Being outrageous

Why do people on the talkboards, whenever there is a post on holocaust denial, talk all the time about the importance of exercising free speech, instead of just....exercising it.
One outrageousness a day keeps the censors away.
I'll start: Hollywood has ruined the American mind, because day after day all their lives they are taught that the world is divided into good and evil. This simplistic way of the world has basically made America what it is.
Most Europeans, liberals and educated people tend to see the world for what it is - existing in shades of grey. Which is why we don't get enthusiastic about nuking innocent Middle Eastern countries. We simply do not believe they stand for "pure wickedness". They are not a cross between Mordor and Star Wars's Empire. America does not wear white and fights on the side of freedom of the galaxy or the Paladins of Gondor.
Now: second point. Is there a direct link between the simple duality that infects every Hollywood film and the moral dualities of the Old Testament (as opposed to the tolerant forgivingness of the new) ....and why so.

Or,put it this way: who runs Hollywood.

Now, I guess that was an anti-semitic reference. This "nonsense" been exposed to the glaring light of reasonable and intelligent and non biased minds. Now, I look forward to contributors putting their money with their mouths are, what they have been saying throughout this thread, and stepping up to the plate to quash it with the force of their arguments.

(PS The responses I got included: Hollywood is not run by Jews it is run by the Japanese, Sony etc. I responded with an an article by a Hollwood entertainment journalist that quoted Marlon Brando saying on a talk show that there never was any negative stereotyping against "kikes" because they ran it. And then went on to affirm that indeed, 60 percent of Hollywood was Jewish, and so what...the writer was Jewish. Another Israeli writer pointed more intelligently and thoughtfully that The new testement was not as dualistic as I thought, giving examples, and that if Americans hadn't embraced Hollywood, there would have been some other manicheanism to give succour to the stupid...all in the spirit of the piece I wrote. Well done.)

Bush acquaints himself with a library

.....Perhaps it was the shift of setting for his broadcast to the nation to the White House library that made the president seem uncomfortable. With the exception of Laura, the former librarian, the Bush clan are not a bookish lot. The late Brendan Gill reported that having stayed at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, he scoured the premises late one night in search of something with which to read himself to asleep and could only find “The Fart Book”.

Survival tip of the week

A make-or-break speech by a beleagured American president is usually preceded by a demonstration of American might somewhere on the planet and the run-up to Bush’s address Wednesday night was no exception. The AC-130 U.S. gunship that massacred a convoy of fleeing Islamists on Somalia’s southwestern border, apparently along with dozens of nomads, their families and livestock, was deployed on its mission on Sunday, to make timely newspaper headlines indicative of Bush’s determination to strike at terror wherever it may lurk.
Moral to nomads: when the US president schedules a speech, don’t herd, don’t go to wedding parties, head for the nearest cave

So, the solution to Iraq

Any solution has to be based on sustainable equilibrium between raw power. Therefore, the US should pull out, let them fight each other to a stand still from an audience position of Kurdistan bases - with the US, perhaps, supplying the weaker side with weapons. Only when the fighting sides have made a ceasefire based on de facto relative strengths should the west/UN reintervene.
It won't be a slaughter to the end. Everything stabilises at some level of mutual satisfaction, where the weaker pays some price of submission for his continued survival - if that means a severely diminished status for the Sunni muslims so be it.

Islamists' guide to wife beating

Here

And why not? I am becoming increasingly fascinated with Muslims. I know to gorgeous western women who have fallen for Muslim men....say they reach the parts of women that (over intellectualised, modern) western men don't. Women always were a bit primitive perhaps. what do they do right

It's all in the birthrates

There is an interesting piece by Christopher Caldwell in the FT that picked up a book by a German academic called Heinsohn
He writes that the problem in the Muslim world is youth, not Islam, and that any society where 30% of the pop is 15-29 will start to fight. It's not ideology. When Israel built its wall the palestinians started fighting each other.

"The problem, rather, is that in a youth-bulge society there are not enough positions to provide all these young men with prestige and standing. Envy against older, inheriting brothers is unleashed. So is ambition. Military heroism presents itself as a time-honoured way for a second or third son to wrest a position of respectability from an otherwise indifferent society. Societies with a glut of young men become temperamentally different from "singleton societies" such as Europe's, where the prospect of sending an only child to war is almost unthinkable."

The point about Iran is that it has European birthrates, thanks to the revolution and heroic efforts of literacy in women.
It is a pacific country.

Notes for MSM journalists

Why is that really interesting posts on the Guardian blo gets so few comments. I suppose it is because bloggers have nothing to say. Memo to print journalists: watch the uncommented posts, for these are your niche areas.

Jocks trashing people's homes

Why is terrorism by the strong called spreading democracy, terrorism by the weak called terrorism? Isn't Iran's support of Hizbollah essentially defensive, given it can be nuked at any moment by Israel. I repeat: Iran was attacked by Iraq and suffered first world war type losses. America has suffered a fraction of that, 3000 dead, on 911. Iran has the more virtuous victimhood.
America just doesn't give up persecuting them. They have every reason to fear and hate the west, and see the rank hypocrisy of America's support of unsavoury regimes elsewhere while focuing on the destruiction of in comparative terms a benign one whose big crime is to be independent of the US.
It is completely surrounded by nuclear powers, or US occuped ones. It saw Saddam destroyed because he didn't have nukes.
They see that America might attack them whether they have nukes or not (CIA shows them having no weapons programme.) They know tghey have oil, and that the US is run by a belligerent, hostile, much hated president worldwide.
Wouldn't you want nukes then?
I think we should relax; Iran will be responsible with nukes, knows it will be obliterated if it ever uses them.
I don't know anout Iran's mischiefmaking in Iraq. As said: terrorism is the power of the weak. Make them responsible partners rather than force them to resort to underhand protective measures.
I just distrust anything that comes from the mainstream media and the government. The BBC is dutifully reporting government planted stories that I fear are preparing the groundwork for being able to say that British jetfighters bombed Tehran this morning....little collateral damage.
If that happens, it would be an utter disgrace on this country and curse it forever.
The Iranians might say their meddling in Iraq is straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel....US direct action has murdered an estimated 200,000 Iraqis. You'd keep tabs omn your chaotic neighbour too, if you were Iranians.
Elsewhere I have read that the Iraqi shia are pretty independent of the Iranians.
Sun Tzu said, know your enemy and you will win a hundred battles. America patently doesn'yt know anything about the Middle East except the big oil govt knows it has oil and the stupid populus who dance to the pipers' tune know they are facing another "Hitler".
How many Americans come onto these talkboards and quote Churchill and his fight against fascism, to everyone's embarrassment; they are living in groundhog day too and cannot even remember three years back; it's so absurd to have this giant with a pinhead brain running our destinies.
Funny though isn't it, that China, with its expanding influence in Africa, its nukes, its giant prison camps, its murder of Falun Gong. Hu Jintao is never called Hitler.
Iran is not perfect, we agree, but sometimes you have to exaggerate to face the garbage coming from the other direction.
America must talk to Iran. And someone must drill into that idiot country's head that history and politics is complicated, and requires complex, pragmatic, multivariate solutions. You can't just going around behaving like a drunken football jock trashing other's people's homes.
I look forward to hearing what the EU has to say on this.

Attack on Iran?

Is America going to go to war with Iran? Either directly or via its proxy Israel? Insane you might say, because it would disrupt oil supplies, send them shooting to $200 a barrel; implausible, because she hasn't enough forces. Criminal, because it contravenes the Nuremberg conventions and Iran is a country at peace that poses no threat to the US.
So I would have thought not, until I read two figures I held in high regard just over Christmas. One is Scott Ritter, the former UN chief inspector to Iraq, being interviewed in the non-mainstream Democracy Now website on Iran. He had written a book about the preparations for an upcoming war, talking to intelligence officials based the region (he as one himself), carefully scouring the Middle Eastern press for clues that never appear in the New York Times. He spoke of Mujahedeen cult groups, based in Kurdistan and Azerbaijan, once labelled terrorist by the US, now allies, infiltrating across the border into Iran, where they have ethnic brethren, to gather and collect intelligence about Iran's nuclear weapons programme on the ground. He said the Israelis were using this intelligence badly, because they applied a system of analysis that deviated from what they had learnt at the Yom Kippur war, which is to double- and triple- check all facts; intelligence these days, he said, has become more sloppy and faith based. And he predicted with great certainty that Israel would launch strikes, similar to the ones carried out on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. There would be tacit support from the Americans, perhaps from ships, perhaps from ground troops in Iraq.
Second, I read the reliable Seymour Hersh's latest piece in the New Yorker, dated November. He has been following Bush's Iran policy for years. He said that the CIA had issued a report earlier this autumn that denied that Iran was running a nuclear weapons programme parallel to its civilian nuclear programme. (To which it is entitled of course according to the Nuclear Proliferation treaty.) The report was based on technical intelligence collected from satellites, measuring the radioactivity of water samples and smoke plumes from factories and power plants. Additional data had been gathered by secret US and Israeli agents placing radioactivity detection devices outside suspected nuclear weapons plants. No amounts of radioactivity were found.
But worryingly this report was being ignored in the White House, where Dick Cheney, chief hawk, was taking no evidence as the fact that Iranians had them and were hiding them. An absurd and unanswerable piece of Alice and Wonderland logic. Nevertheless, it was exactly the kind of argument used to bring the US into the attack on Iraq.
So I was not surpised this morning when I saw the Sunday Times's lead story, saying that Israel had drawn up plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. The piece said that two Israeli air force squadrons were training to blow up an Iranian facility by using low kilotonnage bunker busters, quoting Israeli military sources.
According to the paper, conventional laser guided bombs would tunnel under the target and then the mini nukes would be fired into the plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of fallout. “As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the military sources.
The paper speculated that the leaks from their Israeli military sources could be sabre rattling (combined with the arrival of US warships in the Gulf - along with British ones - who authorised them to be there in the total absence of a debate in the UK?)so as to put pressure on the Iranians to stop what they say is only a civilian nuclear programme. But it could also be that the Israelis have made up their minds and are preparing opinion for a strike. Just reading about it becomes a kind of acceding to it.
As for the evidence, the newspaper swallowed a lot of the background, presenting the Israeli line; The Sunday Times wrote: "This is enough, however, to convince some Israelis that Iran is reaching the “point of no return” at which it has the technical know-how to build a nuclear bomb."
It quoted: "Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, has told members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, that his organisation assumes the Iranians will have a complete nuclear device by 2009."
Note how this belief, which is unsupported, is at odds with the CIA assessment.
One thing worth thinking about is that there was a supporting story on the BBC today, talking of Iranian spies' dirty tricks in Iraq - a slight shift of stance from an organisation that just three months ago ran a cultural events week on Iran to counteract US negativism. This was based on a briefing by British officials, suggesting that they could be in on the Israeli-US game to build up opinion against Iran. Note the double standards: there has been nothing on the numerous incursions by American and Israeli spies into Iran.
So it seems the Brits are on board project Middle East conflagration. How disgusting: without any public debate.
And all for what? For US Oil interests? Satisfaction of Bush's cowboy mentality?
So what can Europe do about this? Last February Angela Merkel, the chancellor, refused to make Schroder's mistake of being hostile to the US by accepting that there might be violence against Iran as a last resort - here opposing her foreign minister, the suave and popular Frank Steinmeier, who is a social democrat. In her visit to Washington last week she appeared to have changed her mind, and was totally opposed to a strike. She was unable to get a guarantee from Bush however. (He was denied his backrub.) Let us hope that she manages to create a united front against a strike among EU politicians when they convene at the general affairs council of January 23. They must put the pressure on Blair and ask: are you with us or, disastrously again, with the Americans?

Idiot's guide to the EU, by a useful such one.....

While waiting for the end of week EU summit - and no, Bing didn't phone incidentally - my thoughts turn to what Europe is about. It's good to have outsiders; they force you to think. And I wrote the screed below.

It's funny, as soon as you write something you stop believing it - so it is in my case. After the piece defending Europe - and I sometimes wonder why I do this - I thought, this is complete nonsense. Anyways.

"...the EU is *not* an heir to the constructivist society of communist Russia, not an heir to the French revolution. It is not run by a revolutionary, unaccountable cadre of irreligious zealots and fanatics, all speaking French and producing pyramids of corpses in the abstract interests of Mankind. (The EU has never killed anyone, unlike the US.)
I used to think so, at university and living in the UK. Many British and American academics sitting in Oxford or wherever probably think so still, in their deluded fantasy.
But practical experience - occasionally useful you know, to have practical experience of something - of Brussels tells me it is ivery different. There are just too many checks and balances, too many different national interests, too many actors - the whole corporate, legal, NGO world is THERE, represented, including from the US. (And there are many nations and actors that are religious.. Others are not....it's not an issue) So many of them would cry foul at the slightest infraction on freedom. There are literally hundreds of meetings every day of expert groups, seminars, between all areas of business, finance, civil service and politics of mature democracies in the square miles that comprise the EU capital.
There is highly transparent decision making, monitored by the world's largest press corps. Everything is online, every commission official is contactable.
Everything has to go through multiple stages of verification. This is how the EU legislative process works: everyone has a say:
If you went to Brussels, and bumped in Mandela one day, the chairman of Texaco and ultracapitalist the next, a left wing NGO scurrying through the corridors on the third, and you spouted your stuff about the new Soviet Union, they would laugh at you. Elitist, yes.
But not totalitarian, not centralised. And it takes years to get a decision through that satisfies everyone.

It is the place of European - and globalised - dealmakers, got that? It is the City of London/New York Stock Exchange of world politics;Europe at the core, the rest of the world in concentric circles.The same international elite that goes to the city to make money goes to Brussels to lobby for financial legislation.
Every evening, the global elite with their briefcases get on the eurostar high speed trains back to London, under the channel, to Paris, to Dusseldorf....

Now my conceit about it being a Burkean aristocracy is this.
These "players" act in moderation to each other as aristocrats in the English parliament did of yore. The EU is not democratic - does not fish for the votes of the single mother of Birmingham or the Amsterdam ethnic street youth - it is no more a democracy that pre 1832 reform act England was. But aristocracies can sometimes make for better legislation, and make for better preservation of freedoms, and guarantee the rule of law, than democracies - especially populist democracies of interwar east Europe that persecuted Jews, or the revolutionary people's democracies that quickly turned totalitarian of France/Russia post 1789/1917.

In fact there are more checks and balances than in the modern UK. While British political instincts are good - its people are more tolerant and open to argument than continentals - the system at the moment is close to an elective dictatorship. That is, once elections are held, the ruling party and government always has a majority in parliament, MPs always vote with their government because they want jobs in govt. The revising chamber, the House of lords, is weak.
Tony Bliar has lost one or two votes in the last decade. It is not the same as parliament of Burke's era, when MPs were unwhipped and just voted with the best argument.
The closes approximation to the House of commons of say 1780 is actually the European parliament, where I have spent god knows how much time. Because MEPs (members of the European parliament) cannot get jobs in govt, I guess they are like the senate, they cannot be bribed into loyalty. They are a genuine revising chamber, looking at arguments on their merits. This is where reasoned, moderate Burkean rumination goes on.
Because of this elective dictatorship in the UK, I always tell lobbyists that if they want something done they should go to Brussels. Why? Because the effective British opposition at the moment is not the conservative party (which under the system always loses every parliamentary vote), it is MEPs and - above all - -those nation states who oppose those bits of legislation that, say, the British govt wants to introduce. Lobby for instance the French or Danish government; they have real power to oppose Blair. The British parliament does not.

As you know, European law precedes nation state law, it is an increasingly federal system, with nation states akin to US states, and Brussels like Washington. Probably sixty percent of legislation coming into the statute book of any given country come from Brussels; the rest are "local", ie nation state, issues. The nation state also has some powers to revise or adapt the general directives coming from Brussels.
But it is at the nation state level where the balance of power is dysfunctional. Ie the supra level is "balanced", and subject to checks and balances, it is when we get down to the UK level that we have elective dictatorship.

That is why Blair likes going to war. War is still a nation state issue. He has complete omnipotent powers here. More than he has about say, fish stocks or civil liberties.

Language of Barbarians

There have been two worthwhile events towards the end of the week. One has been the launch of the transnational radical party in the European parliament, in which Maurizio Turco, a rather cool Italian MEP, gave the keynote speech. Policies such as legalising drugs are part of his box of ideas. Fifteen minute speeches by the Esperanto Radical Association, the Antiprohibitionist International League and the anticlericale.net organisation give some flavour of its ideas. I didn’t stay too long. It will be interesting how it follows up.

Another was a conference on Human Rights featuring – here is a sample – one senior adviser of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. The United Nations People’s stateless organisation secretary general, the Lao Movement for Human Rights. I will be writing about this elsewhere; but I want to tell a little story.
At lunch, I left the meeting and went to a bar café in the area of Matonge. It has a high Congolese population. Congo is Belgium’s former colony. A president, the first freely elected in 40 years, Laurent Kabila, whose father was assassinated a few years back, had just been sworn in. Kabila is very popular in the east, which is Swahili-speaking and under the influence of the English-speaking neighbours to the east. He is less popular in the west, which is French and Lingala-speaking. The fact that Congo has been the battleground for “Africa’s World War” between Rwanda and Uganda on the one hand, and Angola, Nambia and Zimbabwe, which killed up to three million people, is less well known than it should be in the West. The war ended in 2003, a threat of renewed conflict still lingers.
I bought a group of about five people beers. Then one leaned over and said: “English is the language of barbarians.”
I felt a bit uncomfortable about this, given the accusations of complicity to genocide flung back and forth between the French government and the Rwandan government.
I had a sense that language, supremacism and mass murder could well be linked in Africa. The French government supported the French-speaking Rwandan Hutu militias withdrawing to Congyo in 1994. In turn, the French say the guerrillas who went on to form the Rwandan government who came from Uganda where they had been reared and trained in rebel camps in an Anglophone environment also committed butchery, English is now the de facto language of Rwanda.

There is no doubt that British commercial culture can sometimes grate when you have come from the continent, the P&O ferries forming an introduction to this. But I felt a rare twinge of pride, coming back on the coach. (The trains had hiked their prices to a level even newspapers wouldn’t pay for.)
We were searched by French customs officers, who asked quite intrusive questions, and stopped everyone. My experience of British customs is that they only stop people on suspicion. And they have to write up a note, which you have to sign, after the search is completed. The French officers snapped their rubber gloves in a loud and rather juvenile way.
When we got back on the bus, there were several Belgian Moroccans with whom I struck up conversation, each saying that Britain was a much less racist than the continent, more fair, more open. Shortly after, British passport officers in civilian suits welcomed us into the UK with a smile.

When I hear culture I reach for my EU dictionary

I am in Brussels this week. This is a typical routine on my biweekly commutes to that city, for your reference.
I spent Monday at a culture conference, the contents of which have been somewhat anti-culture. The meeting concerned the online consultation that DG culture (in its wannabe way, perhaps) held earlier this year: with a number of citizens giving their input, the commission produced a briefing statement, brought in several bigwigs from the DG - including commissioner Jan Figel - and devoted a day to talking about it with various cultural stakeholders in European arts policy of whom you will, of course, never have heard.
Outsiders were informed that since "its inclusion in the Treaty on the European Union, cultural cooperation has become a new community competency." So what can Europe do for culture?
Here is a sample of the online consultation inputs - all of which are from leading stakeholder figures (didn't see any citizens), from organisations such as the International Photography Network and the Nordic Innovation Centre.
"We need to have a closer cooperation with stakeholders from different sectors supporting Culture and Creative Industries. If Europe should contribute to a professionalizing of the Creative Industries, we must strongly emphasise on the role of the Creative Industries entrepreneur through enhancing the knowledge of the economic setting and business know-how."
"Yes they are linked. Contribute - by making clear that the cultural disciplines have always influenced each other through history. - organise crosscultural concerts as well as crosscultural exhibitions, to be performed/shown in more than one place. - by creating chances for artists to take part in exchange and co-operation programmes. Give them more chances to elaborate projects on cultural integration."
Then:
"Art and culture come from the grass roots way of life. Artists should be empowered to continually reflect this social phenomenon with their artistic creations. The EC should empower inter-statal organisations to lead their members to the goal of integration in diversity."
I don't know quite what to make of all of this; the conference speeches were in the same vein.
I did vaguely why the conference hadn't invited in, say, Gunther Grass or Ryszard Kapuscinski to bring some liveliness into the proceedings.

At the usual elaborate lunch I met the chair of MTV Europe. We discussed Steve Strange, a music DJ from our youths - the early 90s - whom I remembered interviewing once at a European parliament theme television programme recording at the station's studios in Camden Lock, London. "We are trying to become more serious," he said.
MEPs were quizzed on what the knew of European youth culture. Patricia Rawlings - an authentic bluerinse Tory, no longer in the EP - was shown a man who walked on stage in bikers' gear, unzipped a banana from his trousers and started to eat. She replied, "He is obviously a squatter." (He was a heavy metal fan.) Another MEP in an elegant suit lamented that not enough discussion was devoted to the 20 million youth unemployed in Europe but spoilt it somewhat by bringing out a balloon which, when she had inflated it in front of my face, said, "vote socialist" - and I remember finishing my article with the words "MTV is becoming more serious, but not as serious clearly as the European parliament."
Of course, it was the facetiousness of youth. Now I know that the European parliament - indeed the whole EU - truly is a serious place.