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

Valley of the Wolves - Turkish Rambo Flays Evil Americans

A Turkish Rambo-type film, Valley of the Wolves, glamorises a struggle against evil Americans - amongst whom a Jewish doctor who takes out the organs of living Turks. Some politicians (like Edmund Stoiber, Prime Minister of Bavaria) are calling for the film to be banned.

But it hardly makes sense to relinquish the right to free speech over a film of this sort. Aside from setting a woeful precedent, banning it will only make the film more glamorous and popular. It will also underline the thesis that Islamic culture is being suppressed by the west.

In any case, the anti-Americanism of this film hardly surpasses that of its far slicker equivalents in Hollywood.

Berlusconi: "I Am The Jesus Christ Of Politics"

The Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, described himself as "the Jesus Christ" of politics last Saturday, setting off a predictable storm.

Berlusconi has given much entertainment over the years, being slightly more outspoken than most European politicians, even in Italy. He compared a German socialist to a Nazi concentration camp guard and has said that western civilisation is superior to Islam. Last time he compared himself to somebody else, it was to say he was like Napoleon - "only taller."

On January 30th, he also vowed to remain "completely celibate" until after the Italian elections on April 9th. Berlusconi, a former cruise-ship crooner, has recorded two CD's of love songs as part of his re-election bid. His poll numbers aren't looking too good, so he probably needs all the help he can get.

Telegraph | News | Berlusconi says he is like Jesus

Indonesia And The Unfunny Danish Cartoons

Mainstream Muslims continue to call on their co-religionists to temper their outrage over the unfunny Danish cartoons. Din Syamsuddin, of Muhammadiyah, Indonesia's second largest Muslim group, who is also a member of Indonesia's highest Islam authority (MUI), says that the over-the-top protests will paint "an image of Indonesia's Islam as an intolerant, rigid and anarchic society."

The cartoons were reprinted in Peta, a small-circulation magazine in Indonesia. The police are now determining whether its editor, Abdul Wahad Abdi, committed a crime in reprinting the tendentious drawings. Our advice is that whilst it wasn't a crime in the eyes of the law, it was a crime against good taste.

Aljazeera.Net - Radicals 'exploiting cartoon backlash'

Abu Hamza Jailed and Shamed

Under the catchy headline "Hook and a Hooker", the inimitable Sun today reveals how "hook-handed cleric Abu Hamza cheated on his first wife with a hooker" and that this contributed to his becoming Al Qaeda's recruiting sergeant in Britain, with an especial animus against brothels.

Full story: The Sun Online - News: Hook and a hooker

Controversy Caused By Unfunny Cartoons Whipped Up By Extremists Of All Stripes

Christopher Hitchens, in a somewhat confused contribution to Slate, mocks faiths of all sorts:
Cartoon Debate - The case for mocking religion. By Christopher Hitchens:

"It is revolting to me," Hitchens writes, "to breathe the same air as wafts from the exhalations of the madrasahs, or the reeking fumes of the suicide-murderers, or the sermons of Billy Graham and Joseph Ratzinger."

In mixing up what is truly "offensive" with what is pumped-up hysteria (as both Islamists and the right-to-blasphemers are feverishly doing) many new misunderstandings are actively being evolved, as this whole wretched "cartoon controversy" unwinds.

To equate the new Pope in a list with suicide bombers, as Hitchens does, is tendentious at least, especially in light of the Pope's first encyclical, God Is Love. But it's an understandable thing for a polemicist, who is only interested in stoking up controversy, to write. Equally understandable that jihadist imams should encourage their flocks to burn down Danish embassies. It's in the nature of such people.

It is however foolish for us mere people, who live and work among Muslims - or indeed Jews and Christians - to allow the concepts "freedom of speech" or "the right to blaspheme" to be degraded to a kind of moral duty to insult people of faith. It is foolish in the same way as it is for mainstream Muslims to allow their religion to be hijacked by jihadist psychopaths, eagerly sniffing out new sources of mortal offence.

Freedom of speech certainly contains the right to provoke. But the one should not be substituted for the other. Nor should "freedom of speech" become a "duty to insult," as Hitchens implies. That just allows the debate to be hijacked by extremists and polemicists from all sides, something which is close to happening - to the cost of all us non-extremists, alas.

"Garden of Eden" in Papua Yields New Species

New species, including a honey-eater bird, twenty new kinds of frog, butterflies believed lost, and five new palms, have been discovered in an isolated region of Papua, Indonesia.

Species thought to have been hunted to near-extinction, such as the Golden-Mantled Tree Kangaroo, and other rare species such as Barlepsch's Six-Wired Bird of Paradise, and the Long-Beaked Echidnas, have been photographed and studied for the first time.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | New species found in Papua 'Eden'

The Doom Of Europe

Theodore Dalrymple writes about Europe's decline in today's Cato Unbound. He says Europe's decline is relative, and that widespread predictions of doom (by writers like Mark Steyn, for example) are predicated on the notion that historical hindsight, and current trends, can be used to forecast the future. This, Dalrymple says, may be quite unfounded: the future overturns most settled predictions.

Having thus hedged his bets, Dalrymple nevertheless gives a clear diagnosis of Europe's ills. An "immovable" political class, with its plans for a united Europe not desired by its citizens, and the "anti-economic" bureaucracy which, in almost every European country, fetters prospects of growth.

The typical reaction of "Europe" to the open global market is that it is a threat to its economic security and to "social justice". This leads to counter-productive protectionist measures - which in turn reinforce the self-fulfilling prophecy of the "evils" of the unfettered market.

Dalrymple also blames the weakened cultural confidence of Europe's political elite for contributing to the failure to assimilate Muslim immigrants.

Whilst much of his piece is unobjectionable right-wing lore, it is pessimistic in tone and clearly Dalrymple doesn't for a moment believe Europe can shake off its habit of decline. Admittedly, if Europe is concurrently failing at the economic, cultural and political levels, as Dalrymple asserts, then a large measure of gloom is perfectly justified.

At the same time, even if our decline is only "relative", Europe must soon be approaching the point where it no longer makes sense for poor people to emigrate into Europe. The flow should then start going the other way, and completely overturn the demographics of doom. And even if that doesn't happen, continuing decline will force Europe to confront and reform its sclerotic institutions - maybe in a peaceful way, if its politics allow such flexibility, otherwise in violence and conflict. The idea of a gentle continued "sleepwalk" to decline - Dalrymple's closing thought - seems the least likely scenario.

Cato Unbound ? Blog Archive ? Is ?Old Europe? Doomed?

Bishop Marx: Bombshells Among The Bromides

Bishop Marx of Trier, a man as leftie as his name, gives an interview to the Rheinische Post today, full of bromides about the need for Germany to retain its "sozialen Marktwirtschaft" (socially-driven economy) in the face of "radikaleren Kapitalismus" (more radical capitalism). This is German code for tedious leftist doctrine. It isn't even especially controversial to hear it spilling from the mouth of a Catholic bishop.

More dodgy is the bishop's advocacy of collectivism, as when he warns: "Die Gesellschaft darf sich nicht weiter individualisieren" (Society mustn't become more individualistic). He also makes the unprovable and tendentious claim that terrorism has increased as a result of the "illegal" (völkerrechtswidrig) war in Iraq.

Clearly a highly politicised bishop, Marx has nothing of interest to say about the Pope's agreeable first encyclical. Maybe Marx's own collectivist, state-based views conflict so openly with the Pope's that it would be indecent to do so. After all, this is what Benedict wrote the other day:

"The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy, incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person — every person — needs:- namely, loving personal concern."

Instead of heeding his pontiff's wise words, "Bishop" Marx prefers to address what he concedes is the suboptimal state of the Church in Germany by means of his socialistic impertinences. This politicised prelate's partisan pronouncements deserve to be deplored. The blog will be praying for Bishop Marx's immortal soul.

On Alexandra of Denmark - by Claude de Bigny

Princesses Dagmar and Alexandra of Denmark, originally uploaded by Claude de Bigny.

Princess Alexandra of Denmark, who married Edward Prince of Wales and became Queen of England upon the death of Queen Victoria, has had a mixed press, writes Claude de Bigny, the blog's historical correspondent.

Her beauty may have had something to do with that - as it appears to have obsessed not merely the men who surrounded her, but also herself.

I am writing about her today because a malicious rumour has been circulating that she was unfaithful to her husband - a rumour which is not only unfounded, but appears to have been made up quite recently. Certainly no credit has ever been given it before. Hero, who is a distant cousin of Alexandra's through Hero Oomkens von Esens (who married Irmgard von Oldenburg, niece to Christian I and first cousin to Frederik I of Denmark) as well as through the Prussian von Quooß and von Gaudecker families, has asked me to set the record straight.

For over 25 years Princess Alexandra enjoyed the chaste and exalted love of her husband's equerry, Oliver Montagu, younger son of Lord Sandwich. This was well known to all, including the Prince of Wales, and was widely seen as a purely platonic affair of the heart. As Louisa, Lady Antrim wrote:

"The Princess floated through the ballroom like a vision from fairyland.She went out a great deal, and chief among her cavaliers was Oliver Montagu. Her husband by this time was living in a very fast set, indulging in many flirtations. It is surprising that, young and lovely as she was, the Princess never gave any real occasion for scandal. I think it must have been due to Oliver Montagu's care for her. He shielded her in every way, not least from his own great love, and managed to defeat gossip."

Claude de Bigny

Satellite Road-Toll Plans: The "Spying State"

Disturbing details from EU Referendum about how plans for road-tolls are well underway and that several European countries - the UK and Holland among them - are participating. The plan hasn't had a lot of attention, but it will surely compromise citizens' freedom of movement and right to anonymity - as well as their wallets. It smacks of the "Spying State" - overarching, intrusive official powers in the name of the common good, the worse because these plans come across as so covert.
EU Referendum

Demographics May Destroy Euro, Bolkestein Reckons

Another demographic horror story: Frits Bolkestein, ex-EU Commissioner, warns that the ageing population will place "ruthless" pressure on the euro in 10 years' time. Pensioners will then outnumber the working population, thus forcing governments to increase borrowing and increase their deficits, undermining the euro.

In truth, this undermining of the euro is already in full swing. The laughably toothless Stability Pact, which sought to limit contries' deficits, has been ignored by the bigger countries. In a way, Bolkestein's warnings understate the pressure on the euro.

As to the impending pensions crisis, it appears the only way to avoid it is to increase immigration into Europe. But that, of course, will only exacerbate the other scenario of doom - the "EU under sharia law by the mid 21st century" - a scenario tirelessly propagated by Mark Steyn.

EUobserver.com

RIP: Michael Wharton

Michael Wharton died earlier this week. He was by far the funniest writer ever to have written for the Daily Telegraph, whose pages he adorned for 49 years, writing for the Way of the World column as Peter Simple.
Telegraph News Comic fantasy of Michael Wharton comes to a close

Assisted Suicide

Boris Johnson, writing in today's Telegraph, comes out in favour of assisted suicide, partly to end the ridiculousness of British people having to go to Switzerland to kill themselves legally. Johnson rather oddly writes that his main fear about assisted suicide is that he "might change his mind" - that, at the moment of truth, he would back away from his own death, thus embarrassing himself in front of his weepy relatives. A strange preoccupation: to fear this mild level of familial embarrassment more than death itself.
Telegraph Opinion Assisted suicide is problematic, but better than months of agony

God Is Love

Here's Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est - God is love.

He writes about the many different kinds of love and, without dismissing Eros, points out that a false conception of sexual love diminshes people and turns them into mere "commodities." He makes many links to the Old Testament and to the role of Israel. He writes about the afflictions of Job and quotes St Augustine's Sermo 52:

"Si comprehendis, non est Deus"

(If you understand him, he is not God.)

He is careful to separate the role of the church from that of politics. He posits that a personal relationship with God excludes participation in terrorism.
Encyclical Letter "Deus Caritas Est"

"Human Rights Watch" Flays EU and USA

Hunan Rights Watch's new annual report lays into US abuses in the matter of alleged torture, "disappearing terror suspects" and Guantanamo Bay - as one would expect - but also rips apart any pretensions the EU might ever have had to represent even a modicum of decency in this area.

The EU's stance on Russia, China and African abuses is highlighted. The EU "made the US defence of human rights seem vigorous", the report states. It recalls the unseemly competition between Britain's Blair, France's Chirac and Germany's ex-Chancellor Schroeder over who could fawn most over Russia's President Putin, in pursuit of their respective business interests. Schroeder, of course, has since become Putin's employee, so he seems to have "won" - a standing disgrace to the German Chancellorship.

The efforts of France and Germany to lift the arms embargo on China are duly deplored. This blog waged a long, ultimately successful campaign against these disgusting designs - one supported by Richard Gere and Prince Ferfried von Hohenzollern, and given the final seal of approval by Schroeder's emphatic rejection by German voters last November. His successor, Angela Merkel, is opposed to lifting the embargo.

One episode not highlighted is the EU's stance on Cuba. As this blog first noted in February, the EU, to its shame, stopped inviting Cuban dissidents to its cocktail parties, in response to pressure from Cuba's communist dictator. Once again France was in the vanguard of the appeasers.

All in all, a pretty repulsive picture, and one not likely to win the approval of any but the most slavishly Realpolitik-minded voters.
EUobserver.com

"Society's To Blame": Time To Get Rid Of Society?

"Society's to blame" used to be the left's lazy shorthand for the causes of all crime, poverty, and social unrest. These days, it has become the lazy mantra of the right. What with all this unanimity, it's clearly time to do away with society for good.

Here is the societal mantra of today's right: "State-sponsored single parenthood and idleness, easy contraception and divorce, the effective abolition of value judgments, the undermining of the traditional nuclear family - all these were propagated by progressives and lefties and, through them, enforced by the state. The state should roll all these things back and bring back the 1950's or a more tolerant version of them."

Increasingly, also, people who would, in the past, have been on the left, (social and youth workers, teachers, for example) have started to see their old progressive agenda as a dangerous and irresponsible creed. Shaun Bailey sounds like one of them and he writes about it in today's Daily Telegraph.

The piece is persuasive and underpinned by personal experience. No-one will argue with what he describes as "common sense" - only, perhaps, with the implied means of administering it. For if the state is the only agency able to correct these wrongs, its good intentions and actionism in doing so will lead to terrible unintended consequences just as awful as the good intentions of the 60's and 70's did. Society will still be to blame.

The question to ask, in light of all this unpleasantness, is whether, in letting state policies veer us from one well-meaning platform to the next, we are surrendering the ability to live our lives separate from state meddling at all.

Margaret Thatcher is deeply unfashionable at the moment, to the extent of having been partially disowned by the new Conservative leader, David Cameron. But she saw our dilemma clearly enough, twenty years back, when she said that "there's no such thing as society". Whilst one can argue the semantics, in its essence, she was right and remains right: politics should not seek to influence an amorphous abstract ungraspable entity known as "society", but deal on a more precisely individual level, with people - families, associations and interest groups - on their own merits, and with a view to minimising any meddling in their affairs by "society" or the state.

What we need is a plan to get society off everyone's backs. Only then will society no longer be to blame - and we can get back to blaming each other instead.
Telegraph Opinion The reason our streets are so violent

Uses Of Paranoid Polemics: Al Jazeera's Ghannoushi vs Steyn

Soumaya Ghannoushi, writing in today's Al Jazeera, expresses the oppression she feels in today's Britain with its "racist agenda at home and an expansionist policy abroad."

There is paranoia in what she writes - and inaccuracy too, such as her assertion that there was no link between Saddam's Iraq and Al Qaeda - and in this paranoia she is the mirror-image of Mark Steyn, whose piece we linked to the other day. Steyn is convinced Europe will succumb to wave after wave of fast-breeding Muslim immigrants which will swamp its indigenous culture and political institutions.

If public discussion of the future of east and west were left to such polemicists, paranoia would be well-founded. Trouble is, public discussion has taken on an increasingly polemical tone of late.

Is this because partisan polemics are what people really want to read, or because polemicists of this stripe are the best writers available? Both options are depressing, if not quite depressing enough to infect the blog with a corresponding paranoia.
Aljazeera.Net - Europe vs Muslims: No Turning the Clock Back

Murdercide

Michael Shermer, in a short piece in Scientific American, coins the word "murdercide" for the actions of suicide bombers. He points out that suicide bombers aren't suicidal by the accepted definition of the word.

He also underscores the fact that "murderciders" (and it isn't a very compelling or elegant coinage, is it?) are usually well-educated, seemingly well-integrated members of society, a point which has often been made here. He recommends democracy for the Middle East as the best antidote.
Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Murdercide -- Science unravels the myth of suicide bombers

Mark Steyn Flays Cameron Diaz And Predicts Islamic European Union By 2050

Mark Steyn kicks off the new year in familiar guise, in the New Criterion, with his trusty demographic diagnosis concerning the future of Europe, which, to him, looks distinctly Islamic.

Persuasive, up to a point. Steyn says Europe will see a Muslim majority by the middle of the century. "Native" Europeans are no longer having enough babies, whilst Muslims represent the biggest growing segment of the population in many regions. Ergo, Steyn reckons, the Muslim majority will soon achieve either civil war or Sharia law.

As often, Steyn lays into liberal pieties and unwary, loose-tongued celebrities with gay abandon - Cameron Diaz gets it in the neck, and some throwaway otiosities she made are duly skewered.

Good knockabout fun. But one has to wonder whether the millions of Muslim citizens - who come to Europe to make money in an environment where it is possible for them to do so, are really clamouring to dismantle the system from which they benefit.

So how keen are Muslims to be ruled by mullahs, once they have lived in the west? It is true that westernised Muslims of the most well-integrated sort sometimes turn to Islamist jihad, as the suicide bombings in Britain last July showed. But they are a tiny minority amongst Muslims. Some would say that the riots in France this winter, which had little to do with a global jihad, show that marginalised Muslims will easily turn to violence against the laws of their host countries. But it is difficult to accept this as a model for what will happen across Europe, if only because so many Muslims are prospering here, and have been doing so for generations now.

Mark Steyn's demographic diagnosis is designed to make our flesh creep. He fails, not so much because his argument is overfamiliar, but because it is based on a false assumption: that the Muslim majority is gunning to establish shariah law across Europe. Further, Steyn discounts the effects of wealth creation on the attitudes of Muslim immigrant families. Long may they prosper.

The New Criterion ? It?s the demography, stupid

Russia Threatens To Cut Off Ukraine's Gas

As if to underscore the deep dodginess of Europe's energy supply - which is increasingly controlled by Russia - Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian energy company, has been threatening to cut off supplies to the Ukraine if it doesn't agree to an immediate fourfold increase in price.

Gazprom recently appointed ex-Chancellor Schroeder of Germany to a senior job, a reward for the way in which the tarnished German socialist politician pushed Gazprom's lucrative and controversial new pipeline deal through. In this new job, Schroeder is Putin's paid employee. The effect of the new pipeline, which is being subsidised by European taxpayers, will be to place European gas supplies at the mercy of Putin's Russia. The pipeline plan has raised much protest in Poland and the Ukraine, and it now looks as though Gazprom will be aiming to profit from increased prices across Europe.

The European Union, typically, has taken the line of least resistance, sided with the biggest political interests, and has said it would not intervene. And yet the EU - as well as the ex-Soviet states which Putin now punishes or rewards at will - would be far better advised to search out alternative sources of power, instead of placing itself at the mercy of the increasingly autocratic Putin.
Telegraph Money Russian gas war brinkmanship threatens higher energy costs in Britain

Galileo Will Undermine EU-USA Relationship

The Galileo satellite positioning system looks to be on track, following the successful launch of its first satellite, by 2008.

The Galileo project is an expression of the EU's wish to distance itself from the USA. Everyone is saying that Galileo will be more accurate thanthe US's GPS system, and how Galileo will be run by a commercial consortium, as opposed to the military. This is specious; Galileo will be used for military purposes every bit as much as GPS, and given that the governments of China, Israel and Argentina are involved, alongside the EU, the question of control over the system is never likely to be resolved. Presumably each of those countries will have some measure of control over the system.

What is likely is that if the armies of European countries start using Galileo (instead of GPS), they will be compromised in their effectiveness at fighting alongside US troops, as they will need to use both systems - a recipe duplication and confusion.

Galileo, indeed, can only be used against US troops, not alongside them. Whilst this might not prove problematic for the French or Chinese governments, it is likely to be more controversial in countries like Britain or Holland, which do not base their foreign policies purely on aggressive anti-Americanism.
EducationGuardian.co.uk Research Europe's space race with US begins

Released German Hostage: 'My Kidnappers Were Not Criminals'

Susanne Osthoff, who was held for 24 days by kidnappers before being released on December 18th has defended her abductors. "I was so happy to know I had not fallen into the hands of criminals", she told Al-Jazeera yesterday.

Frau Osthoff says her captors were seeking humanitarian aid from Germany for Iraq's Sunnis.

In Germany, nobody knows what to make of Frau Osthoff, who hasn't been in touvh with her family (including her young child) since her release. As a Muslim convert, an Arabic speaker who was married to an Iraqi, Susanne Osthoff seems to prefer Iraq to her country of birth, and this bemuses many.

Reports in the German press this morning suggest that the German government is freezing payments to charities and projects championed by Frau Osthoff - as part of a bizarre effort to get her to return to Germany. These reports seem unlikely, but show the confusion that attaches to the whole Susanne Osthoff case.
Aljazeera.Net - 'My kidnappers were not criminals'

A Questionable Assessment of Anthony Powell

Christopher Caldwell, writing in the Weekly Standard, makes some dubious assertions (amongst many good ones) about Anthony Powell's life and novels, and about the society which informed them.

Caldwell quotes with approval V.S. Pritchett's view that "the key English value" is cruelty, and that Powell expressed this in the "cruel" social system his books "remorselessly" depicted.

Caldwell, whilst disapproving of this social system, still thinks that Americans will "envy the intricacy and elaboration of a social system that can create such beautiful patterns of charm and power."

This seems precious, in a style once de rigeur amongst a certain species of Anglophile US academic - at once patronising yet forelock-tugging - and it seems to be central to Caldwell's take on Powell, on literature and society. But to hold a society as "enviable" or not in proportion to the quality of its "patterns" is to judge societies with the measuring-stick of literature (or whatever it is that elucidates those "patterns" for us) alone - a myopic venture, at best, and one to which few poets, not even Shelley's unacknowledged legislators, would subscribe.

"It is impossible," Caldwell concludes, "to write a novel of the very highest sort unless you believe that behavior is more interesting (and no more superficial) than ´what human beings are`."

In the context of literature, this is a strange and unhelpful distinction to make. Whilst the essence of what people are is clearly distinguishable from the social constructs within which they live, it is quite unnecessary for a writer to focus on one, as Caldwell suggests, at the expense of the other. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how a novelist might accomplish such a task. Later, and most embarrassingly, Caldwell seems to think that cruel social systems somehow equate to "the poetry of life". This is egregious nonsense, and Caldwell deserves a sharp rap across the knuckles for purveying it in the course of his otherwise entertaining piece.
PREVIEW: Anthony Powell's Century

Iran Bans Western Music

Holocaust-denying, Israel-off-the-map-wiping, cartoon-villain Iranian President Ahmadinejad has unleashed his latest weapon in the war on the west: he has called for the enactment of a ban on "indecent and Western" music.

Western music was first banned by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 but it managed to return to Iran after the tyrant's death. President Ahmadinejad, however, clearly feels that music is too dangerous to be allowed to pollute his country further.
CNN.com - Iran bans Western music - Dec 19, 2005

Return Of "Class War" In Britain: Prescott Weighs In

In an interview in today's Sunday Telegraph, John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister of the UK, claims that his party is "always better fighting class". Prescott attacks plans to reform schools and bring back an element of competition for places. He says that parents will want their children to go to good schools and he clearly considers this dangerous. He also mocks the new Conservative leader's background as an Old Etonian.

In lashing out in this way Prescott reminds one of another cerebrally-challenged political bruiser, Franz Müntefering of the German socialists. Müntefering attacked "capitalist locusts" for Germany's economic troubles.

Both of these men are unabashed throwbacks and both are capable of inspiring a small measure of atavistim, a yearning to return to simpler days of "class enemies" and denunciations. But is there any point to such statements, given that their constituency appears to be shrinking?

Telegraph News Class war: Prescott attacks Blair's education reforms and Cameron's 'Eton Mafia'

Cartoonist Describes President Bush As Literally "A Chimp"

A bizarre piece by Steve Bell, the left-wing cartoonist, in which he suggests that President Bush is a chimpanzee because of his closeness to God: Guardian Unlimited Special reports 'How often does a leader of the free world come along who resembles a monkey in every particular?'

"His (Bush's) confidence in his line of communication with the Almighty is total for the very simple reason that he knows he is God, and that is his most chimp-like feature."

As a blog-of-the-world, we read reams of sorry drivel on a daily basis with no undue squeamishness. But we still wonder how something as half-witted, unfunny and nonsensical as this can get published in a national British newspaper.

Harold Pinter's Nobel Acceptance Speech Flayed

Professor Niall Ferguson lays into Harold Pinter's lazy anti-American relativism in today's Sunday Telegraph. Telegraph Opinion Do the sums, then compare US and Communist crimes from the Cold War

Ex-Chancellor Schroeder Rewarded With Job By Putin

When ex-Chancellor Schroeder was in office, this blog often wondered what motivated his mean-minded attitudes in relation to the USA, on the war on terror, and to the "new" eastern European countries which questioned Schroeder's anti-American stance. It also mystified us that Schroeder should be so adamant that Russia was a "perfect democracy" ("lupenreine Demokratie") when evidence from Chechnya and show-trials of billionaires who'd got on the wrong side of the President suggested otherwise.

Now, two short weeks after Schroeder left the Chancellory, things are becoming clearer. He has just accepted a job from President Vladimir Putin to help run the Russian energy company Gazprom. Gazprom hugely benefited from the Schroeder-Putin friendship, which prepared the ground for it to build a vast 1200 kilometre, 5 billion euro undersea pipeline to supply Germany with gas. Controversially, the new pipeline will supersede existing pipelines, which run through the Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The Poles are especially worried that they will be cut out of the future gas supply.

When it was first rumoured that Schroeder was in line for such a job, back in October, his henchmen rubbished the rumours! "Baseless speculation" ("haltlose Spekulation"), commented the government spokesman Bela Anda. "It isn't true." "A vile rumour" ("ein übles Gerucht"), said SPD General Secretary Benneter.

Back then, the people around him could see Schroeder's acceptance of this post as scandalous - likely to tarnish not merely his personal reputation, but also the political path by which this controversial project came to fruition - a path tarnishing also those who merely tolerated it. It's a shame that they could not cut through Schroeder's greed to make him see that too. But the news helps put some of the more disgraceful actions of Schroeder's government in a much clearer light. And Schroeder's departure, true to form, has done as much to corrupt the Chancellorship as his occupancy of it.

Abu Qatada Begs "Swords Of Righteousness" To Release Christian Peace Activists

Abu Qatada, an Islamist "firebrand" awaiting deportation from Britain to Jordan, has made a video appeal beseeching the Swords of Righteousness terrorist group to release four Christian peace activists kidnapped in Iraq, "in accordance with the fundamental principle of mercy of our faith."

These video appeals are becoming more and more commonplace. Gerhard Schroeder, recently ejected Chancellor of Germany, has recorded a similar appeal on behalf of the German activist Susanne Osthoff.

The blog prays for the survival of all hostages in Iraq, but can't help wonder whether high-profile media appeals such as these - made by such questionable people - are really motivated by noble fellow-feeling, or rather by a concern to showcase the men making the appeals in a flattering spotlight.

Telegraph News Islamic firebrand pleads for release of British hostage

Iraqi Author Fadhil Rashad Accuses George Galloway Of "Robbing The Iraqi People" And Warns Him That He Will Be Tried

"Gorgeous" George Galloway, the British Labour MP, was for years a public apologist for Saddam Hussein and his dictatorship. He has remained a high-profile opponent of Saddam's toppling and efforts to make Iraq's new democracy a success. Allegations that Galloway benefitted from the UN's corrupt "Oil for Food" programme have been widespread. So far none of them has stuck. But now Iraqi writer Fadhil Rashad has warned Galloway that he will face charges in Iraq. It would certainly be appropriate for Galloway to be tried in Iraq - rather than, say the USA or the UK itself - for his alleged misdemeanours. It would also enable him to be punished in accordance with a system of law more congenial to him than our western one.

In the UK or a European court, Galloway would probably get off scot-free, or with a rap on the knuckles at best. In the US, it is most unlikely that he would be fried or given a lethal injection. But in Iraq, the odds on Galloway being hanged or shot would be much more sporting. And Mr Rashad's charge against Galloway - of "robbing the Iraqi people" - sounds like he means business. The blog wishes Mr Rashad all the best in his quest for justice, truth and retribution.

MEMRI: Latest News

David Cameron Elected Leader Of British Conservatives

David Cameron, the new leader of the Tories, wants to recapture the centre ground for the British Conservative Party. The question is whether he can do so whilst keeping the Conservatives conservative. So far, Cameron has given few clues as to his true orientation on such divisive matters as the European Union, the euro, and taxation.

Still, his supporters are intoxicated with a sense of new possibilities. Cameron is a media-friendly performer whom everyone is greeting with relief as a plausible potential Prime Minister. Cameron makes no bones about his admiration for Tony Blair's rebranding of the old Labour Party into New Labour, and would love to emulate that reconnecting gambit with the Tories. The "Notting Hill Tories" Cameron personifies represent a younger brand of would-be "inclusive" politically-correct conservatism. This has been espoused by a new generation of Tories, one in some ways reassuringly traditional in terms of social background.

Cameron is the first Old Etonian leader of the Tories since Alec Douglas-Home over 40 years ago. As with many Etonians, Cameron's surface smoothy-chops charm overlays a seam of seemingly self-satisfied smugness. But that may be a superficial judgment.
Telegraph News The new boy v yesterday's men

Kamikaze Pilots and Suicide Bombers

Yuki Tanaka, writing in Japan Focus, makes some comparisons between the Japanese kamikaze pilots of WWII and today's suicide bombers. He believes both groups were and are motivated primarily by a desire to protect their homelands, and that religious justifications essentially do no more than provide a structure and rationalisation for deeds impelled by despair. He also says that the "state terrorism" of bombing civilians, both during WWII and currently in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq, should deserve at least equal opprobrium. He sees "state terrorism" of this sort as morally equivalent to suicide bombing.

This strikes the blog as signally unconvincing. Today's suicide bombers are attacking democratic states, they're intent on forcing those states to act against their own interests. "State terrrorism" - a highly sententious description of the military actions of Israel and the USA in the Middle East - is aimed at protecting or extending democracy.

That both kinds of violence kill innocent people is undeniable, but the difference is that while suicide bombers deliberately target innocents, the so-called "state terrorism" of USA and Israeli governments bends over backwards to avoid them. Voters would soon turn against governments guilty of gross contempt for civilian life.

No such sanction, needless to say, applies to the sponsors of suicide bombers.
Japan Focus Article

Europe, Austerlitz And The Holy Roman Empire

On the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz - the victory which allowed Napoleon to destroy the Holy Roman Empire - Niall Ferguson draws some parallels between that empire and the European Union. He detects the roots of Europe's dirigisme in the Napoleonic period, and suggests that Britain escaped it because the Channel held back the Corsican adventurer's armies. Ferguson ends somewhat apocalyptically, wondering who will emerge to sweep away the EU, as Napoleon removed the old order, only to replace it with his own brand of morally-self-congratulatory despotism.

Full article in today's Sunday Telegraph: Telegraph Opinion Boney's ghost is haunting Blair (but look closely and you might see it weeping)

How European "Moral Outrage" Is A Front For Anti-Americanism: An American View

Whilst most of the moral outrage expressed by European governments and insitutions is outright hypocrisy, it is often also the expression of a burgeoning anti-Americanism, according to today's Wall Street Journal: OpinionJournal - Featured Article

Weaker Gulf Stream May Freeze Europe

Scientists have been collecting data in the Atlantic Ocean about the Gulf stream, the current which brings northern Europe a much warmer climate than it would otherwise have. Their tentative findings suggest that the Gulf Stream may be in significant decline. They are also careful to say that it could just be a glitch in the data, however.

Report in today's Guardian:Guardian Unlimited Special reports Alarm over dramatic weakening of Gulf Stream

German Aid Worker Abducted In Nineveh

Terrorists kidnapped 43 year old archeologist and aid worker Susanne Osthoff last Friday in the Iraqi province of Nineveh. Yesterday morning, the Baghdad office of German TV station ARD received a video from the abductors, a still from which has been released to this morning's press.

Frau Osthoff is by all accounts a brave woman. She has put years of work into Iraq (on behalf of the Medeor charity, and previously on archeological digs), converted to Islam and married a Jordanian. She is the first German victim of Islamist kidnapping.

As this morning's Rheinische Post comments on the motivation of the kidnappers: "If they are really struggling against western civilisation, politics and dominance, an anti-war, Arab-supporting German convert to Islam ought to come last on their list of targets."

But whilst this reaction may feel right, it is way off the mark. The Islamists want to kill off the pacifist German approach to life as much as the more aggressive Anglo-Saxon version.

Social Worker Flays "Liberal" Values

Shaun Bailey, a social worker, describes how liberal pieties have destroyed communities and the prospects of kids brought up on sink estates, such as the one in North Kensington where he himself grew up. He pleads for the family, for traditional patriotic and moral values, and the reassumption of personal responsibility. His pamphlet (no Man's Land: how Britain's Inner City Youth Are Being Failed) is published today by the Centre for Policy Studies.

Such first-hand analysis, with similarly conservative conclusions, has been available for years, from the likes of Theodore Dalrymple, the prison doctor, for example. But it's refreshing to hear from a social worker, a tribe traditionally keener on the "society's to blame" angle.

Focus: My battle with liberal Britain - Sunday Times - Times Online

Ni Putes Ni Soumises ("Neither Whores Nor Doormats")

A march today through Neuilly-sur-Marne is organised by the Ni Putes ni soumises movement (roughly translated as "Neither whores nor doormats"), in support of Chahrazad Belayni, an eighteen year old girl set alight on November 13th by her spurned, would-be husband, a Pakistani workmate, who is now on the run.

Link to Ni Putes ni Soumises site (English version): presentationanglais

Angela Merkel's Travels (And Her Limits)

As soon as Angela Merkel was inaugurated as Chancellor of Germany, she went to Paris - as all her post-war predecessors have done. Unlike them, however, she left France, shortly after the Elyseean hand-kiss, for Belgium, to see EU Commission President Barroso, NATO boss Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and even the Belgian PM. She will be in Britain today to see Tony Blair.

Everyone assumes that Merkel is signalling that the Franco-German-Russian axis -which did so much damage under ex-Chancellor Schroeder and ex-Foreign Minister Fischer - will no longer determine German foreign policy. Merkel, apparently, was also keen to visit Poland as part of her inaugural trip, and was prevented only by Warsaw diary problems. This suggests that she is keen to get the smaller, newer, more vital European nations back on side, after their repeated rebuffs at the hands of the Franco-German-Russian axis.

She is limited in what she can do: hemmed in on all sides by her socialist SPD partners in the grand colaition. Her Foreign Minister is an SPD man called Steinmeier, who worked for Schroeder and will not countenance any major shift away from Germany's pusillanimous foreign policy. This pusaillanimity took hold under the previous government, and most German voters seem to support it, if only because nobody, except for President Bush, has been bold enough to articulate an alternative. But Bush is widely loathed here, mostly on "cretinous trigger-happy cowboy" grounds (exactly the same way Ronald Reagan was perceived during his presidencies), and noone really understands, let alone buys into, his anti-terrorism doctrine.

Under Merkel, Germany's foreign policy focus will free itself of Schroeder's shortsighted French fixation, and she will desist from the anti-American posturing which so disfigured Schroeder and Fischer's tenure. Germany assumes the EU Presidency in 2007, so these small signs of opening up to the outside world are mildly encouraging for proponents of such things as reform of the EU budget, including the ludicrous CAP system, a more Atlanticist foreign policy, and integration of the new, eastern EU countries.

But the important socialists in Merkel's government, such as the rabid anti-capitalist demagogue Müntefering, who is vice-Chancellor, will probably see to it that she can't book any notable successes on these fronts. This is a dispiriting but fair reflection of Germany's election results, which didn't give Merkel the mandate to do more.

Morocco

The blog is off to Morocco for a couple of weeks, searching for sun and truth.

As French Car- and Kindergarten-Burning Continues, Berliners Stage Copycat Violence

The French unrest continues into its 12th successive day, and has just claimed its first life. Thousands of cars across France have been burned, alongside a few kindergartens and the inevitable McDonald's. The rioters are testing the strength of the rule of the law they so despise. Al-Jazeera says that a copycat action may have occurred in Berlin early this morning, with five cars torched, but the German press haven't yet picked up on that. But it seems that the French example may yet inflame the rage of lawless Muslims - and their lawless Western allies - elsewhere in Europe.

This does not appear at first sight to be Islamist violence, but of course it is: it is low-level civil unrest of the sort that has been simmering away for years and is now happening on a bigger scale than we have seen before. The French rioters are overwhelmingly (if not exclusively) Muslim. If they are not motivated directly by jihadist emotions, the idea of jihad does inform their actions, giving it a broader context than mere tedium or frustration.

The question is what effect, if any, French political incompetence, dithering and overreaction may now have.

It seems Interior Minister Nicolas "Sarko" Sarkozy is most interested in building his presidential standing by placating petit-bourgeois xenophobia. The trouble is not that he described the rioters as "scum", for scum is only an accurate term of mild disapprobation. The trouble is that the epithet is assumed to refer to all Muslims, rather than to the relatively small number of malcontents. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, meanwhile, is more interested in appearing statesmanlike by appeasing the rioters. Chirac has been sitting on his hands so far, more interested in seeing the outcome of the struggle between his would-be successors than in restoring peace to the streets of the banlieux.

And this is all wrong. Now would surely be the ideal time to get law-abiding Muslims on-side. That doesn't mean treating the scummy rioters with kid gloves, but it does mean unambiguously standing up for the rule of law. Another problem is the prissy political correctness under which the rioters are never referred to (by politicians or on the media) as Muslims - as if ignoring this reality is in any way helpful. The council of Muslim organisations has been firmer and less-mealy mouthed than most: it has issued a fatwa against the rioters and affirmed that their actions are against Islam. This is much to be welcomed.

This wave of futile violence is terrible not just for France but for all of Europe. For all over Europe we share a fatal tendency to shut our eyes to actual and potential Islamist outrages, pretending that we can wish the problems of Muslim immigration away. But they won't be wished away, not in our lifetimes.

Aljazeera.Net - Police shot, wounded in France unrest

Beginning of the End for Blair?

Over in the UK, David Blunkett, the minister for Work and Pensions, resigned yesterday - for the second time, despite Tony Blair's urging him to stay. Blunkett felt that his latest scandal - a failure to declare his holdings in a controversial DNA company he joined whilst he was out of office - was taking too much attention away from government. Blunkett is always said to be a key Blair ally but this is his second mistake (his first was fast-tracking his nanny's immigration papers when he was Home Secretary) and given Blair's current weakness he really had to go.

Blair received a second blow when a clause in his draft anti-terrorism legislation - the so-called "glorification" clause (clamping down on public expressions of support for terrorism), was passed by only a single vote in the House of Commons yesterday. It was pointed out that Cheire Blair herself could be prosecuted under this ruling - she once said she could understand why Palestinians would become suicide bombers. The government was forced to back down on the infamous proposal that terrorist suspects should be held in custody for up to 90 days without charges being brought.

Simon Hoggart writing in today's Guardian detects signs that even Blair's own MP's are beginning to "enjoy" the process of dismembering their leader.Guardian Unlimited Politics Special Reports Simon Hoggart's sketch

RIP: Theo van Gogh

Today is the first anniversary of the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam.

The murderer is now in gaol with a life sentence. People say that Dutch society changed radically since the murder; this is probably exaggerated. At any rate, even a few months ago there were plenty of young Muslims in Holland who were happy to support the murder.

The blog hasn't yet seen any ideas on how to quell the support of "integrated" western Muslims for the murderous barbarism of al-Qaeda. Van Gogh's murder, like the London bombings in July, was the quintessential expression of this barbarism - and both attacks were pepetrated by seemingly well-integrated, well-educated young men, thriving in the societies they seek to destroy.

Osama Bin Laden In His Own Write

Bruce B. Lawrence writes about Osama bin Laden's public ejaculations. The one attractive feature of this fanatic's style is that bin Laden writes in an antiquated, neo-classical Arabic, and often coins rhyming verses to spread his message.

He believes killing women and children is an acceptable response to the "Judeo-Christian Crusade" which has been launched, apparently, against Islam. Bin Laden is a nihilist, who wishes to destroy societies on earth in anticipation of heavenly delights after death. He isn't interested in improving conditions for the people left alive on earth.

His rejection of the modern world, and the purist simplicity of his destructive urges, may seem romantic, and attract adolescent malcontents eager to die for a cause, to give meaning to their lives by violently denying it to others.

His use of the Koran and the writings of distinguished Muslims is subtle and polemical; his use of modern media, especially Al-Jazeera but also Islamist websites, has given his words a wider audience than would have been possible a decade ago.

It's still astounding, though, that a psychopathic mass-murdering nihilist should be taken so seriously, beyond the confines of some sick computer game.

The Chronicle: 11/4/2005: In Bin Laden's Words

Germany's Putatative Coalition Undermined By Resurgence of Hard-Left Within Socialist Party: Chairman Müntefering Resigns

German politics, opaque enough at the best of times, is in even more of a mess than normal.

Admittedly the Chancellor-elect, Angela Merkel, has seen off the preposterous Chancellor Schroeder - who somehow persuaded himself, in the face of his election defeat, that he remained the only man to lead the country. After a few weeks of populist posturing, he finally had the grace to back off.

So under Angela Merkel's leadership, the centrist CDU/CSU duly set to cobbling together a government with the socialist SPD. The socialists, for their part, were fronted by the notorious Chairman Müntefering. "Münte" as he is known in Germany, has long been a bug-bear of this blog for his advocacy of undiluted socialist dogma - command economy, denunciations of evil international Jewish capitalists and all - to solve Germany's dire economic plight.

Yesterday, however, this mastadon of the left announced his resignation. His nominee for the post of SPD General Secretary had just been defeated by an even more hard left candidate, an ambitious woman called Andrea Nehles. The rebuke from his own party was too much and "Münte" has chucked the chairmanship, although he claims to want to continue putting the coalition together.

But his resignation obviously throws into the deepest doubt Müntefering's ability to represent the SPD in coalition negotiations, let alone serve in a putative Merkel cabinet, so the future of the coalition is now in doubt. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Merkel's centrist partner, Edmund Stoiber of the CSU, may use Müntefering's exit as an excuse to withdraw from his (putative) role as trade and technology minister in Merkel's (putative) cabinet. Ironically, this will strengthen Merkel, as Stoiber is a very uncomfortable partner, touchy about not being number 1, and given to embarrassing outbursts about the innate superiority of his native Bayern and the inferiority of the east and so on.

But the return of the leftists within the SPD is the most immediately worrying thing for Merkel. Even if the "grand coalition" survives, its policy formulation and ability to govern will be made much harder given a resurgent left.

Should it all come unstuck, the likely date for new elections is 26th March 2006, the date on which regional elections will be held in Baden-Württemberg, Rheinland-Pfalz and Sachsen-Anhalt.

"Are We Beasts?" - RIP Dresden 1945

"Are we beasts?" Churchill cried out when he first saw photographs of the devastation caused by the bombing of civilian targets in 1943.

His question is especially pertinent in light of the bombing of Dresden, late in the war, apparently at the urging of the Russians, an act from which Bomber Command subsequently sought to distance itself.

Even in those less squeamish times, the toll of 60,000 dead - mostly women and children, many of them refugees - caused widespread revulsion, even (or perhaps especially) amongst those who ordered it.

The answer to Churchill's question appears to be, "Yes, 'we' are beasts (indeed, our capacity for large-scale, indiscriminate murder puts us in another context altogether from the merely beastly) - but we probably had to be in order to win the war."

The restoration and rededication of Dresden's Frauenkirche yesterday, more than 60 years after its destruction, marks an opportunity to mourn those thousands of innocents who died in the ruins of Europe during the 1939 war.

Telegraph Opinion Necessary or not, Dresden remains a topic of anguish

The Horrors of English Humour - A.A. Gill On English Rage

"English comedy is war by other means," writes A.A. Gill in today's Sunday Times. "Most people share a joke, the English aim them."

Gill, a Scot who's spent all his life in England (and has no plans to move away), cannot reconcile himself to his Englishness. He thinks (for example) that the English ability to invent sports (and the codes which govern them), springs - as English humour and snobbery do - from an urge to suppress a very English, brutal rage.

In this suppression of rage we find the greatness of the English , Gill reckons. This may be so, for all we know. The rage in his condemnation seems a little half-hearted (maybe all too Caledonian), all the same.

I hate England - Review - Times Online

Chirac Allies Sentenced In French Corruption Trials

The Daily Telegraph writes about the many sleazy senior political allies of President Chirac who were yesterday sentenced for corruption. The case focussed on kickbacks received by the politicians - for school building contracts.

Chirac's RPR party was the principal beneficiary, leading a defence lawyer to comment on the "empty chairs" in the courtroom, one of which, he suggested, should be filled by "the president whose name we dare not utter."

Telegraph News President's men tumble in Chirac sleaze trial

Iraqis Approve Draft Constitution

Everyone - well, everyone who's bothered to notice it - is being very downbeat about the approval of the Iraqi constitution by Iraqi voters. But the fact that a majority of Sunnis have now bought into the idea of a federal Iraq is surely news of unalloyed excellence, removing one of the most-cited justifications of the Islamist jihad, which was that the Sunnis were being excluded from the political process.

This signal from the Sunnis, that they would prefer to participate in setting up a federal democracy, added to Saddam Hussein's upcoming trial, are two huge milestones, and anyone would've thought they deserved a little more recognition than they're getting.

Guardian Unlimited Special reports A small and fragile step forward

European "Transparency" Proposals Shelved

Siim Kallas' plans for greater transparency concerning European Union farm subsidies and lobbying "gifts", which were due to have been adopted by the EU Commission yesterday, were taken off the agenda at the last minute.

A spokeswoman for Jose Manuel Barroso, the Commission President, said this was due to practical considerations about how to implement the proposal, rather than to substantive objections to its spirit.

A move to transparency in the matter of subsidies has already been started in Denmark and Holland. In Denmark, where getting the information from the government proved an Herculean task, the Danes learned that the great majority of EU subsidies went to the likes of an ex-minister for food and agriculture, the current farm Commissioner, the royal family and big corporations like Danisco.

Unsurprisingly, such revelations are terrible PR for the EU's discredited CAP policy, and for its lacklustre reputation for combatting fraud. To stymie Kallas' modest proposal may keep the lid on the whole sorry business a bit longer, but sooner or later the EU's supine toleration of corruption is going to backfire on all those who benefit from it.

EUobserver.com

Margot Wallström's "Plan D" for the EU Commission

Claude de Bigny, the blog's irrepressible historical correspondent, has been mixing it over at Margot Wallström's blog (Margot Wallstrom, a Swedish politician whom many suspect of wishing to leave Brussels to return to Stockholm, is the EU Communications Commissioner).

Today Margot writes about the long comment threads which are such an attractive feature of her blog, as they are written by a cross-section of people, most, if not all, confirmed Eurosceptics. Amongst them is a fair smattering of Little Englanders who continuously berate Margot for being, as they say, a moron, an evil, unelected bureaucrat with sinister power over every little aspect of their lives.. Margot today refers to a question which Claude de Bigny has been posing of late - whether her much-vaunted "Plan D" for democracy and so on, is a genuine listening exercise, or merely a "closed" PR exercise.

Some of the Eurosceptics, notably Dr Richard North, are refusing to join in the debate about the future of the EU because they say the EU is not democratic and must, therefore, "be destroyed". This stance upsets Claude as it seems to leave no other option but armed insurrection, a kind of wilful intemperacy which is not at all to de Bigny's fastidious taste.

Margot comments on Claude's question as follows:

" The exchange I found the most interesting recently is between Claude and some others. He says that perhaps some ‘eurosceptics‘ (still don‘t like that term) prefer to stay out of the mainstream and continue to sneer from the sideline in a superior way. I could say today is Wednesday and some people would say that was the fault of the EU and that I am an unelected bureaucrat.

"Claude asks if it is naïve to take me at my word about Plan D. Might Plan D cause a radically different model for the EU to emerge? I don‘t know Claude, but my intention is certainly that this listening to what citizens have to say should be real and should be a serious exercise, with a follow-up. It can not be just “bla bla”."

The challenge is now for the Eurosceptics to show that they are not Euronihilists. The challenge for Margot Wallström is to deliver a debate that is as open and radical in its terms of reference as she implies she is up for.

EUROPA - Margot Wallstr?m, Vice-President of the European Commission: my blog

The Psychological Make-up of a Suicide Bomber

In The Psychological Make-up of a Suicide Bomber: , Joan Lachkar writes:

"Suicide bombers share many of the group dynamics of gang members. They are highly traumatized children who have been abandoned, have had severe losses, have been betrayed, and have been raised by unavailable or absent caretakers (alcoholic, abusive or violent parents). They grow up with endless, relentless rage, shame, and humiliation. Their most dominant feature is the desire to retaliate, get even, find a scapegoat (the police, a school principal, a teacher, a vulnerable new kid in the block, a victim on whom to project their most vulnerable parts."

Sounds plausible, up to a point. But only up to a point, and its very plausibility betrays its weakness, trying to explain the irrational in the easily understood terminolgy of a rational bien-pensant. And it flies in the face of what has been a central learning of recent suicide bombings and attacks in the west: - that perpetrators are often seemingly well-adjusted, non-traumatised members of the societies they want to destroy.

The blog thinks it's time for a revised psychological model to explain that fact - or, perhaps better, an admission that long-established psychological preconceptions cannot adequately explain - let alone deal with - this mentality of evil nihilism.

In Memoriam: Balthasar Oomkens von Esens

Claude de Bigny, the blog's historical correspondent, writes:

Today is the 465th anniversary of the death of Balthasar Oomkens von Esens, Lord of Harlingerland, during the siege of Esens by troops of Bremen in 1540.

Balthasar was the son of Hero Oomkens the Younger von Esens (+1522) and Irmgard (or Armgard) Countess of Oldenburg.

He was first cousin to the King of Denmark and a descendant of an old Frisian landowning family which was also involved, after the manner of the time, in maritime trade - otherwise described, by unkind critics, as "piracy" or freebooting. The arrangement was that the lord would commission seamen to carry out raids or boardings of "enemy" ships. This practice aroused the ire of the Hanseatic cities, such as Groningen, Hamburg and Bremen, which fell victim to it (although they were involved in similar piracy themselves).

On one occasion, a crew of 50 "pirates" commissioned by Balthasar fell into the hands of the Bremen city authorities, who in a disgusting act of legal murder, beheaded all of the men. Balthasar's rage was such that he in his turn - according to some historians - beheaded the Bremen hostages held by him in Harlingerland, as was his right.

The County of Harlingerland, which came to Balthasar as a mixed patri- and matrimony, comprised the lordships of Esens, Stedesdorf and Wittmund and had first been pulled together into a single lordship by Balthasar's grandfather, Sibet Attena von Esens. The strand which runs through the lives of both Balthasar and his father, Hero Oomkens the Younger, was that of protecting the ancient liberty of Harlingerland against the depredations of the Cirksena family, which attempted to subjugate the historically free Frisian lands from the late fifteenth century.

Both Hero and Balthasar conducted innumerable campaigns to uphold this ancient tradition of freedom and independence, a struggle which was ultimately successful, albeit at a high price.

There is a picturesque legend associated with Balthasar. During an earlier siege of his residence-city of Esens, a musician and his dancing bear were caught in the city. As the siege wore on, provisions ran out and the people were close to starvation. The bear, who had been put into a tower cellar under the city walls, was quite forgotten. In due course, the bear's hunger and frustration became unbearable, as it were, and he broke out of the cellar and started to climb up towards the light.

When he got to the top of the tower, the bear roared out his displeasure and in his confusion his paws dislodged some of the stones from the old city walls, casting them out towards the besieging army. When the besiegers saw this crazed bear roaring and hurling stones at them from the tower, they thought that if the people of Esens had enough food to feed the bear, they must have plenty for themselves, and could probably withstand a much longer siege. The soldiers were also none too keen on facing this manic beast in close combat, so they called off the siege and decamped.

The citizens of Esens led the bear back down the tower and fed him a meal fit for heroes, and adopted him as the symbol of their city, something he remains to this day (he is in the coat of arms of Esens, of Harlingerland (Wittmund district) and East Frisia).

Balthasar Oomkens von Esens died in a later siege. He died childless, so the inheritance passed through his sisters, Onna (or Anna) and Adelaide. Onna married Otto von Rietberg, and Adelaide married her distant cousin, a descendant of Tancko Omcken (also known as Tancko Oomkens van Ommeland), who lived in the family heartland , the Oldambt, in the Ommelanden of Groningen. Although the family no longer have a direct connection to Esens, their descendants are thriving in Holland today. Balthasar, for his part, is honoured with a yearly festival in his name, "Das Jünker Balthasar Fest".

Razzia Against Hell's Angels in Holland

The Dutch police are on a roll. Having just made a mass-arrest of Al-Qaeda-linked Hofstad group members, they have now arrested 45 Hell's Angels across Holland. This represents a quarter of the Dutch Hell's Angels membership, apparently.

The Angels are involved in the drugs trade and also stand accused of extortion and weapons smuggling. Police secured a bazooka, hand grenades and an assortment of automatic weapons during the raids.

Thousands of police have been involved in the crackdown at dozens of locations across Holland. It's a big and necessary change from previous official policy - until quite recently, Hell's Angels were a subsidised minority grouping, with state-supported clubhouses and so forth. Putting them in jail seems a much better use of taxpayers' money.

Link to Volkskrant article (in Dutch):de Volkskrant - Kwart van Angels opgepakt bij actie

Ophover Motte, Wegberg, October 2005

IMG_1323, originally uploaded by Claude de Bigny.

Claude de Bigny, the blog's historical correspondent, who periodically posts on miscellaneous subjects here, has been visiting the old Wegberger Land (part of the Carolingian Mühlgau) in the Rhineland. He has been doing ancestral research in that quarter, and has discovered some little-known but interesting archeological sites, including a selection of mottes. He writes:

"The Ophover Motte is one of three mottes in Wegberg/Beeck, all of which were constructed in the late 10th/early 11th century. Unusually, all three have survived, albeit in a state not instantly identifiable as ancient fortifications. Whilst the other two are scarcely recognisable at all, being surrounded by thick woodland, the Ophover Motte is integrated into a public park - easily accessible and, with a little imagination, recognisable as a motte.

"It is highly probable this defensive network was commissioned by Gerhard (and/or his brother Rutger) d'Antoing von Wassenberg, whom the Saint-Emperor Henry II granted extensive lands in the Niederrhein between 1020 and 1024. In return for the grant of estates and lordships, the brothers were charged with keeping the peace in this anarchic area during a time of unrest.

"These holdings were originally centred around Wassenberg, and it is highly likely they also included the nearby "Wegberger Land".

"Whilst Gerhard's descendants became the Earls (later Dukes) of Gelre (Gelderland), Rutger's succeeded to the earldom (later dukedom) of Cleve. Wegberg remained part of the Gelre estates until recent times. The forests nearby were used as the earl's hunting grounds. And the river Schwalm, which was the old border between the dukedom of Gelre and the neighboring dukedom of Jülich, runs right through the centre of Wegberg.

"In line with this descendancy, it seems likeliest that Gerhard d'Antoing van Wassenberg was responsible for the three Wegberg mottes - this one, which is close by the old Ophoven mill, the one near the Beeck manor house, and the one in the woods between them - even though this isn't directly affirmed by contemporary documentation. What is certain is that he was responsible for appointing the motte at Wassenberg as his family's seat, and the place from which he took his original earldom.

"Further mottes in the area include the famous Alde Berg near Arsbeck (possibly also built by Gerhard d'Antoing van Wassenberg, although later associated with the Helpenstein family), which is the largest in the Niederrhein; the island-motte of Tüschenbroich; and numerous others, including an overgrown, scarcely identifiable motte north-east of Wegberg and another just south of Arsbeck.

"In all honesty, a taste for mottes is hardly widespread, but this landscape is profusely studded with their remains. They are agreeably low-key places - with nothing to identify them as historic monuments, aside from the atmosphere of abandoned timelessness which infuses them."

Claude de Bigny, October 2005.

Seven Islamists Arrested in Holland In Preemptive Strike

The Dutch police have arrested seven Islamist members of the Hofstad group in Amsterdam, The Hague, Leiden and Almere in a preemptive action to prevent them assassinating unnamed politicians in the Dutch Parliament. The likely targets would be the MP's Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who wrote the script for assassinated director Theo van Gogh's Submission) and Geert Wilders, another prominent anti-Islamist politician.

At least two of the arrested would-be terrorists had been arrested before but let go due to lack of evidence. No gunshots were fired but the security forces blew up a door in The Hague.

Neighbours of one of the men in The Hague - a married Moroccan with a Surinamese wife and a child - described him as "very nice".

Assuming a major terrorist outrage has truly been prevented, the Dutch are to be congratulated. Furthermore, it seems that letting suspected Islamists go when there is insufficient evidence to try them may be a better idea than suspending habeas corpus to keep them cooped up - an identified suspect on the loose may lead the police to further suspects or, as in this case, specific plots.

Pinter's Prize

The blog is in several minds about the award of the Nobel literature prize to Harold Pinter, an obnoxious lefty actor who turned his hand to play-writing in the sixties.

On the one hand, he is a bolshy luvvie pontificator of the most objectionable kind.

Then again, there's a hint of good old-fashioned social ambition about him - shacking up with Lady Antonia Fraser, a beautiful, charming aristocrat. He is also unapologetically English, something not often seen in the purlieux of the left. Moreover, he's had considerable commercial success with his writing and appears relaxed about his wealth. All this is greatly to his credit.

The plays, of course, are the thing. They appear to be Beckettian gloom-fests, capable of raising a few laughs, but in the blog's limited experience, have neither amused nor disturbed. But thousands would disagree, amongst them, we now see, the bien-pensant, left-leaning panel of Nobel judges.

Socialist Deadbeats Nominated For Key German Government Posts

The three new socialist cabinet German minister-candidates put forward by the SPD today to serve in Angela Merkel's coalition government are truly awful news for Germany's prospects.

Worst of all is Franz Müntefering, who is lined up to be employment minister. This unreconstructed Marxist polemicist became notorious earlier this year when he seemed to blame Jewish capitalists - rather than 8 years' rule by the SPD (of which he is Chairman) - for Germany's economic woes. Chairman Müntefering described capitalists as "locusts" and drew up a list of largely Jewish companies to act as scapegoats. Despite widespread protests, Müntefering remained shameless and unrepentant.

The SPD-proposed Foreign Minister is ex-Chancellor Schroeder's long-term aide, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who can be expected to maintain Schroeder's policy of lining up with the French and Russians against the USA, to push for lifting the arms embargo against China and other such policies.

The finance minister will be Peter Steinbruck, whom voters kicked out of office as prime minister of Nordrhein-Westphalen earlier this year and who will perpetuate the policies that gave Germany's largest state's highest-ever numbers of unemployed.

If these appointments go through (and nothing suggests they won't), it looks like Angela Merkel's coalition government is set for a truly appalling start.

EUobserver.com

The Genetic Roots of Religious Belief

Robert Winston sets out some interesting thoughts on how religious belief may be a part of our genetic make-up, and how religion may have helped early human societies to suvive better than non-religious societies. He also mentions some smallscale qualitative research amongst identical twins (conducted by Thomas Bouchard) which suggests that the religious impulse is driven more by genetic make-up than by environment.

Winston refers to the difference between "extrinsic" and "intrinsic" religious practice, a distinction first mooted by Harvard psycholgist Gordon Allport in the 1950's. "Extrinsic" religion, Allport proposed, is practised primarily to further an individual's social goals; "intrinsic" religion is an ordering principle of life. Not surprisingly, the fomer is associated with higher levels of guilt and shame, whilst the more spiritual "intrinsics" appear to have lower levels of stress.

Bouchard's research with the identical twins (aside from being purely qualitative) seems to me to raise more questions than it answers. For if the religious impule is indeed genetically useful - rather than, as Richard Dawkins seems to suggest, an "evolutionary disaster area" - it is so primarily at the level of the group, rather than the individual. This would suggest it would be handed down the generations through social interaction, tradition and education, rather than through an individual's genes. Yet the identical twin study suggests that the generational handing down of the religious impulse is genetic more than environmental.

Aside from that, these ideas about religion seem commonsensical enough. Indeed, our own Claude de Bigny has written in similar terms about the prehistorical and future functions of religion, if with a characteristically de Bignyesque twist.


Link to the full article in today's Guardian: Guardian Unlimited The Guardian Robert Winston: Why do we believe in God?

Why the British Today Treat Their Lunatics Worse Than In Hogarth's Day

Theodore Dalrymple, ex-prison doctor, explains that it is due to a misapplication of the writings of people like Foucault - who suggested that lunatic asylums were an expression of the medical "will to power", and of R.D. Laing - who thought that the mad were sane and vice versa.

Such ideas became a kind of official dogma in Britain. This, combined with a wish to reduce the costs of treatment, has led to a dehumanising debacle in which doctors, nurses and prison officers regularly lie and perjure themselves, refusing to deal with the truth about the mad, who are then often treated with appalling barbarity. Dalrymple refers to the gradual "erosion of common humanity," because this evil is not willed by the mostly well-meaning people who commit it, but is the result of laziness, or ambition, or daily routine.


More on Foucault and his misunderestimated insights here.

Link to Dalrymple's article:City Journal Summer 2005 In the Asylum by Theodore Dalrymple

The War on Terror and the Left

Sasha Abramsky, writing in Open Democracy, argues that the left, in opposing the war on terror on the grounds that it is being waged by the right, thus allows the right to dictate the terms on which the war is being fought (and debated). This is dangerous, he says: it is in the interests of all citizens of the open society that this war is pursued and won. It would therefore be more contructive, Abramsky continues, if the left could identify how they might win it better. He gives some specific examples:

- bring Russia's "loose nukes" under control
- reinforce protection of nuclear and chemical plants
- address problem of legal "black holes" for terror suspects.

Good to see a left wing voice saying these things.

Link to Abramsky's article in Open Democracy:Whose al-Qaida problem? Sasha Abramsky - openDemocracy

Hollywood Sex and Drug Scenes Not Politically Correct Enough, Australian Researchers Conclude

A silly study by Australian researchers into Hollywood blockbusters reveals that successful films often show people having sex without specifically featuring condoms.

Nor is the harm that can come of unprotected recreational intercourse adequately portrayed.

Drugs too, it seems, are often shown being used without dramatising the baleful effects of addiction (see The Kate Moss Situation for more insight into this).

Link to Turkish Daily News article about the survey:Turkish Daily News - 'Hollywood fails to show negative consequences of sex, drug use'

Turkey and the EU

After embarrassing, drawn-out "negotiations", the EU's foreign ministers have agreed to honour the commitments made to Turkey about accession. It is now possible that Turkey will be a full member by 2014.

The trouble is that the undertakings made by foreign ministers at EU meetings rarely have any connection with what their voters want. This was so at the time of the original undertakings and remains so now. The role of Frau Plassnik of Austria, in aiming to offer Turkey only a reduced partnership with the EU, gave voice to the concerns of the majority of European voters.

The whole subject of Turkey's accession is plagued by hoary preconceptions. Most Europeans who feel uneasy about it do so because they view Turkey as a large poor country which will have to be baled out by EU taxes. This is shortsighted: it would be true if Turkey were to join today, but by 2014, relative strengths will have changed fundamentally. Turkey has a fast growing economy. Demographically, it is a young country. The EU, by contrast, is neither; it has minimal levels of growth and is an ageing society. It desperately needs more growth and younger people.

The religious question is even more vexed: whilst Turkey is a secular society (and a fine, rare example of how that can be achieved with a Muslim population) it is overwhelmingly Muslim and in an age of Islamist terrorism this obviously worries many. The question here is whether it is really wise for the EU to become an ever-emptier Christian's club of helpless elderly people living on their pensions, trying vainly to keep out the seething masses of Muslims outside its gates. Even if that kind of exclusion were possible, it would be undesirable.

On another level, Turkey's accession to the EU will fundamentally change the political face of the EU. Using the old distinction between ever "wider" and "deeper" union, Turkey will hugely "widen" the EU, its 70 million citizens currently represent the second largest European population after Germany. This will, one assumes, render impossible the "deepening" fantasies of the older generation of Eurocrats of creating a crazed bureaucratic Moloch.

The debate about Turkey is thus also a debate about what the EU should be. The French, Germans and Austrian governments (for example) want a EU which is highly regulated, conforming to a code of EU laws and "guidelines" in every aspect of national life. The British and Dutch (for example) want a looser, less interfering union more focussed on cooperation in trade. To the first grouping, Turkey's accession presents insuperable problems. To the second, Turkey offers an opportunity to chop off some of the spare fat of the EU.

The benefits to Turkey itself aren't especially clear-cut either. On the positive side, the process of joining the EU is benefiting justice, freedom of speech, the role of women, and the elimination of torture. The EU seems to be providing a framework and some helpful impulses here. It may be that these will end up making Turkish society more pleasant for more of its citizens. Then again, if taken too far, and into less obviously meritorious areas, Turkey could end up saddled with a set of outdated regulations.

As I wrote in July, "I am delighted that the Turks are still minded to join us in our gently decaying, would-be superstate." But the devil is in the detail, and one of the details is that some countries will put Turkey's accession to the vote. If current opinion polls are to be believed, some 80% of EU citizens would not support Turkish accession. Not for the first time, the gap between the ambitions of the EU politicians and their electorates is yawning. The reason is simple: being a success on the EU stage has little or nothing to do with connecting to voters. The rejection of the draft EU constitution by voters in Holland and France (despite taxpyer-funded promotion of the document by most of the political mainstream), was a sign of this.

Normally speaking, voters don't get given the chance to speak on such weighty matters. If they did, EU politicians might show them more respect, maybe even opening up debates about the weighty matters. It would be better for all concerned if this happened with the Turkey accession debate sooner rather than later.


Telegraph News Turkey wins deal to start EU talks

Day of German Unity, 2005

A day of quiet reflection in Esens, as we remember the words which heralded the reunification of Germany, some two years after they were spoken:

""General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: - Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

"As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: "This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality." Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

"And I would like, before I close, to say one word. I have read, and I have been questioned since I've been here about certain demonstrations against my coming. And I would like to say just one thing, and to those who demonstrate so. I wonder if they have ever asked themselves that if they should have the kind of government they apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they're doing again.
Thank you and God bless you all."

Ronald Reagan, Berlin, 1987. May God bless the great man's soul.

The Kate Moss Situation

Kate Moss, originally uploaded by Hero von Esens.

It seems Kate Moss is off to some drying out clinic in the States to kick the coke and booze. Good luck to her with that, even if seaminess and excess are inextricably intertwined in her image. All the companies who sacked her this week are guilty of the rankest hypocrisy and short-term thinking. I reckon Kate despises them even more now than when she first signed contracts with them.

I doubt "Clean Kate" will sell as well as "Cocaine Kate", but I suspect she's beyond such calculations now. She will have to knuckle down and suffer the infinite tedium of her fellow addicts' self-regarding, self-pitying remorse. Hard to see her in that state for long.

Compassion's Dystopia

William Easterly writes (in Foreign Policy) on how the compassion and financial generosity of citizens in rich countries rarely translates into help for the citizens of poor countries. The reasons? Overambitious goal-setting, bureaucratic overkill, and no follow-through in terms of evaluation. The solution? Not quite "Charity Begins at Home" - but aiming to do less better.

Link to Easterly's article: Foreign Policy: The Utopian Nightmare

Saatchi Gallery Ditches South Bank to Go to Chelsea

After less than three years, the Saatchi Gallery's tenancy of County Hall on the South Bank is sadly being terminated, the result of an unworkable relationship with County Hall's owner, Makota Okamoto. Charles Saatchi said that the gallery couldn't develop "in this malevolent atmosphere."

Okamoto, who sounds like a Guardian pantomime villain, has been accused not only of kicking Gavin Turk's sculpture of a sleeping homeless person, but of denying visitors access to a disabled loo.

So Charles Saatchi is calling time on the 30 year lease, despite the 3 million pounds he invested in the difficult (ex Greater London Council HQ) but interesting spaces of County Hall. The Saatchi Gallery's new home (as of 2007) will be the Duke of York's headquarters, built in 1801, on the King's Road in Chelsea. It is another location that will require the spending of millions. Whilst Chelsea is far smarter than the South Bank, it has much less visitor volume and fewer nearby tourist-traps to swell the numbers. Saatchi is sanguine: "As long as it breaks even, I'll be happy enough."

Link to Guardian article:Guardian Unlimited Arts news Saatchi blames 'malevolent' atmosphere and says sad goodbye to the South Bank

RIP: M Scott Peck

M Scott Peck, who has died aged 69, wrote "The Road Less Travelled" a spiritual growth self-help book especially popular with members of Alcoholics Anonymous. An alcoholic with problems relating to his parents and wives, Peck always saw himself as "a prophet, not a saint."
Telegraph | News | M Scott Peck

Prince Saud: Iraq's Arabian Threat

Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, warns of the disaster Iraq's disintegration would mean for the region.

Prince Saud sees the prime threat not in the wish of the Kurds for self-sufficiency, but in the divisions between the Sunnis and the Shias. He does not believe Iraq is now at civil war, but he warns that the constitution and the elections alone will not suffice to unify the country. He refers to Iran's Iraqi ambitions as a major source of unrest. He underlines mutual Saudi and US objectives in the region.

Saudi Arabia renews warning over division of Iraq

Wild Boar Hunting

The wild boar season has opened and all across the Rhineland countryside hunters are beginning the cull.

Last night when we were asleep an unknown number of wild boar, flying from the guns, converged on our meadow unnoticed and, using their fearsome tusks, ripped open a hundred square metres or so of lawn. By the time I woke and saw the damage this morning, the boar were long gone.

Detremined to avoid a repetition of this porcine outrage, I shall await their return, armed with Hero Oomkens the Younger's fifteenth century tournament lance - the quintessential boar-spearing weapon.

Howard Jacobsen Flays Women's Reading Groups

Howard Jacobsen, the Birmingham-born comic novelist, was in Foyles to address an audience composed largely of the members of women-only book clubs.

"There are 50,000 reading groups going on, but nobody is reading," Jacobsen said. He was especially annoyed that reading groups don't tend to discuss comic novels.

"They don't want to laugh," he snarled. "They're at war with the world."

The women were motivated to join these groups out of "gender rage", he added thoughtfully.

The result of this female anger and failure to read comic novels? Book clubs are "adding to the world's stock of stupidity."


Link to Bookseller's full coverage of the Foyles party:theBookseller.com - Howard's end?

RIP: Lord Kingsale

Lord Kingsale, who has died aged 64, was the Premier Baron of Ireland, and the only man in Britain entitled to keep his hat on in the presence of the Queen.

John de Courcy, the 35th Lord Kingsale, worked mostly as an odd-job man, with spells as a plumber and a bingo-caller, and he ended his days in sheltered housing - a fate he accepted with some equanimity. He listed "self-deception" as a recreation in Who's Who, "because I consider myself important and nobody else does." Aside from the hat-wearing right, John de Courcy owned a lighthouse in Kinsale and the ruins of a castle whose walls were a foot high at their highest point. The Courcys had been downwardly mobile for centuries before John de Courcy's birth, so he represented an old family tradition. A book about the Nouveaux Pauvres brought him some celebrity, and a little extra income, in the 1990s.

Despite advertising in the Lonely Hearts pages, he never managed to find a suitable wife, and the title now passes to his New Zealand cousin, Nevinson Mark de Courcy, whose father was a municipal drains inspector.

Telegraph News Lord Kingsale

End of the Line for Joschka Fischer

One of the few cheering events in the aftermath of Germany's stalemated election is the resignation of Joschka Fischer.

Fischer, a street-fighting, policeman-beating pacifist, somehow became Germany's Foreign Minister. Admittedly this was in the worst-ever post-war government, a byword for incompetence and arrogance. Fischer fitted well into this government of sleazy hacks. He was by a long measure the worst German Foreign Secretary since Joachim von Ribbentrop - if far less effective, and more eager to sacrifice his "beliefs" to the greater good of political survival.

Fischer was a member of the Green party, whose principles, however - like all principles he espoused - he unceremoniously ditched when they clashed with his quest for power. The best example of this was Fischer's support of the government's shameful attempts to lift the EU's arms embargo on China. Even though this crazy policy was against the Green party's deepest principles, as it flew in the face of human rights, and even though Fischer later claimed not to agree with the policy himself, he propounded it as Foreign Minister. It was a key plank in the German administration's continued attempts to embarrass the USA and act, alongside France, as a "counterweight" to America.

Seldom has a politician so compromised himself to so little effect.

The only drawback to Fischer's timely departure is that, like other deadbeats (eg Peter Mandelson) he will be offered something to do by the EU or by the UN - two organisations where his low instincts should serve him well. The danger is that Fischer could then cause continent-wide chaos and damage with his outdated and arrogant assumptions.

RIP: Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal, who has died aged 96 in Vienna, was the world's highest profile "Nazi-hunter", a term which does him too little credit, even if it encapsulates the role which brought him global fame.

Wiesenthal believed in "justice, not vengeance". He rejected notions of collective guilt, collective punishment and collective forgiveness. All crimes were to be dealt with individually, he believed - this was the best way both to deal with the traumatic aftermath of the crimes, and to help prevent a repetition.

"Nazi-hunting" was a role he stumbled into: