No More Guttenberg

No more Guttenberg is probably premature as he's likely to be back before long.

After two weeks' kerfuffle about his copy 'n pasting his doctrorate, KT zu Guttenberg wasn't left a lot of options, although Chancellor Merkel seemed happy for him to stay.

But when Professors at your old university start calling you a Betrüger (fraud, impostor), when political enemies in your own party are saying how ashamed they are, and the country's tabloids are writing about nothing else, staying on as a minister soon becomes untenable.

If he lies low for a bit and shows a bit of remorse (so ill-suited to his brand before, but necessary now), he'll be well placed to take over in the CSU in Bayern. From there, a bid for the Chancellorship itself is far from unfeasible.

His head-turning popularity among German voters will likely make him think along such lines.

Too Young To Burn

Too Young To Burn by Sonny and the Sunsets

White Fright

Christopher Hitchens, writing on Slate, says white America is waking up to the fact it may soon be a minority, but contrasts the pious Glenn Beck crowd to its more sinister counterparts in Europe.

http://www.slate.com/id/2265515/pagenum/all/#p2

12 Step Sustainability Plan

Preetum Shenoy, writing on Sustainability.com, describes people living in western consumer societies as addicts who have yet to admit they have a problem:

http://www.sustainability.com/blog/a-twelve-step-program-for-unsustainable-consumption

Geert Wilders

The trial of Geert Wilders in Holland is curious, an attack on freedom of speech in a country where freedom of speech was pioneered.

The most striking aspect of the case is that it is explicitly not about truth. The Dutch ministry has written:

“It is irrelevant whether Wilder’s witnesses might prove Wilders’ observations to be correct, what’s relevant is that his observations are illegal...”

The illegality rests on whether his statements offend Muslims or incite violence against Muslims.

I've pasted the two laws Wilders is alleged to have broken below:

Article 137c Dutch Penal Code

1. He who publicly, verbally or in writing or image, deliberately expresses himself in an way insulting of a group of people because of their race, their religion or belief, or their hetero- or homosexual nature or their physical, mental, or intellectual disabilities, will be punished with a prison sentence of at the most one year or a fine of third category.

2. If the offence is committed by a person who makes it his profession or habit, or by two or more people in association, a prison sentence of at the most two years or a fine of fourth category will be imposed.

Article 137d Dutch Penal Code

1. He who publicly, verbally or in writing or in an image, incites hatred against or discrimination of people or violent behaviour against person or property of people because of their race, their religion or belief, their gender or hetero- or homosexual nature or their physical, mental, or intellectual disabilities, will be punished with a prison sentence of at the most one year or a fine of third category.

2. If the offence is committed by a person who makes it his profession or habit, or by two or more people in association, a prison sentence of at the most two years or a fine of fourth category will be imposed.

Utopia: Rules with Wiggle-Room

The utopia most people want is a rules-based life, with wiggle room, writes Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal.

Henninger contrasts the primal world of sports, governed by clearly-defined rules, with real life, in which no one knows the rules anymore.

The problem being that in real life we lack a final arbiter, so that wiggle-room has the tendency to expand, exponentially, each time a rule is challenged.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204518504574416774102132370.html

Muslim Creationism

Just to show Creationism isn't the exclusive preserve of Christian fundamentalists, here's an article (from this month's New Humanist) exploring Muslim Creationism.

http://newhumanist.org.uk/2131

NATO Spy For Russia Unmasked

Link to my article on CNSNews.com today:

Dusseldorf, Germany (CNSNews.com) – A senior Estonian government official is under arrest and being investigated for allegedly passing NATO and European Union secrets to Russia.

A spokesman for Estonia’s Defense Ministry confirmed to CNSNews.com on Wednesday that the man had been “caught for having revealed classified information” and said Estonia had given a “firm commitment to cooperate” with a NATO investigation.

Herman Simm, 61, who was responsible for handling classified and top secret material in the Baltic state’s capital, Tallinn, reportedly had access to “nearly all” documents circulated within NATO and the E.U., the German magazine Spiegel reported.

Simm headed government discussions in bilateral talks on protecting secret data flow.

He was also central to negotiations aimed at protecting the E.U. and NATO’s handling of sensitive information and was in charge of granting security clearances.

Intelligence that may have been compromised includes information relating to the controversial U.S. missile shield plans, a cyber protection program, the response to Russia’s actions in Georgia, and all NATO operations, from Kosovo to Afghanistan.

Simm was allegedly approached to become a Russian “mole” or “sleeper” at the end of the 1980s, Estonian politician Jaanus Rahumaegi, who leads the oversight committee for the government security agency, told Spiegel. At that time Estonia was still part of the Soviet Union.

Later, when the issue of Estonia’s NATO membership came onto the agenda, Simm in the mid-1990s “was officially recruited by the Russian government,” Rahumaegi said.

Estonia joined both NATO and the E.U. in 2004.

As European and NATO investigations proceed, the case is proving a major international embarrassment. The security breach is feared to be the worst since CIA counter-intelligence expert Aldrich Ames was exposed as a Russian spy in the early 1990s.

As of Tuesday, neither NATO nor the E.U. has commented on the case. Neither has a defense lawyer acting on behalf of Simm.

Estonian Ministry of Defense spokesman Martin Jasko said Wednesday that “no country is honoured by the fact that its citizen has been caught for having revealed classified information.”

Speaking on behalf of the government, he said its “firm commitment to co-operate in investigating Simm’s treason proves to NATO that it can be considered a responsible and trustworthy member state. Accordingly, we believe that Estonia’s reputation as a NATO partner is even stronger.”

Simm is said to have used a primitive converted radio transmitter to set up secret meetings with his contact man, known as “The Spaniard” because he posed as a Spanish businessman.

In a throwback to Cold War working practices, Simm operated together with his wife, Heete. A former lawyer in the national police headquarters, she has also been detained, charged with being an accessory to treason.

The Simms were originally detained on Sept. 21, but the case has been kept low-key. They will likely be arraigned early next year.

Herman Simm was a senior figure in the Estonian government. In 1994 he worked as Estonia’s chief of police, and later, he became a department head in the Defense Ministry.

He was in charge of secret coordination between NATO and the E.U.

When Estonia joined the E.U. and NATO, Simm’s value to Russia dramatically increased, as he was on the circulation list for highly sensitive NATO and European material.

An official quoted by Spiegel described Simm as a “big fish” who “gave the Russians practically everything NATO and the E.U. passed between them.”

Simm apparently made a fortune selling military secrets to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service SVR, the successor to the KGB.

He first drew suspicion to himself when he bought a portfolio of expensive property, including an opulent villa outside Tallinn and a farmhouse on the Baltic Sea.

His contact man then became careless in trying to recruit a second Estonian spy, who promptly reported it to Estonian intelligence. Following the trail of “The Spaniard” led investigators to Simm and his access to sensitive material within NATO.

Russian media reports on the case say it highlights the lack of security of Estonia’s handling of intelligence and sensitive information.

Estonia, described by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer as “NATO’s most IT-savvy nation,” is a country of just 1.3 million people. Much government and commercial business is conducted online. People vote and pay taxes on the Internet, and government meetings involve virtually no paperwork.

When Estonia infuriated Russia by removing a Soviet war memorial in 2007, the country faced a vicious wave of Web-based attacks. Estonia has been lobbying hard to put cyber-defense on NATO’s agenda and set up a Cyber Defense Center in Tallinn, which is meant to help the alliance as a whole – a project that may now be compromised.

The ongoing NATO/E.U. investigation is being conducted by NATO’s Office for Security, headed by Michael Evanoff, an American.

German Government Likely To Bail Out GM-Subsidiary Opel

Link to my article on CNS News today:

Dusseldorf, Germany (CNSNews.com) – As the global financial crisis lashes the auto industry, Germany’s federal and state governments look set to bail out Opel, a subsidiary of General Motors Corp., with a reported two billion euro ($2.6 billion) rescue package.

Opel’s German management, which requested the aid, is struggling with a cash-flow crisis.

German managers point to failings at GM’s insolvency-threatened U.S. head office in Detroit. They claim they are back-owed billions of dollars in investment. Germany’s GM-Opel management is also considering breaking away from General Motors Corp. should it apply for insolvency. Opel employs more than 25,000 people in the German states of Hessen, Thuringen, North-Rhine Westphalia and Rhineland-Pfalz.

Chancellor Angela Merkel called for an emergency meeting in her office on Monday afternoon to discuss options with GM’s European president, Carl-Peter Forster, GM-Opel chairman Hans Demant, and union boss Klaus Franz. Also attending were Finance Minister Peer Steinbruck and Minister for Economic Affairs Michael Glos.

Proposals on the table include a federal bond or guarantee of around $1 billion. This would be supplemented by another $1 billion guarantee from the four affected German states. The funds are reportedly needed to allow the cash-strapped company to continue manufacturing and to pay its creditors.

Read on here.

Germany To Obama: No More Troops For Afghanistan

Link to my article which appears on CNS News today:

Dusseldorf, Germany (CNSNews.com) – Germany has been effusively supportive of Barack Obama – opinion polls showed he had the backing of 85 percent of the population – but early signs of strain are showing with Chancellor Angela Merkel. She has warned the president-elect that she will turn down any request for more German troops in Afghanistan.

Merkel’s coalition partners in the socialist Social Democratic Party (SPD) are also sounding warning bells. In the build-up to national elections next September, however, the government is downplaying any potential for differences with Obama.

Read the rest of the article here.

Europe Pressures Obama Ahead of G20 Summit

Link to my article which appears on CNS News today:

Dusseldorf, Germany (CNSNews.com) – As European leaders prepare to attend the G20 meeting in Washington later this week, they are stepping up pressure on President-elect Obama to support their plans on both international finance and climate change. The meeting is the first of a series of summits proposed by President Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the president of the European Union’s executive Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, to address the global financial crisis.

The E.U. is planning sweeping reforms for the international financial system, involving a total overhaul of the 60-year old International Monetary Fund (IMF). The proposals include stricter regulation of hedge funds and cross-border financial institutions, a clampdown on tax havens, and a global “early warning” system. European governments have already pledged roughly two trillion euros ($2.5 trillion) in cash injections, bank deposit guarantees, interbank loan coverage and partial or full nationalizations in an attempt to minimize consumers’ concerns about the crisis.

Alongside these wide ranging proposals, officials say the E.U. remains committed to aggressive investment in measures to combat climate change, and – encouraged by Obama’s election – will be aiming to secure increased U.S. support. Saturday’s meeting aims to emulate the Bretton Woods conference in the latter stages of World War II, which established the IMF and the World Bank Group with the objective of preventing a repeat of the 1930s worldwide economic meltdown.

Expected participants include leaders of the Group of Eight leading industrialized countries – the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia – together with those of emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa, as well as Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Australia.

European Leaders Cheer Obama Victory

Link to my article which appeared on CNS News on November 5th:

Dusseldorf, Germany (CNSNews.com) – The election of a new American president always prompts diplomatic congratulations from European leaders, but Barack Obama’s victory prompted effusive reactions on Wednesday.

His victory was an outcome few here doubted and most wished for.

Many of the messages were little more than bland bromides – the Europeans expressing hope that Obama will restore the sense of common purpose many believe was damaged during the Bush presidency.

The president of the European Union’s executive Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, spoke of “a time for renewed commitment between Europe and the United States of America,” adding that this would be “for the benefit of our societies, for the benefit of the world.”

Pointing to the global financial crisis, Barroso called for “a new deal for a new world.”

A similar message came from French President Nicolas Sarkozy: “With the world in turmoil and doubt, the American people, faithful to the values that have always defined America’s identity, have expressed with force their faith in progress and the future.”

Sarkozy, who also holds the rotating European Union presidency, said the election had “raised enormous hope in France, in Europe and beyond.” And to Obama, he said, “By choosing you, the American people have chosen change, openness and optimism.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she looked forward to Europe and the U.S. working together “closely and in a spirit of mutual trust ... to confront new dangers and risks and ... seize the opportunities presented by our global world.”

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said that in addition to confronting “the financial crisis and worsening economic situation” the next U.S. administration would also need to address “the struggle against terrorism, climate change, human rights and free world trade.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Obama had run “an inspirational campaign, energizing politics with his progressive values and his vision for the future.” He said the relationship between the U.S. and Britain was “vital to our prosperity and security.”

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said he looked forward to a renewed partnership in “the cause of freedom, of peace, of a secure and unified, just world order.”

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi voiced the hope that Obama as president would “be able to meet the expectations and hopes directed at him.”

The Vatican also hoped that Obama would respect “essential human and spiritual values,” Lombardi said.

Although the Holy See did not weigh in during the election campaign, a number of Catholic bishops in the U.S. did raise concerns about Obama’s liberal views on abortion, saying the issue should outweigh others for Catholic voters.

Murdoch Mocked By Wolff's Toadying

Extraordinary example of how servile flattery often does more to make its subject look bad in this fawning Vanity Fair article about Rupert Murdoch by Michael Wolff.

Manhattan Declaration: "Global Warming Not A Global Crisis"

The Manhattan Declaration, issued by scientists sceptical about manmade global warming, warns that:

"attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change. Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing, human suffering."

Link to Manhattan Declaration.

Update (14 May 2008): Excellent summary of the current state of play by Mike McNally.

Oral and Literate

Caleb Crain writes in the New Yorker on the decline of reading.

Reviewing a new book by Maryanne Wolf (Proust and the Squid), he speculates that soon, after a few brief millennia of being literate, we shall become a society of "secondary orality" - in which the bulk of our information will come in oral/visual form via TV and the internet, as opposed to newspapers and books.

This reversion to the oral and visual will mean a simpler public discourse. Cliché and stereotype will be more valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis will be discouraged. Literate habits of subtlety and refinement will be sidelined, as such skills will prove largely unnecessary. Reading will become "an arcane hobby".

Less brainpower will be used because "the efficient reading brain" which we will lose, "quite literally has more time to think" (Wolf). People will be more apt to accept propaganda or "the accepted view". This is because literacy enables abstract thought and analysis, while the oral brain embeds thought in simplified stories. The effort to memorise such stories compromises the mind's objectivity and disables its ability to deal with new details.

The other possibility (to which Crain alludes) is that we are on a pendulum which has seen the triumph of the visual and oral media in the shape of TV and cinema over the past century, but will self-correct in due course. The benefits of literacy, according to this view, are too powerful to be surrendered to the passing enjoyment of a purely visual and oral world.

Twilight of the Books: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker
New blog by writers F.O. Fyford, Freddie Omm and Fred De Baer

The Ills of Capitalism

There's been a flurry of anti-capitalist rhetoric in Germany of late.

The socialist SPD party in the governing coalition has been burnishing its lacklustre profile - seeking to distance itself from its centrist CDU partner on the one hand, and the ex-communist PDS party on the other.

This may seem a strange abandonment of the political centre. But in Germany the centre is very much to the left of where it might be found in the US or the UK. And the populist success of the ex-communists doesn't leave SPD leader Kurt Beck a lot of room to manoeuvre. And so he's been dusting off trusty old arguments about the iniquity of private capital, the wickedness of greedy corporate leaders, the locust-like threats of global investment, and all the rest of it. A strong central state managing everything is Beck's answer to these ills.

Stefan Theis, Newsweek's economics editor, gives an analysis of how such attitudes are actively fostered by Germany's (and France's) educational system. Capitalism and entrepreneurs are routinely blamed for the world's woes, says Theis, in the economics courses offered by their secondary schools and universities. State control is posited as necessary to curb the damage wrought by business. In this way, says Theis, France and Germany's elites are given an unbalanced view of business and the state.

Support comes from a reliable source. In the Guardian, Madeleine Bunting reviews Oliver James' The Selfish Capitalist, a study of the ramifications of what has been called Affluenza. James notes that the increased economic wealth brought about by capitalism hasn't brought increased happiness. In fact, it has apparently increased the incidence of mental illness, or at least the incidence of treatment for such ills. The inevitable conclusion, drawn by both James and Bunting, is that capitalism is therefore to blame.

Curious how politicians and intelligentsia of the left, having seen that socialism isn't much good at making citizens rich, now line up to flay capitalism for the problems material prosperity brings. The more so given that socialism's promise was always based on the pre-eminence of material goods.

Link to Bunting's review of Oliver James' The Selfish Capitalist:
The big question | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books

Link to Stefan Theis' article:
Foreign Policy: Europe’s Philosophy of Failure

Black Thursday - The Curse of Von Esens

The leaders of the EU countries have signed something called the Lisbon Treaty. It's an unreadable document, rejigged from the draft constitution so humiliatingly rejected by French and Dutch voters two years ago. Containing the same key elements as the rejected constitution, it creates the EU as a sovereign state, and claims for the EU Commission (the nominated body which rules the EU) a scary range of powers - including the ability to claim any new powers it wishes.

This time round Dutch and French voters will not be asked to vote. Nor are referenda planned anywhere else aside from Ireland. Another humiliation would be too painful for Europe's self-appointed leaders. So apart from in Ireland, the constitution will be ratified by national parliaments. It will then come into force on January 1st 2009. That will set the seal on a quiet, almost invisible revolution in the way European citizens are ruled - replacing the more-or-less democratic system of "elective national oligarchy" with one of "unelected supranational oligarchy."

What's happened isn't remotely recognisable as representative democracy. The fact that the EU's leaders seem likely to get away with it, for now, shows how disconnected from its citizens European democracy - or the political system that masquerades under its name - has become.

The Curse of Von Esens, which has lain dormant for some time, is therefore called down on the wretched document and its creators.

The saddest thing is that the new anti-democratic system is programmed to self-destruct. Hopefully this falling-apart will happen soon and bloodlessly. Given current apathy, however, the problems are likely to lie dormant for a while before coming to a head.

Words of Wisdom (6): Nigel Lawson

"The more one examines the current global warming orthodoxy, the more it resembles a Da Vinci code of environmentalism. It is a great story and a phenomenal bestseller. It contains a grain of truth and a mountain of nonsense. And that nonsense could be very damaging indeed."

Nigel Lawson (Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK under during Margaret Thatcher's premiership) addressing the New Zealand Business Round Table, November 21st 2007.

Words of Wisdom (5): Richard North

"People need to wake up to the fact that government – any government – is their enemy.

"It should be tolerated only because the alternative of not having one is worse. Furthermore, the one we have should be kept tightly restrained, lest it slip its leash and take over our lives."

Richard North of EU Referendum.EU Referendum: The authors of our own misfortunes

Words of Wisdom (V) Vaclav Havel on Climate Change

"What is at risk is not the climate but freedom…

"I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."

Vaclav Havel

Bearded Red Flails Helmut Kohl

Wolfgang Thierse is the ex-DDR Communist functionary who is now Vice President of Germany's Bundestag. His trademark is his bushy red beard, hallmark of the revolutionary firebrand, even if, as his government colleague Glos once observed, Ein roter Bart macht noch keinen Barbarossa (A red beard alone doesn't make you Barbarossa).

In his Vice President of the Bundestag role he's meant to be impartial, rather as the Speaker of the House of Commons, in the UK, is meant to be impartial. But being VP of the BT isn't as important as being Speaker.

Thierse once said he wouldn't allow the demands of the job reduce him to a "political eunuch." He has now demonstrated this in a most repulsive way.

His socialist colleague, the scourge of capitalist locusts Franz Müntefering, yesterday left the German government to look after his ailing wife. Responding to this, Thierse remarked, "Leaving your wife sitting in the dark in Ludwigshafen, as Helmut Kohl did, is not ideal." The dig was aimed at the ex-Chancellor and his wife of 41 years, Hannelore. She suffered an allergy to light and committed suicide in 2001.

It is perhaps the final installment of a long-running animosity between the two men. Back in 2002, Kohl was quoted as saying of Thierse, Das ist der schlimmste Präsident seit Hermann Göring (He's the worst president since Hermann Goering - Thierse was parliamentary president at the time).

Now everyone is calling for Thierse to resign. But the thick skin and indifference to human suffering which doubtlessly stood him in such good stead during his successful DDR career will probably prompt him to cling on to power as long as he can.

Neanderthal Feminists

Maybe it's down to the long bloodlines, but the blog's always had a soft spot for the Neanderthals.

An article in the Boston Globe gives a glimpse into why our closest cousins may have died out.

It suggests that the equality-minded Neanderthal habit of allowing women to hunt alongside men may have led to lots of deaths among child-bearers - and thus caused the demise of the Neanderthals in about 30,000 BC.

Sexist Homo sapiens, whose women specialised in domestic gathering and home-making skills, was thus left in sole command of the world.

Stone Age feminism? - The Boston Globe

Müntefering Resigns From German Government

Franz Müntefering, the socialist Employment minister and Vice Chancellor in Angela Merkel's coalition, has resigned to look after his wife who has cancer.

Müntefering has long been a bugbear of this blog's, mainly because of his posturing in Chancellor Schroeder's terrible government. Fulminating against the locusts of international capitalism (as was that government's wont), "Münte" blamed Jewish businessmen for Germany's economic woes. He might more usefully have looked at his own government's woeful 9 year record. Working with Chancellor Merkel has calmed him down as he has mediated between Merkel's centre-left CDU and his own socialist SPD parties. In comparison with the latter "Münte" almost resembles a man of reason, rather than the demagogue of limited brain he is.

Recently he was humiliated by his party's leader, a brutish, bearded mediocrity called Kurt Beck, in an arcane dispute about unemployment payments. Beck needed to improve his own profile within the party. He did so with a display of hard-left socialist rhetoric at Müntefering's expense. Now "Münte's" stepping down will give him a measure of revenge.

Müntefering's departure will destabilise the coalition. This could be good news for Angela Merkel, who leads in the polls, mainly because of her personal popularity. An election called soon would mean the end of this hopeless government, and a probable return to power for Merkel's CDU, supported by the centre-right FDP party.

For all the praise being heaped on "Münte" as he departs, this would be his only worthwhile legacy.

The End Of Freedom of Expression in Holland: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In a deeply shaming decision, the Dutch Parliament yesterday voted 139-11 to discontinue protection for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch anti-Islamist ex-politician, when she is out of the country.

Ali, who co-produced the anti-Islamist film Submission with director Theo van Gogh (he was murdered for making it), has been repeatedly threatened by murderous Islamist bigots simply for expressing her views.

We used to be told that freedom of expression and freedom of movement were basic rights for each Western citizen. Those "rights", it's clear, have now been terminated in Holland. The Dutch government is no longer prepared to underwrite them. R.I.P. - The Curse of Von Esens is on the 139 MP's who voted for this betrayal.

The End Of Democracy In Europe

Perry Anderson, of UCLA, in a rather long piece about Europe, describes how the EU has drained democracy from European politics.

Democracy, he writes, has been replaced not with the politics of diplomacy, but a kind of unpolitical consensus:

The deadly conformism of EU summits, smugly celebrated by theorists of ‘consociational democracy’, as if this were anything other than a cartel of self-protective elites, closes the coffin of even real diplomacy, covering it with wreaths of bureaucratic piety. Nothing is left to move the popular will, as democratic participation and political imagination are each snuffed out.

Widespread and understandable indifference among Europeans has been the result. Voters can see their judgment and votes are irrelevant - and, worse, seen by the EU as distracting - to the shaping of policy.

In short, the EU is not merely passively undemocratic, it is actively anti-democratic.

Even avowed Europhiles have difficulty disguising their disgust at the way the EU moves to circumvent the expressed wishes of European voters. This has been especially obvious in the case of the European Constitution - a document resoundingly rejected by French and Dutch voters the other year, but now revivified, essentially unaltered, and up for ratification next year.

This obtuse self-satisfaction on the part of the EU's leaders is potentially dangerous, as any divorce between rulers and ruled has always been.

Anderson goes on to discuss how the public anti-Americanism of some European politicians masks collusion in torture of terrorist suspects and an indifference to the sufferings of European (German) citizens by such politicians as the unspeakable exhibitionist Joschka Fischer and Germany's current Foreign Minister, Walter Steinmeier. (Steinmeier actually refused a US offer to free an innocent German citizen wrongly imprisoned, the victim of mistaken identity.)

The politicians are often rewarded by public approval of their moral posturing and gushings. Their dangerous hidden moves are largely ignored.

It is another example of one of this blog's favourite themes - the unbridgable gulf between modern political speech in Europe and the reality of how Europe is ruled today. It's almost enough to make one want to do something about it. But the truly dangerous thing about the whole constitutional drift in Europe is that it is fatally boring to most people. It means power can be detached from the demos without sparking off anything much in the way of protest, beyond the efforts of the admirable EU Referendum bloggers, Christopher Booker and their ilk.

Link to Perry Anderson's article in the London Review of Books:
LRB | Perry Anderson: Depicting Europe

RIP: Gottfried von Bismarck

Gottfried von Bismarck was found dead in his flat in Draycott Place last Monday afternoon. He was 44. A coroner is looking into the cause which is likely to involve drugs. Those of a sensationalist bent will prefer to blame the family curse. We knew Bismarck, slightly, at Oxford, and even challenged him to a duel for "looking like a howling cad". The duel was slated to be fought at dawn on Christ Church Meadow, on bicycles, with broomsticks taking the place of lances. Fortunately, the duel didn't happen as mutual drunkenness intervened, we missed each other in the dark. This was probably just as well, for Bismarck's high-jinks had a habit of turning fatal.

Although an intelligent and sometimes convivial man Bismarck was best known for his association with two tragedies. The first was the death of the charming Olivia Channon (daughter of then minister Paul Channon) in his rooms in Christ Church in Oxford in 1986.

She died after taking an overdose of heroin, combined with a lot of alcohol, while celebrating the end of her Finals examinations. In Olivia Channon's case there was much ludicrous talk of a "Guinness curse" as she was related to the brewing family.

Although Bismarck wasn't directly to blame for her death, there was much scandal because of the drugs. Bismarck himself said, perhaps somewhat self-pityingly, that he was still being blamed, years later, for staining his family's name. He felt he didn't fit into Oxford having attended what he called "an aristocratic Borstal" in Swizerland and having worked on the New York Stock Exchange. Even so, he was a member of such exclusive and self-satisfied Oxford drinking clubs as the Bullingdon and the archly camp Piers Gaveston Society.

The second death happened last year when a man fell to his death from Bismarck's balcony during a party invariably described as a drug-fuelled gay orgy. Again Bismarck was not suspected of anything beyond being the party's host.

Bismarck combined pride in his ancestry (descendant of the Iron Chancellor) with contempt for conventions. This led him to a consciously "aristocratic" lifestyle of excessive self-indulgence and épater la bourgeoisie. He said, if he'd chosen to go for a job in competition with a Schmidt, a Muller and a Meyer, he'd get it jst for the name ( Gottfried Alexander Leopold Graf von Bismarck-Schonhausen). We question whether that is true, inverted snobbery being what it is. Anyway, he had the brightness, and the Prussian steel, to have succeeded in a more conventional way, whatever his surname, but he had little interest in such a path.

Update, 10th October 2007 - The coroner has found that Bismarck's death was the result of "reckless" cocaine use. Bismarck, we learn, had been injecting cocaine every hour during the day and night before he died. Reckless is about right. R.I.P.

More Günter Grass, Alas

Günter Grass writing in the New Yorker to justify his Nazi past, puts part of the blame on his father for having audible sex with young Günter's mother:

The hatred of a mother’s boy for his father, the subliminal battleground that determined the course of Greek tragedies and has been so eloquently updated by Dr. Freud and his disciples, was thus, if not the primary cause, then at least one of the factors in my push to leave home, Grass writes with his customary restraint.

Later, he recalls how he rejoiced at the removal of an heroic pacifist, with whom he served, to the concentration camps, on grounds that the presence of the pacifist made life more difficult for him.

This early pattern - blaming the blameless for his inner disgust at himself - became the trademark feature of the wretched Grass' subsequent career, as he lost no opportunity to castigate capitalism, Chritianity and democracy. The fact that space continues to be given to Grass to justify his deplorable convictions - at ludicrous length- is disgusting.

How I Spent the War, by Günter Grass: The New Yorker

Hero von Esens: Former Waffen-SS Man Has Book To Sell

King Edward of Estonia: A Missed Opportunity

The most important news today is revealed in the Daily Telegraph where it is tucked away in a feature on historian Simon Sebag Montefiore.

It appears that when he was in Grozny just before the Russian invasion, royalists asked him to offer Prince Edward the Estonian throne.

"It was treated as a jokey news story," says Sebag Montefiore ("a cross between Woody Allen and Biggles"), "but I think it was a missed opportunity."l

RIP: No More Immendorff

News trickles through to Esens of the timely death of Professor Jörg Immendorff, left-wing polemicist, Professor and sometime painter, scourge of the bourgeoisie and so forth. He died yesterday, a few weeks before his 62nd birthday.

This can only be seen as the action of a merciful God. Immendorff had been suffering an incurable disease for some years now, the effects of which were distressing in the extreme.

The Professor, always a party animal, persisted in indulging in coke 'n tarts orgies - most unsuitable for a man of his age and distinction, and incompatible with the socialist principles he clung to all his life. No longer able to paint, he entrusted his assistants with the labour of executing his visions. It was no kind of life for a socialist firebrand. The good news is that his pretty young widow will enjoy a state-sponsored pension until the end of her days.
Here's the blog's entry for his 60th birthday.

Dutch PM Wants Less EU

Prime Minister Balkenende of Holland (which last year decisively rejected the EU's proposed constitution) wants to limit the role and expansion of the EU saying the supranational body has moved too fast for a lot of voters.

In advocating a stronger role for national governments (allowing them to veto EU Commission proposals) aiming to curb the "growth by stealth" of the EU's unelected bodies, Balkenende is suggesting some commonsensical measures.

These may inject some democratic principles back into an EU whose more enthusiastic proponents are now dangerously isolated and insulated from the real world. Then again, they may not, if the weird, nakedly anti-democratic pronouncements of the Luxembourg PM are anything to go by.

EUobserver.com

Why Modern Novels Are Boring and Worthy

Julian Gough, writing in this month's Prospect, argues that the modern literary novel is boring and worthy partly because it's been professionalised, partly because these days the tragic is valued more than the comic. He says modern novelists should look to the "new" media and to TV cartoons like the Simpsons for their inspiration.

Link to Gough's article:
Essays: 'Divine comedy' by Julian Gough | Prospect Magazine May 2007 issue 134

Words of Wisdom (4): Jenny McCartney

Jenny McCartney on the apotheosis of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness as, respectively, First Minister and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland:

"... Although I am certainly grateful that Mr Mc Guinness is no longer an active murderer and Mr Paisley no longer an active sectarian bigot, I cannot pretend that my heart soars to see them as joint leaders of the new Northern Ireland. They have abandoned their intransigence at the precise moment at which its shedding will deliver them the greatest political rewards."

(Jenny McCartney writing in today's Sunday Telegraph)

NATO vs Taliban in Afghanistan - One-Sided War

Mark Steyn, writing in the Western Standard, revisits the difference between NATO countries willing to do "peacekeeping duties" and those who are willing to fight.

The latter group, he notes, is a lot smaller than the first, and in Afghanistan is composed of the English-speaking countries plus Holland.

Fighting against the Taliban is being done by soldiers from US, UK, Oz, Canada and the Netherlands. (In noting this, Steyn remarks that Holland "isn't officially an English-speaking country but speaks better English than most of the ones that are.") The photocopiers up north, he mocks, are manned by two dozen other NATO countries.

Even so, the fighting soldiers are hampered by bizarrely over-sensitive rules of engagement - aimed at minimising civilian casualties - which, claims Steyn, allow them to target only specifically-named Taliban fighters. This results in a one-sided war which is near-impossible for the NATO soldiers to win.

Link to article: Western Standard

Globalisation Hurts USA, Says Ex-IBM Man

The Nation discusses Ralph Gomory's take on globalisation. "What countries want and what companies want are different" is the ex-IBM staffer's starting point.

US Companies who move jobs and production offshore are benefitting themselves and the host countries, but not the USA. The conventional globalisers' idea of "win-win" is naive, he reckons. There will most certainly be "losers".

Gomory proposes two courses: cap the US trade deficit and use the tax code to incentivise multinationals to keep added-value jobs and production within the USA.

Gomory isn't aiming at wholescale protectionism, but he's persuasive enough to make that a possible outcome of the debate he wants to start.
Link to Nation's article: The Establishment Rethinks Globalization

Ijtihad vs Jihad

Johann Hari, writing in Dissent, argues that the focal point of current Islamic conflict is not one between jihad and western values, but between jihad and moderate Islam.

Hari points to the spread of Islamic liberalism and Islamic feminism amongst immigrants in Europe. He sees this as an opportunity to help reintroduce ijtihad (the use of reason to reinterpret the Koran which was abandoned in the thirteenth century) in preference to jihad. This could lead to an Islamic Enlightenment.

Link to Hari's article:Islam in the West :: Dissent Winter 2007 Issue

Words of Wisdom (3): Spark on Woolf

Muriel Spark on Virginia Woolf: "A spoilt brat. All right, she committed suicide, but she didn't have to take the dog with her."

Words of Wisdom (2): Albert Einstein

"The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation.…His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. "

Albert Einstein
The Religiousness of Science

Words of Wisdom (1): John Prescott

"If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that everyone wants to go there."

John Prescott, British Deputy Prime Minister.

Dalrymple OnThe Delusions Of Neuropsychiatric Triumphalism

Theodore Dalrymple has been to an inspiring neuropsychiatry convention where he learned about the latest dramatic advances in the fields of neuroimaging, neurochemistry, neurogenetics and so forth.

But he was bothered by the triumphalism he detected among some speakers. They implied that neuropsychiatry might soon be able to give a scientific explanation for all human actions and motivations.

Scientific self-knowledge, rejoins the ineffable ex-prison doctor, is neither possible, desirable - nor, if achieved, sufferable.

Link to Dalrymple's article: Do the Impossible: Know Thyself - New English Review

Do the Living Outnumber the Dead?

No, we don't. The claim you sometimes hear - that the number of people living today exceeds the number of people who ever lived - is a myth, according to the linked article in Scientific American.

Apparently some 100 billion people have lived since mankind first emerged around 50,000 BC. Today's global population of 6.5 billion is thus about 6.5% of people who ever lived.
Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead: Scientific American

Profitable Gossip

A PR report (by social studies group SIRC) finds that mobile phones serve a key therapeutic role in our fragmented society, enabling us to gossip with each other. Gossip is, apparently, an endorphin-building "grooming" activity essential to our mental and physical health. Good to have that spelled out.

The report was sponsored by a company which will be especially delighted with the findings - BT Cellnet, the UK's leading supplier of mobile phone solutions. It is BT Cellnet themselves who make most profit out of mobile-phone gossip.
Mobile Gossip

Murder in Putin's Russia

Anna Politkovskaya, "Russia's dead Cassandra" was murdered in Moscow last October, four weeks before another dissident, Alexander Litvinenko, was murdered in London.

"We are nobody," she'd said, "while he whom chance has enabled to clamber to the top of the pile is today Tsar and God."

Michael Specter, in the New Yorker, shows how Russia's pockets of stability and prosperity have come at a price few in the West would be willing to pay.
The New Yorker: PRINTABLES

Merkin On Tom Stoppard

Delightfully named Daphne Merkin tries and fails to psychoanalyse the elusive Tom Stoppard in a wordy, worthy NYT interview. It seems Merkin is famous primarily for boasting about her delight in spanking. Perhaps this is what makes Stoppard a bit wary of her.

Alexis de Tocqueville and Despotism

The Economist reviews Hugh Brogan's new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville.

Tocqueville's view of the importance of the citizen in government is topical, it chimes in with much well-meant rhetoric today.

He saw that "good citizens matter more to free societies than good institutions." He also saw that democracy can breed despotism as easily as other forms of government, an insight confirmed during his life by the election of the "populist demagogue" Louis Napoleon as French Emperor.

A scion of the ancien régime, Tocqueville's best-known work is his paean of praise, published in 1835, to Democracy in America.

Marie Antoinette And Powerlessness

Camille Paglia, writing in The Chronicle Review, remarks that Marie Antoinette's reputation is recovering somewhat from the "let them eat cake" travesty which defined her for so long, nothwithstanding Edmund Burke's spirited contemporaneous defence of her.

Ms Paglia herself concludes, with fitting, if infuriatingly vague, grandiloquence:

"The return of Marie Antoinette suggests that there are political forces at work in the world that Western humanism does not fully understand and that it may not be able to control."

Could be. Although such unknowable "political forces" have always been with us, and always will be. It could also be that Marie Antoinette's story is at once irresistibly romantic and symbolic - yet continuously controversial - a rare combination guaranteed to keep her in the limelight.

Neo-Nazis Do Quite Well In German Elections

The NPD, Germany's leading neo-Nazi party, got just over 7% of yesterday's vote in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and in Berlin. This makes the party stronger than the Greens and the Left Party.

The NPD is often described as "anti-democratic" but this is a misnomer. The NPD is democratic if (and it's a big if) one identifies the German demos as being exlusively (racially) German. It is also democratic in that in an effective populist way it is articulating important issues - if politically incorrect ones - issues left largely untouched by "mainstream" parties and media. The specific policies advocated by the NPD on its website are as follows:

- Repatriation of all foreigners from German soil (one presumes this includes all Jewish citizens, although this is left unspecified, perhaps out of sqeamishness);

- Withdrawal from NATO, the EU and the euro;

- The creation of an "Interventionsfähigen National- und Sozialstaates" (interventionist national- and social-state), priorising the State over the market economy;

- "Resistance" to the US' "Frankenstein-concept" of nation building and the "Imperium Americanum";

- Removal of all foreign troops from Germany.

It is the familiar mixture of nationalism and socialism which has always characterised the Nazis.

In some ways, however, especially in its anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism, it is quite similar to the bien-pensant bromides embraced by the mainstream left and centre of German politics. Indeed, the NPD sees itself as the "Third Way" between capitalism and communism, quaintly reminiscent of Tony Blair and of Gerhard Schroeder.

There is also a strong "environmental" aspect, which echoes both historical Nazi, and current mainstream preoccupations. One feels sure that these NPD chaps and the tree-hugging Al Gore would have much in common beyond their abhorrence of George W. Bush.

Beyond this resonance with the Zeitgeist, one secret of the NPD's success is its acitivists´ targetting of young voters in relatively disadvantaged, unemployment-blighted areas, especially in the east, and its exploitation of widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream politics. Germany is having a harder time coming to terms with globalisation than, say, the UK, Switzerland and Holland, and political debate is inhibited by a set of outdated, politically-correct assumptions.

The only sure way mainstream parties can spike the appeal of parties like the NPD is to reconnect with voters and work out effective policies to deal with unemployment. Unfortunately, the current coalition gopvernment is hamstrung by its inherent contradictions, and current polls show that its support is weakening.

Whilst this doesn't mean that Germany as a whole is about to embrace the NPD's endearingly dotty policies, it does make it unlikely the NPD will just fade away - as the media and political mainstream appears to hope. It isn't enough - nor even accurate - simply to denounce the NPD as "anti-democratic". That makes a mockery of their electoral success. The NPD may in some ways be a pathetic throwback, but it articulates important themes, in a taboo populist rhetoric. Its notions also to a large extent overlap with those of the German mainstream, as with their opposition to the war in Iraq, George W Bush, and their environmental scaremongering.

It is the vocal populism of the NPD - not just the impractical, wobbly, wrongheaded policy platform - which frightens off the mainstream parties; it inhibits them from grappling with the issues, from taking the NPD to pieces by argument, rather than falling back on their practised, ineffectual "anti-democratic" reflex-cries.

The success of the NPD is a disgrace to Germany - not because of what the NPD represents, but because its success is bred by indifference, on the part of the German mainstream, to what it represents.

Link to the NPD site (German only)

"Rivers of Blood" versus the "Noble Lie"

Roger Scruton, writing in the New Criterion on Enoch Powell's (in)famous "Rivers of Blood speech, lays into liberalism and its "noble lie", by which, he argues, the dangers of large-scale immigration were masked. Powell's extravagant quotation from Virgil, he believes, made it easy for liberals to dismiss Powell's stance as "racist" and so avoid the need to debate his arguments. But the arguments, Scruton says, were far from being racist.

"Nor is it racist" (he writes) "to argue that indigenous people must take precedence over newcomers, who have to earn their right of residence and cannot be allowed to appropriate the savings of their hosts. But it is easier for me to write about these matters in an American intellectual journal than in an English newspaper, and if I tried to write about these things in a Belgian newspaper, I could be in serious trouble with the courts. The iron curtain of censorship that came down in the wake of Powell’s speech has not lifted everywhere; on the contrary, if the EU has its way, it will be enshrined in the criminal code, with “racism and xenophobia”—defined as vaguely as is required to silence unwanted opinion—made into an extraditable offense throughout the Union."

One suspects Scruton of over-egging the cake a little with some of this - his contention that the EU is aiming to make discussion of immigration illegal, his view that "an iron curtain of censorship" exists in these matters. Neo-Nazi parties, after all, thrive in Belgium, Germany, France and Italy. But this element of slightly camp posing has always been part of Scruton's appeal.

Link to Scruton's article:
The New Criterion — Should he have spoken?

Scruton on J.S. Mill the prototype leftist.

"Global Alliance Against Nuclear Terrorism"

Graham Allison, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reckons a terrorist nuclear attack on America is probably "inevitable", although "preventable". He says that the pusillanimity of western governments in this matter is caused by the same failure of imagination that failed to foresee the possibility of 9/11 and calls for a Global Alliance Against Nuclear Terrorism.

Link to Allison's article:
The ongoing failure of imagination | thebulletin.org

NATO In The "Cradle Of 9/11" - Call For More Manpower

America, Britain, Canada and Holland are the only NATO members currently engaged in resisting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, despite NATO's Jaap de Hoop Scheffer's urgent call for reinforcements.

The absence of large European countries like France and Germany is significant, if hardly surprising. Their governments appear wilfully blind to the price of failure in "the cradle of 9/11. In part, this reflects their voters' dangerous amivalences. But it is their own citizens who will suffer if the terrorists are allowed to win through the indifference and pusillanimity of their governments.

Telegraph | Comment | Nato's members must share burden of fighting

Scandal Over Multiple Iraqi Idenitity-Papers In Germany

An Iraqi immigrant to Germany, who arrived illegally, was given three different identity passes by German authorities (in Schwelm). His papers featured different names and ages, but the same photographs and physical descriptions.

This is somewhat embarrassing given that the German Home Office is currently reviewing its security aparatus. If German civil servant happily allow illegal Muslim immigrants to be so flexible with their identities, there can be no real expectation that Germany can keep any meaningful surveillance over this highly dangerous community, which has already contributed much to international terror.

Parallels Between Iraq and 1936 Spain

Stephen Schwartz draws some parallels between the war in Iraq today and the Spanish Civil War.

The main one being that European pusillanimity, in refusing to support the Spanish Republicans against Franco, paved the way for WWII.

Schwartz posits that a similar pusillanimity regarding the war against Islamic fascism may have similarly disastrous consequences.

PREVIEW: 1936 and All That

Foucault's Second Thoughts (II)

Foucault is still a hero to many leftists, who see him as an early champion of "identity politics" and the political correctness with which it is associated. In fact, Foucault's thinking moved on and eventually rejected it, says an article by Richard Wolin in next month's Chronicle (link below). It isn't the first instance of Foucault's thinking discomfiting his original, left-wing audience. As we wrote last year, Foucault, visiting Iran in 1979, had understood that its revolution wasn't against Western values, but against the corruption of the Shah's regime. His coverage of this enraged contemporary leftists.

Foucault, in rejecting "identity politics" as intrinsically narcisstic, and recognising that his analysis of "horizontal" power (in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality) had dismissed the claims of subjectivity (and the self) in the face of impersonal power shifts, reverted to the Classical concept of "the beautiful life" - aesthetic self-cultivation.

This aesthetic means of creating a self he preferred to what he (and Nietzsche) saw as the self-renunciation of Chritianity, as well as the narcissism of modern self-expression and identity politics.

The Chronicle: 8/31/2006: Foucault the Neohumanist?

Former Waffen-SS Man Has Book To Sell

Günter Grass, the walrus-moustachioe'd leftist bore, has been forced to come clean about his membership of the Waffen-SS, 60 years after the event. Grass used the intervening time to good effect, posing as a morally-superior, politically-correct scourge of capitalists and Christians, whom he flayed with deadly hauteur and patronising put-downs. Grass even received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and - most ironically - Honorary Citizenship of Danzig/Gdansk - something Lech Walesa, for one, now deeply deplores. Grass was foremost amongst those who cast their verbal stones of contempt at President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl for visiting a graveyard containing, amongst others, a few tombs of his less fortunate former SS comrades. This episode now seems scandalous for Grass' barefaced impudence alone.

The timing of Grass' "admission" is most fortuitous. It seems that it was forced, as the relevant documents were due to be made public early next year. Pre-empting that has greatly helped him gain attention for his memoirs. It has also made it possible for him to pretend to the mantle of moral superiority and heartsearching. An earlier admission, on the other hand, would have made his subsequent career impossible.

Whilst there is nothing new about Nazis transforming themselves from committed national socialists into equally committed international socialists and greens, it is unusual for the process to be as exhibitionistic, and with as much moral superiority, as Grass made his trademark during the past 60 years. Through all this time, his crackpot views have been listened to with respect. Thankfully, all that nonsense can now come to an end.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Grass to retain Nobel despite row

RIP: Syd Barrett

Syd Barrett, who died last Friday in Cambridge, founded Pink Floyd in 1965 and led them to their initial success - with very English songs like Arnold Layne and See Emily Play - before dropping out of the band as a result of taking too much acid and coming to gigs in a "catatonic" state, unable to play more than a note, if at all.

He wrote a fifth of the songs on the Pink Floyd retrospective greatest hits Echoes album, even though he was only with the band for a fraction of their career. Two solo albums, released after he left, were not hugely successful in terms of sales, but were massively influential in terms of their spaced-out, sometimes mellow, sometimes manic music.

The song Dominoes is one of the finest ever produced, and echoes of Syd's sound live on in hundreds of hugely popular indie bands today.

Telegraph | News | Syd Barrett

RIP: Philip Rieff, 83

Philip Rieff, who died last Saturday, was a conservative sociologist who published "Life Among the Deathworks" earlier this year after a silence of 26 years.

"Deathworks" were "an all-out assault on something vital to the culture". Famous deathworks included Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, and the whole range of Sigmund Freud's theories, which Rieff saw as an "extended deathwork".

Rieff recommended inactivism, as even the best-intentioned action could only make things worse. Now he has achieved that state, may God have mercy on his soul.

Philip Rieff, 83; Noted Sociologist Wrote Books About Cultural Decline - Los Angeles Times

Diving Portuguese Show-Ponies Booted Out of World Cup

The current Portuguese football team have made themselves notorious with their play-acting and diving during this World Cup, and they were roundly booed last night. The preening Cristiano Ronaldo and ageing Figo were the most glaring offenders. Both of them spoil their undoubted skill with histrionics and below-the-belt tactics.

The game in which they "beat" Holland to reach the quarter finals was especially disgusting. In the second half, hardly any football was played, as the Portuguese acted out their neuroses on the pitch, desperately defending their lead against a superior side by rolling hysterically on the ground whenever a Dutch player so much as looked at them.

Noone, aside from the Portuguese themselves, will be sorry to see them go. They represent the apogee of gamesmanship - something which is rife in the game (even Franz Beckenbauer, who fancies himself a bit of a gentleman, praises German players who gain a penalty by diving in the box). Most players sometimes succumb to it, but it should be resisted. Ronaldo complains that too few cards were handed out by the referee in the game against France. This is laughable, and would be true only if the cards were given out to players who indulge in diving and play-acting. But that is obviously the opposite of what the "show-pony" Ronaldo meant.

Having said all that, football players, like any of us, can change, and mature with time. One hopes the Portuguese team will shake off this unpleasant aspect of their otherwise attractive play in time for the European Championships in 2008.

BBC SPORT | Football | World Cup 2006 | Teams | Portugal | Ronaldo defiant after crowd abuse

The Curse of Von Esens - Joschka Fischer Quits

Joschka Fischer, the policeman-beating ex-Maoist Green who became Germany's Foreign Secretary in the late, disgraceful Schroeder administration, has finally upped sticks and is leaving Europe to go teach "international crisis management" in Princeton.

This blog had nothing but contempt for Fischer whilst he was in office, as he grandstanded his way through insults to the USA, a major visa scandal, and the abandonment of Green party policies, even to the extent of advocating arms sales to China. Now that he's gone, unable to do any more harm, here's a sympathetic piece about Fischer, focussing on his good-blokeishness:
Telegraph Blogs: Foreign: Kate Connolly: June 2006: Joschka Fischer packs his bags

Chairman Mao Was "The Greatest Drug-Addiction Therapist In History"

Theodore Dalrymple says that a criminal tendency is likelier to lead to drug addiction than drug addiction leads to crime, and that "whatever caused them (drug addicts) to commit crimes in all probability caused them also to take heroin: perhaps an adversarial stance to the world caused by the emotional, spiritual, cultural and intellectual vacuity of their lives."

Dalrymple writes that it is relatively easy to give up heroin, and that Chairman Mao, who threatened to shoot addicts, was "the greatest drug-addiction therapist in history." The romanticising of addicts began with De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, he continues, and is sustained today by the "compassion industry," which is always on the lookout for victims on whom to lavish high-profile concern.

Article | Poppycock

Misunderestimating German Humour

Preposterous article by Stewart Lee in today's Guardian asserts that German humour is limited by, amongst other things, the stricter structure of its language. Lee sounds halfway convincing - until he gives an example of a "joke" he believes isn't translatable into German because it relies on an unexpected "pull back and reveal" at the end:

"I was sitting there, minding my own business, naked, smeared with salad dressing and lowing like an ox ... and then I got off the bus."

This is actually quite easily translatable into German, if someone thought it worth their while to do so. But it would no more raise a laugh in Germany than it would in England.

Lee also blames German compound words for being less flexible, and so less potentially funny, than English tacked-together-descriptors: "Thus (Lee writes) a federal constitutional court, which in English exists as three weak fragments, becomes Bundesverfassungsgericht, a vast impregnable structure that is difficult to penetrate linguistically, like that Nazi castle in Where Eagles Dare." Difficult to see what Lee is driving at here, but the gratuitous reference to the difficult-to-penetrate-linguistically Nazi castle suggests desperation rather than insight.

Everyone knows humour is the last thing one gets in learning a new language. Lee's article demonstrates this in spades. He doesn't get German humour, but then he doesn't appear to have grasped the English variety either. Mangelhaft.

Postscript - German joke:
Two men are discussing WWII. They're on the subject of concentration camps.
"My grandfather died in Auschwitz, as it happens."
"So sorry to hear it, how awful!"
"Yeah, he fell out of his watchtower one night, pissed out of his mind."

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Lost in translation

Neo-Nazis and the World Cup

Germany is understandably worried that its neo-Nazis will stage some high-profile outrage during the World Cup.

Over the past year, Nazi and other left-wing extremist violence has been on the increase: in 2005, there were 958 acts of Nazi violence (up from 776 in 2004), whilst leftists committed 896 (up 72% from 2004). In the east, support for the neo-Nazis is about 10% amongst young men. Politicians have been lining up to warn foreigners, especially black ones, to avoid "no-go areas" in Berlin (such as Lichtenberg, Friedrichshain and Marzahn) and the province of Brandenburg which surrounds the capital.

"The slapheads (die Glatzen) mustn't be allowed to spoil our World Cup", said CDU/CSU politician Bosbach, clearly more preoccupied with the PR effects of violence than the violence itself.

In an intriguing but unsurprising development, German Nazis are planning to support Iran's football team during the tournament. This is a "reward" for the Iranian president's call to "wipe Israel from the map." It is unlikely, however, that this new sense of brotherhood will be of much use to Arabic-looking fans who stray into the sights Nazis on the prowl in Lichtenberg. By the same token, the likeliest threat of violence (according to Germany's Home Minister Schäuble), is from Islamist terrorists, whose targetting is notoriously colour-blind, and is as apt to kill Nazis as Muslims.

Scruton on J.S. Mill

Roger Scruton argues that J.S. Mill, the Utilitarian, foreshadowed statist leftism, valuing a collectivist approach to society and happiness above individualism, and that Mill didn't understand that wisdom is rarer than rationality. It was Mill, we read, who first described the Conservative Party as "the stupider party".

Scruton (who has himself metamorphosed into a latter-day country squire) points out that the squires who surrounded Mill in Parliament may well have been intellectually inferior to Mill, but that they "recognised the limits of the human intellect" and were thus wiser than the liberal sage.

Scruton himself, we infer, is an example of that rare species, an intellectual who has kept hold of his common sense.

OpinionJournal - Featured Article

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Stripped Of Dutch Citizenship

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, conservative Dutch MP and champion of Islamic women's rights, is to be stripped of her Dutch citizenship for lying about her name when she first applied for asylum. She has resigned as an MP and says she will be leaving Holland.

In her statement, she says she used an assumed name because she feared her Somalian clan would track her down if her real name was publicised. She sought asylum primarily to escape an arranged marriage with her distant cousin.

The decision to revoke Ali's Dutch nationality was made by the Foreign Affairs minister, Rita Verdonk. It has been greeted by dismay and is now being reviewed. [Update (June 28th 2006): The decision has now been revoked and Ayaan Hirsi Ali will be allowed to retain her Dutch citizenship.]

Since the murder of Theo van Gogh, who filmed her screenplay Submission, Ali has been under constant police protection, as the Islamist Hofstad group has repeatedly plotted to kill her. Her neighbours had successfully petitioned for her to be forced to move house, as they did not feel safe living next door to her.

Ali is consistently controversial and this denouement is entirely in keeping. She claims that she has been considering a move to the USA for some time, so that she can spread her message, that elements within Islam are incompatible with an open Western society. QED.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's statement on the VVD website:

"I regret that I will be leaving the Netherlands, the country which has given me so many opportunities and enriched my life, but I am glad that I will be able to continue my work. I will go on."

Yahoo Accused of Shopping Chinese Journalist

Reporters Without Borders claims Yahoo supplied information which got a Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, convicted.

Shi Tao has been sentenced to 10 years for forwarding a message to western websites, a message in which the Chinese authorities had warned his newspaper (Dandai Shang Bao) of possible destabilisation by dissidents returning for the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre.

If this is true, then the passive willingness of Google, MSN and Yahoo to censor their information, has become active collaboration with the Chinese regime in suppressing the Chinese people. That is a depressing progression. It gives the lie to the supposedly liberalising effects of globalisation.

Anti-Smoking Terror Continues

Markos Kyprianou, the EU Commissioner for Goats, is threatening to take Germany to court for allowing tobacco to be advertised and, indeed, smoked in public places. Apparently this is now illegal in the EU.

Ever since Kyprianou personally went round Europe testing 200,000 of our goats last year, he has been casting himself as some kind of expert in matters of heath, and looking around for something equally useful to occupy himself. This is why he has shifted his attentions to smokers. Most European countries have fallen into line with his interfering strictures and are now persecuting smokers and tobacco companies. Only Germany has stood firm. Now it looks like the Commissioner for Goats will crush the poor Germans under his officious heel too.

EUobserver.com

"Islamic Terrorism" Banned From EU "Lexicon"

The idea behind banning the phrase Islamic terrorism from the EU's official documents, as announced today, is to avoid "unnecessary offence". The EU thinks further "radicalisation" may be sparked off by such wording. This may seem a foolish fear, and a somewhat pious wish, on the part of the EU's lexicon-makers. It is sure to spark off "political correctness gone mad" type reactions.

But it's actually a nice way of accentuating the fact that terrorists are not true Muslims. This is still something that needs reinforcing. Doing so will make it easier for our Muslim brothers in Europe to condemn Islamist terrorism, and help us all create a more agreeable society. So for once the blog can say, "Well done, EU bureaucrats!

EUobserver.com

Berlusconi's Cherries

Jeff Israel, commenting on Berlusconi's election defeat, reveals how the media mogul once moved a sofa all by himself, and how he once ate some cherries from a porcelain bowl ("his left arm was practically wrapped around it," Israel discloses). Israel reckons Berlusconi's defeat may leave him, leader of the largest single party, the most powerful politician in Italy. Interesting, if somewhat surreal, perspectives.

TIME.com: How Berlusconi Can Win By Losing -- Page 1

Zany

A zany article by Alan Wolfe attacks President Bush for hating ideas so much that he acted on neoconservative ones. Now the original sponsors of those ideas (the equally zany Fukuyama foremost amongst them) - who supported the actions inspired by their ideas (invading Iraq) - say they were actually terrible ideas which only a moron could have acted on.

Bush, these idea-mongers say, should shift to "realistic Wilsonianism". This means having the same objectives but not using military means to achieve them. "The details can be filled in later", says the idea-monger Wolfe. A dangerous idea, that.

The Chronicle: 4/14/2006: How Bush's Bad Ideas May Lead to Good Ones

Nuking Iran

Seymour Hersh writes a very long piece in the New Yorker, with quotes saying that President Bush has a "messianic" urge to nuke Iran's bomb-building capability. Hersh's sources say Bush thinks regime change will be the sure-fire result of such a holocaust. Bush is urged to sit down and talk to the Iranians instead. Or try a "charm offensive" aimed at weaning young Iranians from the unpopular Iranian regime.

This may well be an excellent plan. But what happens if the talk and charm lead nowhere? Nobody actually knows how close the Iranians are to active nuclear capability, although everyone agrees they are developing it. Will everyone ever agree that nuking Iran is the only way to stop it from nuking Israel first? It seems most unlikely. And yet it seems equally unlikely that the Iranian regime can be stopped without at least the threat of a nuclear strike.

The New Yorker: Fact

V.S.Naipaul Flays Dickens, Austen and James

V.S. Naipaul, a knight and holder of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has attacked English writers like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen for being too parochial, concerned only with English themes.

"English writing is very much of England, and is not meant to travel too far," he said.

Naipaul, himself notably cosmopolitan - of Indian descent, brought up in Trinidad, educated in England, and impeccably well-travelled - has previously attacked James Joyce ("I cannot understand the work of a blind man"), E.M Forster (went to India to seduce gardeners' boys; Passage to India has "only one real scene"), and Indian writers, for their stifling obsession with oppression and suchlike faddish nonsense.

It would be better for literature if more writers were as outspoken as V.S. Naipaul.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Naipaul attacks literary giants

"Community Rights" Crush Individual Rights

Francis Fukuyama writes (in Slate) that Europe's demographic/Islamist crisis is caused by its failure fully to integrate moderate immigrants into society.

Europe, unlike the USA, was more concerned to "tolerate" incoming communites as a whole, even if this meant overriding European values. Oppression of individuals within those communities (especially women and homosexuals) could thus continue, whilst deserving individuals who may have been westernised became radicalised instead.

Fukuyama thus urges European politicians to ignore calls from the "blood and soil" strand of the American right.

It's a valid point, as Europeans will not solve their "demographic crisis" simply by going to church and having more babies (even if politicians somehow found a way of making them do so, which seems unlikely). Then again, one should question the alarmism of those who fan and publicise this crisis, too. Some are actually hailing the crisis as a harbinger of the return of traditional patriarchy.

Europe vs. Radical Islam By Francis Fukuyama

See also: Fukuyama's End of Neoconservatism

Science and Religion's "Parochial" Links

John D Barrow is professor of mathematics at Cambridge and he has just won a few hundred thousand pounds with the Templeton Prize. He writes nicely in today's Telegraph - how parochial, he laments, are "our attempts to find or deny the links between scientific and religious approaches to the nature of the Universe."

Telegraph | Opinion | Astronomy illuminates the glory of God

Western Baby Dearth Will Lead To A Conservative Patriarchy, Says Conservative Patriarch

Phillip Longman argues that the failure of western societies to reproduce at replacement levels means that they will soon be run by the kids of people who are reproducing at relatively higher rates.

These people tend to be patriarchal conservatives, traditional Europeans who love their country, have nothing against armies, and take a dim view of bastardy. Hence, Longman concludes, Europe is set for a return to conservative patriarchy.

Longman's thesis is seductive. It disregards, however, another fertile source of patriarchal revival in Europe: Islam. The effect of large immigrant families on Longman's rosy patriarchy-building scenario is difficult to determine.

It could as easily nurture a revolt against patriarchy as an entrenchment of it. Large numbers of children brought up under the thumb of "repressed" Muslim patriarchs might well stage a backlash in favour of liberal, "progressive" values.

As with Mark Steyn, who ploughs the same demographic furrow from the other side of the field (ie: western baby dearth will lead to Islamic Europe), the argument is built up on the assumption that the childrens of patriarchs, both western and Muslim, will perpetuate precisely the kind of society their parents advocate. This outcome is possible, of course, but hardly inevitable. The Muslim immigrant, for one, is unlikely to believe that everything back home is fine and dandy, or he'd have stayed at home in the first place. And children of western patriarchs are notorious for turning against the values that shaped them - wasn't this one of the wellsprings of the whole countercultural lefty 1960s scene anyway?

Foreign Policy: The Return of Patriarchy

Poland, Holland Oppose Moves For European Foreign Minister

Jacques Chirac, beleaguered President of France, has been pushing for the early adoption of some elements of the draft EU constitution (which was rejected by voters in France and Holland). One such is a stronger role for Javier Solana, currently the EU's foreign policy spokesman/co-ordinator. Chirac wants Solana to assume quasi Foreign Ministerial powers.

This would certainly be in the interests of the big EU countries such as France and Germany, whose mouthpiece Solana would become, but would tend to override the interests of smaller states. Poland's President Lech Kaczynski, who is in Berlin today to meet Chancellor Merkel, observes that such a move would be premature and undemocratic (the interview will be in tomorrow's Frankfürter Allgemeine Zeitung).

Kaczynski is supported in The Hague, where the Dutch government recently protested about Javier Solana's apologies to Muslims, during last month's controversy over some unfunny cartoons published in a selection of European newspapers.

Solana's apologies were impertinent, as it is no business of the EU (nor of national governments) to interfere with the freedom of expression of European newspapers published in sovereign countries.

Similarly, whilst big countries such as France and Germany opposed US actions in removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, others (Poland and Holland among them) came out in support of regime change. In light of such continuing conflicts of interest, it would be otiose to instal a European Foreign Minister to parrot the opinions of the larger European nations.

EUobserver.com

Man To Watch: Lech Kaczynski, President of Poland

Some thoughts from Polish President Lech Kaczynski, prior to his visit to Germany this week (his first ever). Some folk describe him as a right wing nationalist, but he comes across rather well: statesmanlike, and - in contrast to most European politicians' disconnectivity to European voters - able to talk about things that concern ordinary people:

- the most important event in his life was the restoration of Polish sovereignty in 1989 and this experience drives his suspicion of Russia;

- his experience as mayor of Warsaw showed him that many EU directives were utterly unsuited to the situation in Poland;

- he is in favour of Ukraine and Turkey joining the EU;

- his aim is to restore Law and Order in Poland, specifically, to act against the crime caused by an unholy alliance between the local MAFIA and the ex-communist security forces;

- the deal between Germany and Russia's Gazprom to build a new gas pipeline (brokered by ex-Chancellor Schroeder, who is now an employee of Putin's at Gazprom!) is against Poland's interests;

- Kaczynski is proposing an "Energy NATO" to the European Union, involving the creation of a new pipeline, in order to protect the European supply which, as we saw this last winter in Ukraine, is at least partly the mercy of Russian whims.

Kaczynski's views are timely in several respects. First, the energy crisis facing Europe requires a new vision, and Kaczynski is the first politician in Europe to come up with one. Second, Kaczynski's instinctive mistrust of federalist power is shared by many in Europe - voters who rejected the draft EU Constitution in Holland and France foremost amongst them, but many more, who were not allowed to vote on the question by their own politicians. Recent efforts (by Angela Merkel and others) to revive the document are dangerous becuase they persist in seeing the problems of Europe as caused by the nation state. But these days it is EU institutions themselves that are demonstrating myopia and an inability to listen to their citzens' concerns. Europe needs more politicians of Kaczynski's calibre who are willing to challenge this corporatist orthodoxy.

Troop Withdrawal From Iraq By 2008

The most senior British general in Iraq, Lt-General Nick Houghton, is saying that there are plans for all British - and, one assumes, US - troops to be out of Iraq in two years' time.

If this is true, it marks an abandonment of the position - previously promulgated by President Bush and Tony Blair - that coalition troops would remain until Iraq was stable and democratic. It is also a strange contradiction of their previous opinion that only the terrorists and insurgents would benefit from a timetable for withdrawal. If General Houghton is right, it seems that that timetable now exists.

So why this change of direction? The following possibilities come to mind:

- the direness of the situation in Iraq has been grievously exaggerated and everything is nearly under control;
- the competence of the Iraqi security forces has been grievously underestimated;
- the unpopularity of the war is forcing Bush and Blair to adapt their tactics;
- the political, financial and human cost of securing Iraq has become too high.

If the withdrawal is mainly driven by some mixture of the first two possibilities, then the allied invasion of Iraq has been a splendid unacknowledged success. If the withdrawal is mainly driven by the last two possibilities, then the terrorists appear to have won in Iraq.

European Protectionism Undermines Single Market

In the past week, protectionism by national governments has stopped a bid for the Suez energy company in France (the government is merging Suez with the state-owned Gaz de France), and the bid by E.On for Spain's Endesa power company.

Italy's Silvio Berlusconi is now calling for retaliation against the French. The EU Commission is gearing itself up to take action.

Protectionism should be challenged, whether it's at the national level, as now, or at the European level, as with the EU's actions against Microsoft or against cheap leather goods from China. The difficulty for the EU Commission is not taking sides. In the case of the Chinese shoes, the EU's tariffs seek to protect Italian and French manufacturers at the expense of European consumers. In the case of these energy bids, this time round, the open market requires the protectionist European governments to be taken to task. In the case of the shoes and Microsoft, the EU is promoting its own brand of protectionism.

In other words, the EU is happy to override protectionism driven by "national pride" - a pride it actively wishes to destroy - whilst being equally happy to promote a protectionism which harms consumers for the benefit of cross-border manufacturing groups. At some point, the EU's internal contradictions on this matter will come to a head.

Telegraph | Opinion | The single market and Gallic delusions

The EU's "Shoe War"

Citing "serious state intervention in the leather footwear sector" in China and Vietnam, EU Commission spokesman Peter Power is heralding tariffs on shoe imports as of April. This will put about one euro on the cost of a pair of shoes from those countries.

We can only hope that this new piece of protectionist actionism doesn't lead to the disasters incurred by Peter Mandelson's "Bra Wars" of last year, when retailers were stopped from taking delivery of orders they'd made prior to the ban on textiles from China. Empty shelves and bust businesses resulted - in what was described as "the worst retailing crisis since WWII" - before a compromise was patched together to save Commissioner Mandelson's face.

Mandelson is still at his post But the new protectionist move - just like the last one - is supported by countries with strong leather goods industries and a tradition of state protectionism, such as France and Italy, and opposed by those which don't, such as Holland and the Scandinavian countries. It is a most unhelpful move from the EU at a time when protectionism - not merely European, but American too - is increasingly jeopardising the consumer benefits of global markets.

EUobserver.com

Fukuyama's "End Of NeoConservatism"

Francis Fukuyama's somewhat tendentious piece in the New York Times flays President Bush and his neo-conservatives for perceived inadequacies in the conception and planning of the Iraq war and its aftermath.

Fukuyama makes some bizarre comparisons, contrasting the supposedly "Marxist" thesis of his book, The End of History with the "Leninist" ideas of Bush and his neo-cons. Bush et al are "Leninist", says Fukuyama, in the sense that they think that the use of power can help push history along, as the world blossoms into democracy. Whilst these are eye-catching, media-friendly comparisons, they are also singularly unhelpful and tending to muddy the waters.

At one point, Fukuyama says that it may have been better to let the regimes of Afghanistan and Iraq be, that it was wrong to "stir the (Middle Eastern) pot". Better to have stuck with America's "authoritarian friends". American "over-optimism about postwar transitions to democracy" is criticised in this context. Later on, though, Fukuyama seems to endorse "Wilsonian" idealism (ie spreading democracy and freedom) - provided it is "more realistic" than it has been under Bush. This is also somewhat unenlightening advice. One man's "realism" is another man's "appeasement", after all. And the lesson of Reagan's successful, hardline stance against communism is not one which Fukuyama challenges.

When Fukyama advocates the creation of more "overlapping" multinational institutions alongside the UN and NATO, he may be on to something, for sources of international legitimacy for action against terrorists and rogue states are indeed scarce on the ground. The again, overreliance on international legitimacy may lead, as seems likely with Iran, to impotence.

Fukuyama points out that the neo-conservatives saw that social engineering within nation states was counterproductive when it comes, say, to controlling crime. Better clamp down locally on graffiti and panhandling, say, than launch well-meaning but abstract affirmative action programmes. He then wonders why, if the neocons saw this so clearly, they could not also see that Wilsonian social engineering on an international scale (ie spreading democracy to the Middle East) was also doomed to fail. Here Fukuyama is, apparently wilfully, misrepresenting the nature of American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. America has, after all, dealt in the most direct and practical way in those countries. His comparison also misrepresents the nature of terrorist and rogue state crimes and the practicalities of preventing them. For whatever its drawbacks, regime change has indeed removed two rogue states from the scene, staunching their crimes, in a way that positive action programmes do not remove graffiti or panhandlers. Fukuyama's analogy is thus inept.

The effect of regime change on the incidence of terrorism is another question. It can be argued either way, as no figures exist to determine the effects of action versus inaction. Fukuyama clearly believes regime change in Iraq has exacerbated terrorism, but provides nothing to back up his assertion.

All in all, Fukuyama's piece comes over as a piece of high-profile recantation - one not so much of neoconservatism, as of Fukuyama's own thesis in his now foolish-seeming book The End of History. Perhaps one should say he offers a correction of the commonly-held interpretation of his book, which, he implies, has been so sorely misunderstood.
After Neoconservatism - New York Times