostly. But I don’t believe in protests, not in a democracy at least.

Certainly, in states where censorship, police repression and other forms of authoritarianism are the rule, mass protests are a legitimate tool of dissent. In democratic polities, however, protest demonstrations are contrary to the democratic spirit. For example, those tea-party people who are presently demonstrating against the statist agenda of their government (a cross-country protest was held April 15, the deadline for filing annual tax returns in the U.S.), have the ability to persuade their fellow citizens of the probity of their views, by means other than protest demonstrations. They do not suffer from censorship, repression or any other arbitrary impediments to political action.

The fact is, the small-government agenda pursued by the tea party folks was repudiated at the ballot-box in the general election of 2008, which saw not only the leftist Obama voted in as president, but Democratic-party majorities in the Congress strengthened, too. Perhaps the Democrats will lose both houses of Congress in the mid-term elections of 2010. But that’s the way democracy works, isn’t it? Elections invest power in a certain candidate or party for a certain period, during which they will attempt to enact an agenda or programme. Those who are opposed to that programme have the opportunity to run them out of office when an election is held next time, and thereafter pursue their own agenda.

How do protest demonstrations fit into this? They don’t. At best, protests are simply irrelevant; they are orgies of mass self-congratulation, which the participants carry signs that say (as in the Buffalo Springfield hit, For What It’s Worth) “hooray for our side!” If legislators and governors believed that the protests represented majority sentiment, they would adjust their policies at least somewhat to jibe with this.

But a protest demonstration consisting of tens, or even hundred of thousands of people (the latter being exceedingly rare in any case), is still only the fraction of the total number of voters in even the smallest democratic polity of the present day. Why should any politician even bother with them, when they know by public opinion polling whether or not the protestors have majority opinion with them? The fact that a protest movement focuses on demonstrations as it main activity, is substantial proof that it certainly doesn’t have majoritarian backing at all. They protest because they cannot convince others of the legitimacy of their views.

But it isn’t any better when protests are not irrelevant — that is, when they actually do have a real effect on a democratic state. It is by now a platitude that “people have the right to protest”, but I find this sentiment a bit sophistic. After all, who seriously argues that no one has the right to participate in mass protests? The maxim, in a free society, is that an individual may do what she wants, so long as she doesn’t violate the rights and freedoms of others. Yet, the attitude of those involved in protest movements is that their right to demonstrate is triumphal over the right to freedom of movement enjoyed by the vast majority who are not protestors. This is true even where a particular protest is genuinely non-violent and non-coercive. Assuming the latter to be true, non-protestors have to deal with the disruptions in traffic and convenience that inevitably go along with street protests.

And yet, many mass demonstrations are not simply marches or rallies at all. The specific intent of their organizers is to get the government to change a policy on a particular issue — based on nothing other than the size of the demonstration itself. But to emphasize, even the largest mass demonstrations consist of no more than a small percentage of even the total electorate (to say nothing of the total population). Just who are the leaders of a protest movements to demand a change in any policy? Again, it demonstrates the democratic impotence of protest demonstrators, that they feel the need to demonstrate, instead of organizing to persuade voters to support their agenda. This is where, of course, protest leaders are not contemptuous of democratic government entirely.

I’m addressing the anti-government tea-party protestors, just because they are most conspicuous type of demonstrator at the present time. But this is even more pertinent to protest-demonstrators with a decidedly anti-tea party agenda that were commonplace in the decade prior to the election of Obama in 2008. These latter protests began as an “anti-globalization” movement (although this was a severe misnomer), which then morphed into an “anti-war” movement following the attacks of September 11, 2001. And, in contrast to the tea party movement, this group of protestors were explicitly coercive in their aims. This was evidenced at one of the early such mass demonstrations of the “anti-globalization” movement, which occurred at meeting of the World Trade Organization at Seattle, Washington, in December 1999.

The first day of the meetings between leaders of most of the world’s governments had to be cancelled when the protests blocked access to the facility at which the conference was to be held. When, the next day, police prevented the protestors from blockading the conference again, there came the inevitable cries of “police brutality!” The “anti-globalization” movement’s rationale for taking to the streets, in Seattle and in many places thereafter (including Ottawa and Quebec city) must be more flimsy than those of the tea-party protests. The “anti-globalizers” were not censored or repressed in expressing or articulating their views: on the contrary, many parts of the establishment — including most academics, many in the news media, as well as in the government itself — are sympathetic to these views, and much of the “anti-globalization” / “anti-war” protests’ coverage was extremely sympathetic to the cause.

This is not the case, however, for the tea party protests. Initially, in 2009, most major news media simply ignored the demonstrations. This is odd in itself, given how news services generally find protest-demonstrations irresistible to cover. However, when the tea-party movement became too big to be ignored, most news media chose to cover the events in, at best, a condescending way; and at the worst, reporters and commentators were outright hostile toward it.

At least some referred to them as “tea bag” protests (a term, which means, according to the online Urban Dictionary, to place one’s testicles into the mouth of a sexual partner, whilst the latter is lying down). There isn’t even any wit or cleverness about that; it is just to substitute a vulgar term for the real one, because the latter sounds like the former. The other tack taken by the news media is to portray the tea-party demonstrations as something akin to Hitler or KKK rallies. This bore fruit when, last month, the U.S. Congress passed legislation to extend health-care coverage to all American citizens, by forcing them essentially to buy medical insurance.

Tea-party demonstrators were present near Capitol hill when the vote was taking place. At one point, several black legislators were passing near the demonstrations, and at least a couple of them alleged that they heard at least some of the tea-party protestors shout “nigger” in their direction. There were also allegations that one or more of these legislators were spit upon. Accounts of this event vary. Initial reports quoted one of the legislators as saying much or even the whole crowd were chanting this insult. Later, this was “clarified” to state that only one or two of the demonstrators had made this remark.

These allegations quickly were reported around the world. My wife told me as to how she was “disgusted” with the racist comments made by the anti-heath care bill demonstrators, a report that she heard on the car radio on one of the local station’s hourly news updates. This is what is meant when it is said that an untruth goes halfway around the world before the truth has time to put on its hat. Since this alleged incident took place, no independent corroboration of tea-party demonstrators using racist language against the Congress members, or anyone else, has been revealed. This is in spite of the fact that the demonstrations — and the legislators’ walk through the crowd — was attended by many television reporters and freelance videographers. There is, even so, no audio or visual record of this event. The only people who claim to have heard it, are those making the allegations.

Somehow, though, the onus has been placed upon the tea party movement and their supporters, to prove that the incident didn’t happen. One conservative activist, who’s offered $100,000 to anyone who can produce audio-visual proof of the incident, was recently taken to task in an Associated Press report for publishing footage showing the Congress members passing through the tea-party demonstrations, apparently without being harassed or abused, racially or otherwise. Except that, AP claimed, this particular tour through the crowds took place some time after the alleged racist language was used. This, in itself seems odd. If the tea-party crowds were so threatening the first time through — one legislator initially claimed that the crowds reminded her of Klan rallies — why would they return to be abused again?

In the AP article just noted, independent corroboration did seem to come from a “blue-dog” (that is, more conservative) Democratic-party member of the Congress, who said he also heard the racist taunts. The Associated reporter took care to mention that this particular legislature was white, as though that fact alone would verify the accusation. However, speaking to a different reporter later, this same Congress member said he was misquoted, and did not hear the abuse at all. Nevertheless, Joan Walsh, editor of the online journal Salon, after touting the blue-dog’s testimony, just went ahead and took the word of the offended black Congress members that the incident took place. No proof needed, so long as the accuser is on “our” side.

There is a larger point being lost here: what if one or two of the demonstrators actually had said these words? Should this reflect upon the entire group of demonstrators? I think anyone — even Joan Walsh of Salon — would be hard-pressed to argue this point, by logic or by example. Just as any protest-demonstration in itself, no matter how large, necessarily represents majoritarian sentiments, no single member of any crowd can be said to speak for all of those present. This is especially so, given the fact that anyone at all can join a crowd of demonstrators. I don’t recall Salon or any other news service making a big deal out of “anti-globalization” or “anti-war” protestors of past years, carrying banners that depicted the former U.S. secretary of state and national security chief (both black Americans) as gorillas, or in other instances, signs that read “Death to Jews” or “Kill the Jews.” Unlike the tea-party people, the anti-war and anti-Israel crowd can rely on the news media keeping their backs.

Update 20 Apr 10: Roland Martin, a commentator at the CNN web site, has this to say to those who would criticize the tea party demonstrators:

First, let's deal with the Tea Party haters. Please, shut up. How can any liberal, progressive, moderate or conservative be mad about a group of Americans taking to the streets to protest the actions of the country? What they are engaged in is constitutional. The freedom to assemble, march, walk, scream and yell is right there in the document we all abide by.

How true.

Engineering and Athletics

2010-04-06T10:58:00.000-07:00

In spite of my utter scepticism about the Olympics, and about nationalism, I had to admit that I was very proud that Canadian athletes had done so well at the recent winter Games in "Vancouver" (although most events were held in Whistler) — really for the first time ever at an Olympic games.

An article I read the other day about the Cuban Olympic boxing team, and its success at summer-Olympic games, reminded me as to how during the Cold War, the former Communist regimes of eastern Europe, were so successful at both the winter and summer games.

The figures (these from Wikipedia) are undeniable. At the 1924 summer Olympics, hosted by Paris, the top five countries by medal rank were (in order): the United States (which won ninety-nine bronze, silver and gold medals), followed by France at 38, Finland with one less than France, and then Great Britain (34) and Italy (sixteen in total). At the 1928 summer games in Amsterdam, the top five were: the U.S., Germany, Finland, Sweden and Italy. In 1932 in L.A., it was the U.S., Italy, France, Sweden and Japan.

The last summer Olympic games held before World War II (when the Olympic games were suspended) was in Berlin. Not surprisingly, Germany won the most medals (at 89), followed by the United States, Hungary, Italy and Finland. After the war, the composition of the top-ranked Olympic nations began to shift rapidly. At the 1948 summer games, held in London, the top five ranking countries were the U.S., Sweden, France, Hungary and Italy. Much the same as in previous games, but notable was the eighth-ranked country: Czechoslovakia, which just that year had seen the Communist party take power in a putsch.

By 1952, when the summer Olympics were held in Helsinki, Czechoslovakia had jumped to sixth-place. For the first time in ‘52, as well, the Soviet Union sent an Olympic team. The U.S.S.R.’s medal rank came second that year behind the U.S., with 71 versus 76. But for the 1956 Melbourne, Australia games, the Soviet Union won 99 medals (thirty-seven gold) as against only 74 for the U.S. Four years later in Rome, they did even better, getting 103 versus 71 for the Americans. Eastern bloc countries Czechoslovakia and Poland came tenth and ninth, respectively.

Again in Tokyo in 1964, the U.S. was beaten by the U.S.S.R. in total medals (though it won more gold than the Soviet Union), while Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were also in the top ten. In 1968, when the summer Olympics were held in Mexico city, the U.S. beat out the Soviet Union for most medals; Hungary and Czechoslovakia were also in the top ten, but a new Olympic team, representing East Germany (or the German Democratic Republic) came in with 25 medals, almost tying West Germany with 26 (although the East did win more gold medals than the West; prior to ‘68, the two nations had competed on a single “united Germany” team). By 1972, when the summer games were held in Munich, the Soviets were back on top, with the U.S. in second, the GDR in third, handily beating out fourth-place West Germany. Meanwhile, the last three places in the top ten were held by Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria. During the Montreal Olympics in 1976, the Eastern bloc was clearly winning the field: seven out of the top ten were Communist states, with the U.S.S.R. and East Germany coming first and second, winning 215 medals between them, including 89 gold trophies.

During the Cold War, Communist authorities were clearly interested in using the Olympic games as propaganda vehicles, to show off the superiority of Leninist socialism. What is interesting is that the success of Communist-state Olympic athletes was ramped up, even as these same countries encountered both relative and absolute economic decline. I think this parallels how command economies — and the state-controlled sectors of competitive economies — are able to more successfully develop engineered technology than are firms that operate under competitive conditions.

For a decade or more, I’ve pondered as to why this is the case, even though the cash sector is able to more effectively organize a technology-based economy better than where no competition exists. My tentative conclusion on this point has been that, in regard to research and development of applied forms of engineering, financing by governmental means is not a detriment that it obviously with other forms of investment; private financing of R&D is not as successful as it is in virtually all others forms of endeavour. But why?

There are several reasons. Motivation, for instance. Perhaps more than anyone, experts looking to bring scientific theory into engineering practice, have intrinsic incentives, regardless of the profitable end that may come from their work. This is as true of researchers working under a competitive, cash economy, as under command socialism. But, quite unlike with for-profit firms, participants in research projects financed by the state, are not usually delimited in their activities, by the necessity of creating a product or service that can sell in the marketplace. The need to make a profit is what brings discipline to the activities of companies working under competitive conditions. But it appears detrimental to research and development in the field of engineering. The need for an immediate, or at least certain, return on investment, which inspires efficiency under a cash-economy as a generality, is not at all efficacious when dealing with the technological basis of a modern economy.

Research and development under command-economy conditions (or even when investments are provided by the state which presides over a “free market” economy) does frequently lead to practical results because it such work lends itself to relatively limited ends, and measurable benchmarks. This is, of course, different from the more mundane types of production, such as clothing, housing and feeding people. As is well-known, the command economies of the former Soviet bloc were notoriously inept at these basic tasks, even as they developed satellites or jet-fighter craft that were far superior technologically to their counterparts being created in Western countries.

What does this have to do with the undeniable success that Soviet bloc athletes encountered during the Cold War? The same set of conditions are in place for athletic as for technological supremacy. Like research scientists, athletes are intrinsically motivated: their desire to win has to do with the activity itself, rather than any outside incentive, such as money. And, this intrinsic motivation is evident not only for the athletes themselves, but for those who assist them — coaches, trainers, even those who cheer them on. Certainly, athletes can make a great deal of money, both from professional salaries and from endorsements of commercial products. But this doesn’t really apply to Olympic athletes, at least not so much. Being “amateur”, athletes are not paid directly for their services. Multiple gold-medalists can make a great deal of cash from commercial endorsements, but usually this doesn’t last very long. The vast bulk of Olympic athletes have no endorsement prospects at all.

In Western countries, this has meant that athletes had to be independently wealthy (as was often the case during the first few meetings of the modern Olympics), work for a living while training part-time, or else live very modestly on stipends provided by foundations, universities or government in order to have enough training-time to compete at an international level. In the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, however, authorities were so interested in beating the West — and especially the United States — on the Olympic field, that any student showing promise in athletics was whisked into special programmes to build up her competitive potential. As such, Olympic hopefuls from the Soviet bloc were granted privileges not available to the average “citizen” in Communist countries: access to Western consumer goods, relative freedom from censorship, and most of all, travel outside the country in order to compete at the Olympics and other international athletic events. Most of all, though, they were given the free time to train without worry of having to make a living at a non-athletic job. Given this, it would be surprising if Communist-bloc athletes during the Cold War were not able to beat out Western competitors with every Olympiad.

In essence, then, what Communist Olympic programmes set out to do was to engineer the superior athlete. And, like with the successful attempts by government agencies at engineered technology, state-directed athletics (and this is as true of Western countries as of former and present Communist states), shows superior results compared to “laissez-faire”, because athletics and engineered both lend themselves to accurate metrics, and thereby to higher command-and-control.

Why Islam sucks...

2010-03-31T10:38:00.000-07:00

...It's not really to do with terrorism...

I've rarely commented upon Islam; since 9/11, I've written quite a bit about terrorism, but have not discussed any belief I may have about the general culpability of the religion itself, as being influential upon Islamist terrorists.

This is because I have only general knowledge of Islam, and no direct knowledge at all of its holy scriptures. More so, though, I think this issue is mostly irrelevant. Osama bin Laden and many others like him, believe they are good and true Muslims. I take their word for it. As for other Muslims who assert that they are not? That's between y'all. If the latter group truly believes that, they would encourage scholars and clerics of their faith to resoundingly condemn Islamic fascists.

However, the main activity of Islamic lobby groups seems to be taking umbrage at any hint or suggestion that any Muslim anywhere could be considered a terrorist; and desperate assertions that Muslims who do indeed carry out terrorist acts in no way could be motivated by religion — when they are obviously so motivated. And, continues the claim, locutions such as "Muslim terrorist" or "Islamic terrorism" are very offensive to us.

It doesn't take much curiosity to see how disingenuous these claims are. I am satisfied that the numerous lobbyists claiming to speak for all Muslims, are not front groups for terrorism. Yet, these same lobbies seem to take up a lot of time, when not performing grievance theatre, also failing to unequivocally condemn terrorism carried out by Islamic fascists. Any critical word against Islamic terrorism is mere throat-clearing, before the true agenda of anti-anti-terrorism comes into focus for the duration. This is altogether irritating, but scarcely reserved only for Islamic lobby groups. Indeed, politicians, academics, opinion-leaders of all kinds, are very keen to exonerate Muslims and the Islamic religion as a whole, from guilt in the actions of Islamic fascists.

The modern establishment is correct, but for false reasons, to conclude that terrorism is not the major threat from Islam. The more obvious point, that Islam itself, in its mainstream form, is problematical, is confused and confounded by the issue of terrorism. If all Islamic terrorists suddenly disappeared, still the Islamic religion itself, as it is practised in any country where it is pursued by the majority, is insufferable.

Usually, discussion of "mainstream" (ie. as opposed to terrorist) Islamic morals, revolves around the status of women. That's all for the good. In spite of talk about the veil being "feminist" or even "sexy", women in Islamic countries would be happy to become second-class citizens, instead of mere chattel. Or, if they were not so happy with that prospect, they are chattel even so. Whatever the Koran says, there is no doubt whatsoever that the suppression of women by men is validated by Islamic clerics. One European cleric, famed on that continent for his alleged efforts to modernize Islamic theology, was a few years ago challenged during a TV debate in France by Nicholas Sarkozy, then a government minister and now president of that country, to condemn outright the stoning of women in Islamic states. This fellow would only call for a "moratorium" on stoning, until the issue could be adequately addressed.

This is bad enough itself. But while Islam clearly permits men to bear so very heavily upon women, it scarcely grants men much in the way of volition or free will. Islam, as practised devoutly, without molestation or violence upon anyone else, nevertheless imposes a regime of behavioural and thought control that is an abomination to Enlightened liberty. This is precisely why I despise Islam. Anyone who believes in liberty, must respect others' freely-chosen decision to be unfree: this goes for the devoutly religious of any stripe. The totalism of the Islamic faith — again ignoring the issue of terrorism — seems inappropriate to a liberal-democratic ethos.

What's outrageous is how at least some of the same Islamic lobby groups mentioned above, have attempted to abuse the concept of religious accommodation (itself of dubious value, but nevertheless), to in effect force everyone else to behave as Muslims are supposed to. A recent case in Quebec highlighted this trend. A young Muslim student complained to the provincial human rights watchdog after she was expelled from a vocational college. While attending classes, this woman had reportedly demanded not only the right to wear a full Islamic headdress. She also did not want to speak any male, be it teacher or student. She said, too, it was her right to demand that all males in a classroom not look at her, at any time. This is outrageous enough, but is only one of many examples of strictly-religious Muslims attempting to impose their dogma on others.

A few years ago at Concordia university in Montreal, school administrators met with members of the student government around Christmas. A Muslim member of the latter group objected that alcohol was being served — against her religion — at the gathering. When she was told that she could not impose her religion on others, not only Muslim student groups, but the leftist student governors themselves, erupted in outrage. The complaint seemed to be that the administrator was "racist" for his remarks. Around that time, I saw a local multicultural lobbyist on a news report, insisting that "We need to have single-sex swimming time" at city pools, presumably in order to "accommodate" Muslim women who are forbidden to even partially disrobe in front of unrelated members of the opposite sex. I was myself astonished at the presumption of this individual, no Muslim himself, of the necessity of this measure, as though it were not a matter of controversy.

It's hard to understand the common ground that leftists and multiculturalists have apparently found with strictly-religious Muslim individuals and lobby groups. Multiculturalists and socialists are, as a matter of their core beliefs, completely against what mainstream Islam stands for. And, the reverse is true as well: what do Muslim groups have in common with the cultural left? These are allies of convenience, against a common foe: liberalism. That each comes at the job from "opposite" ends, is apparently no consequence to either.

I think Nick Cohen, writing in What's Left?, correctly described why it is that liberal-leftists at least, have become so simpatico with Muslim lobby groups. For thirty years, beginning in the 1970s, the left face defeat after defeat, big and small. The sixties student left was broadly repudiated by established democratic institutions: as in the United States with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, or the success of President De Gaulle in rallying the French public against the insurrectionists of May and June that year. By the early ‘70s, what remained of the New Left cascading into "third-world" style terrorist revolutionism. At the same time, stagflation brought statism and welfare liberalism into disrepute long before the ascension of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. During the 1980s and ‘90s, mainstream leftist parties continued to see dramatic erosions in their support. In 1989, too, came the European velvet revolutions, which saw the peaceful transfer of power from Communism to democracy in Czechoslovakia (itself now divided between Slovakia and the Czech republic), Poland, East Germany, and Bulgaria (only Romania and the former Yugoslavia succumbed to violence during or following the overthrow of Communist party rulers). Even before 9/11, the political left in the West was tentatively reaching for alliance with mainstream Islamic groups. I think this started to happen during the second Gulf war, in 1991. After Sept. 11, the alliance was cemented. Like the alliance of some of the churches at least, and of industrialists with the National Socialist party of Germany. The former thought that they could `control' the latter; but we all know where that led to.

Hands off Salman Hossain

2010-03-09T06:25:00.000-08:00

I have just returned from an extended sojourn in the southwestern United States.

I may blog about that experience later.

Upon my return, though, one of the first items I came across in the Canadian press was this one.

It tells of a student at York university in Toronto who has been suspended from class for posting what are described as `calls for genocide' against the Jewish people.

I'm not going to dispute that Solman Hossain's web site, Filthy Jewish Terrorist, is the work of a mind deranged by Islamic fascism.

However, as I stand up for the free speech of neo-Nazis, I must say that even Islamic fascists - who are, to my mind, a much greater threat not only to Jews, but to world peace generally - must have their speech rights protected as well.

The idea that anyone – even those who espouse vile ideas, such as Hossain – should be `investigated’ for their speech, let alone having to appear before a disciplinary hearing at his university, strikes me as quite terrifying in itself.

In the first place, it is entirely unclear to me just what this has to do with York university.

I have googled this Filthy Jewish Terrorists web site – no, I will not provide the URL but anyone can find it if they Google the term themselves. It’s off line now, but a cached page shows just how vile it is.

Nevertheless, it is not hosted by York university, as far as I can tell; it doesn’t mention that Hossain is a York U. Student (so far as I was able to tell, I didn’t read very much of it); again, as far as I saw, he threatens no Jews at York U.

Are universities now going to make it their business to police the actions, even the speech, of its students, during extra-curricular activities. That strikes me as really scary.

The news story reports that Hossain is also under investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police. This is, in itself, a legitimate exercise, because the province does have so-called `hate-crime’ laws on the books.

However, if so-called hate crimes do not apply to David Ahenakew, the Saskatchewan Indian leader who told a reporter, some years ago, that Adolf Hitler was correct in his attempt `to fry’ the Jews during the Holocaust – among many other expressions of hatred against Jews – then they certainly don’t apply to this Hossain character.

Ahenakew was acquitted – twice – on charges that he incited hatred against an identifiable group, on the absurd grounds that Ahenakew thought he was having a private conversation – when he spoke to a reporter who identified himself as such.

Objectively, Ahenakew was inciting hatred against an identifiable group – the Jews. It was my hope, though, upon his second acquittal, that the entire concept of `hate speech’ would become a dead-letter, as far as Canadian criminal statute was concerned.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

The National Post story had an even scarier tidbit: three years ago, in response to the same or a similar web site, Hossain was also charged with inciting hatred against an identifiable group. However, he did not go to trial because the Ontario attorney-general at the time said he was “undergoing rehabilitation to correct his offensive behaviour” (hate-crimes prosecutions in Canada must be okayed by the provincial or federal attorneys-general).

Excuse me? “Undergoing rehabilitation” for “offensive behaviour”?

THAT definitely is scary.

In the first place, “rehabilitation” is supposed to be for those who have actually been convicted of a crime. According to the Ontario A-G, the whole hassle of due process was avoided in order to “rehabilitate” someone who, by definition, was not yet convicted of any crime.

Secondly, “offensive behaviour” is not a crime. Has anyone been convicted in court (true courts, not kangaroo-court `human rights’ tribunals) of being merely offensive?

Not in contemporary times, I would suggest.

Some will label me a “free speech absolutist” for my views. This term doesn’t even make sense, though. Free speech by definition must be absolute – short of direct incitement to violence or other harm AGAINST PARTICULAR INDIVIDUALS. If citizens’ speech is constantly abridged by exceptions, limitations, caveats and so on, it is simply no longer `free’ speech.

That goes for Islamic fascist such as this Hossain person, as well as Stalinists, Marxists, even anti-gay religious fundamentalists.

The Flowers of Evil

2010-02-17T07:34:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend while returning clothes to Value Village, I picked up Judgement Ridge, a true-crime hardback describing the murders in early 2001 of Half and Susanne Zantop, German-born married professors at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, at the hands of two teenagers from a nearby town. By reporters Richard Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff and published in 2003, it is in fact a very good read (I finished in two days), written with obvious sensitivity toward the victims and the townsfolk who were to learn, weeks after the murders, that two of their nicest — and brightest — young boys were responsible for the butchery (both the victims had multiple stab wounds, with one stabbed several times straight through the skull with the kind of knife used by U.S. Navy “SEAL” commandos).

The brutality led investigators to believe it was a crime of passion — perhaps one or the other of the couple was having an affair. Disgruntled students and colleagues were also questioned. The status of the victims — Half Zantop was a noted geologist, his wife a German language professor whose works had been published in book form — also attracted wide news-media attention. Soon town gossip, innuendo and irresponsible leaks by authorities found their way even into respected broadsheets. Murder victims haven’t a shed of privacy, and no voice with which to defend themselves.

The crime may never have solved at all, had the murderers not left behind the sheaths to the knives they had purchased over the Internet a few months before the deaths. From them, investigators were able to track down the make of the weapons. Tedious searches through local and regional retailers of such knives, yielded up a name of buyer of two knives from the town just a few miles from the small hamlet where the Zantops made their home, and met their end. It was ordered by one of the teenagers — they were sixteen and seventeen at the time — who had carried out the crime. When police questioned Jim Parker, they did not believe his story that he and his friend (the other perpetrator, Robert Tulloch) had sold the knives to a mysterious stranger soon after purchasing them.

But they also did not believe that Parker and Tulloch were directly involved in the murders. Only when Tulloch and Parker fled New Hampshire, did the police obtain warrants to search their family homes, uncovering the actual knives that Tulloch had inexplicably forgot to get rid of not only after they had murdered the Zantops, but also after the pair had come to the attention of police, and decided to flee.

After the pair were arrested at an Indiana truck stop, the question turned to why Parker and Tulloch chose to murder Susanne and Half (whose name meant, literally, “help” in German) Zantop. The killers did not know the couple. Though no one from their town were as well-off as the Zantops or any other faculty member of the “ivy league” Dartmouth, they weren’t from poor homes either. They were not driven by hatred of the rich, of foreigners, or of academics. The Zantops had come from Germany, but both Parker’s and Tulloch’s families were also from outside of New Hampshire (the latter had moved there just a few years before the murders).

Neither were high-school dropouts: on the contrary, both had finished high school ahead of time, bright students who had, on the other hand, little inclination toward going beyond what was necessary. Neither they nor their friends drank booze or used illicit drugs. Both boys had girlfriends at the time of the murders, or had one shortly before. The only thing taken from the Zantop’s lavish home was several hundred dollars from Half’s wallet.

It seems that, in what was to be their last year of high school in the autumn of 2000, Parker and Tulloch entered an intense companionship that came to exclude not only the rest of the gang they had been running around with, but wholly or partially, their girlfriends as well. Lehr and Zuckoff provide no evidence that Parker and Tulloch were homosexual. Instead, they believe something more sinister was at play. Quoting the B.C. psychologist Robert Hare, the authors conclude that Tulloch was a psychopath. The teenager not only had no apparent feeling for others, he also had a grossly inflated estimation of his own self and his abilities.

Just months prior to the murders, Tulloch had encountered unaccustomed setbacks and humiliations, including an effort to remove him as student-council president for failure to carry out his duties, and the loss of a state-wide debate-club title after referring to his opponent (an exchange student) as “just a German.” Zuckoff and Lehr propose that around this time, a bloodlust had erupted in Tulloch, an aggressive response to these setbacks. It was around this time, too, that Tulloch began to alienate Parker from their other friends, and from his girlfriend as well. Tulloch, a year older and always the dominant personality, began to persuade Parker of the need of the two of them, superior brains both, to leave the small town in which they had come of age, and which offered no future. He suggested that they’d need ten thousand dollars to get to the various places they had chosen to run away to (Europe, New Zealand, and the finally, Australia). The only way they could get this kind of money quickly, was to take someone hostage in their home, force them to reveal their bank account and credit card numbers, and take what belongings were there. From there the plan escalated to murdering the hostages, too, lest they reveal their assailants’ identities. As the authors see it, the initiative for these actions came from Tulloch, with Parker going along in order to please his idol.

But to them, it was all a ruse. Tulloch’s actions at the Zantops’ disprove the robbery motive. After gaining entry to the house under the pretense of being students conducting an environmental survey, the murderers did not overpower and tie up the couple (who, in their fifties and sixties, could not be expected to put up too much resistance even to sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys). Tulloch went for his knife the first moment Half Zantop turned his back, plunging the weapon into the man’s chest as soon as he turned around again. He continued his assault until he turned his attention to Susanne, already dead after Parker had slit her throat. Tulloch proceeded to stab her several more times.

After they were apprehended, both Parker and Tulloch pled guilty to the crimes. Parker turned on Tulloch, and received a lighter sentence than the latter, who will not see the outside of a prison. There is something else that Lehr and Zuckoff dwell on. The knife-sheaths were the key to solving the crime, but the boys’ rush from the scene could explain why they would have been left behind. But what about their decision to keep the knives, even after the police were on to them? This flatly contradicts Parker’s and Tulloch’s own assertions that they were beings with superior intelligence. There is, however, a pattern of heinous murderers committing stupid mistakes such as this, which result in their capture. It has been remarked that Ted Bundy, the infamous serial-murderer of young brunettes during the 1970s, was apprehended twice (for the first time, and then again after he twice escaped custody) by his disobedience as a motorist of basic traffic regulations. Denis Rader, who terrorized Wichita, Kansas, for twenty years as the “bind, torture, kill” predator of mostly elderly women (though his toll also included an entire family), was apprehended after he was assured by investigators that his identity could not be traced if he continued his long-running correspondence with authorities on computer disk rather than on typed pages. Forensics quickly discovered the meta-file data necessary to track Rader down. He had been using the computer at his church, where he served in a lay capacity, to write his murder notes.

I dwell on this macabre subject perhaps because not dissimilar crimes have resulted in an arrest closer to home. In early February, I learned of the disappearance of a 27-year-old Belleville, Ontario woman, late last month, upon reports that news was imminent in the matter. At a press conference a little later, the police announced the identity of the suspect not only in this case, but also in the rape and murder of a 38-year-old corporal serving at a Canadian Forces airbase in Trenton, not far from Belleville: the base’s commander, colonel Russell Williams. Williams is accused not only of these crimes (the Belleville woman’s body was discovered in a field not far from town), but also in two other home-invasion rapes in the vicinity. This was startling news to everyone. Williams is a big-shot. He was commander of the only real functional airbase in Canada. Recently, he piloted the minister of National Defence to Afghanistan, and last year he ferried the Prime Minister and several cabinet members on an official visit to India. He’s appeared in the news media, and was well-known in the town of Trenton. Williams lived with his wife in Ottawa, on a street a block over from where my wife once worked.

One has to assume that, on his climb through the ranks, Williams was subjected to several levels of psychological testing. My private conclusion is that he is guilty, since he reportedly led authorities to the body of the Belleville victim. If this be so, then Williams’ twisted mind was not revealed to the examiners. How else could he have reached so high a rank, at such a relatively young age of 45? Those who knew Williams and his wife, and are ready to express an opinion, all say that they are complete shock as to the accusations against him. If anything at all is said about Williams, it is that he was “hard to get to know.”

Through my own casual studies of murderers of this type — those who kill for gratification, whether sexual or not — I believe that no environmental situation can account for such behaviour. A small number of people are born evil. The predatory instinct exists in all humans (except again, for a very small number), but so does the sympathetic drive. Robert Tulloch, and I presume, Russell Williams, don’t have this sympathetic instinct, or not enough of one to make a difference. These are indeed the evil ones.

There are certain common features of the background of many famed serial killers, namely disorder and dysfunction within their immediate families. Russell Williams, for example, is apparently estranged from his brother and mother, after the latter went through a bitter divorce with Williams’ step-father a decade ago. The English-born Williams scarcely knew his biological father, after he and his mother divorced at when he was very young, and she emigrated to Canada with her new husband. The aforementioned Bundy was raised by his grandparents, thinking they were his actual parents, and his mother, his sister. He did not know his real father, either. Paul Bernardo, the “schoolgirl” murderer and rapist in southern Ontario during the 1980s and early 90s (assisted by his wife at the time, the ugly Karla Homolka), also did not know his real father. His mother was reportedly something else entirely, a strict disciplinarian who kept the family’s food locked way in a cupboard under her bed. Robert Tulloch’s father was an alcoholic, depressive and once attempted suicide. His mother was indifferent to him, or preoccupied with caring for his sister, who had “special needs” and was a compulsive shoplifter.

But these factors cannot themselves explain cold-blooded murderers like these. Or rather, it is this environment of family disorder and uncertainty, together with the predisposition to pitilessness, which is key. Paul Bernardo and Robert Tulloch’s siblings (each had at least one sister and one brother) did not become sadistic rapists and murderers. There is some abnormality at birth with the psychopathic serial killer involving, as I said, the absence of a sympathetic drive. But, in addition to this, there is abuse and neglect at home, thus ensuring that even a stunted instinct for empathy, will not be developed at all during the early-years’ “critical period.” The scary thing is that there is really no way to tell when a child who has faced such domestic trauma, will grow up to be a psychopath.

In Judgement Ridge, the authors make reference to another murderous incident carried out by a pair of teenagers, the Columbine high school massacre in Colorado in 1999. In that case, as with Tulloch in regard to Parker, one of the pair of young killers was determined to be a psychopath, who over time prevailed upon his more sensitive and humane cohort, to murder twelve fellow students and a teacher (the Columbine duo had also planted explosives at the school, intending to kill hundreds more; fortunately, the bombs failed to detonate). In that case, as with the Zantop murders, Lehr and Zuckoff describe the “missed signs” and “telltale acts” that might have identified the murderers, before they actually struck.

This line of inquiry (also the centrepiece of an official report issued by the Colorado governor some time after the Zantop killings) has always seemed off-base to me. Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris (the Columbine killers), along with Robert Tulloch and Jimmy Parker, were involved in relatively minor crimes prior to carrying the acts for which they are now infamous. But there was nothing in these which suggested either pair of killers was capable of slaughtering fellow human beings. It is true that Eric Harris at least, had made open threats against classmates and his school, verbally, in private journals, and in Internet postings. But many people, especially teenagers, make such threats. Very few go on to carry out their threats. Indeed, very few of those who murder openly threaten their victims beforehand, for to do so automatically renders the perpetrator as suspect.

But what could authorities do, in any case, if they became certain that a certain youngster or adult, had a personality consistent with psychopathy (according to Robert Hare’s detailed personality checklist), and thus, was a danger to the public? The police couldn’t touch them, unless and until they did, or were in the active process of carrying out, a serious crime. There is no way, in any case, to judge psychopathy, that would stand without controversy and contention. But even if there were, there is no legal basis for imprisoning an individual on the basis of what he might do, given his psychological resemblance to others who have done very bad things in the past. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition especially, punishment is based on deed, not thought. The psychopath is, by definition, one without a conscience. Imprisonment would have thus cause little penitence, because the capacity for the latter is missing in the “psycho”. It would, on the other hand, excite the non-offending psychopath to even more grandiose efforts at bloody revenge for his persecution. A psychopath, once apprehended, couldn’t be freed. This would put authorities, and the public, in the uncomfortable position of imprisoning people for life for something they might do. Again, it is hard to see how this would not be extremely controversial, especially given the number of people who wish to make folk-heroes out of those who have committed horrendous crimes.

A couple of observations, in closing, about the Zantop murders. I found it remarkable that even in rural New Hampshire, as long ago as the turn of the century, not a single person is described owning an American-made car. Everyone — the victims, the investigators, the murderers, the friends and families of the murderers and victims — is driving a Saab, Subaru, Mazda, Volvo, Toyota, or BMW. Not a Chevy or Ford in sight, at least according to Zuckoff and Lehr’s account.

When Parker and Tullouch fled New Hampshire following the initial police inquiries (leaving behind the murder weapons), they eventually abandoned their car for fear of falling into the dragnet police had set up for them. They ended up at a truck-stop somewhere in New England, soliciting drives from cross-country truckers. They were repeated stiff-armed but by two separate haulers. Both of the latter were southeasterners. They were both ultimately fired for disobeying their employers’ strict no-hitchers policy.

Liberal- and Statist-Democracy

2010-02-10T09:05:00.000-08:00

I was pondering Max Weber's assertion that bureaucracy is the height of human rationality. It occurred to me that bureaucracies place social relations on a machine-like, or mechanistic basis. As with the parts of a machine, the functions of a bureaucracy are divided and subdivided between different offices and departments. Each functionary carries out his or her work, indifferent to the work of other functionaries in other departments. The bureaucracy cannot, or should not, show feeling or favouritism toward anyone; it is simply a method of getting things done. It may be objected that bureaucracies, in the real world, far less efficient and far more dysfunctional, than are machines that run on inanimate power sources. But in the real world, too, few machines function at anywhere near maximal efficiency. Very frequently, they don=t function at all, or do their job very inefficiently. Again, though, they get their job done, just as most bureaucracies do, eventually. I

I have often thought, over the years, as to why I identify myself as `conservative', when I don=t particularly identify with many conservative beliefs. For example, I believe that "all things being equal" a child should be brought up in a two-parent family. Yet, all things are never really equal and sometimes it is better that quarrelling parents should divorce (I'm acquainted with a couple whose constant fighting is having a manifestly deleterious effect on at least one of their children). I'm dubious as to the assertions that welfare-programmes lead to family breakdown, broken communities and drug abuse. I think the `war on drugs' is about the stupidest thing that was ever conceived (at least some died-in-the-wool conservatives are with me here). I'm against the death penalty, partly for pragmatic reasons (namely, the impossibility of pardoning a wrongly convicted individual who has been put to death) but also for moral reasons (capital punishment is morally demeaning to a society C not the equivalent of cold-blooded murder, mind C but demeaning nonetheless). I'm also dubious as to the benefits of laissez-faire economics: yes, most of the economy should be in private hands; however, it is equally obvious to me that certain taken-for-granted industries and services (ie. modern medicine, and mass-schooling, not to mention industrial-engineering) would not exist without the subsidies provided by the state over the last century and more.

Yet, for all this, I can only turn my head away in disgust and disbelief at what the modern liberal-left has become. Pick any issue, and in my assessment, left parties and intellectuals are on the wrong side of justice, decency, logic, and just plain common sense.

Take the issue of terrorism. I supported the policies that George Bush the younger adopted after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and believed, as he and his officials did, that `terrorism' (it is Islamic-fascist terrorism) must be met with a military response. This is a policy decision. To me, it is self-evident that a criminal-justice approach to terror will not be effective. Others, however, disagree. That is their right. Others still (and not only on left) will state that the threat of terror is `exaggerated', proffering statements that `You are x times more likely to die from an automobile accident, than be killed by a terrorist.' I think such commentators miss the point, but again, it is an entirely legitimate point of view. What I find incomprehensible, however, is that much of the left has actively chummed-up with Muslims who, while not actively part of Osama Bin Laden's crusade, are advocates of terrorism against Jews and other Westerners nonetheless.

Recently, the Canadian journalist (and former union activist) Terry Glavan reported on a `fact-finding' mission to Afghanistan by the American left-wing group Code Pink. The latter have been prominent since at least 9/11, demanding that the U.S. military withdraw from Afghanistan (they were of course opposed to any plan to invade the country initially), and indeed, believe that the U.S. military should not be stationed anywhere in the world. According to Glavan, however, the Code Pink activists were surprised when most of the Afghani women they encountered were not in favour of an American withdrawal C for the good reason that if the Taliban fascists again take power, women and girls will again become the prisoners in their homes, as they were during the Taliban's rule up to October, 2001). Earlier, Glavan wrote, the Code Pink activists had gone on another fact-finding mission to the `occupied' territories of Palestine. They were there, of course, as guests of Hamas, the terrorist government of the Gaza strip whose charter promises not only to destroy Israel, but also, to kill Jews anywhere they can be found. In regard to social questions, Hamas may be slightly more moderate than the Taliban: perhaps homosexuals in a terrorist-led Palestinian state would not be killed, but merely locked up for long periods; women who were Apromiscuous@ may also escape execution in favour of long prison sentences. This is the movement that the `feminists' of Code Pink have chosen to give aid and succour to.

Even where the left has not actively courted alliance with known terrorists, they have sought common-cause with Muslim lobby groups that advocate social philosophies that these same leftists condemn when they are proposed by Christian lobbyists. The example of the Canadian New Democratic party, the socialist group in the federal Parliament, is illustrative. A few years ago, Parliament voted on the issue of same-sex marriage. Although the vote was designated as `free', that is, members could vote their conscience, the NDP leader, Jack Layton, whipped his caucus, such that his members were expected to vote in favour of legalizing same-sex marriage (for the record, I am against granting gays the same right to marry as straights, although I am otherwise stoutly opposed to discrimination against homosexuals - as with the stupid `don't ask, don't tell' policy of the U.S. military). One NDP MP chose to vote with her constituents, and her own conscience, and said `nay' on the issue. The response was quick and brutal: she was kicked out of the NDP caucus, her party membership was revoked, and in the nomination contest in the run up to the next federal election, party officials engineered her defeat at the riding level, such that she was not able to run in the poll.

But, in this very same general election, NDP leader Layton sought out a prominent Muslim activist to run in an Ottawa riding. This woman, who never appeared anywhere without a prominent head-veil, was revealed to be stoutly opposed to same-sex marriage. Rather than jettison her candidacy, however, Layton simply let it be known that the Muslim candidate, if required to vote on the issue of same-sex marriage, would be allowed to `vote her conscience.' The hypocrisy on display here is astounding. Layton declared war on one of his own MP's for breaking ranks with the party on the very same issue that another potential MP, would be allowed to break ranks on if she were elected office (the Muslim candidate went down to defeat; but alone among the many other NDP candidates who faced that situation, she was given a high-paying job the party headquarters in Ottawa).

Then there is the issue of terrorism generally. Soon after the attacks on New York city and Washington, D.C. that day over eight years ago, the left's explanation of the `root causes' of terrorism settled on the dogma that the attacks were motivated by `the divide between global rich and poor', the `35-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip', and the `oppression of the Muslim world' by the United States (and what do you know? These are exactly the causes championed by the modern left!). These soon became conventional wisdom among the elites in politics, academia and the news media. All of this in spite of the lack of any evidence for any of them.

Is terrorism is the last refuge of the impoverished against the affluent, as asserted so many times by those on the left? Osama Bin Laden was not poor at all; he came from a very wealthy family, and even if the nineteen attackers were not as rich as he, they all came from the upper-middle class. They were, as a group, far richer than most of the 3,000 the terrorists wantonly murdered that day. This holds, too, for terrorists who carried out attacks subsequent to 9/11 (like the Jordanian doctor who, posing as an informant, killed several CIA agents, soldiers, and some reporters in Afghanistan recently, or the Nigerian `underwear' bomber, whose family is the richest in Africa).

Were they motivated by the so-called occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel (the Israelis pulled out of the Gaza strip years ago, but apparently, are still `occupying' the territory somehow, at least according to the left)? There were no Palestinians involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, and no mention was made of this `occupation' in the initial communiques released to Al-Jazeera TV by Bin Laden (only subsequently, after Western leftists brought up the issue, did he include it in his list of `grievances' to justify the attacks).

Were the Sept. 11 terrorists motivated by the mistreatment by the United States of the Muslim world? The overthrow by the Iranian military, backed by Britain and the U.S., of a duly-elected prime minister of that country in 1953, resulting in the rule of the Shah, was often cited as an example of this U.S. `oppression', in the weeks and months after 9/11. Another was the support given by the U.S. to `corrupt oil monarchies' in the Middle East. This is, in itself, pretty thin gruel. There were no Iranians involved in the Sept. 11 attacks; again, Bin Laden never mentioned the overthrow in his `grievance' list; there is no expectation whatsoever that Islamic fascists such as Bin Laden and his operatives, would be compelled to kill thousands on behalf of a secular Iranian prime minister who was thrown out of office nearly half a century earlier.

As for the U.S. support of `corrupt oil monarchies' in the Middle East, this is a peculiar argument as well. All of these monarchies do, to a lesser or greater degree, uphold a very `fundamentalist' interpretation of Islam, that Wahhabists like Bin Laden find quite felicitous indeed. When in 1991, the U.S. repelled the Iraqi army from Kuwait, the Americans were obviously doing so to secure an vitally important commodity - crude oil. Incidentally, however, they were (aside from defending international law) ensuring the reinstatement of a regime that upheld a version of Islamic law that, while not as severe as that found in Saudi Arabia, was hardline by any other standard, from an invading state that was (as we were told ad infinitum in the run-up to the Iraqi war in 2003) a secular Arab regime that had itself suppressed political Islam for decades.

There is another thing also. The United States and other Western countries can be criticized for their support of illiberal, anti-democratic regimes such as Kuwait's and the Saudi Arabia's, sure. But the enemies of the U.S. and the West in the Middle East and nearby regions, are all far more illiberal and anti-democratic than any `corrupt oil monarchy' that counts itself as an ally of the Americans: thus, Libya, Iran, Hussein's Iraq, Assad's Syria, the Hamas- (and Fatah-)controlled Palestinian territories, Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban (in this, they have much in common with all anti-American regimes, past and present: Castro's Cuba, Chavez's Venezuela, the Soviet Union and its eastern European satraps, Mao's China, and so on).

Is terrorism the only issue over which the modern left has lost its way? Far from it. Take the matter of freedom of speech. At one time, the left was a diehard opponent of censorship; conservatives, on the other hand, were hardly fast friends of liberal rights of speech. An episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, accurately dramatized the situation as of the late 1970s. In the segment, the station's manager, Mr. Carlson, is visited by the leader of a church-based `concerned citizens committee.' The actor who portrayed the latter character bore an uncanny resemble to the late Moral Majority head, the reverend Jerry Falwell, who was just then coming to prominence as a leader of the religious right. The `Falwell' character presents Mr. Carlson (played by Gordon Jump) with a list of songs he believes should be banned from the playlist, for containing crude or sexual language. The churchman issues an ultimatum: stop playing the songs, or else the members of his flock will stop patronizing the businesses that advertise on WKRP. Semi-reluctantly, Mr. Carlson agrees. Inevitably, the situation escalates. The `Falwell' preacher returns with yet more songs to be banned, with the boycott-threat intact.

Eventually, Mr. Carlson presents the churchman with the lyrics of Imagine, by John
Lennon. `Falwell' begins to read the lyrics, `Imagine there's no heaven...', and immediately trails off. Mr. Carlson asks him, `Is it on or off the banned list?' The preachers says, almost more in sorrow than in anger, that because the song preaches atheism, it must go on the list, too.

`Ok. But now,' Mr. Carlson replies, `you're not just trying to ban songs with bad words. It=s ideas you=re trying to ban.'

Although exaggerated for dramatic effect, this WKRP episode portrayed rightly just which end of the political spectrum had the least respect for traditional speech rights, thirty and more years ago: the right. It also showed how censorship inevitably results in escalation: the determination to ban some expression that `everyone' agrees shouldn't be articulated in public (words such as `shit' or `fuck', let's say), leads to the banning of other words, and even ideas, that only those in power believe should be banned.

I will return to this theme in moment. For now, I will say that the scenario offered by the WKRP episode became stale-dated within a very few years. Starting in the 1980s, the political left, in the United States and Canada, and no doubt, elsewhere, became less and less enamoured with the concept of free speech. If a similar scenario were being presented on a fictional TV programme today, it wouldn't be some Falwell-like preacher demanding censorship; it would instead be a university professor, an `anti-racism' activist or a grubby street protestor.

Or, what am I saying? In fact, Hollywood-Burbank script-writers would try to make it seem like the greatest threat to freedom of speech was from the religious right, even today. Just as, in any Hollywood movie or TV show produced during the millennium, only Christian `fundamentalists0' or neo-Nazis are terrorists, and Muslims are always perpetually the victims of hatred and violence on the part of whites. And what is true in fiction, is true of the news as well...

I first noticed this trend myself, when I began university during the late 1980s. In my first year as an undergraduate, the British historian David Irving was scheduled to give a talk at a convention centre nearby my alma mater, the University of Ottawa. Leftists on campus were up in arms about this. Signs went up around the university: `No free speech for Nazis.' I accept the judgement of a British court, handed down some years ago, that Irving is a Holocaust-denier. There is, however, no evidence whatsoever that Irving was or is a Nazi. In any case, I don't believe that Irving or any other Holocaust denier should face speech bans, or even worse, face charges for using their liberty of speech to convey reprehensible ideas. The activists were, however, undaunted. I recall the words of one young anti-Irving protestor, replying to claims from an interviewer, that she and her comrades were advocating censorship: `We're not advocating censorship,' she claimed. `We just want Irving to crawl back under the rock from which he came...'

Nice. These protestors were engaging the same sort of dehumanization of their opponents, as was carried out by gangs of Nazis on the streets of Weimar Germany. Since the late 1980s, `anti-racist' and other left-wing protestors have proven worthy successors of the Brownshirts. For more than twenty years, what had been isolated incidents wherein `anti-racists' and other left-wing protestors denied speech to truly reprehensible people, the situation escalated to the point, where by the early twentieth-first century, a presentation by the former prime minister of Israel was shut down by a mob of neo-Brownshirt thugs, hoisting the flag of Palestinian oppression. The American radical-turned-conservative David Horowitz must, when given talks on university campuses in his own country, attend with as much as a dozen private security folks, in order to prevent attacks on himself or the use of the Aheckler=s veto@ on the part of protesting Muslim and radical students. During a recent visit to a college campus where, in contravention of university rules, a Muslim student group had posted on a school web domain quotes from the Koran, in which the Prophet counselled his followers to `kill all the Jews.' After complaints, the page was taken down, but according to Horowitz, it reappeared soon after, at a different domain owned by the university, and remained there at least until Horowitz visited the university recently. His visit was, inevitably, occasion for protests against his very presence on campus, and again according to Horowitz, the student group that invited him was called into a private meeting by a top university official, who tried to `persuade' them to dis-invite Horowitz, claiming that his presence there was `divisive'. Apparently, to the university administration (supported by much of the faculty), a web page exhorting people to kill Jews, on a domain owned by the institution, is A-OK, but the appearance by an activist denouncing this kind of thing is 'divisive.'

On Canadian campuses, meanwhile, the latest group to be subject to repression on the part of activist student governors, are anti-abortion activists. At Carleton university in Ottawa, anti-abortion groups were recently de-funded by student administrators: it means that they will receive no funding from the compulsory fees levelled upon undergraduates at the behest of the student administrators, will have no space on campus to carry out their activities, be given no way to promote these activities through campus media. In effect, it is a ban on anti-abortion activism on the Carleton campuses. This is, of course, outrageous enough. Yet the reasoning employed to justify on the part of the student government, was quite marvellous. According to them, abortion-on-demand is a woman's `right' (there is no such `right' under Canadian law, but no matter). For anyone to suggest that abortion should be banned or restricted in any way, was thereby in violation of `women's rights.' The president of the student administration came up with an even bigger whopper. He claimed that, if he was not able to ban anti-abortion activists from campus, his own rights of free speech would be violated.

It is hard to fathom that anyone would justify censorship on these grounds, in public and with a straight face. Yet, they passed by mostly without comment from those who are always sniffing around for signs of repression coming from the conservative camp. It illustrates how the bounds of censorship are continually increased, once the principle of freedom of speech is thrown in the trash. These examples, sadly, are just a gob in the spittoon of repression that has enveloped university campuses over the last two decades, a regime enforced by left-wing student activists and protestors, assented to by similarly leftist administrators and faculty, and largely ignored by the news media. I call it neo-McCarthyism, the effort by leftists on campus to label anyone they don't like as `racist', `sexist', `homophobic', or whatever. Except Senator McCarthy, Roy Cohn and their anti-Communist (really, anti-liberal) minions had just a few years to wreak havoc upon campuses, and then mostly from without, and in the face of the hostility of faculty and administrators. The neo-McCarthyites have had a run of more than two decades, been welcomed on campus, and been subject to no `have-you-no-shame' denunciations by any official that I'm aware of. The truth of the matter is that, they have no shame (it's a bourgeois hang-up, I guess).

I've barely scratched the surface of either of these issues. In regard to censorship, I haven't even touched how government bodies charged with protecting human rights, have gone berserk in their efforts to suppress the human right of free speech, in favour of the `right' of certain people, and certain groups of people, not to be offended. And these are only two of the issues where the left has gone very wrong. But it is not only in the realm of social and cultural issues. What about their views about our governing institutions and so on?

The democratic left is always complaining about how insufficient are Western democratic institutions. For this reason, the NDP, the Canadian social democratic party, is avidly in favour of adopting some kind of `proportional representation' system in favour of single-riding plurality that exists in the present day, wherein a candidate that receives more votes than anyone else, wins representation in the legislature. This would mean that a party would receive the number of seats in Parliament in exact proportion to their total vote. I've written extensively on the many difficulties of proportional representation (a system which is, in fact, supported by some on the political right, as well). For one thing, if legislative seats are to be awarded based on the total proportion of the vote, rather than the actual number of votes counting in any electoral district, how is representation to be decided. Under `first-past-the-post', the member of Parliament (or any legislature) is she who has received the most votes in the riding. This is exactly what proportional representation seeks to abolish. 'P-R' would thus shift representation from the local level to insiders and place-sitters belonging to each of the contesting parties. Hardly an improvement in democracy.

Another problem with proportional representation (this list is hardly exhaustive) is that it enshrines political parties as semi-official entities. Parties are private entities: they may be regulated under laws other than what are employed for other types of association (ie., business firms, labour unions, charitable or other associations), but they are still associations of private individuals who come together under a common ideological interest, in order to compete with other, similarly motivated private entities, to form the government. But proportional-rep makes the party primary over its individual members, thereby rendering them as, essentially, para-governmental organizations. Again, I don't see this as being beneficial to democratic rule. Nor is another issue that is unique to P-R: that is, its empowerment of fringe parties. Under an electoral system wherein each party is awarded representation precisely in proportion to their total vote, parties with twelve or nine or five percent of the vote that are denied seats under first-past-the-post, get represented under P-R. Larger parties with the support of, say, four of ten voters, are never able to get a majority of seats. Thus, under proportional-rep, the two largest parties must, following a vote, bargain for the support of all the fringe parties, just to form a government. The bargaining power resides almost exclusively with the marginal parties. They will not, after all, be able to form a government themselves. Their clout rests in being the spoiler for the parties that are able to do so. For a party with a tenth or a twentieth of the vote to, essentially, control the agenda of competing party with almost half the votes counted, hardly seems very democratic.

This is germane to Canada's NDP: its support for proportional-representation is clearly motivated by self-interest. It has never received more than twenty percent of the total vote in any federal election (and more frequently, in elections since the turn of the 1990s, it got under ten percent). Under P-R, it would gain far more seats that they have ever received in any first-past-the-post election: they would become the permanent balance of power. Again, since the NDP has never had nearly enough votes to form a government, the two other main parties (the Liberals and the Conservatives) would be forced to bargain for the support of the third party, following each election. This would lead, in effect, to a permanent leftist government. The Liberals, a centrist-left party, would find it easier to bargain with the left-wing NDP than would the centre-right Conservative Party. In Canada, proportional representation would permanently disenfranchise the Conservative-party plurality. The votes of one fifth (or even a sixth) of the electorate would always count for more than the near-half who support the right-centre party.

It is hard not to conclude that it is this, not `electoral fairness', which has made demands for proportional-representation virtual dogma among social democratic parties like the NDP. This is especially evident when one moves beyond abstract debates, to how the left has responded to actual proposals for democratic reform.

The Conservative party of Canada, currently in government under prime minister
Stephen Harper, is actually less than seven years old. It was formed from the union of two conservative parties, the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative party of Canada. In the year 2000, a general election was called by the Liberal-party Prime Minister, Jean Chretien. At the time, Chretien was battling charges of corruption involving the sale of a Québec hotel and golf course in which he had part-ownership. In fact, the election-call seemed timed to shut down a Parliamentary committee that was looking into the corruption charges. When a reporter had the temerity to question Chretien about this, the Prime Minister of Canada manhandled the journalist, screaming `Get out of my way!' (Chretien had, a few years earlier, grabbed and choked a protestor who was similarly too pushy).

One might think that the scandal, and the behaviour of the prime minister in response it, would have dogged Jean Chretien throughout the campaign trail. News media love a scandal, don't they? Apparently, they do not; at least not in Canada, not when it involves one of `our guys' (ie. a Liberal prime minister). Instead, led by the state-owned CBC news, the fourth- and fifth-estates went after Stockwell Day, the former Alberta politician who had taken the leadership of the Canadian Alliance (and thereby, that of the official opposition) a few months earlier. Their pretext for doing so was a plank in the Alliance campaign platform which called for citizen-initiated referenda, such as exist in several U.S. states (and in Switzerland).

Apparently, allowing citizens the right to vote on any issue enough of them believed was important enough, was a threat to civilization itself. Reporters from the CBC and elsewhere dreamed up a scenario wherein a petition of 250,000 could result in a vote that would put restrictions in the current regime of abortion-on-demand (as has existed in Canada since a Supreme Court ruling in 1988). The news-media narrative then became, ACanadian Alliance threatens a women=s absolute right to abortion at any time in her pregnancy@ (and yes, I am exaggerating for effect). Day was repeatedly questioned about this totally phantom issue. A CBC comedy programme then piled on, setting up an online petition wherein it was demanded that a referendum to compel Stockwell Day to change his given name to `Doris.'

The elites in this country treated the latter stunt as a great example of wit. Meanwhile, the comedian most responsible for this `cleverness' went on CBC radio and declared citizen-initiated referenda a `stupid idea.' Left unstated were the really pertinent points about citizen-initiated referenda. First, any law, whether enacted by Parliament or by popular referendum, is subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. No matter if, hypothetically, a plebiscite declared all abortion illegal, the courts could (as they did in 1988) declare such a law as against the Charter, and thereby, invalid. Second, there is nothing to stop a group of pro-abortion activists from getting one quarter million signatures for a referendum to declare abortion completely legal and taxpayer-supported for all time. All this is aside from the fact that, at the time, there was no organized effort on the part of abortion opponents to have such a ballot; and public opinion surveys indicated that there was little support for an outright ban on abortion.

The whole episode showed, however, the contempt with which the modern left holds democracy. Were the pro-abortionists, in 2000, so fearful of direct citizen balloting, because they knew their positions were not popular C they need the courts to fulfill their agenda? That seems to be the case. There have been many legitimate criticisms against plebiscites or referenda. But I think citizen-initiated ballots are just dandy. They are used in Switzerland, as I said, and in fact they are used more frequently there than anywhere else. Anti-plebiscite people are always ready will examples of how, in referenda, the people made the Awrong@ choice (ie., the recent Swiss vote which banned minarets on Islamic temples). Do these critics ever believe the people make the right choice?

I would like to return here to the more general thrust of this discussion. I identify myself as a conservative, but that is only because I believe the nomenclature of ideology has become outdated and insufficient to describe what is really going on in Western political culture. Rather than dividing up politics between `liberals' and `conservatives', I think it is more useful, now, to say the biggest divide is between those who are liberal-democrats, and those who are statist-(or social-)democrats.

Before I explain this, I would like to take a slight detour into political terminology as it is employed in American politics. In the U.S., a `liberal' is someone to the left of the political spectrum. This does not mean, as is usually suggested, that the U.S. has no true left-wing. In fact, is simply a euphemism for `socialist' or `social-democrat.' Those who, in other Western countries, are called `liberal', are in the U.S. called `moderates' (the U.S. use of `conservative' conforms to that found elsewhere, at least in the English-speaking democracies).

This is to say that many or most American `liberals' are not liberal in any meaningful sense of the word: they are statists, who believe that the government, rather than civil society, or the collective of individual citizens voluntarily working in cooperation with each other, should have the lead role in society. This is the difference between statist- and liberal-democracy. I should caution that not all statist-democrats are on the left, or at least, they traditionally were not. Up until the 1970s, at least, many conservatives were quite keen to use the state in order to enforce what could be considered a generic Christian ethics: chiefly in regard to sexual morals (ie, bans on homosexuality, premarital and adulterous sex, severe limitations on divorce, abortion, contraception, etc.), but also bans or controls of behaviours thought sinful (mainly, the drinking of alcohol, but also the use of drugs such as cocaine, heroin and marijuana C though it must be strongly emphasized that Prohibition in the U.S. was a Progressive hobby-horse for decades before the Volstead amendment of 1919, which banned the consumption and sale of booze; and the Franklin Roosevelt government imposed the first restrictions upon marijuana).

As evidenced by Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and other movements of the religious right, statist-democrats continue to exist on the right of the political spectrum (in part, the modern religious right arose in reaction to the loosening or revocation of the sexual-prohibition laws described above during the 1970s). What is also remarkable is how spectacularly unsuccessful these right-wing statist-democrats have been in imposing their agenda on anyone. Thus, abortion: still not banned. Homosexuality: this speaks for itself, but not only has the Christian right singularly failed in its attempt to re-marginalise homosexuals, the latter now have the right at least to enter into civil partnerships in most places, and the right to `marry' in some others. Porn: not banned and (since the advent of the Internet) has become nearly a mainstream area of entertainment. The list goes on. This is in marked contrast to the great success that social or statist-democrats have had in imposing their own agenda on everyone else (as with Apolitically correct@ speech codes; `employment-equity' or `affirmative action' - preferential hiring based on race and sex; the alteration of judicial and policing polices to suit the whim of left-wing activists). And again, in spite of the lack of success by conservative statist-democrats in imposing their polices on government, their very presence has been used as a cudgel by those on the left, including but limited to social- or statist-democrats, to bash more moderate and centrist conservatives with the charge of Atheocrat@ (invariably, those who scream about the Athreat of the religious right@ maintain a blissful ignorance about the real theocratic fascists in our midst, the Islamist radicals).

This, then, is the distinction between statist-democrats and liberal-democrats. The latter believe the heart of a polity resides in its civil society, the voluntary association of individual citizens, who are assumed to be rational and if not completely virtuous, then possessed of moral (and common) sense. Accordingly, liberal-democrats believe that laws and regulations are a necessary evil, a mechanism for ensuring that the actions of one individual or one group, do not infringe upon others, and that the law should be applied even-handedly to all persons and all groups. Statist-democrats believe, in broad form, the opposite of these things. Christian-right statists, on the one hand, view human beings as inevitably fallen and thus, cannot be expected to resist the temptation to sin, if private sexual and other practices were not strictly regulated by the state.

Social- or statist-democrats on the left, do not base their beliefs on the Bible or Christian theology. Instead, they see people as not essentially rational, and thus, not able to assess and regulate their own behaviour without the assistance of the state, which is thus given primary in society. As for Acivil society@, statist-democrats only recognize the contributions of individuals, when the latter belong to groups that would not exist without the subsidies provided by the state. The latter are usually really referred to as Anon-governmental organizations.@ But since most of them would not exist without the largesse of the government, they are really more accurately named `para-governmental organizations.' They exist only because of the state; but unlike government officials and agencies, they are completely beyond the control of the state and of the electorate. Para-governmental organizations can be relied upon to promote an ever-expanding state, and to criticize those liberal-democrats who wish to limit the power of government (and generally, their status as creatures of the state goes completely unmentioned in the news media).

It is important to remember, however - and their critics often do forget - is that statist-democrats are democrats. They are not Stalinist or Leninists in disguise (or at least, this is the case with statist-democrats in the Western world), who would impose a dictatorship of the proletariat at the first chance. Social- or statist-democrats believe that popular sovereignty (as opposed to say, violent revolution) should be the vehicle for the imposition of their agenda. When this agenda is met with defeat through a democratic mandate, statist-democrats accept (however begrudgingly and half-heartedly) the verdict of the people, and leave office. On the other hand, the attitudes held by social-democrats, when they do encounter electoral defeat, give a clue to their views of Athe masses.@ Rather than conceding that the electorate was not in agreement with what social-democrats believe, at least at the moment, statists believe that the voters have somehow been tricked or deceived by their opponents into voting for things that are against their interests. This was the thesis of What's the Matter with Kansas?, a 2004 book published by the American `liberal' (statist) Thomas Frank. It was the logic behind the statement made by Barak Obama, when he was running for the U.S. presidency in 2008, and he told a well-heeled San Francisco audience that the decline of traditional American industries in the heartland, was the reason so many working-class and rural whites became `bitter', making them `cling to their guns and religion.' This thinking reared its head, too, more recently, when Republican Scott Brown was elected to the Senate in Massachusetts in a special election, and at least some `liberal' commentators condemned the Massachusetts electorate of voting against their own interests (at least point of view made more sense than the instant dogma among the American left, that Scott Brown=s victory meant that the electorate was angered that Obama was not being statist enough for them).

As I said, not all statist-democrats are on the left (at least, this was the case traditionally). Conversely, not all of those on the political left are statists. But there is a definitive trend where those who would have in the recent past been considered liberal-democrats, are growing increasingly statist in orientation. No better example of this exists than the Liberal Democratic party of Great Britain (formed by the union of the once formidable British Liberal party, and the Labour-breakaway Social Democratic party), which far from being liberal-democratic, is in many ways more statist than the British Labour party. In Canada, the Liberal party has gone so far to the left that its previous leader felt comfortable enough, in November 2008, to attempt a coalition with the social-democratic party and secessionist Bloc Quebecois (also a social-democratic party), to turn the ruling Conservative party out of government, this just weeks after the Liberal leader, Stephane Dion, had specifically disavowed such an idea, but which he had entered secret negotiations about immediately following the October vote (the plan was abandoned in the face of popular outrage).

To restate: statist pols in Occidental democracies, are democrats (and not, say, closet Leninists). This doesn't mean there are not contradictions in the statist-democratic credo. For example, if people generally are not rational (and thus, need to be guided or - in the fashionable terminology - `nudged' to behave correctly), how is it that the people in government can be so rational not only to determine what is in their own best interest, but that of everyone else? Further, if the `little people' need a powerful state to protect them, what will protect the little people from a powerful state. Nevertheless, logical contradiction didn't stop any political movement before, and it won't stop statist-democrats now.

coming soon: part two of this essay

POTUS and Caesar

2010-02-01T13:17:00.000-08:00

The day before the first anniversary of Barak Obama assuming the U.S. presidency, his Democratic-party candidate to succeed the late Ted Kennedy as senator from Massachusetts, went down to defeat to the Republican challenger, named Scott Brown. Just to emphasize: this was the former office of the "lion of American liberalism", held by the Kennedy family since 1952 (but for a couple of years, when John Kennedy vacated it to assume the presidency in 1961, and his younger brother, Teddy, was then too young to run for the office); in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a margin of three to one; and where no Republican has won a Senate seat since 1972

Brown is no right-winger, but he vowed on the campaign trial that, if elected, he would vote against the health-care socialization bill that Senate Democrats, who held sixty of the 100 seats in the chamber, had threatened to invoke cloture on (thereby passing it into law). The Democrats, other leftists, and their many cheerleaders in the media were, at first, in deep shock as to this election results for the office that one pundit referred to as "Ted Kennedy's seat."

Having had time to rally, the left has seemingly succumbed to the same delusions that overcame some Republicans following the defeat of John McCain in 2008. Back then, American conservatives fervently believed that the public had rejected them because McCain was perceived as too moderate, and that if the party had only run a true conservative, the public would have backed them. Similarly, the instant dogma on the left is that the Democratic candidate lost to Scott Brown, because Obama was "too moderate." One Canadian former union official put it as such: "Obama was sent an ultimatum by the electors in one of the most liberal states in the union. It wasn't: Please compromise more. It wasn't: Don't forget to track down all the nuances before you make the slightest move." He concludes (with the emphasis in the original): "Yes, we're pissed off enough to put a homophobic Cosmo nudie with a taste for water-boarding into the Senate. Did that get your attention?"

Apparently, to this commentator, the election of a Republican senator in Massachusetts is some kind of guerilla theatre, wherein the people voted for someone who is entirely opposed to what they really believe in, as some kind of attention-getting ploy. Amazing.

Another Canadian, who identifies himself as a "conservative", took a rather different tack. Although everyone acknowledges that the election of Scott Brown was a referendum on the presidency of Barak Obama and his health-care "reform", radio host John Moore said that this is just the "loss of one lousy Senate seat." It was so lousy, apparently, that Obama took time out from his busy scheduled to jet in to try and save his clearly failing candidate. Somehow, according to Moore, to suggest that the loss of Massachusetts senate seat is important, is part of the "new intolerance."

I'm not certain how sincere Democrats and leftists in general, really are with this thinking. There must be some element of face-saving, here, surely. I'm very sceptical than any serious political operative within the Democratic party actually believes that the aftermath of the election of Scott Brown should be that the Obama government becomes even more so what the public is clearly rejecting. As it stands, no one believes that Obama's ambitious efforts to socialize American health care has a chance of becoming law, at least not the bill that the Democrats had threatened legislative cloture upon prior to the election.

I'm scarcely a fan of the Republican party. I am, however, heartened that the party has managed to revive itself in the year-plus since the 2008 election (heeding the lesson, finally, that it they did not lose because the party ran a moderate candidate rather than a right-winger). Long-term dominance by one party, whether Liberal or Conservative, Democratic or Republican, is no good in a democracy.

On the other hand, the more I look at America these days, the more so I am reminded of ancient Rome. This is hardly a novel analogy: but my own comparison is not with the Rome of the third and fourth century of the Christian calendar, the period prior to it final collapse. I'm thinking instead of the closing decades of republican Rome, when the Italian confederacy at which the original city-state stood at the head, finally transformed itself into an imperial monarchy (in all but name).

Studying ancient history, I was always struck by the parallels between the rise of Rome and the development of the United States, from its origins in the "thirteen colonies" to the continental polity as it exists in the present day. In both ancient Rome and revolutionary America, prospering yeoman farmers and slave-holding landholders, supplemented by urban merchants and others of the "middling sort", rebelled and expelled their king, establishing self-government. Neither Rome nor America were, during their early republican eras, democratic in the modern sense, let alone compared to the direct democracy that was practised in the city that came to be so influential upon the Romans, ancient Attica. It was not only that, in the early United States, women and (naturally) slaves were denied the vote; even white men without property qualifications couldn't vote in Congressional elections (the Senate was appointed until 1912), which was in turn a significant number of this demographic.

The American presidency, meanwhile, wasn't really directly elected until 1828, when the votes of the Electoral College were rendered a post-facto formality. The early United States, like early Rome, was what I call an aristocratic republic. In neither ancient Rome, nor the early U.S. were the aristocrats granted noble titles. Yet, the elites of both polities recognized themselves, and were recognized by others, as a patriciate standing apart from the rest. It took much longer, in Rome, for the plebes to achieve full popular sovereignty, than was the case in the U.S.

There are, of course, many differences between America and Rome, as there are between any two polities. But the early American patriciate, themselves looked to republican Rome as their chief influence (as evidenced in the architectural style of the Capitol building, the White House, Supreme Court and so on). One chief difference between Roman and American government, was that the former refused to invest executive power in a single individual — the president — and instead opted for a dual proconsulship. This would, the Romans hoped, prevent the emergence of a single ruler, who could attempt to reimpose a monarchy. The ultimate result of the dual rulers was the exacerbation of schism within the Roman government itself. Ultimately, the Romans created the office of Dictator, who in times of emergency or internal strife, was given authoritarian powers to defend the republic from threats internal or external, for the period of a year only. Again, however, the Dictatorship spurred yet more schism, as many of those chosen for office, refused to leave after the year term.

This leads to, in turn, perhaps the most significant difference between late-republican Rome and the United States during the contemporary era (1920s on): whereas the Romans, prior to the appearance of Caesar, and ultimately, his step-son Augustus, were engaged in civil war more frequently than not, the Americans have had one such conflict in their history, and that was a long time ago. But even so, part of the reason why the Roman republic became an empire, was that Rome already was an empire by the time Julius Caesar came along. The institutions established to rule a city-state, and then a confederacy of such states, were insufficient to govern the vast territory controlled by the Latins by the second century before the calendar. I don't believe that the United States is an empire, under any meaningful use of that term. But because all the other great powers chose to destroy themselves during the World Wars, the U.S. became the default hegemon, at least of that part of the Cold War world not under control of Communist governments. But the responsibilities this entails, have been as challenging to governing institutions of the U.S., as much as if the Americans became the dominant global state — the hyper-power — by conquest instead of consent.

Recently, I came across a piece by Washington Post columnist George Will, about "Washington's latest awful idea", that idea being "for Congress to divest itself of the core competence that the Constitution vests in it — the power to make the taxing and spending choices that shape the nation. This power would be given to an 18-member panel assigned to solve the budgetary crisis."

The devolution of sovereignty from legislative bodies to organizations, agencies and committees that are not directly responsible to the electorate, was a feature, too, of the decline of Roman republicanism. It is commonplace not only in the United States, but in every other Western democracy, as well. Take the aforementioned health-care restructuring bill that Scott Brown promised to help filibuster, should he be elected to the U.S. Senate. This proposed law runs to more than 1,900 pages of legal text, yet the Senators who support it openly admit that they have never read in whole (some even say that they have not read even a word of the bill itself). A different bill (also floundering before the U.S. senate) which would "cap-and-trade" carbon dioxide emissions, so as to help prevent the greenhouse-effect (is it too early to ask, "Whatever happened to the climate-change panic?"), is not quite that long, but it is more than 1,000 pages, and many senators have stated openly that they've never read it either.

It is obvious, though, that someone has read the entire of this bill, and of course, someone, or rather some people, actually wrote the bill. It wasn't, though, the legislators who are supposed to either pass it into law, or defeat it, by majority vote. Again, responsibility for this vast undertaking by the U.S. federal government was farmed out to lawyers, presumably those in the employ of the government itself, but also no doubt to various attorneys belonging to the various lobby groups representing the interests most affected by the bill itself.

Of course, the process by which the administrative power of the U.S. government was delegated to officials without direct responsibility to the public, began long, long before Barak Obama became the president. The "imperial presidency" began probably with the first Roosevelt to occupy the White House, Theodore (who served as president from 1901 to 1909); but it really got going with "Teddy's" distant cousin, Franklin Delano, the longest serving U.S. president, from 1933 to ‘45. FDR was charged with fighting the Depression and World War II, but the war-powers granted to (say) Abe Lincoln during the War Between the States, or to Woodrow Wilson during the Great War, were not subsequently relinquished to the second Roosevelt's successors, after the conclusion the Second World War (Franklin Roosevelt himself died some months before the war came to an end in August, 1945), due to the need to fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

As well, Roosevelt's "new deal" social programmes marked the beginning of the American welfare state, which expanded slowly following World War II, and then greatly with the "great society" measures introduced by Lyndon Johnson (president, 1963-69). The welfare state required yet more delegation of responsibility to unelected officials than ever before. Add to this the need of this behemoth government to collect the taxes to pay for itself (not to mention the other activities taken on by the executive branch, such as hunting down illegal firearms, smugglers of non-excised taxed commodities — ie. tobacco and alcohol, as well as sellers of illicit drugs).

Such are the leviathan powers now possessed by the office of the President of the United States — not the least of which is the power to take the country to war without an even an resolution of the Congress — that one wonders when the American executive branch will become all-powerful, and the U.S. Senate, like its Roman predecessor, an ineffective talk-shop. One wonders if the new imperator will have a title such as "POTUS", to suit her or his august position.

Some thoughts from Georgia...

2010-02-01T08:45:00.000-08:00

Wakefield Tolbert, follower / reader from the great state of Georgia (U.S. Georgia that is - I've never been there but they came up with the Allman Bros. Band, and that's good enough for me!) has some thoughts germane to `Revolution and romanticism', that I thought bear repeating -

(btw, Wakefield, please believe me when I say that the comments I left on your site re: climate-change are completely friendly, respectful disagreement...)

Wakefield away!:

The Labor/Knowledge dichotomy is interesting to behold.

Reminds me of one pundit who said this is akin to how the United States Navy basically operates at the human level: A system of fantastically complex machines designed by geniuses, to be operated by dummies. Without taking so glum a view of the abilities of the quotidian masses hired to do the wet work of war, some have also pointed to the "Rosie the Riveter" phenomenon of WWII, where millions of American women--primarily secretaries and housewives for the age where most women were tending home, hearth, and snotty noses of kids--were hired to forge the machinery of war almost akin to some Tolkien narrative about Sauron hiring Orcs to beat metal into scimitars. Johnny went of to war, so Mom had to step in and follow the factory whistles and routines of labor in his absence.

Engineers set the standards for mass productions of the war such as tanks, planes, machine guns, etc. Of course. But it was demonstrated that "the average person" could very well grasp--with some shortened hurry-up training--many of these same intricacies of design. No, engineers and scientists were not made out of these women, but it's all the same fascinating to know that the majority of the American war effort's labor and detail of weaponry was made by female hands that formerly were rocking cribs.

Your knowledge of history is far more in-depth in mind. I know some of the major players and busybodies on the political or philosophical stage, and that we be about it for my elucidation in the public system of the state of Georgia. No doubt you've moved by choice and interest far beyond this kind of thing.

In any event, I can only add that it would be beyond fascinating to speculate what future historians will say was the proximate cause or main set of causes in what will invariably be our turn to have our coffee tables, refrigerators, and cars dug up from the successive layers of soil, that tomorrow's archeologists will almost doubtless sift.

Unless, of course, we end things long before then or the transition is something smoother. But whether Utopian or Dystopian, there WILL be some sort of future that we can only guess at and of which writers of all stripes have had much mirth in trying to pin down entertaining vignettes for their stories.

Wakefield's a very astute man.

With respect W.T.'s statements as what will come in the Future, I'm reminded that the most accurate predictions that I have heard, came not from `serious' science fiction, but from comedy programmes.

I'm too young to have watched the original `Laugh-In' show, that aired in the late 1960s and early '70s. I saw a retrospective of the show in the 1980s.

Not surprisingly, the producers of the retrospective decided to include clips of several `jokes' that turned out to be true (I'm going by memory here): "Dateline, Washington, Dec. 1988: President Ronald Reagan..."

and

"Berlin, 1989: the Berlin wall fell today, and was replaced by a moat of alligators..."

This is in 1968.

Note: checking this out on the net just now, I discovered a youtube clip of both of these segments:

Note: I'm planning a new essay as why the modern world differs in sensibility from the Middle Ages.

Revolutions and Romanticism

2010-01-29T06:17:00.000-08:00

A passage in David A. Bell's The First Total War (Boston: Houghton Miffln, 2007) caught my eye. Reflecting on the growing cosmopolitanism of European society during the eighteenth century, Bell notes: "... commerce was binding the states of Europe more closely to one another. Commodities imported from the Americas and Asia — sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco, textiles, spices, precious metals — clogged every port in Europe with heavily laden ships and drove the European economy into unprecedented expansion. Bordeaux alone saw its maritime trade increase sixfold between 1724 and 1789 (most of the cargo moved straight out again to other European destinations). ... The development of commerce was further aided by the slow rise of `cottage industry' — which had transformed half the farmsteads in some areas of France, Britain and the Netherlands into scattered elements of what amounted to a giant, primitive factory." (This is my emphasis).

This sentences sums up quite nicely the reality that factory-industry arises not in metropolitan areas, but on the countryside (as per previous entry). Bell does not directly mention Flanders, the Dutch-speaking Belgian province that was, at the outbreak of the Revolutionary/Napoleon wars in 1792, part of the Austrian empire, and after 1815, was temporarily made a part of the Netherlands (Belgium became an independent kingdom in 1830). However, the Dutch-speaking Flemish areas was where heavy-industry became predominant in the Belgian economy; as in Britain, industrialization took place in these outlying areas, instead of in or near Brussels, a city founded in the tenth century. Belgian Dutch — the Flemish — were also relatively disenfranchised compared to their French-speaking compatriots (the Walloons), who until recently controlled most political power in Belgium.

As Bell notes, the "cottage" manufactories were themselves a kind of loosely-organized factory system. In Britain, due to the abolition of feudal bonds and the apprentice system long before other European states, it was relatively easy to organize these "cottages" into a single factory existing under one roof. A web site devoted to European industrial history, suggests why it is, of all European states, it was Belgium that experienced industrial revolution first, after Britain: "In 1792 the country was conquered by Napoleon. His occupation had a positive effect on the economy: he abolished the old guilds and introduced freedom of trade. At the same time a large new market was opening up in France, not least for coal."

Of course, Belgium was not conquered by Napoleon Bounaparte, in 1792 or ever after. Napoleon was an officer with the Republican army during that time, but did not participate in battles in Austrian Netherlands; it was a Revolutionary army that took over the country that year, and did impose the liberal economic reforms as described in the passage, which led to the rapid industrialization of Belgian almost as soon as the Napoleonic wars concluded in 1815.

In December I referred to the paradox of the division of labour, in which high intellect contributes to the process wherein work itself becomes de-skilled and monotonous. This reduction of work to a dumb mechanical process is just a particular instance of the reality of scientific and Enlightened thought generally, which reveals a natural world denuded of romance and spirituality, in favour of dumb mechanical processes. This is, as I said, behind the inevitable division that exists in industrial societies between bourgeois and proletariat, or management and worker. To get a better sense of how intellectually-addled is factory work, I will refer to a book I read years ago, which quoted an academic who had worked his way through school as employee of a factory. Working on an assembly-line, he said, is comparable to a clerical employee typing out the same page of text, over and over again, for five days a week, for as long as twelve hours per day. The outlook of the proletarian, thus, is radically different from that of a bourgeois, regardless if the worker actually has an income as high or higher than the average white-collar worker. In essence, the worker can gain no inherent reward from his work. Thereby, he gains his identity and meaning from anything other than work. A bourgeois, on the other hand, does have the opportunity to gain intrinsic pleasure from her work. Thus, her identity is wrapped up closely with work.

Most books covering the Napoleonic wars begin with Bounaparte's coup d'etat on the 18th Brumaire, Year 8 of the Revolutionary calendar (November 8, 1799). Bell's work instead covers the years from the Revolution itself in 1789, to the coup ten years later, this to more fully pursue his thesis that the Revolutionary/Napoleonic conflicts were the "first total war." His argument is that, apart from the vast scale of the conflict itself (with battles themselves often numbering more than half a million combatants, when engagements of anywhere near 100,000 were rare before 1790), it was a change in mentality among the French revolutionaries which made the conflicts the Revolution itself engendered, into total war (Bell, FTW, p. 73). Prior to 1789, Bell says, the military was not considered a distinct realm apart from civilian life. The word "civilian" itself, referred in English only to an expert in Roman civil law (Bell, FTW, p. 7). Officers would usually pass seamlessly from military to civilian life, fighting wars (for various militaries) in between service as ministers of the state, being full participants in "society", as well as contributing successfully to arts and letters. The rank and file, meanwhile, were not actively segregated as they are today in "their own communities (military bases), complete with special forms of housing (barracks), a separate education system (military academies and other specialized schools), and even a separate legal system," just as eighteenth-century soldiers were not "conspicuously marked off from civilians by their uniforms" (Bell, FTW, p. 27).

Before the French Revolution, rank and file soldiers usually lived within in their own communities, or when on campaign, were (usually reluctantly) quartered within the civilian population (the obscure third amendment to the U.S. constitution expressly forbids the quartering of soldiers within "any house, without the consent of the owner").

This situation was paradoxical, however. Although there was no conceived opposition between "civilian" and "military" in ancien-regime France, and the rest of Europe, wars themselves rarely ever affected much of the non-combatant population. There were many instances of armies running amok upon civilian populations, of course: this was common in civil conflicts all through history, and it occurred frequently during the seventeenth-century wars of religion (which were often civil wars, as well). But, as Bell notes, during the eighteenth century, even as war itself became progressively more lethal for combatants, attacks on civilian populations actually decreased. As well, codes of honour among the nobles commanding the militaries usually prevented the wholesale slaughter of losing armies by the victors (after all, officers had often previously fought alongside officers they were now fighting against).

The American and French Revolutions firmly established that militaries were under the authority of civilian leadership (temporarily, as it turned out, in the case of France). This began the breach between "civilian" and "military". But this carried its own paradox. For although military personnel were thenceforth deliberately separated from civil society, armies themselves were (as with the Revolutionary levee en masse) vastly expanded to include, in potential, the whole of the adult and male population. Not only this, even those not conscripted to serve in Revolutionary or republican forces, were subjected to aggression and violence on the part of the mass armies. This is the meaning of "total war", according to Bell (a professor at Johns Hopkins university in Baltimore), and it is the reason why, at the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, as many as five million Europeans had lost their lives, most of these being direct combatants, but including a far larger proportion of civilians than ever was the case previously.

Reading through Bell's review of the debates and controversies which gave rise, by 1792, to the doctrine of total war, I could not help but to be reminded of Peter Gay's assertion that the original Romanticists did not view themselves as rebels against the Enlightenment, as they are usually considered today. They instead wished to bring advance Reason from its traditional concerns with society and politics, to the realm of the arts, literature, and the psyche itself. In fact, Romanticism and the Enlightenment existed in a figure-and-ground relationship. Romanticism subsisted on the domination and enslavement of nature and natural processes, as occurred through the scientific and industrial revolutions. Enlightened philosophy, at least in its Gallic form, incorporated an ideal of the "natural goodness of man" that has, in fact, no rational basis. There is little to differentiate the chief philosopher of the Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the Swiss Protestant who lived from 1712 to 1778), from any member of the Romantic movement in the post-Revolutionary period, and into the nineteenth century. Rousseau exalted the Noble Savage, while derogating the civilized arts and sciences (including the printing press, the means by which Enlightened ideas were spread throughout Europe).

According to Bell, Rousseau's avid followers during the French revolution were frequently Romanticists, to the point of delusion. Bell writes, "Take, for example, the durable belief that freedom gave `citizen-soldiers' something close to supernatural abilities, despite their lack of experience," (p. 138) and cites Revolutionary deputies and journalists who claimed that, in face of royalist enemies, soldiers of the republic would be immune from gunfire and that would magically gain the power of ten men. Bell writes, "Then there was the curious matter of the pike. As a weapon, it had not featured seriously on western European battlefields for a century. When used to impale the horses of oncoming cavalry, it still had some utility, but for soldiers to rely on it when facing companies of well-trained musketeers was little more than suicide. Nonetheless, the Girondins [radical Revolutionary deputies to the National Convention that ruled France from 1791 to ‘93] had blithely promoted it as the true weapon of free citizens before the war, and its cult continued to flourish even as the Prussians had began their march. In September 1792, the department of the Marne, on the Prussians route to Paris, ordered smiths and locksmiths to abandon all their work in favor of pike making. The sober military engineer Lazare Carnot, a future member of the Committee of Public Safety [which instituted the Reign of Terror in 1793-94], argued for the distribution of pikes to the entire adult population. In a revealing exchange in the Legislative Assembly [which ruled from 1789-91], a deputy criticized Carnot for holding up the pike-bearing Macedonians and Romans as models. ... But another deputy immediately shot back, to huge applause: `If we have not been either Spartans, or Athenians, we should become them.' In 1793, a Revolutionary general would complain that the government had burdened him with no less than `sixty thousand [pikes] that are good for nothing.'" (pp. 138-139)

But, there was a change in intellectual life, which distinguished the Enlightenment philosophy from that of the Romanticists. It was simply due to he French Revolution itself. The plans and schemes proposed by Rousseau and the other philosophes were acknowledged (even by the philosophers themselves) as mere fantasia. It was believed that, perhaps, in a century or so, perhaps as long as two hundred years, humanity would be adequately prepared to live by Reason. As 1789 dawned, no one in France or anywhere else had any idea that, by the end of the year, royal absolutism would be replaced with a constitutional monarchy, let alone that a few years after that, a republic would be declared and Louis XVI and Queen Mary-Antoinette would be put to the guillotine. The fantasy republics envisioned by Rousseau, Montesquieu and Condorcet obviously couldn't measure up to the reality of Revolutionary republicanism.

But, far from ushering in a new age of liberty, the Revolution introduced the Terror (the Marquis du Condorcet lost his life to it in 1794) and total war (which eventually gave rise to Bounaparte). In response, many of the Enlightened turned away from politics entirely, or even embraced reaction — like William Wordsworth, the English poet and radical Whig who embraced the French-Revolutionary cause, only turn away from it during the Reign of Terror, and who, by the time of his death in 1850, was a firm Tory. But, as Peter Gay points out, most Romanticists were not like Wordsworth; to the extent that they did react against the Enlightenment, it was more so out of a recognition that Reason, while necessary, wasn't in itself sufficient to living a full life.

In any case, Romanticism and Utility formed into a Victorian dialectic: as industry and rationality proceeded during the nineteenth century, so too did Western culture become more and more enamoured with romantic concepts — to the point of cliche, by the mid-century. Certainly, Romanticism powerfully informed the radical political movements of the time. The socialist philosophy espoused by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, had as its meta-purpose the expulsion of Romanticist concepts from socialism. Marx and his followers sought to revive the dormant spirit of the Jacobins, the ultra-rationalist Terrorists of what Marx called the "Great French Revolution." It is, on the other hand, not surprising that Marx and Engels — like their erstwhile mentor, Georg Hegel — would promulgate a philosophy of history. The systematic and scientific treatment of the past was another area pioneered by the Enlightenment — in particular by German academics. History, long the only real social-science (in spite of its treatment as an "arts" subject in the English-language curriculum), had brought clarity to the past as never before, or at least since ancient times.

It established the time-line of history as being much older than was previously assumed, just as geology was beginning to prove that the earth simply had to be millions of years old. Before history was developed as a science, the past was a pastiche of legend and fact. Early-modern philosophers neglected history because they recognized how unreliable were accounts of the past. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, along with most others, instead ignored the past and proposed a hypothetical man "in the state of nature", as the starting point of their theories. Otherwise, early-moderns looked to the ancient past, accounts of which in Thucydides and Herodotus were assumed to be accurate.

The narrative of the past proposed by these early scientific historians — that the classical world marked the height of human achievement, the Middle Ages were represented the apex of darkness and superstition, and history ran on a progressive course — have become the common-sense of the educated today. These and other notions of the past have been superseded, or upended entirely, by professional historians. Marx and Engels, as much as Hegel, looked to a philosophy of history as a way to lend meaning to past events, thereby lifting humanity from the realm of dumb mechanical processes.

This one's for you, Sceptical Eye

2010-01-13T12:51:00.000-08:00

During the Christmas season, one or more of the for-pay cable channels is presented for free, with the hopes of encouraging viewer subscriptions. One of the services on free-preview this week, was a channel that features a "ghost-hunter" reality-programme. I wouldn't have given this much thought, except for the fact that the spot advertising the show was repeated at each commercial break (I was watching a New Year's day marathon of the Office for a few hours yesterday). The ad features the "real" ghost-hunters of the show, apparently being harried and troubled by the ghosts they are looking for. In one sequence, for example, one of the hunters is seen in some kind of structure with a corrugated roof. From within the building, can be heard something or someone brushing across the corrugated metal, while the hunter remarks, "Can you hear something on the roof?" I would say that any programme called Ghost-Hunters will forever be hunting its quarry; for, if these hunters ever "caught" their prey, the news would not be reported on a locally-produced cable programme.

I don't believe in ghosts, of course. But reflecting on the ghost phenomenon, I thought it might be relatively simple to disprove the existence of out-of-body spirits. This can be done by taking the inductive approach. Namely, what is a ghost — what defines it as a phenomena?

A full description can be gleaned from eyewitness accounts of people who profess to have seen ghouls. Based on these, I would say a ghost has the following characteristics. First, it is usually transparent. Which is to say, ghosts have substance, but of a quality that does not completely reflect light. Ghosts have to be substantive, or else they couldn't accomplish the things ghosts are said to: turning off lights, moving furniture, generally causing a racket (poltergeist is German for "noisy ghost"), even appearing in photographs. Ghosts are also observed to speak.

So, at least typically, ghosts are witnessed to be solid, yet are also partially invisible. This transparent quality practically defines photographic phenomena said to depict ghostly beings, for example. If such images were not transparent or even translucent, they wouldn't be identified as ghosts. But, in spite of this apparent solidity, ghosts are also observed to have the characteristics of a gas: walking through walls, disappearing in mid-air, even appearing (in one famous recent photograph) in the midst of a raging fire.

So, ghosts are phenomena that can change elemental states at will, from solid to gas, back to solid again, all without the influence of heat or cold, for example. Ghosts do so without apparently compromising their physical unity. This raises the question as to the molecular structure of ghosts. This must exist, as everything in the universe consists of molecules. Being dead, ghosts presumably have no DNA; their ability to change physical states at will precludes them from being alive in any way understood by biology. How can chemistry explain the anomalous behaviour of ghostly atoms?

Other transparent objects, whether in nature (the membrane of a jelly-fish, for example) or in the human world (glass), are not able to change physical states, unless under extreme cold or heat. They are, as a rule, far tougher as solids than are non-transparent objects. Somehow, ghosts are able to achieve what no other object in the universe can, though.

Perhaps it is that ghosts are neither solid, gaseous or liquid, but a kind of energy — plasma. Ionized energy, the fourth state of matter, has characteristics of the three other states. This would explain a lot about ghosts, except for one thing. Plasma, like all forms of energy, dissipates rapidly when it is not contained naturally or artificially (and, of course, it dissipates eventually in spite of being contained). Stars are plasma, but of course, all stars are in the process of dissipating their energy to the planets that may surround them.

If ghosts consist of plasma, something must keep them integral — a structure or membrane of some kind. Thereby, a least part of the structure of ghosts must be solid; but what happens to this solidity when a ghost walks through a wall? Does it suddenly transform into ionized energy as well? This transformation in a state of matter occurs, as with the theorized ghostly change from solid to gas, regardless of environmental conditions, as well. Not only that, the membrane changes back into a solid once the walking-through-wall part has been carried out, so as to contain the plasma that the ghost consists of. And, once again, such a transformation has never been observed by science.

There is also the fact that ionized matter exists in low concentrations throughout the universe, for plasma to constitute even such a being as a ghost, would require great deal of energy indeed. It would be enough to be measured on commonplace instruments for this purpose. Ghostly concentrations of plasma would also be disruptive of other electrical devices nearby it — this at least, is also described in some ghost testimony. It would make sense. But it ought to be a simple enough matter, going by the proposition that ghosts are concentrated plasma, to attempt to measure ionized energy within an allegedly haunted environment.

There are other characteristics of ghosts which seem abnormal, even disregarding physics and chemistry. Ghosts, for example, are hardly ever described as being naked. It was commonplace at one time for ghosts to be depicted as draped in a white sheet or similar garment (as with the children's comic-book, Casper the Ghost). However, ghosts are more generally said to be attired in the fashions appropriate to their time: perhaps the clothing they were buried in. But, why should ghosts be clothed at all?

Ghosts are, one presumes, the souls of the departed. No theory of the soul, from Plato to the Hindus, proposes that one's clothing is integral to the soul; it is essential at least to the eastern religions, in fact, that the body is not essential to the soul. Surely a departed soul's clothing would not be treated as more essential than his body, but from the testimony of those who have seen ghosts, this appears to be the case. Perhaps this particular difficulty can be overcome by arguing that ghosts are not objects at all, but projections, earthly representations of deceased beings. Spectres are able to go through walls and do other physically impossible things because they are not really there. The ghost appears in clothing because it is merely the image of the soul, not the soul itself. This explanation (if indeed, it has ever been proffered) has its own difficulties. If ghosts are projections from heaven, how are they able to affect the world physically (ie., knocking on walls, turning on lights, etc.)? By what means are these ghostly images projected onto the earthly dimension?

Whatever way one slices it, there are basic difficulties in squaring the phenomenon of ghosts with the nature of physical reality as explained by science; this is according to the testimony of those who are alleged to have seen ghosts. Perhaps ghostly phenomena are indicative of aspects of physical reality that cannot be observed by conventional scientific instruments. But the more probable explanation is the simpler one, that "ghosts" exist not in physical reality, but are projections not of heaven but of the human mind itself.

The Labour Theory of Capitalism; or Rubes, Rednecks and Hicks: The Makers of the Modern World

2009-12-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

Reading The Industrial Revolution, published this year, and written by Lee Wyatt. It seems like an advanced undergraduate text, but general histories of this momentous event are surprisingly hard to come by.

My long-running thesis is that "industrialization" had little to do, at first, with inventions such as the steam engine. Instead, it was the division of labour which was key. Wyatt hews to the "consensus" that machinery was essential to the industrial revolution, but presents evidence that suggests otherwise.

The classic example of early division of labour was found, of course, in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, from 1776, in which is described an pin factory in which work is "divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them."

What Smith described was essentially a process of manual labour — very tedious and even strenuous labour — that went largely or wholly unaided by water- or steam-power at all. The classic case of the division of labour, very familiar to modern society, is the McDonald's restaurant. Established as a single outlet in California in the 1950s, it was the McDonald brothers' themselves who established the "production-line approach to service" (the title of a 1972 Harvard Business Review article by Theodore Levitt) that became characteristic of the later worldwide chain, when they eliminated wait-staff (including all female employees, who were presumed to be magnets for amorous punks), radically simplified the menu (eliminating any dish that required the use of a fork and knife), and of course, divided up the responsibilities for the cooking and cashiering between several more people than would normally be employed at a hamburger joint — staffing levels made affordable by the very low wages paid for the work. This is, I think, "industrial revolution" in a nutshell.

Like any instance of the division of labour, a McDonald's (or any fast-food) restaurant results in the de-skilling of work. McDonald's has long been the byword for low-paid, low-skill work (the "McJob") that doesn't require much talent or even brightness at all. Wages are evaluated so meagrely precisely because "any idiot" can do a McJob. It works out from the employer's point of view, because employees who quit or grow insubordinate can be quickly replaced by the next idiot. The key point is that McDonald's has never employed actual powered-machinery to achieve the "assembly-line" levels of productivity that made it the global success that it remains. Of course, the original McDonald's restaurant no doubt employed the most up-to-date appliances and other technology for fast-food production. However, in this respect, it were no different than hundreds, and even thousands, of competitors at the time. Where it was dissimilar was in the utilization of the manual labour of making hamburgers and French Fries. The McDonald's division of labour rapidly increased hamburger-productivity, and with it, the profits from selling fast-food. Eventually, of course, it was this method which resulted in billions and billions in profits, from "serving millions and millions" all around the world.

It was the same with the pin factory and similar efforts at the division of labour in industrializing Britain. It allowed — unaided in large part by machinery — for a workforce of ten to "make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day," as Smith described it. He went on: "Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations."

The steam engine and other engineered machinery came to be employed for productive purposes, because of the division of labour, rather than the latter being a consequence of the former. The division of labour was made possible in turn, by the widespread acceptance of wage-labour. It is the chief reason why Britain became the first industrialized country. There, far more than in continent, the feudal system had given way to enclosure, and landowners cleared their possessions of wastelands and peasantry, to farm cash crops and raise livestock. The nobility converted themselves into agrarian capitalists (the word "firm" comes from "farm"), and the toiling masses were converted into wage-labourers. The rural proletariat of the early-modern period were doubtless no better off than the peasantry of the Middle Ages. However, the enclosure of farmlands vastly increased agricultural productivity, thereby causing a decrease in the price of basic staples. This is the reason, too, why wages in the agricultural sector remained so pitifully low.

However, the capitalization of the agricultural industry was also the spur for innovation and improvement in farming techniques (such as those introduced in the early eighteenth century by the pioneer agronomist Jethro Tull). These innovations, in turn, boosted productivity all the more, thereby making food staples all the more cheaper. This had the effect of boosting population in Britain considerably (an increase of thirty-three percent to nine million between 1700 and 1790), while higher productivity and a larger workforce continued to depress wages. According to Wyatt, already by 1700, the proportion of the workforce involved in the agricultural sector was considerably smaller than in the major European nations: "... in 1600 the average farmer in Great Britain had produced enough food to support his family and half an additional one. By 1800 that same farmer could feed his own family and one and one-half more. By the mid-19th century, Great Britain had the lowest proportion of its workforce in agriculture than any other country in the entire world."
At that time, according to Wyatt, only 22% of the British workforce was involved in farming.

It was the "surplus" non-farming population which supplied the workforce for the early manufactories, in the textiles and other industries (such as pin-making) — not to mention the markets for the cheap (in price and quality) goods that were produced from this process. It is no coincidence that the factory system developed in the very areas (namely, the midlands and north of England) where enclosure was pursued most vigorously and successfully (Wyatt points out that not all, or even the vast majority of efforts at enclosure were carried out off). It shows how industrialization, at least in its early stages, represents not the colonization of the metropole by the hinterlands, but rather, the reverse: factory-industry developed initially far from the centres of power, culture and influence, eventually drawing metropolitan areas into its orbit. This is why, as Wyatt points out, the five largest cities after London in 1800 — Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield — were small towns or mere villages in 1600. No coincidence again, that all of these were major manufacturing centres at the turn of the nineteenth century.

This pattern held, too, for the United States, which in 1800 could be considered one vast hinterland, in relation to the economic might of its former colonial master, Great Britain. The American industrial revolution, though, took place largely away from the old centres of power — Boston, New York city, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta and so on — in backwater places that later became Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago (which grew from a population of 250 in 1833 to three quarters of a million at the time of the great fire in 1871), Indianapolis, and Los Angeles.

Manufacturing that did take place in the states that were the original Thirteen Colonies, was concentrated away from larger centres: rural New Jersey, Connecticut or New York upstate instead of New York city, Lowell, Massachusetts instead of Boston, Pittsburgh instead of Philadelphia.

The other area where I believe conventional historical understanding of the past is mistaken, has to do with the notion that machine-industrialization (in Britain) as elsewhere, developed under "laissez-faire" or "invisible-hand" conditions. Manufacturing under division-of-labour conditions was, in eighteenth-century Britain, largely accomplished without government intervention.

However, as Wyatt himself notes, until the Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars near the close of the eighteenth century, British industrialization was not characterized by the sort of the heavy, steam- or coal-driven machinery that would characterize factory work in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries: "In reality, until the 19th century the large factory was no the common sight in industrial districts, as most mills were essentially just more sophisticated workshops of the past." The latter form of factory industry occurred in Britain, as elsewhere, due to deliberate government involvement in the economy — whether to fight war or a result of a dirigiste economic policy (ie., as in later nineteeth-century France, Germany, Japan and, much later, Soviet Russia).

The idea that government subsidy and other forms of intervention were necessary for factory-industry to grow was one of the few areas of agreement between Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president and advocate of an agrarian-yeoman republic, and Alexander Hamilton, the Carribean-born American revolutionary and later the first Secretary of the Treasury, who advocated an industrial policy. They simply disagreed as to how desirable such intervention was. Hamilton pursued industrial development both in and out of government. As a private citizen, though, Hamilton acted not merely as a venture investor, but as a lobbyist to federal and state government for subsidies and trade restrictions which would help industry develop. Eventually, he and others entered into partnership with the New Jersey government, encouraging industrial activity in a remote area that eventually became the city of Paterson. Hamilton's efforts were, as it turns out, largely desultory, and the United States remained an agrarian nation until another form of government intervention in the civilian economy — the American civil war — sparked a real machine-industrial revolution.

The division of labour itself, while made practicable by the existence of wage-labour as the standard form of contract (to the exclusion also of slavery), is a by-product of analytical consciousness, given such potency in modern times by the printing press, optical technologies such as telescopes, abstract icons such as graphs, maps and clocks — timepieces especially. The factory itself has been described as an extension of the clock, and even before the introduction of heavy-machinery into the factory workplace, the division of labour itself was dependent upon the iron rule of the clock.

The factory system's dependence upon rationality is behind the split between bourgeois and proletariat. Lord Russell once remarked that all work consists of rearranging matter at or near the surface of the earth, and telling others to do so. The division of labour demands that a portion of the workforce must carry out tasks which are repetitive, tedious, and even robotic in nature, requiring little in the way of skill and intelligence. But the variegated, particularized activities of the factory demand also highly cerebral and calculative oversight — that part of the workforce which is now referred to as "management." This is the bourgeoisie, a class that once consisted largely of the direct owners of capital, but which is now made up of professional delegates of those in ownership.

This basic split between worker and management, is as inevitable under the division of labour as that between lord and peasant under feudalism. The distinction persists even where, as in the advanced capitalist countries, a unionized worker in heavy industry (such as an automobile plant) can expect to make as much (or often much more) than many belonging to management. The class division in industrial society arises, as Marx said, in how the proletariat and bourgeoisie approach work or labour. It persists even where ownership of capital, or machine-engineering, is in the hands of the state. Marx and Engels argued that the abolition of capital would eliminate the division of labour. But productive wealth is based on this division. Rendering the factory system more "humane", eliminates the productivity that is the whole point of the division of labour. In the Soviet Union or any other industrialized Communist country, the division of labour was not abolished, of course, and inevitably, a managerial class emerged — the nomenclatura — which simply became the "new boss, the same as the old boss", or rather, much worse than the old boss.

The abolition of command socialism has met with contrasting results in the two major Communist states of the twentieth century, China and Russia. Twenty years ago, the expectation might have been that Russia, which had already undergone full urbanization and industrialization, would quickly become a Westernized, developed liberal democracy after not too many years. China, on the other hand, was still very poor, with a vast population and Communist leadership that, while promoting economic liberalism, was ready to shoot down its own young people in the heart of the capital, Beijing, rather than submit to political reform. Instead, Chinese industrial growth zoomed far ahead not only of Russia or any other former Communist state, but also the Japanese "superstate", as well as every country in the world except for the United States, which in turn became the market for the export industries that sprang up in China during the 1990s and the new century. In the meantime, Russia went into near collapse. Not only its industrial base, but its birth rate and life expectancy went into free-fall during the ‘90s, the government unable to restore order or even to remain in office for very long, until the turn of the century when the state was taken over by a former KGB colonel. The conventional explanation for this divergence, is that in China, unlike Russia, the Communist party did not relinquish political control, instead abjuring political reform in favour of economic liberalization, while Russia did the opposite.

In an article published by the Hoover Institute at Stanford university, Paul Gregory and Kate Zhou argue that the dissimilar paths taken by the two largest former Communist states, have different sources. In sum, the authors state that in China, unlike Russia, traditions of single-family ownership of farms were very ancient, an endured in spite of the period of collectivization of agriculture. Gregory and Zhou submit that, when privatization of land holdings came to Russia, the workforce was reluctant to depart from the security of the farm collective. But in China, the authors argue that it was the peasantry which led the way to economic reform, setting up illegal private farming operations following the lifting of totalitarian oppression after the death of Mao Tse-tung in 1976, and the removal of his radical allies the "gage of four" (including Mao's wife) thereafter.

In contrast to China, Russia had by the time of Gorbachev's reforms experienced more than three decades of (relative) stability and (relative) liberality, following the death of Stalin, Zhou and Gregory write that when reforms came in the late ‘70s, "a large percentage of the population was recovering from the catastrophes of the Mao years. Rural dwellers, in particular, had witnessed the chaos of the Great Leap and had seen their parents and children die from starvation during the 1958–61 famine. They learned they had to take care of themselves." In the 1980s, as Mikhail Gorbachev was offering 50-year leases of land to a resisting rural workforce, Chinese peasants "began to quietly distribute the land, with each family delivering production for the state quota. Gorbachev called for decollectivization from above; China's farmers decollectivized spontaneously from below. They created their own `contract responsibility system,' initially at risk of severe punishment. There were no leaders; there were no face-to-face confrontations. ... As agricultural production soared, Deng Xiaoping and his party realized they could not resist and could take advantage of something that was working."

That economic reform originated in the Chinese countryside is not in dispute. There, as in Britain and the United States in the past, industrialization originated in the rural regions, before spreading to the major centres. As Gregory and Zhou observe that in Russia in the Gorbachev era, "the farm population had shrunk to a quarter of its former size; only older workers remained, working perfunctorily on state land or tending their private plots. They had long been converted into wage workers and received pensions and socialized medical care, albeit of a low quality. In China, rural dwellers accounted for 80 percent of the population; compared to Russian farmers they were young and vibrant. They lived without the social guarantees of Russian farmers. In China, only the young had not experienced private agriculture. Small private plots had existed in China for 2,000 years." When, in the 1980s, both Russia and China began to privatize its non-agricultural sector, Russian entrepreneurs came largely from the city, but "China's first entrepreneurs hailed primarily from the countryside, and they got their start by marketing farm products in the cities. Private trade developed in China at the grassroots level, emerging from rural regions and prospering because it filled a vital need. The rural contract responsibility system created huge agricultural surpluses which had to be marketed outside the state system. Farm products had to be moved over long distances, either directly or through intermediaries — in violation of laws and without contracts that could be enforced in courts." Zhou and Gregory write, "China's early trader-entrepreneurs had to first overcome the problem of distance between producers and consumers. ... Throughout the early 1980s, farmers in north Jiangsu packed their bikes with chickens, ducks, and other fowl, crossed the Yangzi River, and shipped their products by rail to urban centers in the Yangzi basin. ... By 1983, the majority of consumers in major cities purchased their products in free markets rather than in government stores. Within one year (between 1979 and 1980), most state vegetable markets, except the highly subsidized Beijing and Shanghai markets, were out of business."

By 2007, the authors write, the wealthiest Chinese citizen "was the daughter of a poor farmer from the southern province of Guangdong, whose family became wealthy after acquiring large tracts of land and distressed assets in the countryside, where there was no real estate business, in the early 1990s." Private firms, non-existent in 1978, numbered almost thirty million in 1997, with nearly one million corporate or joint ventures. Private capital consisted in that year two-thirds of GDP, again up from nothing almost thirty years earlier. Gregory and Zhou state, "Private business originated in agriculture, spread to the cities, and then returned to the countryside as rural-based industry. Many large private manufacturing firms developed in predominantly agricultural provinces (Zhejiang, Shandong, Guangdong, Hunan, and Sichuan). China's largest agribusiness, the Hoep Group, was founded by the Liu brothers, who left the city to found their company in a rural part of Sichuan province. Wang Guoduan, a rural entrepreneur from southern Guangdong province, built the largest refrigerator maker, Kelon Group; Huanyuan, China's largest air conditioner maker, is based in the agricultural province of Hunan. China's first automobile exports will likely come `from the agricultural hinterland of Anhui province...'."

All this shows that the "capitalist" system is dependent upon the labour-factor of production, above all. Communist economics could productively organize both land and capital quite well — often better than capitalist economies (witness of the superiority of initial Soviet space technology or the MiG jet-fighter over its Western counterparts). Economic history has shown that the free market, or "invisible hand" is wont to invest in complex or engineered-machinery, i.e. productive capital, before its utility is proven by state investment in such machinery, either for war-making or as official economic policy. Communist economies, which have the workforce dictating the productive decisions, fail in their inability to properly organize the labour factor of production. As mentioned, Communism did not and could not abolish the division of labour. However, the organization of the workforce in this manner had desultory results, just because of the inability for command socialism to properly serve and service the vast capital infrastructure. A worker's wages could buy nothing beyond staples, and anyone was rewarded thereof regardless of how hard or little one worked (rewards came through other means, such as acting as an informant on others). As factory and industrial work generally has little inherent reward, most people chose not to work beyond what was necessary.

Deniers, Fraudsters, Hoaxers and Sceptics

2009-12-09T11:14:00.000-08:00

Reading Crowded with Genius, about Edinburgh in the 1700s, by James Buchan, British novelist and historian, and the grandson of Lord Tweedsmuir, also a novelist and one of the last British governors-general of Canada. In the late seventeenth and early seventeenth centuries, Scotland had been one of the world centres of high Calvinism. According to Buchan, this left a dreary pall over Scotland's preeminent city, especially prominent on the Lord's Day, when it appeared that the entire town had died of bubonic plague.

However, by 1719, the population was already slacking, at least according to a pronouncement drafted that year by church elders, severely criticizing Edinburghians for the many sins committed on Sundays, including: gathering in groups on the street for conversation, receiving visitors to their homes, leaving the city for the countryside, eating during daylight hours, attending ale- and milk-houses, and worst of all apparently, sitting and staring out of windows.

Such zealotry seems to contemporary sensibilities as contrary to a truly free society. On the other hand, radical moral asceticism is the paradoxical background to the development of a tradition of independent scientific tradition. Just a few decades after the Presbyters' brimstone tract of 1719, Edinburgh became known as the "Paris of the north" for its contribution to the Enlightenment, in history, economics, the sciences, not to mention literature (Dr. Johnson, who held out little affection for Scotland, called Edinburgh "Britain's other eye"). It is similar to the way to how New England became a centre of science and learning during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and even today, Boston has the most schools of higher education per capita than any other major city in the U.S.), after the zealotry of its earlier Puritan period had died down. It may even be the reason for the "Islamic enlightenment", the rise of the sciences among largely non-Arab Muslims in the Middle East and southern Europe around the turn of the second Christian millennium.

But isn't such ascetic religion the enemy of "value-free" empiricism? The very destruction of mysticism and Gnosticism through radical asceticism, lays the groundwork for the sort of reality-based perception necessary for scientific advance to take place. All this is to say that the line between science and religion is not very clear.

This is germane, of course, to the recent controversy over e-mails that were leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, U.K. The CRU is one of four institutes providing the official data compiled in reports issued by the United Nations agency overseeing global-warming treaties, and which in turn have concluded that the earth's climate is rapidly warming, and that human activity, namely through the burning of fossil fuels, is causing the atmosphere to heat up — with catastrophic consequences for the planet.

I've rarely commented on the whole global-warming issue. I did so for the first time three years ago. It was occasioned by the fact that, for the first time in my life, December had come to Ottawa without a snowfall. Not only that, it was not particularly cold, either. But, the next winter and the next after, saw snow coming very early, and staying on to March. This past summer was intemperately cool and wet, on the other hand.

For years, advocates of measures to counter global-warming had pointed to just the apparent shortening of winter, as well as the heating up of summer, as conclusive proof that "global warming is real." Did the cooler than expected summers, and much-colder than expected winters in the northern hemisphere in 2007-08, affect the climate-apocalypse rhetoric at all? No. The advocates simply de-emphasized the term "global warming", and substituted "climate change", arguing that while the "greenhouse effect" would make the earth hotter on average, in some areas, it might become much colder than before. Fair enough. Except, it became increasingly clear that, indeed, the earth was not getting hotter at all. The global mean temperature had, since 1998, been decreasing.

I must say, I didn't become sceptical about global warming or climate change until a few years ago. After all, it is indeed established scientific fact that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere serves to trap heat the earth's surface. Doesn't it make sense that a greenhouse effect could occur? I began to doubt global-warming theories, not because of anything in particular I had read by climate-change "sceptics" (is the polite term), but from the response to these by global-warming scientists, and their advocates. The rule was that, instead of attempting to counter the sceptics' arguments by reference to their own supposedly unassailable theories, the sceptics were attacked in turn as "shills of the hydrocarbon industry", and given the label "deniers", as though to associate them with deniers of the Nazi Holocaust, and to imply that the sceptics knew their arguments were wrong, and yet argued in bad faith because they were being paid to do so by oil companies.

Basically, the sceptics' arguments were always ignored, and they were attacked personally, if not for having a self-serving agenda, then because they were (allegedly) unqualified. The mantra was that "the science is settled" about global-warming, and that anyone who contests this alleged settlement, is behaving in an "anti-science" manner.

Such personal attacks were my first indicator that something was very fishy about this whole thing. It was the assertion that the "science is settled" that really got me steamed. I'm sorry: no scientific theory or proposition is ever settled. Indeed, the whole point of science is to convey statements in a manner so that they can be falsifiable. If global warming theories cannot stand up to such scrutiny, then they are not theories at all (quite like the conspiracy fables or narratives propounded by Kennedy-assassination buffs, or 9/11 troofers). To simply assert and reassert that the "science is settled", is in itself an anti-scientific statement.

I've been similarly unimpressed with statements from global-warming researchers and politicos to the effect that human-made climate change represents the "consensus" of active researchers in the field, and thus there is no need to consider the arguments of the sceptics. Again, every empirically-backed theory is the consensus of active researchers, up to the moment it is upset by a rival or "revolutionary" theory. In 1905, it was the consensus of physicists that the universe existed in the way described in the theories of Isaac Newton. Thereafter, the relativity theory of Albert Einstein became the consensus view as to the operation of the universe, as it remains today. One day, relatively theory too could well be supplanted, but it is precisely this that the climate-change researchers and their advocates deny with respect to their own specialty, a stance that is thereby contrary to science.

Scientists were, before 1905, at least partially mistaken in their view of the physical universe. It is easy to identify other instances of scientific consensus which were rather more baleful, even catastrophic in their political and social implications. It was once the consensus among biologists, from the late nineteenth century into well into the 1930s, that human evolution occurred in the manner described by eugenic theory. Heeding the scientific consensus of the time, authorities put into place laws that sought to identify the "feeble-minded", sterilizing them to prevent their inherent stupidity from being multiplied through subsequent generations. Winston Churchill, as a rising young cabinet minister, was an active proponent of eugenic theory. The Social Democratic party of Sweden, upon coming to power in the 1930s, instituted a eugenics-based policy sterilizing the mentally retarded (a policy which persisted into the 1970s). Tommy Douglas, the socialist politician and later premier of Saskatchewan, also in the thirties wrote his doctoral thesis in support of eugenics. Feminist Margaret Sanger was driven to form Planned Parenthood, just with the intent of preventing the biologically inferior from breeding too much. A bastardized version of eugenic theory was, of course, used to justify not only the sterilization, but also the outright murder of the feeble-minded, along with six million others, under Nazi Germany.

After the Second World War, a different scientific consensus emerged, which treated homosexuality not as a sin, but a psychological perversion, one which required treatment by drugs or hospitalization. It led the association representing American psychologists to include homosexuality as a mental illness in the 1957 edition of its master-diagnostic handbook.

Even aside from all this, though, references to "the consensus" are anti-science and even anti-logical, in their appeal to authority. To say "the scientific consensus is that man-made global warming is real", or similar assertions like "ninety-one national science academies agree that climate change is a problem", is the same as saying, "To quote the Bible..." Incontrovertibly, the scientific consensus has been wrong in the past. There is no reason thereby to assume that ninety-nine or a thousand science academies are automatically correct if they hold something to be scientifically true. There is, too, the character of the consensus in regard to global warming. Climate-science became the major field that it is, just because governments and foundations have poured billions of dollars into the field over the last thirty years or so — tens or even hundreds of billions by now. The whole bias of the field has been to "prove" that human-caused global-warming is real. Is it any surprise thus that the "consensus" among the many scientists trained in climate science should be that climate change is real?

This isn't at all to question the good faith of climate scientists, who believe sincerely in what their theories say. The scientists who accepted Newtonian physics (without ever reenacting the experiments which led Newton to his conclusions) were acting in good faith, and I will say that, too, about the consensus view in the early twentieth century which held eugenics to be true. This is a courtesy that climate scientists themselves never extend to their critics, however. At best, the sceptical scientists are regarded as inexpert. Just a little less politely, as these things go, the "deniers" are deemed to be cranks. When this doesn't suffice, the old chestnut of conflict-of-interest is trundled out: "Scientist A has received funding from oil company B..." I've read through a great deal of articles making these claims. Never has a global-warming hysteric been able to convincingly show that a sceptical scientist has been on the payroll of any oil company.

The "evidence" seems to stop at some vague "corporate" funding, or even merely funds received from "right-wing foundations." A couple of years ago, the Canadian magazine Walrus ran a piece on the nefarious connections of global-warming sceptics to... the tobacco industry.

There is several curious things about this tack. It is, once again, contrary to science to refuse to engage a theory, simply because of how its theorist was financed. Science is, by definition, empirical. To be "scientific" is to falsify a theory by alternative facts. It is anti-scientific to ignore a theory because the theorist is judged unreliable. Newtonian physics was not refuted because it was discovered Isaac Newton believed in numerology; it was replaced by Einstein's physics because the latter had the better proofs. Similarly, whether a scientist's work is financed by the oil-wealth of Exxon Mobil or of Osama Bin Laden, is a matter of indifference as to whether it is scientifically viable (and once again, there is no evidence at all that any climate-change sceptic is acting at the behest of hydrocarbon-burning firms).

This is, quite aside from the fact that, in regard funding and financing, all the big bucks are on the side of the global-warming hysterics. Compared to very paltry sums given (usually indirectly) to climate-change sceptics, scientific advocates of human-caused climate change receive hundreds of millions and even billions in funding — very often from the very oil firms they themselves attack as being behind all the global-warming scepticism. Again, all of this leaves aside the fact that, now, the "green" market (including, but not restricted to trading in so-called "carbon-credits") is probably just as lucrative as the entire oil industry.

Are we to understand, using their own logic, that climate-change hysterics are on the payroll of vested "green" interests? The oil companies themselves have done everything they can to remake themselves as "green" firms (British Petroleum, for example, changed its name to "Beyond Petroleum"), and far from railing against the Kyoto accord, have lobbied actively in favour of it. It is, of course, entirely logical that carbon-belching firms would be in favour of Kyoto or any other international accord that artificially restricted the supply of oil, and thus made that commodity much more pricey, and thus more profitable, than before.

In recent years, attempts to discredit sceptical experts on climate science have become a lot more vicious — and irrelevant — than what is described above. Is it coincidental that this new phase of smear and innuendo has kicked in just as the weather is not cooperating in being too warm? In 2007, a group of impeccably-credentialed, not-associated-with-oil-companies experts on climate signed a letter to the U.N. agency which had just issued an alarmist report that, contrary to the actual findings, stated that there is no doubt whatsoever that human activity is causing global warming. A p.r. flack associated with the foundation belonging to former geneticist and current TV presenter David Suzuki (the public relations firm in question shares the same Vancouver office space with the David Suzuki Foundation) touched on the usual hysteric talking-points (the signatories are "not experts", we're uncertain of their funding, and so on), but then hit on a new low: bigotry.

The flack claimed that, of the sixty who signed the document, "most were Americans." This is a line of argument that I don't think has been seriously employed by anyone since the end of World War II, at the most: that someone's national origin is the key ingredient in their intellectual credibility. It says something as to how desperate the climate-change hysterics have become, that they have begun to employ logic familiar to early twentieth-century eugenics theorists, in order to buffet their argument. It was such an embarrassment that, when it was pointed out that, indeed, less than a third of the sixty were actually American, the p.r. flack himself didn't reappear to defend himself: instead he had one of his flunkies write a letter to the editor which acknowledged the error (but not, naturally, the irrelevancy of the assertion itself) by stating "Jim misspoke himself".

More recently, the web log of the Breakthrough Institute, ran a series on a phenomenon it called "Climate McCarthyism." The Breakthrough Institute advertises itself as a "small think-tank with big ideas", and says its mission is "committed to creating a new progressive politics, one that is large, aspirational, and asset-based. We believe that any effective politics must speak to core needs and values, not issues and interests, and we thus situate ourselves at the intersection of politics, policy, philosophy, and the social sciences." Hardly a manifesto of the New Right, and climate researchers who publish at its blog are not in fact sceptical as to whether human beings cause global warming, not at all.

They do differ from others, though, in arguing that climate change is a problem that will be overcome not through carbon-reducing schemes such as emissions-trading (or placing a tax on carbon-use), or not through these alone, but from investment in new technology, and the reinvestment in older, non-carbon emission technologies such as nuclear power.

Series authors Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus focus their ire upon Joe Romm, a member of a partisan Democratic party think-tank in Washington, and climate blogger at the web site of the New Republic. In part one, they detail how Romm went on a campaign against Keith Kloor, a former editor of Audubon magazine and no sceptic of climate-change. Kloor had criticized Romm for feeding quotes to a climate researcher who'd been quoted, inaccurately, in a recently published book exploring alternatives to the strict-carbon reduction plans of treaties such as Kyoto. Email exchanges between Romm and the scientist revealed that Romm had insisted the researcher be quoted as saying the authors "utterly misrepresented my work." In fact, the scientist had been given proofs of the book to read, and had (by his own admission) overlooked a relatively minor inaccuracy in the authors' characterization of his theories. Romm went with the "utterly inaccurate" quote in his blog post attacking the book's authors. When criticized by Kloor, Romm responded with a post entitled "Meet Trash Journalist Keith Kloor" (which according to Shellenberger and Nordhaus, Romm changed to "Meet Journalist Keith Kloor" following the publication of the first part of "Climate McCarthyism"). There, Romm conjured up some offence that he imagined Kloor had committed against Romm's small-time journalist father, all the while never linking to Kloor's actual Internet posting on the matter. Shellenberger and Nordhaus remark on the irony of Romm characterizing Kloor's journalism as "trash", when he himself had said in email exchanges with the climate scientist, that he was looking for material to "trash" the authors of the aforementioned book.

Meanwhile, Romm has gone after other climate scientists — not even those who question man-made global warming, but who simply believe other measures than strict carbon rationing are necessary in order to stem climate change. Scientists that published an article in Nature magazine, advocating rapid investment in technology by governments, were branded by Romm as "global-warming delayers." Romm absurdly characterized them as being part of some cabal to which also absurdly belong George Bush the younger, Newt Gingrich and Danish statistician Bjorn Lomberg (author of the Sceptical Environmentalist). They are instead apparently Democratic partisans as well, and open supporters of U.S. president Barack Obama.

In part two of "Climate McCarthyism", Shellenberger and Nordhaus show how these scientists were wrongly associated with the American Enterprise Institute, also a partisan think-tank, but to the right, just because their Nature analysis superficially resembles one published by the Institute some years ago. They write: "The character assassination, the bullying, the psychological projection — it all adds up to Climate McCarthyism, and Joe Romm is Climate McCarthyite-in-chief. Joe Romm's `Global Warming Deniers and Delayers' play the same role as Joe McCarthy's "Communists and Communist sympathizers." While Romm built a loyal liberal and environmentalist following for attacking right-wing `global warming deniers' — a designation meant to invoke `Holocaust denier' — he spends much of his time attacking well-meaning journalists, academics, and activists, who take the issue of global warming seriously, accept climate science, and support immediate action to address it."

The sort of yellow cyber-journalism that Joe Romm engages in, is the rule throughout the hyper-partisan Internet. What makes it significant is his apparent influence on mainstream news-media columnists and commentators, who apparently pick up on Romm's blogging without bothering to verifying his attacks with a cursory check of the work of those being attacked.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus observe, "Joe McCarthy, like Romm, was compulsive in projecting his own dark side onto others." But isn't this the case with global-warming hysterics as a community? Isn't it the global warming alarmists who are enslaved to vested interests — that is, the billions upon billions in taxpayer and corporate funds that support the effort to bring carbon emissions under a regime of global control? Isn't it they too behave in an anti-scientific manner, when they absolutely refuse to engage the sceptics' arguments and instead attack them ad hominem for their alleged financing, their mental health, even their nationality? Climate-change theories of sceptics that I've read spend virtually no time going after the proponents of global-warming catastrophism personally, instead focussing on the actual theories at hand. These theories may be wrong. But this is science: the proposal of hypotheses that in most instances have no experimental or empirical bases at all. To attack the good faith of scientists who don't hue to the "consensus" is, to emphasize, not science at all, but the practice of religious zealots throughout the ages.

And, as the "hacked" e-mails from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit show, isn't it the global-warming scientific alarmists, not their critics, who are engaging in fraud and conspiracy, or at least of pursuing research in bad faith. Indeed, the leaked exchanges do reveal this in spades. One needn't bother with the extreme lack of professionalism that is encountered in the climate researchers' messages to one another, when referring to global-warming sceptics (or even those who, in Romm's terminology, wish to "delay" action against climate change). What is consequential is the scientists' frank admissions as to their efforts not only to jerry-rig temperature figures to show that warming has been more dramatic than it otherwise would be without (in the words of one e-mail) a certain statistical "trick".

The CRU climate scientists also worked assiduously to prevent independent agencies and researchers access to their raw data, pressured research journals to reject submissions from scientists believed to be "delayers and deniers", and lobbied these same publications to "get rid of" board members and staff-members likewise identified as "deniers." Earlier this year, a Toronto statistician associated with the Web site Climate Audit (not to my knowledge a climate sceptic at all), revealed that the East Anglia climate research facility had "accidentally" destroyed the raw figures by which it was able to calculate the warming trend in the twentieth century. The leak revealed e-mail exchanges on this very subject, involving the Climate Research Unit head (now been suspended from his job pending investigation of the leak), who said that, if British Freedom of Information statute forces him to reveal this data to Climate Audit, he will instead have to destroy it. Under the FOI, it is illegal to destroy information subject to an access of information request. This is a frank admission of intent to commit a crime. The e-mails are damaging enough, but also leaked were data files containing the underlying codes by which global warming calculations were carried out. These proved to be such a mess that a CRU software engineer spent months or even years trying to make sense of them — but finally gave up trying.

This is simply scandalous. Naturally, the climate-change alarmists tried to minimize the whole thing. But even George Monbiot, a British leftist known as a global-warming extremist, admitted that the leak was a great blow to the atmosphere of hysteria that he and the many others like him have managed to create over the last few years. Nevertheless, one can judge how titanic the whole thing is, by how assiduously the mainstream news media has been in ignoring the controversy. An early story, posted on the "right-wing" Fox cable-news site, simply stated "Climate sceptics see `smoking gun' in researchers leaked e-mails" (November 20, 2009). The controversy was covered in the New York Times, which in turn refused to publish the e-mails, on the grounds that they were "stolen communications."

Nearly forty years ago, the editors of the New York Times, along with Benji Bradlee of the Washington Post, went to the Supreme Court to request permission to publish other stolen communications, the top-secret analyses of the justification and strategy for U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which became known as the "Pentagon papers." The high court ruled that, while the purloining of the Pentagon papers was indeed illegal, the "public interest" imperative in making them public, overwhelmed any national-security considerations. A precedent was established wherein third-party recipients of illegally obtain information, were not bound by any contract or promise between parties to keep information secret. With a major international conference about to convene in a matter of days in Copenhagen, with the aim of imposing restrictions on carbon even more severely than under the Kyoto treaty, surely the public interest in learning about criminal fraud from a facility responsible for much of the research justifying these restrictions, outweighs any alleged right to privacy among researchers who are, after receiving millions in public funding. But at least, initially, such reasoning did not prevail among the editorial board of the New York Times. For its part, the Washington Post's first stories on the matter focussed almost entirely on the "rivalry" between researchers, as revealed in the leaked e-mails. Fraud? What fraud?

The leak has given succour to those in the "denier" community who are the counterparts of the McCarthyite Joe Romm among the alarmists: those who believe global warming is a "scam", a "fraud", even a "conspiracy". But, as I said, I don't question the good faith even of those scientists who are indeed implicated in fraud, any more than I question the good faith of Maynard Keynes, who pursued compulsory sterilization as head of the British Eugenics Society in the 1930s and ‘40, for his genuine belief in biological quackery — any more than I question the good faith even of police and prosecutors who have been shown to have either withheld or planted evidence that convicted those later proven innocent. The latter genuinely believe (like Orson Welles' duplicitous sheriff in Touch of Evil) that they've "framed no one who isn't guilty."

Outlaws, Thugs, Dictators... and Ticky-Tacky Boxes

2009-11-27T11:24:00.001-08:00

Sporadically, I've been thinking about the "outlaw." Not so much any particular outlaw, but rather, the Outlaw as a product of cultural mythology. The term "outlaw" itself, I have learned, derives from a legal manoeuvre undertaken by medieval authorities, wherein a particular lawbreaker was declared "out of the law." The law, in other words, no longer offered the outlaw any protection: he could be manhandled, assaulted, murdered, mutilated even, all without his assailants being held accountable under the appropriate statute. What fascinates me is the great reverence and respect accorded to many outlaws by common people. Part and parcel of this is the "mythologising", ie. lying, about outlaw figures. No better example of this is found in the lyrics of Woody Guthrie's Pretty Boy Floyd, about the Depression-era outlaw of that name. Guthrie sings of how Charles Floyd, known as "Pretty Boy", was approached by a deputy sheriff in Oklahoma city, who used "vulgar words of language" in front of Floyd's wife. In reaction, "Pretty Boy grabbed a log-chain/The deputy grabbed his gun/And in the fight that followed/He laid that deputy down." I was able to find no reference to such an incident in a cursory research of Pretty Boy Floyd's life, but I highly doubt the cause of contention between himself and the lawman had to do with the latter's use of vulgar language. It seems rather that Guthrie was attempting to justify the real crime here, the murder of a deputy sheriff by a wanted criminal. In this sense, it is probably not lying, but half-truth being portrayed here: namely, that the deputy did indeed use vulgar words of language, while Pretty Boy Floyd's reaction had little to do with this. Instead, he killed the deputy no doubt to escape being arrested.

The romanticizing of outlaws in this fashion, extends back long before Pretty Boy Floyd and his contemporaries, such as George "Machine Gun" Kelley, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, George "Baby-Face" Nelson, not to mention the psychopathic weirdos Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who seem to be the only Depression-time bank-robbers never to be given nicknames. Indeed not, as the mythological treatment of outlaws was commonplace in the American Old West, and in the Old World, too. "Robin Hood" does not seem to have been actual person living the Sherwood Forest of Nottingham in the thirteen century. Rather, the word appears to be a conflation of a Middle English term to "rob under a hood", evolving to become a placeholder referring to any robber whatsoever. Nevertheless, it is revealing that in the centuries hence, various writers found it productive and profitable to cobble the various tales of the "Robin Hoods", into the band-of-merry-men stories we are familiar with today. Another English outlaw immortalized in poesy actually did exist: Dick Turban, the eighteenth-century highway robber whose exploits were romanticized by Wadsworth Longfellow in The Highwayman.

A century later, in the American West, Frank James and his younger brother, Jesse, came to be known as the "Robin Hoods" of the post-Civil War era. What's revealing is that none of the outlaws so esteemed by the common folk in their time and afterward, ever actually engaged in the practice of "taking from the rich to give to the poor" as the Robin Hood of legend was supposed to have done. There is no way to fairly describe Frank and Jesse James as other than cold-blooded killers. The pair had been Confederate irregular guerilla fighters during the Civil War in the passionately-divided Missouri federal territory. In this capacity, they engaged in several ambushes and massacres of federal troops, mercilessly gunning down soldiers even after they had surrendered. After the war, the James brothers' quickly dropped these activities and turned full-time to the bank- and train-robbing that had been the Missouri guerillas' lifeblood during the conflict itself. Again, there is nothing to suggest that the James' brothers and their partners in crime did this for any higher cause, let alone to "give to the poor." Yet, Robert Ford, the man who shot Jesse James to death in 1882 for a thousand-dollar award, is known in the folk-song Jesse James as "the coward who shot Mr. Howard/And laid poor Jesse in his grave" (James had been going by the name of Thomas Howard when he was killed in St. Joseph, Missouri). Indeed, a recent film biography — starring Brad Pitt as James — was even titled, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Ford (who was shot to death himself, a decade later), may well have been a coward for gaining the trust of James, and then killing him with a sucker-shot. But how does James escape from the same designation when he was known to have killed unarmed men?

Probably every society in history has had folk-stories and folksongs that romanticized past and present outlaws. What is paradoxical is that the treatment of the outlaw as a hero has occurred where public or "folk" sentiment was clearly on the side of law-and-order. This is especially true of the United States, which today and for all of its history been very unforgiving toward lawbreakers. It is why the reputations of Jesse James, Henry "Butch Cassidy" Longworth and his Hole-in-the-Wall Gang (or Wild Bunch), as well as Bonnie and Clyde, must undergo whitewashing, so as to make their crimes "mean something bigger" than mere self-interest. It is entirely perverse, but the fact that the widespread mythologising of outlaws occurs during periods when legitimate government has come under disrepute (as during the Depression, or in the areas of the U.S. Mid-West where widespread sympathy toward the Confederacy was seen, or even during the early-modern period in England, when the Robin Hood tales first took shape), shows that in some way, the outlaw is held up as a paragon before the supposed bumbling and corruption of legitimate political figures such as princes, presidents and sheriffs. The fact that the most famous outlaws are those who are able to escape justice over long periods, further demonstrates the incompetence of constituted authority. I wonder if something like this is not in play with the romanticization of guerillas and strongmen dictators, as has occurred throughout the twentieth century, into the present day. Guerillas are, by definition, outlaws whose crimes are committed but for a higher purpose, ie. Liberation or Revolution. Yet, if one traces the career of the most famous guerilla of our time, Ernesto Lynch, or "Che Guevara" as he is known to the world, the Argentinian doctor who, who under the leadership of the Castro brothers, Raul and Fidel, helped overthrow the Batista regime in Cuba in 1959, it is impossible not to view him as a psychopathic killer. Guevara was ruthless not only in his efforts to overthrow Batista; upon coming to power, Guevara, as the minister of security under the Castro regime, was equally quick to place before a firing squad those who, labelled "bandits", engaged in the same guerilla tactics that Guevara used to get to where he got to, as well as others not willing to to kowtow to the new government. It is telling that Lynch left Cuba in the mid-1960s, after his reign of terror had either killed off any native opposition, or saw it flee to the United States, and there were only matters of administration to occupy himself with. Famously, of course, Guevara was killed in 1967, while ineptly attempting to foment revolution in Bolivia. Nevertheless, the famous image of Lynch, rendered to appear like Jesus Chris, is one of the most recognizable in the world even today.

It is entirely necessary, given the stark reality of Ernesto Lynch (publicly available to anyone who wishes to look), for Che Guevara to emerge, in popular culture, as a myth. It is a mythological Guevara that is portrayed in recent movie biographies the Motorcycle Diaries and Che, both of which were little-seen when in general release. They may not affect the popular image of their subject the way the names "Bonnie and Clyde" conjure not gimpy near-dwarf Barrow or homely Parker, but Warren Beatty in his hunky prime, and Faye Dunaway, the most glamorous actress of her time. In any case, the guerilla doesn't necessarily relinquish his outlaw image, merely by taking power in government. Fidel Castro was (until a couple of years ago), the president of Cuba, and recognized as such by diplomatic corps of the globe, with the lone exception of the U.S. State department. Castro has been the toast of the intelligentsia and literati of the Western democracies for that same period, precisely because he is viewed as an "outlaw" by the U.S. (which, de facto, recognized the Castro regime long ago). This is in spite of the fact that Castro's government has been blatantly and viciously anti-democratic and illiberal, without regard for any value which the same artists and intellects that toast his success purport to hold so high.

Or really, just because Castro and other strongmen are such outlaws. The ardour with which Western leftists hold toward "outlaw" regimes such as Castro's, is strongly correlated with how flagrantly tyrannical and dictatorial they are. The Soviet Union's strongest support in Western countries came during the time of Stalin the Terrible. Its influence among Marxists in the capitalist Occident waned as the Soviet leadership passed on to ever more duller, greyer apparatchiks, such as Leonid Brezhnev. The USSR under Brezhnev was far less dictatorial than under Stalin. It was hardly liberal in any sense, but opponents of the regime were not summarily executed, as under Djugashvili, nor put on show-trial en masse (as occurred often in the 1930s, and frequently thereafter, in the Soviet Union). Instead, they were jailed, or sent into internal exile, and only seldom made to suffer greatly, as was common under Stalin. Moreover, Brezhnev's KGB, unlike the NKVD, did not persecute ordinary people who merely seemed to be opponents of the New Order. Western Marxists could reasonably point to the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union as an advance upon the Stalinism that existed previously, a state that while not supporting "luxuries" such as freedom of the press, speech or assembly, nevertheless fed, clothed and housed people to a very adequate degree, where no one need go hungry or be without a job (at least, if the entirely bogus state statistics were to be believed, and most did believe them). Yet, rarely did the USSR after Kruschev and before Gorbachev evoke any passion whatsoever in the Western radical and academic left. Instead, this is when Western Marxists began to portray the USSR as a "state capitalist" economy. The fact that Brezhnev entered into detente with the U.S., thus ending any lingering vestige of the Soviet Union as an "outlaw" regime, seems to have permanently ended the romance of Western leftists with the USSR.

Following the ascension of Brezhnev in 1964, Western Marxists rapidly switched their "outlaw" allegiance to Communist China. Just as the USSR was about to enter what was later called "stagnation", Mao Tse-tung was initiating his insurgency against the established leadership of the Chinese state, who had banished Mao from power (if not from office) over the catastrophic Great Leap Forward (an attempt to implement heavy-industry on a village scale), which caused millions to starve to death. Mao used his position as general-secretary of the Communist party to foment rebellion among young high-school and university students against their teachers, professors, administrators, and constituted authority generally, for the refusal of government officials to follow the ideology of Communism, instead becoming "bourgeois pigs" and "capitalist roaders." This eventually resulted in the chaos known as the Cultural Revolution, the real goal of which was to restore Mao Tse-tung to dictatorial authority. This is precisely what happened by 1966, when enraged students were able to storm the compound of the Chinese President, holding him prisoner to their taunts and minor assaults (having won back power, Mao then viciously crushed any of the rebels who persisted in the delusion that they would still be able to wreak havoc, as they had been doing for months and years). On university campuses in Western democracies, the Cultural Revolution was looked upon with envy by the burgeoning New Left movement. Almost overnight, a new strand of Marxism, called Maoism, sprang up, rapidly supplanting Trotskyism as the "alternative" (ie., not aligned with any official Communist line) form of socialist radicalism. Mao's so-called Little Red booklet, a short compendium of the Great Helmsmen's trite, bizarre and ridiculous pronouncements, was resurrected from its deserved obscurity and subject to near-biblical exegesis by the newfound Maoists. The radical pedagogue Paolo Freire, a Brazilian whose theories on the education of the "oppressed" were highly influential at teachers' schools in the years thereafter, lengthily toasted the Cultural Revolution as a new hope for China and the world. The fact that millions of Chinese were oppressed and killed as a result of this movement, was of no consequence to leftists such as Friere. Tellingly, Maoism disappeared as quickly as it arrived, after Mao formalized relations with the United States in 1973, under the Left's and the New Left's old nemesis, president Richard Nixon.

The demise of Maoism after 1973 coincided with the dormancy of leftist politics in the Western academy. Things picked up, though, after 1979, when another guerilla movement, the Sandinista Liberation Front, came to power in Nicaragua. As with Cuba, the United States refused to extend diplomatic recognition to an avowedly-Marxist government. As the Marxists within the Sandinista government consolidated power, deposing their more liberal former allies, refusing to hold free elections, shutting down opposition press, the U.S. began to lend financial and material support to Nicaraguan "contras", guerillas against the Sandinista regime led by remnants of the former Somoza regime, but also former Sandinistas who had been run out of power by the Marxists. This, in turn, became so controversial that a Congress led by the Democrats, outlawed support to the contra rebels (efforts to finance the contras in spite of the law, led to the infamous "Iran-contra scandal", wherein White House operative Lt-Col. Oliver North oversaw the shipping of arms to Iran, the profits of which were to be funnelled to the Nicaraguan rebels). The Sandinistas, needless to say, were quite popular within the left in the United States and Europe, as an outlaw regime allied against the U.S. The Sandinista president, Daniel Ortega (who regained the presidency some years ago), was a bespectacled, unassuming little fellow, even in the military fatigues that he seemed to wear all the time. Reality never prevented to the formation of outlaw myth, but Ortega was too insignificant a personage to mythologize properly. Nicaragua nevertheless became the site of Western-leftist pilgrimage, as earnest people from the United States and elsewhere (dubbed "Sandalistas"), arrived to help build the new rural utopia. I remember the news footage of some of these Western well-wishers, on the evening in 1990 when, under an agreement brokered between the U.S. and Nicaragua, the latter held internationally-monitored, free and fair elections for the first time since the installation of the Sandinistas eleven years earlier. The Sandinista government lost, decisively. The Sandalistas had gathered somewhere in Managua, anticipating victory (as indeed, public-opinion showed the government in the lead), but instead ended up wailing and clutching each other like small children unready for bedtime, apparently indifferent to the spectacle they no doubt produced of themselves.

They and others so dearly affected by the fall of another outlaw before Uncle Sam, soon had cause to dry their eyes, and gaze afar with hope. For, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded Kuwait, a tiny emirate to the south. This was, of course, a very flagrant violation of international law. The U.S. government, presided over by the elder George Bush, began immediately to rally international support to force the Iraqi military out of Kuwait. In spite of most Western countries either signing up for direct military engagement, or lending materiel support to the effort, the Hussein regime stoutly refused to vacate the emirate, calling it "Iraq's new province." Hussein's seemingly formidable military (more than 700,000 men at arms), proved to be a virtual mirage, as the U.S. and allied militaries simply mowed the Iraqis over in the re-conquering of Kuwait during January and February of 1991. Saddam Hussein didn't become an antihero to Western leftists, however, immediately during the runup and course of the Gulf War of ‘91. It was simply too discombobulating. After all, U.S. president Ronald Reagan, along with his vice-president Bush the elder, were criticized for having Hussein as an ally, in the years before the latter invaded Kuwait.

Only later, under the sanctions imposed through the United Nations because of Iraq's non-cooperation with the Gulf War truce's weapons provisions, did the country and its leader become a cause celebre of the Western left. Then, a portrait of Saddam Hussein emerged, which characterized him as a "creature of the CIA", who was "best friends" with the United States until he "went rogue", after which he became an enemy of America. Ergo, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It was precisely his status as an outlaw of the international community, which so endeared Hussein to the Western left. It was therefore necessary to lie about him and his regime. A mythology grew up wherein Hussein's many crimes as head of the Iraqi state were either "exaggerated", resulting from "demonization" by the U.S., or else (given their well-documented character) occurred "only when Saddam Hussein was a U.S. ally", and not thereafter, as though to say that Hussein was some kind of liberal who only took to torture and murder at the direction of the U.S. And, of course, these same Western pilgrims (such as actor Sean Penn) to Iraq uncritically accepted government propaganda to the effect that half a million children had died as a result of U.N. sanctions on the country. These figures were shown to be fraudulent, after Iraq was finally liberated of Saddam in 2003; and the criticism ignored the reality of the regime's complicity in the admitted scarcities that afflicted Iraqi society in the period between the two Gulf Wars, during which Hussein had more than enough funds at hand to finance the construction of dozens of presidential palaces and other elaborate buildings. I'm sure Saddam Hussein must have marvelled at how an ugly son of a bitch like himself could live in such endearing repute among the beautiful people of the world.

But, even before the U.S. government, recovering from the shock of the Sept. 11, 2001terrorist attacks, decided to take out Hussein and his nuisance regime for good, a new strongman was stealing hearts among the Western left: Hugo Chavez, the teddy-bear thug of Venezuela. Now, the fact that Chavez was duly elected to power must have staunched the heartthrobs of Marxists in the democratic West, at least somewhat. But, long before Chavez received a plurality of votes in a legitimate election in 1998, he and other "Bolivarian"-socialist officers in the Venezuelan military, had in 1992 launched an unsuccessful military coup. This fact surely redeemed him to the outlaw-loving Marxists of the West. And, of course, Chavez wasted little time in shredding democracy and the rule of law in his country. As he did so, his stock among the Western left only went higher.

Thus, when Chavez moved to shut down the main opposition television station, a group of leftist artists and writers (including the loudmouth British playwright Harold Pinter) signed a statement in support of the Venezuelan strongman, denouncing the international associations of journalists, and others concerned about human rights, who had criticized Chavez on this matter. As I recall, their argument revolved around the technicality that, in fact, Hugo Chavez was not shutting down the television station. It would still remain in operation. However, Chavez did in fact revoke the broadcast rights of the station's owners, and grant them to another faction far more sympathetic to his "Bolivarian" revolution. His justification for doing so was that the station had lent support to the coup plotters of 2002. That is, Chavez was condemning the TV station for supporting (assuming that these charges were truthful) the same actions which he also unsuccessfully tried to carry through ten years before that. It shows that committed leftists will cheer for the same actions that they would denounce, if the actions were taken by a strongman or outlaw dictator whom they believed was against their goals. Any South American strongman that attempted to shut down a leftist-sympathizing broadcaster would be immediately be condemned as a "thug" or a "fascist", just for that fact. But because a South American dictator named Hugo Chavez, the advocate of socialism, undertake this action, he is to be hailed. Or, to cite a more concrete example of such blatancy, let us return to Saddam Hussein for a moment. George Galloway, the far-left Scottish member of the Westminster parliament, was known in the runup to the Iraqi war, and afterward, as the most prominent apologist for Hussein. What is less known is that, years earlier, Galloway had been a trenchant critic of the Hussein regime, simply because it was "allied" with Britain and the U.S., against the Iranian regime. His switch was not gradual: instead, he became a Hussein apologist almost from the moment that the Iraqi dictator invaded Kuwait in 1990, and thereby became the enemy of his enemy, the United States.

In regard to Chavez's shutting down the opposition broadcaster, some expressed amazement at the "contradiction" that artists and writers, who presumably value freedom of speech and democratic rights above all, should come out in support of an act that was clearly in violation of these values. Artists and writers may well value these freedoms. However, literati and intellects who are leftists, in common with others on the left, simply do not value democracy and liberal rights at all. Socialism is, even in theory, authoritarian. It is no accident, no "error", no corruption of doctrine, which means that in practice, socialism is always totalitarian.

George Galloway himself has been a leader among at least a faction of the Western left which has embraced those international outlaws who no longer even profess to Marxist or socialist doctrine; it is enough for Galloway, and many other leftists, for an outlaw to be an opponent of the United States in order for much of the left to find a place in their hearts for them. This explains the attraction that leftists had for Saddam Hussein, but even more so for their newfound love of Islamic fascists. And, contrary to what is generally believed, this affair didn't begin the weeks and months after Sept. 11, 2001. It was budding long before that, during the 1990s, but it took the terrorist attacks of that day for the full consumption to take place, such that we now have a faction that some call the "Islamo-Left." It explains why, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, leftists were so ready to impugn their own grievances against Western society onto the motives of the terrorists that day: the attacks were a reaction against "the growing imbalances between the global rich and poor", or "the illegal occupation of the West Bank by Israel for the last thirty-five years" (although all the suicide-attackers on Sept. 11 were at least middle class in background, several more wealthy than most in the Occident, and no Palestinians were involved in the operation).

From there, the alliance of the left with Islamist and crypto-Islamists only got more intimate. Thus, in December of 2001, when it was revealed that a chapter of the Muslims Students Association at McGill university was involved in fundraising for terrorist causes, a representative of the McGill student was quoted by the Gazette newspaper as being "more worried about the effect that this news will have on our Muslim students than about any allegations of terrorist fundraising..." Of course not. Later that year, on the anniversary or a day or two before or after the Sept. 11 attacks, a mob of leftists and Islamists at another Montreal university, Concordia, blocked access by the public to a speech to be given by former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who recently regained that office) on the grounds that the latter was a "war criminal." In the course of this "protest", an elderly Holocaust survivor was assaulted by the blockading students. And, in spite of this outlaw behaviour, few if any of the "protestors" faced prosecution or even punishment as students at Concordia. In spite of it all, to leftists, the Islam Lobby and even the mainstream media persist in the assertion that Muslims are always potential victims of violence, never its instigators (except, of course, in "reaction" to what others have done to them).

From then, this unholy alliance has only solidified. In 2006, representatives of Canadian and other Western "peace" and "anti-imperialism" groups met with Islamists at a conference in Cairo, Egypt, essentially formalizing the partnership. That year, too, it was falsely reported by the National Post and other newspapers owned by the Canwest chain (whose proprietors, the Islamo-left is always reminding the world, are — ahem — "Zionists") that Iran was to impose regulations on its Jewish population, requiring them to wear a gold Star of David on their clothing, as was the case in Nazi Germany and its conquered territories before and during the Holocaust. In fact, the proposal was part of a draft law before the national legislature, a section that was excised from the bill before it came up for debate. It wasn't, in other words, made up by those nefarious "Zionists."

The Post ran, soon after, a front-page retraction of the story, but the whole controversy had the left-Islamists crowing. The next issue of one of those giveaway arts/culture weeklies that end up littering the floors of buses and other places not swept regularly — the editorial line of which, it goes without saying, is resolutely leftist in orientation — had a commentary feature on the Iranian Star-of-David gaffe. The criticisms were completely unremarkable, but the accompanying cartoon both enraged and nauseated me. It depicted the president of Iran with his head on a chopping block, an black-clad and -masked, axe-wielding executioner standing nearby, with a name-tag: "Canwest." It is hard to convey how hideous this is. In Iran, homosexuals are put to death — the fortunate receive long prison sentences — for the crime of being homosexual. The death penalty is otherwise used quite frequently by the regime of the "victim" being portrayed in this cartoon. In no way, however, does a news organization, whether it is owned by "Zionists" or anyone else, have the power to bring down the death penalty anyone in Iran, let alone its president. In any case, I believe it was the very last time I've ever touched that same periodical.

It is long past the point where any reasonable observer can conclude that Western-leftist love of outlaw regimes or dictators is any "contradiction" to or "aberration" from their central credo. It is the psychology identical to the common-folk's reverence for gangster-criminals just as Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde. Except, of course, instead of being the province of just plain folk, so uncomprehending of and frustrated about a society based on law, that they cast their sentimental lot (and sometimes more) with wanted outlaws, leftist outlaw-worship is a manifestation of an elitist disdain for Mass Culture and Mass Society, and the "Babbitry" that supports it. Such snobbery cannot be articulated openly of course. It is conveyed instead with a perverse "identification" with the impoverished masses of the non-Western world, in general, and particularly with the guerillas and strongman that supposedly represent or promote their "aspirations": Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Guevara, Chavez, and so on.

An article published by Time online last year, honestly conveyed the mentality of these thug-loving leftists, with reference to the Nicaraguan Sandalistas (Tim Rogers, "Twilight of the Sandal-istas", Mar. 6, 2008): "When the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was voted out of power in 1990 after a decade of battling U.S.-backed contra insurgents, many of its supporters from the United States and Europe packed up their bandanas and Birkenstocks and went home with a good story. The Nicaraguan revolution was over, and most of the `Sandalistas' (the nickname that combined their preferences in politics and footwear) saw no point in staying on: There was nothing sexy about helping out a centrist transition government led by a grandmotherly widow when you'd been drawn here by the allure of a regime of guerrilla poets."

It is, of course, never about the people the Sandalistas were supposedly trying to help — be it in Nicaragua, or elsewhere. It is all about the leftists, their own vainglory as well as their own perverse attraction to "regimes of guerilla poets." My own journey from left to "right" (as adherence to traditional liberal principles is now considered) began when I smelled this rat: the disdain held out by leftists for everyday people and their culture. I don't think there's anything more emblematic of this contempt, than the song Little Boxes, which was popularized by Pete Seeger and appeared on his 1967 Greatest Hits collection. The lyrics run, in part:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.

[...]

And the people in the houses
All go to the university,
And they all get put in boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
And there's doctors and there's lawyers
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

I hated this song from the moment I first heard it. It is, obviously, a swipe at suburban tract-style housing. What justification, though, does the song have in describing the people who live in such housing as "being all the same", or even that the structures are "ticky-tacky", that is, poorly-made? My assumption had been that Seeger wrote this song. In my own judgement, the lyrics are an example of sour grapes. After all, Seeger and other folk-singing apologists for Stalin, had long condemned the lack of adequate housing in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Western world, as proof as to how capitalism "immiserated" the common folk. But tract housing pretty much resolved the problem of slum housing at a stroke: it was not only doctors and lawyers, as alleged in Little Boxes, but also factory workers and other members of the working class, were able to afford a single-family residence because of suburban development.

As for the lack of aesthetic values in suburban tract-development, it is remarkable that so many intellects and artists were able to condemn them so easily, when this same group of people did, during the post-war, not only reject considerations of "beauty" and "ugliness" in regard to the visual and plastic arts, as some much "bourgeois decadence"; they also hailed the advent of the brutalism in architecture (pioneered by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) that very few today argue has any aesthetic worth whatsoever. As for the left's hatred of suburbia in general, I cannot help to think about the dialogue in the opening few minutes of the 1997 Brazilian film, Four Days in September, about the 1969 kidnapping of the U.S. ambassador to that country by a group of left-wing urban guerillas. Shortly before kidnapping, in response to the mocking by one of the guerillas of American moon-landing triumph in August, his apolitical friend says, "if the Soviets did it, you'd be dancing on the ceiling." So it is, if the Soviets or any other Communist regime had managed to build tracts of little boxes for their workforces, Pete Seeger and any other apologist for Stalin, would be singing the praises of these "workers' houses" to the end of the calendar.

Investigating Little Boxes further, I found that my original assessment of the song was mistaken in only one regard: it was not authored by Pete Seeger at all, but by a far less well-known American folk-singer, Malvina Reynolds. The song is regarded as a folk "classic", and is in fact used as the theme song for an American cable-television drama, Weeds (which is about a middle-aged mother living in suburbia who, facing job-loss, turns to marijuana trafficking in order to support her family). On a web-site associated with that programme, Nancy Reynolds, daughter of Malvina and also a folk-singer (the latter died in 1978) described how her mother came to write the song: "My mother and father were driving South from San Francisco through Daly City when my mom got the idea for the song. She asked my dad to take the wheel, and she wrote it on the way to the gathering in La Honda where she was going to sing for the Friends Committee on Legislation".

I think what is being described here is the literal definition of "drive-by smear." Malvina Reynolds wrote a song about people that she literally never had contact with: she came to very negative judgements about them, based on her seeing from afar the housing that they lived in. These facts are not in dispute, but rather than treating the songs as an example of bigotry and prejudice, folk-revival fans have embraced it as a classic.

Fox News, the Obama White House and Spiro Agnew

2009-10-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

Back in January, I was none-too-pleased to hear from my daughter that her school let pupils watch the coronation of U.S. president Barack Obama.

After all, they don’t broadcast the swearing-in ceremony of the prime minister of Canada; why is the leader of foreign country accorded such treatment? In the runup to Obama’s election, last November, and on to the presidential swearing-in, it was common to see people wearing t-shirts and other clothing emblazoned with Obama’s name and image.

It’s funny: you don’t see these much anymore. Obama may remain popular among Canadians, just because he is not a Republican or George W. Bush. However, his support among Americans, the people who actually elected him, continues to ebb. I am not often roused to write critically about politicians, especially foreign politicians, with whom I am not in agreement. Such criticism can simply appear to be sour grapes; more than that, however, I think it is essentially for the politically-engaged to submit to the will of the majority, both when their side wins, and when their side loses. Especially when their side loses, for the continuance of democracy depends upon it. If politically active people decide that their side losing an election means that the system is no longer legitimate, there is no enduring democratic political system. I also don’t like snap judgements: my preference is to wait and review everything being said about some issue or controversy, and then make up my mind only after that.

Moreover, I don’t really have anything to say in particular about the policy agenda pursued by the Obama government: right now, for example, it is in negotiations with lawmakers in regard to its plan to impose universal health-care on the United States. This is what the American people voted for last year. Just how you can have a universal health care system, run by the federal government, for a country of 300 and more million people, is beyond me. However, Obama and his team, as well as the U.S. Congress, seem determined to bring it in. Again, they were democratically elected to do so.

That said, however, I believe also that democratically elected politicians must play by the democracy play-book. In this regard, the conduct of Obama and his government has been absolutely disgraceful. I’m referring in particular to White House officials’ recent targeting of the Fox cable-news channel. I’ve never seen the notorious Fox news, as it is not available to me, and I wouldn’t watch it anyway, because I think all TV news — let alone twenty-four cable-news — is a bunch of crap. Obama official Anita Dunn, however, said that Fox cable-news is like "the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party" (according to an Associated Press report from the web site of the MS-NBC news channel, Oct. 19, 2009). Rahm Emmanuel, Barack Obama’s chief of staff, stated in the same piece that Fox "is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective."

There’s something to ponder over: is a news organization not to have a "perspective", a "point of view", even a "bias"? No one seriously argues any longer than news organizations are unbiassed; certainly, MS-NBC has a bias, as does Newsweek magazine, as well as the New York Times. These, as well as the news divisions of the CBS, NBC and ABC networks, have "point of view", a "perspective", and a "bias": it is one that accords with the worldview of Anita Dunn, Rahm Emmanuel and, presumably, Barack Obama himself.

Fox cable-news decidedly does not share in these biases: on the contrary, its perspective, its bias, its point of view is one friendly to the right-of-centre and to the Republican party. It is precisely this which drives Obama and his officials to distraction. The other networks are not a problem for them: they have behaved, at least until very recently, more like Obama’s publicists than "objective" reporters. Thus, during the presidential campaign last year, when it appeared that Sarah Palin, the former Alaskan governor appointed the vice-presidential nominee, would pose a challenge to an Obama cakewalk, the major news media homed in on Palin like a group of African honey-bees.

Suddenly, and although Palin would be only be the vice-president (if Republican candidate John McCain had won), reporters with the major news media became very interested in how well Palin could answer questions about foreign policy ("What is the Bush doctrine?", asked one interviewer with a major news service), about then just-erupting financial crisis ("Just how would you solve this crisis", Palin was asked, as though anyone knew what to do at the time — or thereafter), even about her personal life. Very quickly, the left-wing "blogosphere" began publishing really nasty stories about Palin, her husband, and the rest of her family. Andrew Sullivan, the former toady of Bush the younger who became a slavish apologist for the Democratic party when it better served his career, went on a months’-long crusade to prove that the Downs’ Syndrome baby that Palin delivered in 2008 (in her early forties), was actually Palin’s daughter’s baby, and that Palin claimed to be pregnant in order to defend her teenager’s "honour" (Sullivan was undaunted in this crusade by the fact that Palin’s daughter actually did have a baby out-of-wedlock in 2008). There were stories that Palin had been a supporter of the Alaskan Independence party, that while mayor of a small Alaskan city before she was elected governor, she made up a list of books she wanted banned at the local library, that she demanded (after becoming governor) that "creationist" beliefs be included in the state school curriculum. All of this, and much else, was proven to be false, or at least, without foundation.

Of course, news media will get things wrong sometimes; and usually, unsubstantiated rumours were not themselves reported by the major, liberal-leaning media. It isn’t, either, any violation of journalist ethics to aggressively go after a candidate for high public office, as was the case with Palin. What is outrageous is how such treatment was reserved for Palin only. In particular, the attacks on her "lack of experience" as an executive was laughable in light of the fact that, as a mayor of a small city, and governor of a small state, she had greatly more such experience than Barack Obama, who had none at all (Obama, or his people, argued that his experience in running an election campaign was sufficient for holding the "most powerful office in the world").

As for Palin’s various verbal gaffes, can they really compare to Obama’s statements about their being "57" U.S. states, or that the U.S. president serves in office "eight to ten years", or that white rural and small-town Americans, having lost so much of their prosperity by the hallowing out of heavy industry in the heartland, "cling to guns and religion" as compensation? Just to restate the obvious: Palin was running for the vice-presidency, the do-nothing office; Obama of course was the presidential candidate. Obama’s actual vice-presidential candidate, Joe Biden, was if anything even more Spiro Angewish in its verbal statements: such as that "president Roosevelt went on TV in 1929 to calm the nation after the stock market crash", or requesting that a wheelchair-bound man to stand for an ovation. (But, according the front cover of this week’s Newsweek, a publication without a "perspective" apparently, "Joe Biden is no joke.").

Palin was condemned for the company she kept (ie., allegedly supporting the crypto-fascist Pat Buchanan during the latter’s previous presidential bid), while Obama received very little criticism at all for attending a church for twenty years presided over by a bizarre conspiracy-fabulist who claimed again and again that whites were trying to kill blacks, the Bush government is attempting to impose a dictatorship, that Jews are really in control of everything (Obama claimed he never heard any of these things in the reverend’s sermons).

Just to restate: there was nothing wrong in going after Palin. It is the difference in treatment that is outrageous. It seems, however, that the Obama government is not satisfied to have all news organizations except for one in their corner. Instead, in the face of the president’s falling popularity, Obama officials have chosen to target this one, right-leaning news medium: Fox cable. It is simply because the news service has been as critical of the Obama government, and the left movement in general, as all the other news media were to the previous administration, and to Republicans generally. Fox news revealed, for example, that the so-called "green jobs" so-called "czar" (basically, the term for the chief policy maker and administrator of environmentally-friendly technologies and procedures), Van Jones, was actually a Leninist who preached revolutionary socialism as recently as a few years ago. I don’t even think that this fact alone is what forced Jones’ resignation: instead, it was a petition he signed a few years ago on behalf of a 9/11 "truth" organization, although Jones claimed that he was largely ignorant of the aims and motives of the petitioners.

More recently, Fox news aired hidden-camera footage of two young conservative activists, posing as a prostitute and her pimp, who visited branch offices in several U.S. cities of the activist group ACORN. Several of the ACORN community activists were shown advising the dress-up prostitute and pimp how to run a bawdy house in order to avoid detection by authorities, how to launder their earnings, and how to successfully smuggle underage illegal migrants to get them into prostitution. Fox cable cagily aired each video over several days: after the first airing, ACORN representatives were quick to announce the firing of the "rogue" activist or activists involved in such activity, reassuring the public that this was "just an isolated incident." Then the second and third hidden-camera incidents were shown, leading to more firings, more denials, more reassurances as to how atypical this was.

Yet more footage came, and the story — heretofore ignored by the balance of the fourth estate — simply could not be resisted any longer. Law-enforcement officials opened investigations at the state and federal levels, the U.S. census department quickly cancelled contracts it had with the organization (the full name of which is some formulation that is intended to be the acronym "ACORN"), and several large private-sector sponsors (such as the Bank of America, which is a private financial institution and not the U.S. central bank), also cancelled their donations. Naturally, as ACORN officials were involved in several felonies.

ACORN fought back as best it could. One official, it was claimed, knew that the "pimp" and "prostitute" were a ruse, and simply "played along" with them. Again, it was stated that another ACORN worker had contacted the police, as indeed she did: that is, her brother-in-law, a local detective, the day following the visit. It was also confirmed that the conservative undercover activists had visited other ACORN offices, and were quickly shown the door after revealing their plans. But the consistency of the advice given to the would-be prostitute and pimp, involving ACORN offices hundreds or thousands of miles apart, seems to show that, to some degree, the organization has involved itself in criminal law-breaking, including apparently money-laundering, furthering the aims of prostitution, and people-smuggling. The best was yet to come, though. A few weeks after the revelations, ACORN’s lawyers filed suit against the two conservative activists, as well as their own sponsor, the proprietor of the web site Big Hollywood, for alleged "invasion of privacy." It turns out that in the state of Maryland, it is against the law for a person to record another while in conversation, be it over a telephone line or in person with an audio or video tape-recorder. This arose from a visit the couple made to an ACORN office in Baltimore. The organization is looking for a million dollars.

It is clear that this is a nuisance lawsuit, designed to dissuade other freelancers from doing their own investigations of ACORN activities. From my understanding of the legal issues, the defendants have a perfectly sound defence from the charges, in that ACORN is public-service organization and the conversations were conducted in an office open and accessible to all. As for the non-Fox media, there was some noises initially as to the "lack of ethics" of such hidden-camera recording, which is perfectly laughable given that hidden-camera investigations have been a staple of local and network news since it became technologically feasible to hide cameras away. The Dateline programme on NBC, for example, had a long-running feature called To Catch a Predator. Adults posing as pre-adolescent girls and boys would go on Internet chat-rooms and the like, "meeting" adult men online, who would agree to meet the "girl" at a particular location. Instead, the Dateline reporter and camera-crew were there. They would thence harangue the predator at length for his deed. This is very close to entrapment. It is in any case far more ethically-challenged than what the ACORN pair did — and it must be said, quite a bit less ballsy.

Here’s another irony: one of Sarah Palin’s network Inquisitors (he asked her to define the "Bush doctrine") was queried about the ACORN story after it became public. He professed ignorance of the whole thing. When the details were revealed to him, he suggested that "it better be left to the cable networks."

What’s this have to do with Barack Obama? Years ago, the president got his own start as a community organizer with ACORN. Thereafter, he seems to have remained involved with the group in one capacity or another. ACORN, in turn, employed its organizational muscle to register voters for the Obama campaign, both in the Democratic primaries and in the general election last year. It was part of a campaign which, beating the odds (a first-term Senator versus the former First Lady of the United States), was one of the most successful ever conducted in American politics. ACORN was rewarded in return. After the election, the U.S. census was brought within the direct aegis, apparently for the first time, of the White House. ACORN was given some or much control (depending on the account) of the census-taking, the first time an independent non-governmental organization has been given such responsibility (apparently). As mentioned, this contract has now been cancelled. But is it really so advisable permit a private organization with an implicit or avowed ideological intent (ie., "social change") to be responsible for the enumeration of all the people and things in the United States? There had been accusations of malfeasance, chiefly in regard to voter-registration fraud, directed at ACORN earlier. These were or are under investigation by authorities in at least one U.S. state. However, it seems that the chief witnesses in these cases were former ACORN officials who were themselves fired for their own malfeasance (including one woman who used an organization credit-card for personal items). The hidden-camera stuff really blew the lid off things, though.

Did the attempt at "quarantining" Fox news on the part of the Obama White House, come in reaction to the ACORN revelations? It is, in any case, very reminiscent of the crusade on the part of Nixon vice-president Spiro Agnew against the "nattering nabobs of negativism" in the network news and major dailies. Except, it is even more outrageous than that. Agnew condemned the press corps generally, and never a reporter or newscaster by name. Obama’s team is going after one single media source, the one that happens to be playing the role of loyal opposition at this time. Some commentators have remarked as to the "lack of wisdom" in attacking the news media, but it is of course only one news organization. It is a news service whose very existence is roundly despised by very influential people academia, the rest of the news media, the U.S. government, and it seems, within the executive branch itself. Attacking Fox cable-news for its "lies" and "bias" will energize the braying, hateful, elitist base of the Democratic party. Right now, the Obama government needs that shot in the arm.

Update, Oct. 23, 2009:

Other information I came across after writing my previous entry, demonstrates that the Obama government’s conduct toward Fox cable-news is even more outrageous than I thought.

One of the Obama officials attacking Fox news I didn’t quote was David Axelrod, the president’s legal advisor. Axelrod not only echoed the government’s talking-points in reiterating (according to the Politico web site, Oct. 18, 2009), "that they’re not really a news station if you watch even — it’s not just their commentators, but a lot of their news programming", he also went to say as a guest of an ABC-TV political programme — this is the real heart of Obama’s contempt for democracy and freedom of the press — "the bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way." In essence, Alexrod is saying that other news organizations should join the Obama White House in blacklisting Fox cable.

What’s more, it’s quite clear that Obama and his officials are attacking Fox not because of any factual errors the latter has allegedly committed — the critics would be detailing these errors — but because, as Fox news host Chris Wallace (son of the legendary 60 Minutes reporter Mike Wallace) stated, it was just because its researchers had the temerity to fact-check a statement made by one of its deputy cabinet secretaries. According to the New York Times (Oct. 23, 2009), the "spur" for declaring war on Fox cable was when "Executives at other news organizations, including The New York Times, had publicly said that their newsrooms had not been fast enough in following stories that Fox News, to the administration’s chagrin, had been heavily covering through the summer and early fall — namely, past statements and affiliations of the White House adviser Van Jones that ultimately led to his resignation and questions surrounding the community activist group Acorn."

So, it seems my presumptions were correct: the Obama government did start its blacklist campaign against Fox news following the news of the ACORN hidden-camera revelations, and the damage it apparently did to this group, steadfast allies of Barack Obama throughout his career. It gets even worse, though, according to the Times: "Fox’s television news competitors refused to go along with a Treasury Department effort on Tuesday to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with the executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg that was to be conducted with a `pool’ camera crew shared by all the networks. That followed a pointed question at a White House briefing this week by Jake Tapper, an ABC News correspondent, about the administration’s treatment of `one of our sister organizations.’"

It is evident that, among other U.S. news organizations, there is as much love for Fox news as there is within the Obama government. Perhaps it is enlightened self-interest, but it is hardly universal. In Newsweek magazine (on-line, Oct. 17, 2009, newsstand date, Oct. 26, 2009), a periodical that is advertising the fact on this week’s issue, that they are the only new organization that doesn’t view vice-president Joe Biden as a fool, columnist Jacob Weisberg stated that not only is Fox cable "garbage", this is standard fare among the left-wing elite, but it is "un-American."

Weisberg even "accuses" the Fox news-stories on this matter, of denying " the accusation with a straight face while proceeding to confirm it with its coverage." The columnist criticizes Fox for "citing no one" to "confirm the truth" of the White House attack, or to admit "that it could make sense for Obama to challenge the network’s power." This, while Weisberg himself fails to cite any critic of his own views, nor yet to challenge the notion that the executive branch ought to be using its power to challenge Fox news. He then goes on, with a straight face apparently (from the attached image at the Newsweek web site, it’s hard to image Harold Weisberg ever actually smiling, though), that "What's most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its century-old tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups." Just to restate, this comes from a publication that has been — in common with all news services but Fox cable-news — a cheerleader for Barack Obama and "progressive" causes in general.

Weisberg, in fact, doesn’t seem to be representative of colleagues in the left-wing mainstream media. On the other hand, the remaining news services have demonstrated a quietude about this attempt to demonize Fox news, where they would be screaming "Dictator!" and "Un-American", if it were a Republican president who was attempting to demonize one single outlet that did its best to demonize his government (not mentioning any names here). Susan Estrich, a long-time Democratic party operative, is also a Fox cable-news analyst. In an interview transmitted Oct. 21, 2009, Estrich said that what " don't get is why the mainstream media, which, frankly, would go absolutely nuts if George Bush had singled out MSNBC and said, you know, Nobody follow them, they're not really a news organization, and we're going to boycott — I mean, all my friends in the 1st Amendment crowd would be up in arms, saying, you know, the government shouldn't be dictating to news organizations. And I've been a little stunned, frankly, by the silence from the press."

The Importance of Karl Marx

2009-07-31T08:51:00.000-07:00

Karl Marx, the Lutheran whose family had converted from Judaism, was key to the “secularization” and deracinating of the age-old contempt and suspicion held toward money and merchantry.

Marx did not succeed completely in his mission: before him, and into the present day, class division has taken on distinctly ethnic overtones, simply because the merchants are usually from minority nationalities. Throughout Europe, it was the Ashkenazim, from which Marx himself descended, who were disproportionately involved in trade. In the Near East, it was the Christian Armenians that dominated money and markets, while descendants of Arab-Muslim conquerors were predominate in trade in the Far East. The “overseas” Chinese, based out of Pacific Asia, have been disproportionately numerous in business in that region, and latterly in the western coasts of Canada and the United States, which also hosts a business class where Muslims from the Middle East, Jews from Europe and Armenians from Africa and the Near East (as well as those from the Subcontinent) are again found in trade more frequently than the strict proportions of these minorities in the general population.

The apparent universality of “stranger” or minority populations involved disproportionately in trade, stems from several causes. For one, minorities may be forbidden outright from standard occupations, such as farming or handicrafts, as well as the law, medicine and so on. Trade has always been considered, by the high and low, as so disreputable that only despised minorities were left to it. However, simple discrimination in this fashion is not sufficient for a minority population to survive in business. There are many minorities who remain penniless, but for their possession of religious beliefs of a lesser or greater ascetic import, which is shared in common with all or most of the minority-trading populations cited above. It is true of the Ashkenazi Jews, as of the Armenian Christians; the Muslims of the Far-East and modern-day Europe and North America, as well as the Hindu and Islamic Subcontinentals who live in the Occident today. The Overseas Chinese are adherents of Confucianism, which alike with Buddhism, expresses the ascetic aspect of Asiatic religiosity. This is of course paradoxical. Why is trade, supposedly based on greed and chicanery, so associated with the ascetic faiths of inconvenience? It is precisely the self-discipline and energy of the ethical and ascetic, which makes them so right for business.

As a rule, too, minority-trader populations are “homeless”, possessing no proper place of origin, being neither from here or from there. This is literally the case with the Jews of Europe, as well as the Armenians, who each lost their homelands thousands or hundreds of years ago. The Muslim descendants of the Arab conquerors were, by the time of the collapse of the power of the Caliphate, so integrated into the societies of those whom they had conquered, that the Arab language itself was lost or had evolved completely into a new tongue, and the Muslims themselves had become Asiatic in appearance. This holds true, to a lesser extent, with the Overseas Chinese, especially in the Pacific Asia home-base. However, for racial, ethnic or religious reasons, the minority populations are not considered a part of the host society. They instead sought a base of power outside what was acceptable to most — in trade. And, for this reason, virtually all the trader-minority populations mentioned, have been subjected to varying degrees of assault and despisal, especially when times were bad.

Karl Marx, the convert who was so darkly-complected that his nickname was “The Moor”, and who moreover came from a milieu familiar with money and markets (his father was a lawyer, but his uncle founded in Holland what became Phillips Electronics, and of course his partner was Freddy Engels, the Manchester factory-owner), sought to channel the natural hostility of the masses toward the merchant class, entirely away from ethnic and racial conceptions. His dialectical philosophy taught that all human beings were defined essentially not by race, religion, ethnicity or sex, but by class: either bourgeois or proletarian. These groups formed, as it were, separate and antagonistic “nations” that were (or would become) global in reach.

It is obvious that this is not the case, that members of bourgeoisie and of the proletariat define themselves foremost by nationality, ethnicity, gender, and so on, before they see themselves as middle- or working-class (this is dismissed by Marxists as an aspect of “false consciousness”). However, it is true more generally that participation in trade and (especially) industry in modern times has been characterized less so by ethnic or religious minority-status. In virtually all industrialized countries, the nationality, ethnicity and religion of the bourgeoisie was broadly the same as the proletariat. But this general statement disguises the fact that, very often, religious or national minorities were more predominant in capitalist trade given their share of the total population.

During the industrial revolution in Britain, for example, Dissenters from the Church of England were far over-represented among the nascent capitalist class, compared to their overall population. Dissenters were Protestants, but belonged to other than the official denomination, which meant their full participation in civic life was curtailed or forbidden (no holding of elective office, for example). In Scotland, industrialization was carried out mainly by those of Anglo-Saxon heritage, as compared to the proletarian descendants of the Celtic Highlanders (including the minority Scots Catholic population). Calvinist Anglo-Scots have in turn, been predominant in modern business throughout England itself, and in Ulster, Canada and the United States. In Germany, Max Weber famously observed that “Protestants eat well, while Catholics sleep well,” indicating the predominance of the former in business and the professions, the latter among the working-classes. In Germany, too, secular or convert Jews were again over-represented in trade and merchantry, notoriously to fall victim to Nazism because of it.

The reality of the prevalence, or outright dominance, of ethnic and religious minorities in the ranks of the merchantry, is confounding to the respective views of human nature held by Marxists, on the one hand, and by monetarists, on the other. Far from being, by definition, rational benefit-maximisers, as argued by classical liberals, people only take to trade as a primary way of life, under extraordinary social circumstances. It is the ascetic value placed on “saving for another day”, which paradoxically makes capital accumulation possible. But this is upsetting, in turn, to the Marxian assumption that, in the first place, capital accumulation is not dependent upon ethno-cultural particularities, and that it is impossible for the dispossessed to get ahead by saving and risk-taking.

All the religious and ethnic minorities that were, ultimately, noted for their shrewdness in business, were originally in wretched straits. It was precisely their denial of full participation in the feudal-tributary economy, which forced the minorities into trade, and thus, subsequent wealth. Under capitalism, it is possible to get ahead; but success and sagacity in business requires a particular socio-cultural conditioning, and is not otherwise intuitive. In reality, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century occurred against a particular social and cultural background. Ascetic religion, the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, thrived especially in nordic Europe (essentially, Britain, the Dutch- and German-speaking lands, as well as Scandinavia) during the early-modern centuries. Protestantism was successfully transplanted from there to northern America, as well as other outports throughout the world (southern Africa as well as Australia and New Zealand). True asceticism was the province of but a minority of the pious, but the values of hard work and sobriety in conduct and manners, were broadly held throughout English-speaking and other nordic-European societies.

Anglophone society as well, had a tradition of free labour, extant since long before the advent of factory-employment. This together allowed Britain to pioneer a factory-based economy, a process repeated on a far more grandiose scale in the United States. In Britain and the United States, industrialization was hardly trouble-free, but not marked by the sort of social and class division that characterized the factory revolutions in France and elsewhere in Europe. Although even in the English-speaking world, trade and commerce was dominated by those of ascetic denominations and ethnicities, the general embrace of Protestantism allowed those of lower station to make something of themselves, as long as they were ready to adopt monastic habits themselves.

The American Empire: A Tabulation

2009-07-22T06:58:00.000-07:00

When, so often, is heard the phrase “American empire,” I have to wonder, where is this empire at?

If, as everyone agrees apparently, America is the global hegemon, its reach is not as global as most seem to suppose. For example, there are more than six-billion people alive today. America is not a political nor economic hegemon over at least a billion of this number, people who live in China. Nor does it hold sovereignty over another billion or so individuals, those who live in India. Already, there is one-third of humanity that is not dominated by America. Still, two-thirds of billions of people is a big empire. Let’s see how it breaks down.

Nearly one-hundred and fifty million people live in Russia, and another one-hundred million or so in the former territory of the Soviet Union. One-quarter billion is not the same number as a billion, but scarcely any of this number live under American domination. Whatever the waning weakness of Russia as a world player, no one seriously suggests that its government is controlled by America.

What about Western Europe, whose societies and economies are, in general, similar to that of the U.S.? Moreover, Western European countries are more or less traditionally aligned with America. Surely this area of the world must show symptoms of being the “periphery” of the American empire. Most of Western Europe has been, for many decades, collected in the European economic union. The population of this entity now exceeds 600 million. The EEC, and then the EU, was formed with the express purpose of establishing a “common market”, one in which foreign (ie. American) goods would be prevented much access. If American hegemony exists in the economic sphere, it is difficult to see where. What about the political?

Since the Maastricht treaty, “Europe” has steadily gained greater political sovereignty over their member states, including foreign policy. Has the EU bureaucracy cow-towed to its imperator? Hardly. In terms of foreign relations, Europe has taken its own course, quite distinct from the U.S. For example, when Palestinian uber-terrorist Yasser Arafat died in Paris, his body was conducted to the airport by a military honour guard, and by the French president, Jacques Chirac. The Europeans, and in particular the French, have also been great chums with other regimes (such as Saddam’s Iraq) which were considered “rogue” by the United States.

In the 1950s and early ‘60s, it became commonplace among French intellectuals to refer to the United States as the successor to the Nazis in the occupation of France. But after 1966, when Charles De Gaulle had American bases in his country removed (this is the French president, we were told by Zbigniew Brzezinski and John Kerry, who had “no need” to examine satellite photographs of the Russian missiles in Cuba, during the “missile crisis” of 1962, as presented by the American ambassador, such was the high level of trust that then existed between France and the U.S.), the idea that France was under occupation by America, is surely ludicrous.

So we have, with China, India, Russia and its former empire, and then Western Europe also, practically half of humanity which is definitively not a part of any American empire. What about the region that was once known as Eastern Europe? Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia and the Czech republic), Albania, Roumania and Bulgaria are not very populous individually, amounting to no more than sixty million people today. There were slightly less people there in 1989, when these countries gained liberation from another empire, the Soviets.

The western Slavic peoples (along with East Germans, another 17 or so million people) would know enough about empires to stay away from the U.S., surely? But what have Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czechs and Slovaks, done in the last few years? Joined NATO, the military arm, according to some, of the American empire. Might this affiliation be coerced by the American imperialists, say through economic pressure? But each of these countries has also applied to, or joined up with, the European Union, the express purpose of which is to act as an instrument to counter American dominance. No, the Eastern Europeans joined the Western security alliance of their own volition, as their best bet against dominance by a future resurgent Russia (ie. the Russia of today).

How much of the remaining half of humanity is part of the U.S. empire? There is, of course, East Asia, home to a massive chunk of the remainder, nearly two-thirds. China is not, as we saw, subordinate to the U.S. economically or politically. Indeed, there are complaints throughout the American government and society that China’s low-cost, low-wage factories are putting Americans out of work. These same complaints were made about Japan, and then the other “Asian Tigers”, such as South Korea, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, before currency meltdowns and economic slowdown lessened the “threat” of these powers. It would make sense if Japan, a conquered country after World War II, was an unambiguous colony of the U.S. In reality, civil government was restored to the Japanese in 1951, after which the country had “Western-style” democracy for the first time.

The American military has maintained a presence in Japan since the end of the war. The Japanese government and public would rather not have them there, it is true. But no one suggests that this force is the “real power” behind the Japanese government, the domestic sovereignty of which is without question. Critics of U.S.-style imperialism are always quick to remind their audience that the American empire is a “post-modern” or “extraterritorial” entity, without precedent in history. But the American empire, goes the argument, is alike with previous empires through the enforcement of a centre-periphery “dependency”, wherein the non-hegemon countries remain undeveloped because of their dependence on the metropole. It is hard to see how this relationship applies either to Japan or to the European Union. It must be re-emphasized that Japan and most of western Europe do not have militaries capable of defending themselves from attack (the exception, of course, is France). They are completely defenceless against the U.S. military.

However, this has not meant, as in past empires, that the U.S. has presided over a campaign of economic plunder against its former enemies. Instead, Japan came to use its relationship with the U.S. to flood the latter with cheap knock-offs (as they were perceived at first) of American consumer goods, eventually coming to dominate markets in home electronics and automobiles. It was the same for the other Asian tigers, who leveraged their geopolitical positions vis-a-vis the United States in the global struggle with Russia and China, to gain privileged access to the richest market in the world. Again, South Korea, Thailand and Singapore managed to gain access to the U.S. market, usually without having to open their markets to American goods in turn, a relationship that hardly fits the description of colonialism.

American fought two conflicts in the post-World War II era in eastern Asia: Korea and Vietnam. In the former war, the Americans, the great superpower, were able to fight the armies of North Korea and China to a draw at the 38th parallel. In Vietnam, the Americans were never decisively defeated, as were the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and in fact won most of the battles in which they engaged the North Vietnamese. Even so, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regular army were continually able to rally from defeat, and return in force to challenge American troops. Arms shipments from Russia helped the cause, but unlike the confused and indifferent American soldiers, the Vietnamese were passionately determined to secure their country from foreign invaders.

Due to waning support for the war on the home front (and contrary to wisdom, support collapsed mostly among those in middle age, while younger people registered higher approval of involvement), the Americans slowly withdrew, even though by 1969-70, they had largely cleared South Vietnam of enemy soldiers. So it was that democratic pressure, in the form of letters to Congress members and Senators (Republican and Democrat alike), from concerned mothers, fathers, mayors, business leaders, veterans, retired service officers, blue-blood matrons, civil rights leaders, and other pillars of the community, forced the American empire out of a fight it was actually winning.

Vietnam has always been considered a “little” country, but today, it has 85 million people. Together with North Korea, with over 20 million people, we have another one-hundred million people who are not part of the American empire. Whatever sovereignty is exercised elsewhere in east Asia, is more than offset by the presence of almighty China in the same region. Already, the possible number of people that could be considered subjects of America, has dwindled to a substantial minority of humanity, perhaps just over a billion people (not including the population of the United States’ mainland).

Appropriately, we turn to Pacific Asia and the Antipodes. The Philippines and Indonesia are the largest countries in this vast region, with (respectively) eighty-three and 220 million people. How do these 300 million fare in their relations with the U.S.? As it happens, the Philippines was an actual colony of the United States for several decades, beginning in 1898, when the island was ceded to the U.S. by a defeated Spain. From 1899 to 1902, the American military fought a protracted guerilla insurgency similar to, but more much lethal than, what is going on in Iraq today. In the end, the rebellion was brutally crushed, killing an estimated 100,000 Filipinos. Thereafter, for several decades, the U.S. administered the Philippines as a colonial possession, until it was conquered in turn by the Japanese (MacArthur was departing the archipelago when he famously declared, “I shall return”). Return he did, but after World War II, the U.S. did not seek to reimpose colonial status on the Philippines. Independence was granted, in return (as with Japan) for the siting of two U.S. military installations.

The country went through a succession of corrupt governments for two decades, until a putative reformer, Ferdinand Marcos, was elected President in 1965. By 1972, Marcos had declared martial law, and eventually became as corrupt as his predecessors. In 1986, he was overthrown by popular demonstrations after attempting to steal an election. His successor, Cory Aquino, was the widow of an opposition leader Marcos had murdered upon his return to the Philippines in 1983. It is true that Marcos was a steadfast ally of the U.S. in its fight against international Communism (he had suspended civil freedoms to fight a Marxist insurgency). Embarrassingly, the Reagan government maintained its support of Marcos until he was literally barricaded in the Presidential Palace in Manila, from the “people power” outside. Does this mean, however, that Marcos, his predecessors and successors, were merely pawns of the American empire? Many Western critics of the U.S. would say yes, that the Philippines is an example of a country left in underdevelopment, due to its “dependency” on the U.S. However, the Philippines was granted the same favourable terms of trade with America, as were Japan and South Korea, upon the latter countries’ independence. If the Philippines has not, unlike the other two, been able to take advantage of its prospects, it has not to do with U.S. foreign or economic policy. It is a creole society, much like the colonies established by Spain and Portugal in South America and the Caribbean. An elite, consisting of natives hispanicized by conversion and intermarriage, has ruled over a mass of people, themselves divided by dialect and ethnicity, to little improvement of society as a whole. However much this situation has been exploited by the United States, America was not its cause, nor would the absence of America alleviate Filipinos’ condition.

Unlike the U.S. with the Philippines, the Dutch had no intention of granting Indonesia independence, and did so only after a bloody war, 1945-49. For the next near-twenty years, the country was ruled by Sukarno (Indonesians go by one name only), a warlord who had collaborated with the Japanese during World War II. After the war, he fought for independence from the Dutch. The story of Sukarno’s rule is complicated, but by the late 1950s, he had abolished the factious Parliament that been part of the constitution since independence. Thereafter, he became increasingly dictatorial at home, while instituting an aggressive foreign posture, threatening Malaysia, aiding guerilla movements for independence in the remaining parts of the archipelago still controlled by Europeans (Portugese Timor and the Dutch-controlled West New Guinea) and cuddling up with Moscow and Beijing.

In 1965, events transpired, the meaning (if not the significance) of which is still in dispute. That year, leaders of the Communist movement announced that, in collaboration with elements of the military, they were seizing power. Civil conflict ensued between the putschists and military factions still loyal to Sukarno. The coup failed, and as many as half a million people (mostly Communists and innocent civilians) were killed in the war and subsequent crackdown (events portrayed in the 1982 film, The Year of Living Dangerously, with Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson). But within a couple of years, Sukarno himself was eased from power, and a new warlord, Suharto, took over, remaining as strongman until overthrown by civil rebellion in 1997 (as in the Philippines a decade earlier, after a stolen election).

It has been widely alleged that the initial Communist coup in ‘65 was a scam, a way for the reactionary faction of the military to take power. However, there seems no question that the putschists were serious in their intent to take power that year. Further, it is also suggested that American spies were deeply involved in the whole affair. Suharto, unlike Sukarno, was geopolitically pro-Western. Less successfully than Japan and South Korea, but more so than the Philippines, Suharto was able to leverage his security alliance with the U.S. to economic advantage, at least until the “meltdown” of the Asian currencies in ‘97 (another cause of Suharto’s downfall). During Suharto’s rule, Indonesia was relatively stable and prosperous for the first time.

Its reputation (and by association, that of the U.S.) was blackened by its quarter-century occupation of East Timor, the Portugese colony that was finally granted independence in 1975. Within days, the Indonesian army invaded and annexed the territory, enforcing a brutal rule that killed several hundred-thousand out of a few million Timorese. The world had pretty much forgotten about East Timor until Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August, 1990. As the U.S. and its allies prepared to expel Hussein’s army, anti-war activists raised East Timor as a baton
against the war effort. The championing the Timorese, at least at first, had little to do with genuine sympathy for the occupied, as it did with arguing that invasion of sovereign territory was not necessarily a casus belli. After all, Indonesia, America’s ally, invaded a sovereign territory, and was not challenged militarily. America’s interest in Kuwait was only due to its oil — which is the only reason why anyone gives a damn about the Middle East at all.

The situation was different, of course. East Timor, unlike Kuwait, was not a sovereign country with a recognized government, as yet. As a colony, it was always claimed by Indonesia, and the conquest was an extension of that claim. There is no doubt about the injustice of the Timorese occupation. To the degree that the U.S. did not object, nor pressure, the Indonesians, to grant independence to East Timor, it shares complicity with what activists would label “cultural genocide.” The bloody denouement of this sorry chapter came in 1999, when the Timorese voted for independence (after international, and U.S., pressure was finally applied). Thereafter, military and militia loyal to Indonesia went on a rampage, killing thousands more Timorese.

But as it happens, East Timor is an awkward example in the case for the American empire. It became independent, finally, at the urging of the U.S. And the “genocide” undertaken by the Indonesia military and government was as much “religious” as “cultural” in orientation. East Timor was distinct from most of the rest of the Indonesia, for being Catholic. Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world and attempted, during the occupation, to Islamicize the territory, by closing churches, arresting clergy and importing Muslims native to other parts of Indonesia. Many of the latter joined in the slaughter after the independence referendum in ‘99.

Do the anti-occupation activists now believe that the U.S. either instituted, or agreed with, the wiping out of a Christian country by a Muslim nation? John Pilger, an Australian left-wing muckraker based in London, for many years championed the cause of the Timorese. In 1994, according to Pilger’s web site, he and another journalists managed to “sneak” into East Timor, posing as travel agents. They apparently documented much of the brutality and oppression of the occupation (I’ve never seen this film), and Pilger also famously alleged that Henry Kissinger, as U.S. secretary of foreign affairs under Gerald Ford, gave approval or “permission” to the Indonesians to invade East Timor on a visit to the country shortly before the occupation began.

After 9/11, Pilger obligingly became a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy and the war against terrorists, and an advocate of the “root causes” school. In October, 2002, a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, was attacked by bombers, who killed more than two hundred people, mostly foreign tourists, most of these Pilger’s fellow countrywomen and men. Immediately, Pilger leapt to blame the war against terrorism for the deed: “Last week's atrocity in Bali, like the September 11 attacks on America, did not happen in isolation. They were products, like everything, of the past. According to George W. Bush, Tony Blair and now Australia's prime minister, John Howard, we have no right to understand them.”

But here’s Pilger’s problem. For in a recording made of Osama Bin Laden in November, 2002, the terrorist warlord stated: “Reciprocal treatment is part of justice. .... What do your governments want from their alliance with America in attacking us in Afghanistan? I mention in particular Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia. We warned Australia before not to join in [the war] in Afghanistan, and [against] its despicable effort to separate East Timor. It ignored the warning until it woke up to the sounds of explosions in Bali. Its government falsely claimed that they [the Australians] were not targeted.” On the Lateline programme, on the Australian Broadcasting Network, November 23, 2002, presenter Tony Jones questioned Pilger on the contradiction:

TONY JONES: Osama bin Laden, if one believes that is him on that tape, was suggesting that one of the reasons Australians were targeted in Bali was because this government, the Howard Government, had a responsibility for freeing East Timor, which plenty of people in Indonesia didn't like.

JOHN PILGER: That ‑‑ certainly as far as the Indonesian military are concerned ‑‑ that may well be true. What is not being discussed, as it should be, although I think in the 'Sydney Morning Herald' Hamish McDonald has discussed it, is the role of the Indonesian military in manipulating the extremist groups over the years.

Here we have the Australian Government now saying it's going to train against Kopassus, the special forces of East Timor, probably some of the world's greatest terrorists.

I mean, what is being achieved from all this?

[...]

TONY JONES: ... But let me just stick with Bali for a moment and the logic of what you were saying.

If Osama bin Laden is right ‑‑ if Australians were attacked because of their role in freeing East Timor ‑‑ is that something you would speak out against because whatever you think about the Howard Government, it had a direct role in allowing East Timor to become an independent country.

JOHN PILGER: Wait on, Australian troops played an admirable role in going to East Timor, there's no doubt about.

But before that ‑‑ from 1975 until 1999 ‑‑ there was a great silence in this country over East Timor when I went to film this secretly in the early '90s ‑‑ no politician, Howard especially, and certainly those among the ruling Labor Government then, gave a damn about the East Timorese.

So it's very much a very delayed embrace of East Timorese freedom.

TONY JONES: But the point is, apparently, because of that belated embrace, we've been targeted.

That's what Osama bin Laden is saying.

JOHN PILGER: We can't believe that. We can't believe all these things we're being told. The police are producing all these perfect identikit criminals that are meant to have caused the Bali atrocity. What we have to remain is sceptical. But, above all, sceptical about what our own leaders are telling us.

What we don't hear, which I find extraordinary having been to Iraq especially, is the consequences of an attack ‑‑ the human consequences. We had a report by a group of Australian doctors this week that I don't think had any publicity. They estimated something like 48,000 people would be killed in a sustained campaign in an assault on Iraq. Australia is going to be part of that. Imagine the resentment, the bitterness in that part of the world. Imagine the kind of anger.

You know, the greatest victims of terrorism in the world are Muslim peoples. Numerically, that's pretty well true.

Pilger, of course, cannot explain the contradiction, and so moves on to the manipulation and propaganda. His only excuse is, “We can’t believe that, can’t believe it’s true.” No, he cannot, if he’s to believe that East Timor is a product of American imperialism, which he surely does. Westerners were attacked for their role in East Timorese independence, when East Timor was the cause celebre of the nineties’ multicultural left. It is cognitive dissonance that has now fallen down the memory role.

The American empire does not extent its sovereignty over the 250 million Indonesians, not when, as Pilger insists, that country’s government “manipulates” extremist groups. Does the empire control far less populous Pacific neighbours, Australia and New Zealand? Certainly, left-wing spokesmen in these countries will insist their governments are under the thumb of the Americans, referring to alleged CIA manipulation of trade unions during ‘70s-era labour strife, when Australia had a socialist government. However, both Antipodean nations are independent democracies, electing left-wing governments that made populist sport of non-cooperation with the U.S. during the Cold War.

Having treated India, it is appropriate to turn to the colonial status of other countries of the Subcontinent. Pakistan, with more than a hundred and fifty million of humanity, is an ally of the U.S. in the war on terrorism. Does this make Pakistan a colony of the U.S.? In the 1970s, the country was run by the secular, anti-American Bhutto senior (whose daughter, Benizar, became prime minister in the 1990s), who was in turn overthrown in a coup (and subsequently arrested and hanged). The military strongman, Zia al-Hag, was killed in a plane crash in the 1980s, and thereafter, democracy was restored, with Benizar Bhutto succeeding to power against an Islamist opponent. She was eventually run from office in the face of massive corruption charges, with the Islamists coming to power.

Pakistan then became a booster of the fundamentalist crusade, creating and equipping the Taliban before it took power in Afghanistan, where it set up training bases for al-Qaeda. Even after the Islamists were deposed in yet another coup, lead by general Musharraf, the Pakistani secret service continued to support the Taliban, just as it is accused of sheltering Osama Bin Laden in the present day. Musharraf is, as I said, allied with the U.S. in fighting terror, but this has as much to do with the geopolitical contest with India, and the military government’s efforts to gain leverage against powerful Islamic factions inside the Pakistani state. It is, in other words, the pursuit of raison d’etat, not to do the bidding of a imperial overlord (no matter how “post-modern”) that Pakistan is an ally with the U.S. in the war on terrorism.

What about the other countries in the region, like Bangladesh, Nepal or Sri Lanka? Given the regional power exerted by India and Pakistan, not to mention China, there is hardly enough room left on the Subcontinent to insert a sheet of paper, let alone an empire. Pakistan’s neighbour Afghanistan, is often considered part of Central Asia, as well as the Middle East. It was famously where the attacks of September 11, 2001, were planned and prepared, and there has been a lot of flim-flam uttered since 9/11, with regard to the U.S. and its relationship with the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is, for example, the contention that the Taliban were in receipt of hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. aid, right up until September 11; or that Bin Laden, a former guerilla in the fight against the Soviet invasion, was a “creation of the CIA.” The first claim is true, in so far as the “U.S. aid” was emergency foodstuffs to prevent starvation after the Taliban had wrecked the Afghani economy.

And according to Steve Coll, Washington Post writer and author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (published in 2005), there is no evidence whatsoever that American intelligence “created” or even subsidized Bin Laden’s militia against the Soviets (this in spite of the title of Coll’s book, which suggests the opposite). The question of how many of those the U.S. did support in Afghanistan against the Soviets, later turned their guns on American, is unresolved. However, it is a certainty that Pakistan, in opposition to the U.S., helped create the Taliban, which gave Bin Laden safe haven.

Afghanistan borders on Iran, which for the last quarter century and more, has not been part of the American empire. Its status before 1979, when its ruling dynasty was overthrown by Shia Islamists, is a controversial part of Cold War U.S. foreign policy. The king or Shah had been a steadfast ally of the U.S. prior to his overthrow. The Americans and British had in fact helped reinstate the Shah to power in 1953, deposing a leftist Prime Minister who had nationalized the oil industry.

Thereafter, the Shah became increasingly autocratic, instituting a police state, jailing and exiling opposition critics and clerics (such as the Ayatollah Khomeini), all without opposition from the U.S. or U.K. In spite of the modernization of industry and (to a certain extent) mores under the Shah, the lack of democracy in Iran was favoured by the leading nations of the “Free World”, under the principle that the Shah was “our son of a bitch”, and thus, not their’s, the Soviets. It was feared that in Iran, as elsewhere in the developing world, the electorate would vote for pro-nationalist or pro-Soviet parties, and thus being democratic was not compulsory. But does this mean that Iran, before clerical rule, was an outpost of the U.S. empire? In other words, was the brutality of the Shah, as of the junta of South Korea before the restoration of democracy there, directly commanded by the U.S., or was it merely tolerated by Americans for geopolitical purposes? When the Shah’s regime collapsed, the Ayatollah immediately made Iran an enemy of the United States.

When the Iranians seized American diplomatic personnel as hostages later in 1979, there was nothing the U.S. could do (aside from staging an ill-fated “rescue” mission, which itself had to be rescued) but negotiate with a knife at its throat. The whole drama lasted nearly a year and a half, the utter impotency of the American empire embarrassingly evident. There were 30 or 40 million Iranians in 1979, and there are seventy million today, all of whom are not colonials of the American empire. In spite of widespread internal opposition, particularly from the majority of the population not yet born when the Islamic Revolution occurred, the clerical regime in Tehran remains in power; and again, this in spite its diplomatic and geopolitical opposition to the U.S. Indeed, as the regime is now developing nuclear weapons, it has little worry about being deposed by the U.S., as occurred to Saddam Hussein.

There is no sense in reviewing the difficulties that the United States military — the very muscle of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla — has encountered in Iraq. Although the vast majority of Iraqi Arabs have long come to despise their invaders, they do not view them as oppressors. The Iraqis have never feared the Americans: from the outset, when the U.S. military had deposed their tyrants, what did the population do almost immediately? Loot almost anything of value, right under the noses of heavily-armed troops. The U.S. military was widely condemned for simply standing by and letting this mass-looting to occur. But really, what were the soldiers to do? If everyone — men, women and children — is taking what is not their’s, are the soldiers to indiscriminately shoot everyone? The war critics would have had a field day with that, just as they did when the Marines, wisely, chose not to fire on the looting crowds. Again, critics mutter about “inadequate pre-war planning”, but what is any military to do with a population that opts to virtually dessicate its own country? It was, of course, all downhill from there, as we know. It shows that while the Americans are hated, they are scarcely feared.

It is also widely believed that Saddam Hussein was an ally of the U.S., even put in power by the Americans, before he “turned” and invaded Kuwait. The truth is that Hussein was as much, or more so, a chum of the Soviets and French (who helped him build nuclear reactors) than the Americans, if not more so. The U.S. did not in fact recognize the Hussein regime until 1984, at which time the Iraqis were in the middle of their attrition-war with the U.S. archenemy, Iran. The Americans cynically viewed Hussein as an indirect means of neutralizing Iranian power, but they also double-dealt with the Tehran regime (as with the infamous Iran-Contra scandal in 1986). Of course, when the Iraqi military invaded Kuwait in August, 1990, the U.S. did not foresee it, nor could it strongarm Hussein into pulling back, short of fighting a hot war in early 1991.

It is forgotten that, in the months preceding the counterattack against Saddam Hussein’s troops from U.S. forces based in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, the Soviet Union (which did not collapse until August, 1991) was adamantly opposed to any measures, military or otherwise, aimed at getting Hussein out of Kuwait. After all, they rightly viewed Hussein as their son-of-a-bitch, a geopolitical counterweight against the influence of the Americans in the region. Saddam Hussein himself may well have gambled that the U.S. would do nothing about the Kuwaiti invasion, due to his alliance with the Soviets (and French and Chinese). Before the decline of Soviet power, the stakes might have paid off for him, and Kuwait would now be (as Hussein envisioned it) Iraq’s nineteenth province. By 1991, however, the Red Army was in no position to beat its way out of a wet paper bag, let alone take on the U.S. military, especially to aid a thug like Hussein. In any case, it shows that, far from being a U.S. ally (let alone an American colony), Hussein-era Iraq was a true rogue state, attempting to play one superpower against the other, until he took the game too far.

Famously, Osama Bin Laden cited the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi Arabian soil, as a casus belli in his holy crusade against the Americans (Bin Laden is the Saudi-born scion of a wealthy family that originally came form Yemen). Does this mean, then, the House of Saud is merely a pawn of the U.S. empire? During 1990-91, when the U.S. was taking up position in the Saudi kingdom, ostensibly to “defend” it from further Iraqi aggression, but really to mass troops to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait, it became common knowledge for the first time that Saudi Arabia was just as “fundamentalist” as the Iranian regime, if not more so. Moreover, the Saudi government was not, unlike the Iranians, elected to office. Many war opponents at the time were outraged that the U.S. was setting out to defend a regime that was not only undemocratic, but also denied women basic rights and freedoms (such as the right to drive an automobile).

Kuwait, too, was a dynastic regime that was not much more feminist than Saudi Arabia, and these facts lent credence to the “accusation” that the U.S. was going to war for oil (as though defending accessibility to a scarce resource from a megalomaniac was in any way ignoble). This argument gained traction because Bush the elder always pitched his crusade against Saddam Hussein as an effort to “liberate” Kuwait. There is quite a big difference between securing a staple-commodity for the good of all, and preserving it for the good of oil companies, but the “pacifists” were always ready to elide the distinction, and neither Bush nor anyone else had the political guts to explain it to the population. However, after the Iraqis were expelled from Kuwait, American or other oil companies were not handed the oil riches of either Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, nor were the Kuwaitis forced to endure “American-style” democracy. Meanwhile, the American military was stationed in Saudi Arabia before and after the (second) Gulf War, where soldiers were compelled not only to drink no alcohol and read no dirty magazines, but also to refrain from practising the Christian (or any other but the Muslim) faith while on “sacred” Saudi Arabian soil. This wasn’t just the case, when American soldiers and other officials left their Saudi bases; they couldn’t do it on their bases, either. In order to attend church, drink booze, or pay for sex, American service personnel were compelled to leave Saudi Arabia and board U.S. military ships stationed in the Persian Gulf. The Americans must be the most mild-manner imperialists in history.

So we find that, during the 2nd Gulf War, the United States and its allies were defending the sort of Puritanical and feudal Islamic regimes from an Arab state that was no less undemocratic, but was also (as we were reminded ad nauseam prior to the Iraqi war) avowedly “secularist” and national-socialist, an enemy of Islamic “fundamentalism” of Osama Bin Laden. For this, the Bin Laden came to view the United States as the biggest threat to Islam.

With regard to the Saudi Arabia, both war opponents and war advocates have accused the Bush government of being too friendly with the regime there — the long-time ambassador of the House of Saud to the United States was even nicknamed “Bandar Bush”, such was the latter’s coziness to the first family. Indeed, the Bush clan, and the United States government generally, has been too amiable to such a regime as the Saudis’, by virtue of the latter’s control of vast supplies of crude oil. Fifteen of the nineteen suicide-attackers of September 11, 2001, were Saudi subjects, and several of these obtained entry to the U.S. through a special student-visa programme that waived normal security and background checks for the applicants. This programme was suspended after 9/11, but ever since, the U.S. State department (ie., the foreign-affairs ministry) has been periodically trying to get it reinstated. All this should be and has been subjected to critical scrutiny; but in any case, Saudi Arabia’s actions are not consonant with it being a colony of the U.S. To the contrary, the Saudis have subsidized the kind of “fundamentalist” religious-education at schools in their own country and throughout the globe, that is most amiable to the philosophy of Osama Bin Laden.

The controversies with regard to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan, seem playful when compared to passions stirred by another Middle Eastern state, Israel. It must be said that, on the anti-imperialist left, opinion is sharply divided as to the status of the Jewish state in the American empire. Some believe that Israel is merely a pawn of the United States, a proxy state carrying out the imperialists’ mission of crushing and annihilating the “indigenous” Arabs and other non-Jews, starting with the Palestinian Arabs. Others believe differently. They argue that it is the United States that is somehow enthralled to Israel, and that “Zionists” control American foreign-policy, especially when Republicans have control of the White House and both houses of Congress (as they did up until January 2007). It is difficult to judge which is the more centrist of these two schools. One holds that Jews are committing genocide upon Arabs, at the behest of the United States, the other that Americans are committing genocide against Arabs, at the behest of “Zionists.”

It is not, in any case, my intention to examine the justice of the Israeli state as to its founding, or continuation — only to analyze the outsize place of Israel in the conceptions of American empire. If, on the one hand, the American empire is controlled by Israel, then there must be a “cabal” of Jews (sometimes joined by evangelicals) that possess a serpentine influence on the institutions of the West, in the manner described by the Elders of Zion or Joseph Goebbels. If the United States is controlling Israel, going to the other argument, then Americans are simultaneously attempting to slaughter Arabs and Muslims, whilst also “propping up” fundamentalist dynasties that are avowed enemies of Israel. This just doesn’t make sense to me, unless taking a page from the Protocols school of anti-Zionism, I could infer that Zionists control both American imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism, deploying these apparently opponent forces as needed, with the end of shielding the public from who the real powers are (certainly, some believe that “Zionists” were responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001, arguing that Islamic terrorists “just couldn’t on their own have carried out such an attack”).

If the “Israeli problem” is too complex to be disposed of in two paragraphs, I should add only that the enormous antagonism directed by Westerners toward Israel, especially on the part of the Europeans, is entirely too piqued to have been inspired only by the Israeli treatment of Arabs — who are often despised in Europe itself. Especially in the frequency with which anti-Israeli voices in Europe compare Israel to Nazi Germany, there is something of an exorcism to be found in the militantly pro-Palestinian stand of so many Europeans, of the spectre of the Holocaust and their society’s complicity with it.

Time to return to our tally. Of the more than six billion people in the world, we have seen in Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, virtually no one lives as a subject of the U.S. empire. What about the remaining continents, Africa and South America? Surely in these benighted places, the vicious boot of American imperialism has left its most thorough footprints? Africa is by far the poorest continent in the world — composite photographs of the globe taken from outer space show that, during the nighttime hours, Africa is literally the dark continent. While Europe, Asia and the Americas show massive amounts of territory blotted out by city lights, Africa is by far the dimmest (except for Antarctica), paltry illumination emanating from the coast line, with massive sections of territory with no light whatsoever. Surely, there is artificial lighting all over Africa, but it is simply not concentrated enough to appear in satellite photographs. The intensity of artificial light, as seen from hundreds of miles in space, is a sure measure of the wealth of any region — the dimmer, the poorer.

So it is with Africa, which has nearly one billion people, not one soul of whom has lived as a colonial of the United States. Except for Ethiopians, virtually all Africans were colonials not long ago — of other Western powers aside from the U.S.: Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal chiefly. These powers did, in a lesser or greater measure, rigorously exploit the natural resources of the continent, essentially thieving resources from Africans for a period of nearly two centuries, until 1975, after revolution in Portugal forced the divestiture of that country’s remaining colonies, Angola and Mozambique. Until the nineteenth century, it is true, Americans exploited Africans by participating in the slave trade. However, Britain had outlawed the trade in 1804, using its powerful navy to enforce the rule on the high seas — over the objections of Arab and African potentates whose very power rested on human bondage (and which power subsequently collapsed due to the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself by Britain in 1834). In fact, the British seizure of American slave-trade vessels after 1804 contributed to tensions between the two countries, eventually leading to the War of 1812-14. After the U.S. civil war, however, many American citizens and officials were anti-imperialist on principle, and viewed the colonization of Africa with a jaundiced eye (the U.S. nearly went to war with both Britain and France over the blockade of southern ports during the War Between the States).

Yet, even after decolonization, great powers have intruded upon the internal affairs of African countries: Chinese, Soviets, French, British, and Americans, too. Communist countries armed dictatorial regimes friendly to their cause, whilst the Western powers did the same, and both blocs during the Cold War also armed insurgents to destabilize regimes unfriendly to themselves. However, some African countries, belonging to the French-speaking part of the continent, exist in a semi-colonial relationship with the metropole even today. French African countries are internationally-recognized legal entities, but their actual sovereignty is severely eroded by their economic dependence upon what used to be referred to as the “franc fort”, wherein the countries’ legal tender was (de jure or not) the French franc (and now, the Euro). The French, for their part, see no trouble sending in their military to dispose of, or to “rescue”, the French African leaders they alternatively dislike or wish to support (as occurred in the Cote D’Ivore in 2003, just as the Iraqi war was getting started). The French, also coincidentally, had at the time concluded a deal in which the money from the Iraqi “oil for food” scheme, was to be traded in Euros instead of U.S. dollars.

Africa, of course, has become much poorer since decolonization, while the rest of the world has become immeasurably richer (except for most of Latin America). Is this because of the American empire? As we saw, much of African is under control of another imperator, the French (and European union). Outside of French Africa, the United States has scarcely exercised domination over the various warlords and strongmen that have controlled nearly every country on the continent. During the Cold War, several dictators simply switched sides, with kleptocrat Mobutu of Zaire, for example, becoming allies of the Soviet Union, ordering American military and intelligent officials out of the country. Similarly with Said Barre of Somalia. The American empire was likewise powerless to prevent its expulsion from Ethiopia after the Emperor Halle Selassie was overthrown by Marxist rebels in 1974, who made the country part of the Eastern bloc, turning its people to starvation after just a decade. Similar decrepitude was the rule in other African countries, such as Angola and Mozambique, which resorted to Maoist or Stalinist economics.

The present-day conflicts on the unlit continent, in some way result from the meddling of the Great Powers — those of the nineteenth century, who created the current borders without heed to ethnic and tribal lines, elevating certain minorities as taskmasters over the majority ethnic group, placing hated rivals within the bosom of the same state. But there is no evidence to suggest, had the Europeans carefully divided up their colonies by reference to ethnicity, that pacific relations between these entities would be the rule today. Instead of civil wars, there would be interstate wars. In any case, the problem with the school of thought that blames imperialism for all of Africa’s ills, is that it is countries that were never or scarcely colonized (such as Ethiopia), that are the worst off today. It is also true that the area once known as the “franc fort”, is relatively stable and prosperous compared to African countries not part of the French sphere of influence.

In Latin America, the United States has behaved as an overt imperialist. It has taken control of more than a handful of countries in central American and the Caribbean especially, and acted as a facilitator and all around good chum to various military dictators in South America, going back two centuries. After the conclusion of the Spanish war in 1898, the U.S. took control of the remaining Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. Cuba remained a colony of the U.S. until the 1940s, and Puerto Rico remains a dominion in the present day (Puerto Rican nationalists nearly killed president Truman). After World War II, the American military dispatched a Marxist regime in the Dominican Republic (in 1965), and in the 1990s actually installed a Marxist regime in Haiti. In 1989, the U.S. deposed the Panamanian thug Noriega. The U.S. even lent a couple of rusty ships and a few outboard motor-boats to Cuban exiles, who tried to depose Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. The result was Castro’s total consolidation of power. He could truthfully argue that the state was endanger of invasion, whilst depriving Cubans of their civil rights and freedoms for nearly five decades.

Dependency theory finds an even richer field to ply, in the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America, than is the case with Africa. However, the rhetoric surrounding denunciations of the American policy with regard to Cuba, is inconsistent in this regard. Since a couple of years following Castro’s seizure of power, the U.S. has imposed a complete embargo on goods from Cuba, and on investment in and trade with the Communist state. The U.S. has no official diplomatic relations with Cuba, and the trade embargo is blamed particularly for the hard times that Cubans face. However, isn’t trade precisely the mechanism by which Third World people are impoverished by their participation in the American empire? Shouldn’t Castro and the Cubans be thankful that they don’t have to engage with the Americans? Moreover, Cuba trades with all other countries in the world, often on favourable terms. Even still, Cubans face the same problems of shortage and scarcity as did the regimes of the Eastern bloc, who were lent billions by Western aid agencies and private institutions just to keep afloat.

Even so, the Americans were scarcely alone in their molestation of Latin American autonomy. Even after the pitching of the “Monroe doctrine” in the 1820s, forbidding colonization of Latin America by European powers (thereby leaving it as an American sphere of influence), the British used their naval power and the pound sterling, to strongarm and entice the creole elite of South America. In the 1860s, France actually tried to colonize Mexico, with emperor Napoleon III installing some in-law as king (who was murdered by native rebels in 1867, still sitting on his throne). The loss of Mexico led indirectly to the younger Napoleon’s downfall. In either case, the Monroe doctrine was revealed to be a mere message to Congress from a long-dead president (in spite of the agitations of the general public and legislators that the U.S. should “do something” about European meddling in their own backyard).

We find that there is nowhere in the world where the U.S. presence is not contested or even minimal, in spite of talk about America being the “only superpower”, or even a “hyper-power.” The status of the U.S. as the greatest of all powers, militarily (if no longer economically) dwarfing all others, hardly came about as a result of the ambitions of the American government or public. As recently as the 1930s, the U.S. military was no bigger than of Yugoslavia (ranking 132nd in the world, according to historian William Manchester). The U.S. became a superpower by default, because of the acts of what were greater powers, which fought two long world wars, and also engaged in the expensive business of global colonization. By any definition, the era of global U.S. dominance has been the apex of prosperity and freedom. During the Cold War, the society of the opposing superpower was the most repressive and spartan of any in the world, too.

Where command economics was attempted after decolonization, the result was complete immiseration and starvation. The countries that oppose the American empire, are invariably anti-democratic, or otherwise beholden to dangerous religious fascism (as in Iran). But such is the hatred for America among so many, not least among the American professorial and media class, is that they are willing to agitate, apologize and appeal on behalf of the most vicious dictators in the world: Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, even Slododan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.

Fortieth Anniversary of Moon-Shot

2009-07-20T10:36:00.000-07:00

Recently, I wrote about both the Apollo programme and the Woodstock festival.

On the actual 40th anniversary of the former, my own thoughts are pretty much summed up by this piece by the long-time cultural observer, novelist and snob Tom Wolfe.

And the children shall be led...

2009-06-26T06:52:00.000-07:00

The folks over at Principalities and Powers - namely Canadian ex-pat in New York David Innes - was curious enough to hunt down a clip of a public-service segment aired in Canada, that I found rather... odd.

Thanks David and Harold!

ps - is Harold our modern-day Eric Hoffer?

Charlie's Angels, the Unknown Comic, the Masquerade, and Nostalgia

2009-06-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

Upon hearing the news about the death of Farrah Fawcett today, I thought I'd publish an essay I composed some years ago that concerned Charlie's Angels, the TV series which launched Fawcett to worldwide fame.

Nostalgia focuses on the period twenty years before, for two reasons: because it appeals to those entering middle age, who wish to be reminded of their ebbing youth; and, because it appeals to those in their late teen and early twenties, just entering adulthood, who wish to know about the years whence they began this world, but which they are too young to remember.

Nostalgia is, by definition, a remembrance of the past on exclusively pleasant terms. This is why some aspects of “twenty years ago” are revived, and others are left out. For example, in the ‘70s, nostalgia for the nineteen-fifties took the form of rock-n-roll “revival” shows, the staging of sock hops, the television series Happy Days (the title says it all), the stage-(and later film-)musical Grease, and a return by some youth to the greaser look. However, the youth-gangsterism, the fears of atomic war and racial violence of the 1950s were nearly forgotten.

Similarly with the nostalgia of the 1960s that took place in the ‘eighties, when “the sixties” came to be synonymous with psychedelia and protest (with the ugly edges of the counterculture mostly buffed away) while the Vietnam war, the Kennedy assassinations and the civil rights struggle were mostly overlooked (although the television series The Wonder Years, which was presented as a comedy-drama in the half-hour format usually reserved for sitcoms, did indeed tackle larger “issues” in its depiction of the family and school life of a twelve-year-old boy in suburban U.S.A., 1968). The nostalgia for the ‘seventies that occurred in the 1990s was even more frivolous, focussing on music and fashion and leaving almost everything else behind.

Indeed, even very famous entertainment personalities of that era, the same people who live in obscurity in the present day, did not achieve very much of a revival of their fortunes in the 1990s. For example, there was in the late ‘70s a performer known as the Unknown Comic — for that was precisely what he was: a stand-up comic wearing a brown paper bag over his head, with holes for his two eyes and mouth. Mr. Comic’s national fame (his real name was Murray Langston) didn’t last very long, perhaps a couple of years. During that time, however, he appeared on numerous TV variety and talk programmes in the U.S., and toured the country as a warm-up performer to several musical acts. Nevertheless, there has been little appreciable demand for a return of the Unknown Comic to stage or screen in recent years. Why? It’s not that the Unknown Comic was terrifically funny. But he wasn’t awful, either. It may be instead that laughing at someone with a paper bag over his head doesn’t seem very funny any more — a tad creepy even.

This figure, the Unknown Comic, was part of a subtle trend toward masquerade as a device in popular entertainment in the 1970s. Certainly, the masquerade has been used in Occidental drama from the beginning (the actors of the classical era wore grotesquely oversized masks to play their parts). It seems, however, that masquerade in fiction and drama has always been a corollary to ultimate exposure, as when the Great Wizard of Oz is revealed to be a trembling, shy little man. During the ‘70s, the masquerade was employed in certain products as an integral and inevitable part of character, theme and narrative. If the Unknown Comic had told jokes on television and stage without his banal paper bag, it is unlikely he would have achieved the level of fame that he did. It was the performer’s assumption of anonymity through the simple device of a paper bag over his head which seemed simple, yet absurd enough to inspire laughter at the “face” of it.

The series Charlie’s Angels began airing on American television in 1976. It portrayed three young women, former police recruits “who couldn’t quite make it on the force”, as private detectives in the employ of a never-seen “Charlie”, who gave instructions for each case (courtesy the voice of veteran actor John Forsyth) to his charges through a speaker telephone. I don’t believe the identity of “Charlie” was ever exposed throughout the run of the series. To have done so would have undermined the premise of the show — which incidentally, and unconsciously or not, is voyeuristic in conception.

Here is this mysterious “Charlie”, his voice suitably middle-aged and avuncular in tone, employing three beautiful young women (played originally by Farrah Fawcett, Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson), who are never allowed to see him but who, in turn, are seen by him (“Charlie” mentions in several episodes how he’s been “watching you Angels” or refers to an incident depicted previously, to which “Charlie” was obviously a witness outside the knowledge of the “Angels”; each time, they express shock and surprise at his unknown presence among them). It was never explained why “Charlie” never showed himself, nor what his motive was for employing only young women at his private-detective agency.

The obvious answer is that “Charlie” was, in conventional parlance, a “perv”, a voyeur who became stimulated at the sight of young women going about dangerous business wearing improbably skimpy and tight clothing. And, for all the “Angels” knew, “Charlie” could have been observing them when they were at home in skimpy night clothes or engaging in coitus with men-friends. Charlie’s Angels is remarkable because it employed the masquerade device in a way that incorporated the voyeuristic role of the show’s audience. The typical viewer of Charlie’s Angels was, like “Charlie”, a voyeur, tuning in not for anything related to drama or acting (for the show was indeed a drama), but for the attractions of tight, young, female, threatened, fighting, detained and otherwise kinetic bodies.

The rock band Kiss, in its heyday during the second half of the 1970s, never appeared on stage or on TV without full make-up, concealing their features. Band members in fact utilized their real names, but their masquerade was essential to the band’s early personae. Kiss did, after seemingly fading to obscurity, re-emerge without their makeup to further recording success (though not nearly the mass-popularity they enjoyed previously) in the early 1980s. It seems unlikely that Kiss would have originally won popularity only the strength of their material, presenting only their homely faces to the world.

The band, which at the height of its success toured North America featuring a highly pyrotechnic stage-show (which included also the lead singer and bassist, Gene Simmons, spitting “blood”) were the fag-end of the “glam rock” movement, which was essentially the application of burlesque and Broadway to rock-‘n’-roll. It was initiated by young gay or bisexual men such as David Bowie in Great Britain and the New York Dolls in the U.S. in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Bowie, the Dolls and many other like performers wore make-up and played roles (Bowie’s was named Ziggy Stardust), engaged in a subtler form of masquerade. In popular music in general there was a trend toward obscurantism. The major “non-glam” rock groups of the ‘70s, such as Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin released albums with sophisticated cover art and expensive jackets, often without including images of the band members themselves.

I can’t fathom at the moment the reason for this relatively short-lived masquerade trend. I don’t think it was recognized by anyone back then, or today, and I don’t think it has existed as a theatrical device very much in twenty years. The last show to employ it was Magnum, P.I., which ran from about 1980, on for most of the rest of the decade. The lead actor in that show, Tom Selleck, lived at the Hawaiian estate of the “billionaire Robin Masters”, who was not seen, and was featured only as a voice on a telephone (that of the great Orson Welles). Unlike “Charlie”, though, “Robin Masters” spoke to Magnum at best once in a season.

I read somewhere that the television series The West Wing, about the executive staff of the White House, was originally to have a complete on-screen absence of the President. It was later decided that the Commander-in-Chief should have a supporting role. Ultimatley, “President Bartlett” (played by Martin Sheen) is such the undisputed star of the show that the West Wing’s supposed “star”, faded cinema actor Rob Lowe, left part-way through its run. I doubt if the show would have been successful at all if the producers had chosen to show Bartlett only from the back of his head or via a muffled or disembodied voice. It would have seemed hokey, an outdated device, “something from twenty years ago.”

However, on television starting twenty and twenty-five years ago, there has been distinct counter-trend of the masquerade, toward exposure of the “behind-the-scenes”, as a deliberate part of the show, the flip-side to the indefinite use of masquerade. Variety programmes were popular on commercial television during the 1950s and ‘60s. The last variety show on American television (running from 1966 to ‘77) was that which starred Carol Burnett. What is remarkable is that the Carol Burnett show is remembered today not for its material, but for the fact that Burnett and her co-stars, including Vicki Lawrence, Tim Conway and Harvey Korman, would frequently crack-up or freeze-up while delivering their lines, providing more humour for the audience than would have been the case if the performers had not “accidentally” flubbed their lines. Some skits were even written with the premise of Burnett playing a woman in fits of hysterical laughter. Another popular feature of the Burnett show was her comedic bouncing of questions from the studio audience during the intro.

Also popular on late ‘70s TV were “blooper” shows, which featured discarded takes of major movies and series, when some particularly comic flubbing or mistake serves to expose, even if momentarily, the rouse of filmmaking itself. These blooper shows have disappeared from television mostly, if not entirely, but not because of a lack of popular demand. It seems more likely that actors and actresses have included in their contracts the proviso that their giggling and forgetfulness when making movies and television shows will not be subsequently seen in public.

A different form of exposure of behind-the-scenes occurs on television chat shows. On the programme Live, broadcast weekday mornings out of New York city and starring Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa, the hosts frequently call on the show’s producer, a certain “Gellman” , to answer various questions about the guests, the new prop on the set, a current event, etc. The appearance each day of one of the show’s “behind-the-scenes” executives, Michael Gellman (no doubt, given the business he’s succeeded in, a shrew and wily man in his own right), as the doltish straight man “Gellman” to the hosts’ ribbing is not accidental or essential to the programme. When Philbin says, as he often does, that he “doesn’t understand” or “doesn’t get” something about a guest or the show’s new contest (and proceeds to quiz “Gellman” about it), he’s surely not being very candid. If Philbin were that absent intellectually, he wouldn’t be the star of the show. It is all to make the whole enterprise seem “natural” and “spontaneous”, as though the presence of broadcast technology in the studio were an incidental thing, with no regard given to the difference between on-stage/public and off-stage/private.

The Live show is a moderated, middle-of-the-road version of the deliberate violation of public/on-stage and private/off-stage on late-night talk TV, carried in the U.S. for more than twenty years by David Letterman. Letterman’s tenure on NBC, from 1982 to ‘93, saw him engage in the exposure form more thoroughly than after he made the sweetheart deal with CBS, though. Letterman then (as now) had the traditional talk show desk and chairs, but he would also, for example, request that the show’s director, “Hal”, emerge from behind his counsel in the control room and show off what he was wearing (always the same bland slacks and chino shoes) or engage in some other tomfoolery. Later on, Letterman would (like Philbin) pepper the show’s producer standing just off camera, “Morty”, concerning this or that “on the show tonight that I just don’t get.” “Morty” would answer inaudibly (for he was rarely miked), to which Letterman would crack a joke. Of course, Letterman and Robert Mortimer understood perfectly what they were doing and talking about. As with Live, the moments on Late Night where it seemed the show had broken down somewhat, where things weren’t certain, were just a pantomime in the effort to make the show seem natural and spontaneous.

To this end, Letterman would occasionally leave behind the Late Night set, pushing through heavy doors located a few feet to his left, to a white hallway, where various, usually surprised people were milling about or doing their jobs, and look for laughs by (for example) yelling through a bullhorn at fellow NBC hosts presenting a live show on the street below. On this particular occasion, he also used the megaphone to loudly berate those going about their business in the corridors, demanding that people ”stop crowding the hallways.” Another similar gag had Letterman securing the telephone numbers of office workers in buildings across the street from the NBC studios, and then calling them for their on-camera reaction to him (it was during this that Letterman came into contact with “Meg”, an attractive young book editor, whom he called and spoke to from an office window periodically for years, until he left NBC).

The long-time chat host Johnny Carson, star of the Tonight Show (which was preceded on the schedule Late Night with Letterman on NBC) would occasionally ask the show’s producer, Fred De Corva (who played a chat-show producer in the King of Comedy) a question or two. But De Corva was rarely if ever shown on-screen. Carson was a host of the “show must go on” variety, where no ignorance of on-stage and off-stage was tolerated. However, the most memorable moments on the show were those when order did break down, when two famous guests would ignore the host and begin talking with one another or become involved in some other hijinks. It is telling that Carson, given his hosting style, was visibly annoyed when this occurred (and why, in later years, very famous guests would leave immediately after their chat, begging that “I have a plane to catch”).

It may have been this peevishness that made Carson initiate, by accident, the sort of “guerilla” format later perfected by Letterman. One evening on the Tonight Show in the late ‘70s, Carson had returned to the programme after comic Don Rickles guest-hosted the night previously. Carson was bantering with his sidekick, Ed McMahon, when he moved to open his wooden cigarette box, and found a hinge or something was broken. McMahon informed Carson that Rickles had inadvertently broken it while clowning as guest host. Evidently, the box was expensive or meaningful to Carson, for when he saw the damage, he said, “What the hell happened to this?”, genuinely annoyed.

Carson then left the set with a remote camera, proceeded down a white hall to a studio where Rickles was taping a sitcom in which he starred as a naval petty officer. Carson entered the set and proceeded to rant and berate the uniformed Rickles about the broken butt case. It may have been a set-up, but Carson actually seemed pissed-off, just as Rickles and his co-stars (dressed in their naval costumes) appeared truly surprised and embarrassed about the intrusion. The next day, however, it was the talk of the town, reported in newspapers and on the news. The whole scene was ultimately replayed on the “best of” Tonight programme for that season, and probably again elsewhere.

It’s curious, though, that the first use of the “producer” persona in a television programme was not in the chat genre, but in a skit show, Bizarre, which was broadcast on Canadian television in the late 1970s. The show starred, and was introduced each week by an American actor, John Byner, who had appeared in the send-up Soap TV series in the U.S. Each episode, there was an intro and closing with Byner on a bare stage with curtains. Sometimes he would request the participation of one or more audience members. Byner would then involve them in short bits, but just when he asked them to do something particularly outrageous and “bizarre”, a tall man in a business suit would appear on camera and sombrely yet insistently announce, “John, you can’t do that on the show”, to which Byner would seem surprised and disappointed. Byner would ask why, and he’d then offer an alternative, equally bizarre prank for the audience-member to perform, to which the “producer” fellow would invariably respond, “You can’t do that, either.” At first restricted to these audience-participation segments, the “producer” (the fact that he was an actual producer of the show, Bob Einstein, has no relationship to the fact that he Einstein was playing a part when he appeared on-screen) would later on show up with his “You-can’t-do-that” line in the middle of skits, also, and his brief appearances stretched into skits in their own right, with Byner and Einstein leaving the studio to go outside on one occasion. It was evident by then that the “producer” intrusion was a comedy bit, but it was carried off at first at least half-
convincingly.

This use of exposure of the off-stage in contemporary television is paradoxical. It makes what is ostensibly “behind-the-scenes” part of the show, thus seeming to abolish the distinction between off-stage and on-stage. However, most of the interaction between “on-stage”/public and “off-stage”/private actors is itself staged, a fiction, and there are probably many elements of Live, in common with Late Night and Bizarre, that are always off-stage and private (it is rumoured, for example, that Reject and Smelly privately despise each other, but that never comes out on the air). Indeed, in some ways the staged use of the off-stage serves to obscure the less pleasant or uninteresting aspects of the show. Perhaps, then “exposure” is only the contemporary form of “masquerade.”

Personal Computers, the Internet, and the "New Economy"

2009-06-18T07:22:00.000-07:00

The history of the personal computer’s infiltration into almost every home is a quixotic one.

The Xerox corporation did, as early as 1971, develop a prototype personal computer, complete with a graphical-user interface, and a handheld device that later came to be known as the mouse. The company shelved any plan to sell it, judging the market to be too small. The first successful personal computer was marketed by a small startup, Apple computer. But the Apple II remained a boutique product, purchased only by those with an avid interest in computing.

The PC became attractive beyond this demographic, only when a relatively low-cost model was introduced by International Business Machines — the behemoth that was founded in 1888, long before the invention of the electronic computer itself. IBM originated the punched-card method of high-speed inventory in the nineteenth century, and the company (which was not renamed International Business Machines until 1924, taking its name from the Canadian subsidiary) successfully exploited the latest innovations in information technology, before and after the invention of the modern computer, to become one of the largest companies in the world (complete with its own company town).

From punched-cards, IBM moved on to the super-computers of the 1950s and ‘60s, with almost all of its business going to government or other large corporations. At the beginning of the 1980s, its executives sensed a great opportunity in shifting to the consumer marketplace. The company, with so much capital at its disposal, simply updated the old industrial method, going back long before Henry Ford, of manufacturing by assembly line on a scale great enough, to make the device affordable to the worker that manufactured it. The IBM personal computer — “The PC” as it came to be known — was judged inferior to its main competitor (the Apple, and later the “Mac” or Macintosh PC), but its relative cheapness could not be overcome in the mass market.

Moreover, the PC’s software was “open” to the degree that any startup firm could create programs for it (again unlike the Apple, which came with most common software pre-loaded). Apparently, however, IBM, a company with several hundred thousand employees, did not have the expertise on-hand to quickly create the necessary software (what came to be known as the disc-operating system) to make a personal computer functional. After they were unwisely turned down by Apple computer, IBM then turned to an obscure Washington state firm, Micro-Soft.

That company’s president, Bill Gates, was no computing genius, but had great business sense. His firm did not, however, actually have the necessary software, nor apparently, the expertise to write it. Micro-Soft discreetly purchased a different software firm’s “quick and dirty” operating system, patching it up as best they could before passing it off to IBM as their own work. The latter company was not able to purchase MS-DOS, however, instead licencing it from Micro-Soft. It was thus how Gates was able to leverage his very small firm into the biggest corporation in the world, ultimately dwarfing IBM. It was, again, old-fashioned business methods, instead of the superiority of the product on offer, which allowed Microsoft to become such a monstrosity, and Gates the world’s richest man.

Very different than the “new economy” described by some, Gates’ rise was almost a parody of the saga of the robber barons of the “gilded” age. Microsoft not only managed to become a monopoly interest in a key product, but Gates (like Carnegie and Rockefeller) ultimately turned to philanthropy in penance for his fifty-billion dollar fortune.

The Macintosh computer, the first successful graphical-user interface PC, is held in reverent esteem for it user-friendliness. The great costs of designing and manufacturing the GUI-PC nearly bankrupted Apple computer, however, such that its bohemian operatives were compelled to accept the leadership of an old business hand, someone heretofore uninvolved with the computing industry. Thereafter, its founder (Steve Jobs) was kicked out of the company. Again, however, the ultimate standard graphical-user PC was not the Mac, but the IBM model with its substandard Microsoft Windows operating system, which came out a couple of years after the Mac was first marketed in 1984. Mass-manufacturing won out over the boutique model, once again.

Given the plain facts of the development of the computer industry in the last few decades, it is hard to understand the credence given to the notion that computing will somehow overcome the difficulties associated with the “bricks and mortar” economy. The computer itself became a staple precisely through economies-of-scale and standardization-of-product, old-fashioned methods that information technology was supposedly going to supersede. For many years now, IBM has been but a minor player in the personal computer hardware market. Its place was taken by other manufacturers, such as Dell computer, which followed the IBM model by manufacturing on a mass scale (often in low-wage countries such as Mexico).

The new-economy utopians somehow convinced themselves that information-processing would, on it own, cause the lion to nestle up to the lamb, and the conflicts and stresses associated with the “industrial” age, would disappear. As to the value of software as opposed to hardware (ie. “bits and bites” as opposed to “bricks and mortar” — as though the latter were the most advanced material of industrial age), software only became valuable when the hardware on which it runs was mass-produced to be cheap enough to the common household. The biggest computer companies in the world — IBM, Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Dell — are makers of hardware, not software. The exception is, of course, the biggest company in the world, Microsoft. But, as mentioned, Microsoft became so large because it had (and maintains) a proprietary hold on the computer operating system — essentially the interface between the hardware and software of the personal computer.

Besides, as the Economist noted in the 1990s, a good chunk of Microsoft’s profits has come from the sale of hardware, such as mice and other peripherals (which operated best, naturally, under the MS-Windows system). Initially, independent software producers such as WordPerfect and Lotus were able to make millions off their “killer” applications (in word-processing and spreadsheets, respectively). But inevitably, Microsoft itself introduced copycat software programs, which eventually marginalized both WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 as the standard applications. Because Word and Excel (the MS spreadsheet program) were integrated into the Windows programming, they were easier to learn and manipulate than either WordPerfect or 1-2-3. However, after the introduction of the Windows Chicago system in 1995 (like the IBM PC fourteen years earlier, the initial sale of “Windows 95" was introduced by a massive advertising campaign which included the multimillion-dollar licencing of the Rolling Stones’ Start Me Up), direct sales of operating-system software became relatively small.

Mostly, Windows 95 and its successors came pre-loaded on virtually all PC’s that were sold, anywhere in the world. The fee paid for this privileged was incorporated into the cost of the computer itself. In fact, software became less and less valuable, the more accessible computer hardware became during the 1990s. The number of people using any particular software program, was far greater than the number who actually purchased it, directly or through the purchase of a computer, due to software “piracy.” And courtesy other innovations in computer hardware, involving the digital recording (“ripping”) of writeable compact discs, which made not only software programs easily distributable, but also made commercially-sold compact discs subject to piracy.

When the resulting digital-encoding of songs was made available through the peer-to-peer networks of the Internet, it ultimately caused the collapse of the value of the software of the music and movie industries in the general marketplace. Software producers have gone to great lengths to guard against software piracy, often causing problems with programs themselves. The failure of Microsoft’s ballyhooed Windows Millennium operating system, was largely due to problems caused by excessive security safeguards.

A publicly-accessible Internet became possible only after computing was made a household appliance via traditional methods of manufacturing and marketing. As mentioned, the Internet resulted from the needs of the U.S. defence department to build a computer network that was (relatively) safe from enemy nuclear attack. The Internet is, at its base, a triumph of hardware, not software, with its revolutionary method of simultaneously fragmenting, replicating, and then reassembling data between any two nodes on a network.

Again, without the subsidy provided by the government and universities, this hardware would not have been developed at all. Moreover, it took twenty-five years following its invention, before the Internet was made available, by commercial means, to the general public. At first, commercial network service providers, such as CompuServe and America On-Line, resisted the adoption of Internet technology and protocols. Even Microsoft had, at first, planned to construct its own network while setting up its online service.

As for the tiny, mostly local Internet service providers that sprang up in major centres in North
America and Europe around 1994 (when the development of the World Wide Web made going online a graphic experience), were remarkable for not being very profitable at all. Eventually, these startups went belly-up, or merged into ever-bigger regional and national companies. Eventually, long-established telecoms and cable-TV firms swallowed up most of the independent Internet service providers. As for the hardware side, the market for Internet equipment was for a long period held by one company, Cisco Systems, which continues to hold the lion’s share even now. This dominance of a single entity, whether Cisco, Microsoft and Intel, of each niche in the computer industry, is of course more similar to nineteenth-century monopoly capitalism than the vision of the twenty-first, as offered by the new-economy prophets.

There is, in fact, good reason why virtual-monopoly concerns would come to predominate the computer industry, on the hardware and software ends. As the Economist also noted at the beginning of the tech boom, widespread networked computing depends upon the adoption of an operating standard. Thus, either all players had to agree to the hardware and software standards in the beginning (which, as we know, they did not), or a single commercial provider would come to dominate a market so completely, as to shut out all other players (which is what in fact occurred).

During the nineteenth century, the cutthroat practices of Gould, Rockefeller, Edison and other robber barons, made available to the common lot thousands of goods and services. Would the oil, railway, electrical, telephone and other industries have been better served by a situation of perfect or ruinous competition? This is what in fact prevailed in the early years of most machine-technological industries from the nineteenth century on. Engineered technology, on the other hand, seems to promote oligopoly, and even monopoly. This was even more true of computer-engineering than the “industrial era” technologies of railway and motorcar. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, as advances in computer-engineering led to always-fresh opportunities for commercial exploitation, hundreds of thousands of startup firms have come and gone, with a relative handful, such as Micro-Soft, becoming behemoths. Monopolists such as Bill Gates and Andy Grove made computing available to the masses, for better or worse.