As Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi returns to a hero's welcome in Libya, Statfor look at the evidence for his guilt.
Libya: A Hero's Welcome
Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report
August 26, 2009
...
Like Osama bin Laden’s initial denial of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, al-Megrahi’s claims of innocence have served as ready fuel for conspiracy theorists, who claim he was framed by the U.S. and British governments. However, any conspiracy to frame al-Megrahi and his Libyan masters would have to be very wide ranging and, by necessity, reach much further than just London and Washington. For example, anyone considering such a conspiracy must also account for the fact that in 1999 a French court convicted six Libyans in absentia for the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772. The six included Abdullah al-Sanussi, Gadhafi’s brother-in-law and head of the ESO.
Getting two or more governments to cooperate on some sort of grand conspiracy to frame the Libyans and exonerate the Iranians and Syrians is hard to fathom. Such cooperation would have to involve enough people that, sooner or later, someone would spill the beans — especially considering that the Pan Am 103 saga played out over multiple U.S. administrations. As seen by the current stir over CIA interrogation programs, administrations love to make political hay by revealing the cover-ups of previous administrations. Surely, if there had been a secret ploy by the Reagan or Bush administrations to frame the Libyans, the Clinton or Obama administration would have outed it. The same principle applies to the United Kingdom, where Margaret Thatcher’s government oversaw the beginning of the Pan Am 103 investigation and Labour governments after 1997 would have had the incentive to reveal information to the contrary.
While the U.S. and British governments work closely together on a number of intelligence projects, they are frequently at odds on counterterrorism policy and foreign relations. From our personal experience, we believe that it would be very difficult to get multiple U.S. and British administrations from different political parties to work in perfect harmony to further this sort of conspiracy. Due to the UTA investigation and trial, the conspiracy would have to somehow involve the French government. While the Americans working with the British is one thing, the very idea of the Americans, British and French working in perfect harmony on any sort of project — much less a grand secret conspiracy to frame the Libyans — is simply unimaginable. It is much easier to believe that the Libyans were guilty, especially in light of the litany of other terror attacks they committed or sponsored during that era.
Had the IED in the cargo hold of Pan Am 103 exploded over the open ocean, it is very unlikely that the clothing from Malta and the fragment of the MEBO timer would have ever been recovered — think of the difficulty the French have had in locating the black box from Air France 447 in June of this year. In such a scenario, the evidence linking al-Megrahi and the Libyan government to the Pan Am bombing might never have been discovered and plausible deniability could have been maintained indefinitely.
The evidence recovered in Scotland and al-Megrahi’s eventual conviction put a dent in that deniability, but the true authors of the attack — al-Megrahi’s superiors — were never formally charged. Without al-Megrahi’s cooperation, there was no evidence to prove who ordered him to undertake the attack, though it is logical to conclude that the ESO would never undertake such a significant attack without Gadhafi’s approval.
Now that al-Megrahi has returned to Libya and is in Libyan safekeeping, there is no chance that any death-bed confession he may give will ever make it to the West. His denials will be his final words and the ambiguity and doubt those denials cast will be his legacy. In the shadowy world of clandestine operations, this is the ideal behavior for someone caught committing an operational act. He has shielded his superiors and his government to the end. From the perspective of the ESO, and Moammar Gadhafi, al-Megrahi is indeed a hero.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
NHS and alternative health care systems
(Note: am having to start a new thread because of bloody Blogger comment length restrictions. I'm musing on moving our blog to Wordpress for that reason. But anyway, here's the older NHS thread).
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NHS and alternative health care systems
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Tim Harford's fascinating book The Undercover Economist was on health care systems. Astute readers, such as the ImpDec audience, will probably be unsurprised to learn that both Britain's NHS and America's bizarre public/private health care systems are extremely poorly designed and wasteful. After a discussion as to the characteristics of systems likely to do better, Singapore was held up as an example of how to do it.
This article gives a flavour of Singapore's system:
Singapore's Health Care System: A Free Lunch You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
Library of Economics and Liberty
JANUARY 13, 2008
All this is in the news because of comments from Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP, disparaging the NHS. It turns out (this is a massively underreported in the discussion) that Hannan also favours the Singaporean model. Having read his comments below, I'm firmly on his side. And I can also say, having lived in Spain and Germany, that their systems worked a damn sight better than ours, and that anyone who thinks the health care argument is between the UK and US models needs to have his head examined. Preferably after a 6 month wait, and in an MRSA infested hell-hole.
The NHS row: my final word
Daniel Hannan's blog
August 14th, 2009
...
As far as I can tell, three separate charges ae being laid against me. First, that I have insulted NHS workers. Second, that I want to impose a US-style healthcare system on Britain. Third, that I have made criticisms overseas that I wouldn’t make in Britain.
Let’s take these in order. Start with how I insulted the 1.4 million NHS workers. Here’s what I said: “I don’t want to imply that, because we have a bad system, it doesn’t contain good people. A lot of very generous, very patriotic people become doctors, even though they’re working in a system that doesn’t maximise their utility, because they have a calling to help other people.” Pretty rude, eh? I suppose I should have learned manners from the NHS’s founding spirit, Nye Bevan, who described Conservatives as “lower than vermin”.
Nor do I believe - as Peter Mandelson seems fatuously to be claiming - that Britain should adopt a US-style insurance-based system. While in the States last week, I repeatedly emphasised that I thought their set-up could be improved, that costs were too high, that litigation drove up premiums and that powers could be shifted from big insurance companies to individuals. There is a difference between saying that the US shouldn’t adopt the British model and saying that Britain should adopt the American model. Think about it for a few seconds and you’ll see that it’s quite an obvious difference.
If you want to go in for shorthand categorisation by country, the model I’ve been pushing for is one of personal healthcare accounts, a system most closely approximated in Singapore, whose people enjoy a higher level of healthcare than Britons do while paying considerably less for it. Nor can it be repeated often enough that Singapore - like every developed country - pays for the healthcare of those citizens who can’t afford it. No one I know wants a system where the poor go untended. Nor will you find such a system outside the Third World: it really isn’t a British peculiarity. After ten years in the European Parliament, I have found that the only foreign admirers of the NHS are those on the serious Left. Mainstream social democrats on the Continent do not, as a rule, argue for a heathcare system funded wholly out of general taxation.
The third charge - that I should, as Labour’s Tom Watson puts it, “say it in Britain” - is the most asinine of all. I have been saying it in Britain for years. I’ve written a book all about how to shift power from bureaucracies to consumers. It’s called The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, it’s been in Amazon’s top 30 best sellers for nine months, it has become the best selling political tract in Britan and you can buy it here. In it is a lengthy chapter on healthcare which sets out how Britain compares with other countries in terms of survival rates, waiting times and so on, and proposes to replace the NHS with transferable savings acounts (which, to repeat, since some of my critics seem deliberately mulish on this point, would be met by the state for those who lacked the wherewithal).
Now you can agree or disagree with my views. But to ignore them for ten months, pick them up when they are attacked by John Prescott, and then - then - to complain that I haven’t expressed them in Britain, strikes me as a bit much. Of course, that isn’t how these rows work. Almost no one who has phoned me seems to have watched what I said in full. If they had, they would have seen that I conceded that there is majority suport for the NHS in Britain (although I believe this is partly based on the false premise that free treatment for the poor is a unique property of the British model), and that my views did not reflect those of my party leadership.
Still, I do wonder at the tone and nature of the criticism. It seems to be based on playing the man rather than the ball. My detractors say that I’m out on a limb, that I’m in the pay of the insurance companies, that I’m insulting those who have had successful treatment from the NHS. (What? How?) If supporters of the status quo were truly confident of their case, surely they would extend their logic. I mean, why shouldn’t the state allocate cars on the basis of need, with rationing by queue? Or housing? Or food? I am reminded of the debate over asylum ten years ago, or Europe ten years before that.
more...
--------------
NHS and alternative health care systems
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Tim Harford's fascinating book The Undercover Economist was on health care systems. Astute readers, such as the ImpDec audience, will probably be unsurprised to learn that both Britain's NHS and America's bizarre public/private health care systems are extremely poorly designed and wasteful. After a discussion as to the characteristics of systems likely to do better, Singapore was held up as an example of how to do it.
This article gives a flavour of Singapore's system:
Singapore's Health Care System: A Free Lunch You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
Library of Economics and Liberty
JANUARY 13, 2008
All this is in the news because of comments from Daniel Hannan, a Tory MEP, disparaging the NHS. It turns out (this is a massively underreported in the discussion) that Hannan also favours the Singaporean model. Having read his comments below, I'm firmly on his side. And I can also say, having lived in Spain and Germany, that their systems worked a damn sight better than ours, and that anyone who thinks the health care argument is between the UK and US models needs to have his head examined. Preferably after a 6 month wait, and in an MRSA infested hell-hole.
The NHS row: my final word
Daniel Hannan's blog
August 14th, 2009
...
As far as I can tell, three separate charges ae being laid against me. First, that I have insulted NHS workers. Second, that I want to impose a US-style healthcare system on Britain. Third, that I have made criticisms overseas that I wouldn’t make in Britain.
Let’s take these in order. Start with how I insulted the 1.4 million NHS workers. Here’s what I said: “I don’t want to imply that, because we have a bad system, it doesn’t contain good people. A lot of very generous, very patriotic people become doctors, even though they’re working in a system that doesn’t maximise their utility, because they have a calling to help other people.” Pretty rude, eh? I suppose I should have learned manners from the NHS’s founding spirit, Nye Bevan, who described Conservatives as “lower than vermin”.
Nor do I believe - as Peter Mandelson seems fatuously to be claiming - that Britain should adopt a US-style insurance-based system. While in the States last week, I repeatedly emphasised that I thought their set-up could be improved, that costs were too high, that litigation drove up premiums and that powers could be shifted from big insurance companies to individuals. There is a difference between saying that the US shouldn’t adopt the British model and saying that Britain should adopt the American model. Think about it for a few seconds and you’ll see that it’s quite an obvious difference.
If you want to go in for shorthand categorisation by country, the model I’ve been pushing for is one of personal healthcare accounts, a system most closely approximated in Singapore, whose people enjoy a higher level of healthcare than Britons do while paying considerably less for it. Nor can it be repeated often enough that Singapore - like every developed country - pays for the healthcare of those citizens who can’t afford it. No one I know wants a system where the poor go untended. Nor will you find such a system outside the Third World: it really isn’t a British peculiarity. After ten years in the European Parliament, I have found that the only foreign admirers of the NHS are those on the serious Left. Mainstream social democrats on the Continent do not, as a rule, argue for a heathcare system funded wholly out of general taxation.
The third charge - that I should, as Labour’s Tom Watson puts it, “say it in Britain” - is the most asinine of all. I have been saying it in Britain for years. I’ve written a book all about how to shift power from bureaucracies to consumers. It’s called The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, it’s been in Amazon’s top 30 best sellers for nine months, it has become the best selling political tract in Britan and you can buy it here. In it is a lengthy chapter on healthcare which sets out how Britain compares with other countries in terms of survival rates, waiting times and so on, and proposes to replace the NHS with transferable savings acounts (which, to repeat, since some of my critics seem deliberately mulish on this point, would be met by the state for those who lacked the wherewithal).
Now you can agree or disagree with my views. But to ignore them for ten months, pick them up when they are attacked by John Prescott, and then - then - to complain that I haven’t expressed them in Britain, strikes me as a bit much. Of course, that isn’t how these rows work. Almost no one who has phoned me seems to have watched what I said in full. If they had, they would have seen that I conceded that there is majority suport for the NHS in Britain (although I believe this is partly based on the false premise that free treatment for the poor is a unique property of the British model), and that my views did not reflect those of my party leadership.
Still, I do wonder at the tone and nature of the criticism. It seems to be based on playing the man rather than the ball. My detractors say that I’m out on a limb, that I’m in the pay of the insurance companies, that I’m insulting those who have had successful treatment from the NHS. (What? How?) If supporters of the status quo were truly confident of their case, surely they would extend their logic. I mean, why shouldn’t the state allocate cars on the basis of need, with rationing by queue? Or housing? Or food? I am reminded of the debate over asylum ten years ago, or Europe ten years before that.
more...
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Russia
Fascinating analysis.
The Geopolitics of Russia: Permanent Struggle
Stratfor Geopolitical Report
October 15, 2008
Russia’s defining characteristic is its indefensibility. Unlike the core of most states that are relatively defensible, core Russia is limited to the region of the medieval Grand Principality of Muscovy. It counts no rivers, oceans, swamps or mountains marking its borders — it relies solely on the relatively inhospitable climate and its forests for defense. Russian history is a chronicle of the agony of surviving invasion after invasion.
Traditionally these invasions have come from two directions. The first is from the steppes — wide open grasslands that connect Russia to Central Asia and beyond — the path that the Mongols used. The second is from the North European Plain, which brought to Russia everything from the Teutonic Knights to the Nazi war machine.
To deal with these vulnerabilities, Russia expanded in three phases. In the first, Russia expanded not toward the invasion corridors to establish buffers but away from them to establish a redoubt. In the late 15th century, under Ivan III, Russia did creep westward somewhat, anchoring itself at the Pripet Marshes, which separated Russia from the Kiev region. But the bulk of Russia’s expansion during that period was north to the Arctic and northeast to the Urals. Very little of this territory can be categorized as useful — most was taiga or actual tundra and only lightly populated — but for Russia it was the only land easily up for grabs. It also marked a natural organic outgrowth of the original Muscovy — all cloaked in forest. It was as defensible a territory as Russia had access to and their only hope against the Mongols.
The Mongols were horsemen who dominated the grasslands with their fast-moving cavalry forces. Their power, although substantial, diminished when they entered the forests and the value of their horses, their force multipliers, declined. The Mongols had to fight infantry forces in the forests, where the advantage was on the defender’s side.
The second phase of expansion was far more aggressive — and risky. In the mid-16th century, Under Ivan IV, Russia finally moved to seal off the Mongol invasion route. Russia pushed south and east, deep into the steppes, and did not stop until it hit the Urals in the east and the Caspian Sea and Caucasus Mountains in the south. As part of this expansion, Russia captured several strategically critical locations, including Astrakhan on the Caspian, the land of the Tatars — a longtime horse-mounted foe — and Grozny, which was soon transformed into a military outpost at the foot of the Caucasus.
Also with this expansion, Ivan IV was transformed from Grand Prince of Moscow to Tsar of All Russia, suggesting the empire to come. Russia had finally achieved a measure of conventional security. Holding the northern slopes of the Caucasus would provide a reasonable defense from Asia Minor and Persia, while the millions of square kilometers of steppes gave birth to another defensive strategy: buffers.
Russia — modern, medieval or otherwise — cannot count on natural features to protect it. The Pripet Marshes were small and could in many cases simply be avoided. There is no one who might wish to attack from the Arctic. Forests slowed the Mongol horsemen, but as Muscovy’s predecessor — Kievan Rus — aptly demonstrated, the operative word was “slowed,” not “stopped.” The Mongols conquered and destroyed Kievan Rus in the 13th century.
That leaves buffers. So long as a country controls territory separating itself from its foes — even if it is territory that is easy for a hostile military to transit — it can bleed out any invasion via attrition and attacks on supply lines. Such buffers, however, contain a poison pill. They have populations not necessarily willing to serve as buffers. Maintaining control of such buffers requires not only a sizable standing military for defense but also a huge internal security and intelligence network to enforce central control. And any institution so key to the state’s survival must be very tightly controlled as well. Establishing and maintaining buffers not only makes Russia seem aggressive to its neighbors but also forces it to conduct purges and terrors against its own institutions in order to maintain the empire.
The third expansion phase dealt with the final invasion route: from the west. In the 18th century, under Peter and Catherine the Great, Russian power pushed westward, conquering Ukraine to the southwest and pushing on to the Carpathian Mountains. It also moved the Russian border to the west, incorporating the Baltic territories and securing a Russian flank on the Baltic Sea. Muscovy and the Tsardom of Russia were now known as the Russian Empire.
Yet aside from the anchor in the Carpathians, Russia did not achieve any truly defensible borders. Expansions to the Baltic and Black Seas did end the external threat from the Cossacks and Balts of ages past, but at the price of turning those external threats into internal ones. Russia also expanded so far and fast that holding the empire together socially and militarily became a monumental and ongoing challenge (today Russia is dealing with the fact that Russians are barely a majority in their own country). All this to achieve some semblance of security by establishing buffer regions.
But that is an issue of empire management. Ultimately the multi-directional threat defined Muscovy’s geopolitical problem. There was a constant threat from the steppes, but there was also a constant threat from the west, where the North European Plain allowed for few natural defenses and larger populations could deploy substantial infantry (and could, as the Swedes did, use naval power to land forces against the Muscovites). The forests provided a degree of protection, as did the sheer size of Russia’s holdings and its climate, but in the end the Russians faced threats from at least two directions. In managing these threats by establishing buffers, they were caught in a perpetual juggling act: east vs. west, internal vs. external.
The geography of the Russian Empire bequeathed it certain characteristics. Most important, the empire was (and remains) lightly settled. Even today, vast areas of Russia are unpopulated while in the rest of the country the population is widely distributed in small towns and cities and far less concentrated in large urban areas. Russia’s European part is the most densely populated, but in its expansion Russia both resettled Russian ethnics and assimilated large minorities along the way. So while Moscow and its surroundings are certainly critical, the predominance of the old Muscovy is not decisively ironclad.
The result is a constant, ingrained clash within the Russian Empire no matter the time frame, driven primarily by its size and the challenges of transport. The Russian empire, even excluding Siberia, is an enormous landmass located far to the north. Moscow is at the same latitude as Newfoundland while the Russian and Ukrainian breadbaskets are at the latitude of Maine, resulting in an extremely short growing season. Apart from limiting the size of the crop, the climate limits the efficiency of transport — getting the crop from farm to distant markets is a difficult matter and so is supporting large urban populations far from the farms. This is the root problem of the Russian economy. Russia can grow enough to feed itself, but it cannot efficiently transport what it grows from the farms to the cities and to the barren reaches of the empire before the food spoils. And even when it can transport it, the costs of transport make the foodstuffs unaffordable.
Population distribution also creates a political problem. One natural result of the transport problem is that the population tends to distribute itself nearer growing areas and in smaller towns so as not to tax the transport system. Yet these populations in Russia’s west and south tend to be conquered peoples. So the conquered peoples tend to distribute themselves to reflect economic rationalities, while need for food to be transported to the Russian core goes against such rationalities.
Faced with a choice of accepting urban starvation or the forcing of economic destitution upon the food-producing regions (by ordering the sale of food in urban centers at prices well below market prices), Russian leaders tend to select the latter option. Joseph Stalin certainly did in his efforts to forge and support an urban, industrialized population. Force-feeding such economic hardship to conquered minorities only doubled the need for a tightly controlled security apparatus.
The Russian geography meant that Russia either would have a centralized government — and economic system — or it would fly apart, torn by nationalist movements, peasant uprisings and urban starvation. Urbanization, much less industrialization, would have been impossible without a strong center. Indeed, the Russian Empire or Soviet Union would have been impossible. The natural tendency of the empire and Russia itself is to disintegrate. Therefore, to remain united it had to have a centralized bureaucracy responsive to autocratic rule in the capital and a vast security apparatus that compelled the country and empire to remain united. Russia’s history is one of controlling the inherently powerful centrifugal forces tearing at the country’s fabric.
Russia, then, has two core geopolitical problems. The first is holding the empire together. But the creation of that empire poses the second problem, maintaining internal security. It must hold together the empire and defend it at the same time, and the achievement of one goal tends to undermine efforts to achieve the other.
GEOPOLITICAL IMPERATIVES
To secure the Russian core of Muscovy, Russia must:
* Expand north and east to secure a redoubt in climatically hostile territory that is protected in part by the Urals. This way, even in the worst-case scenario (i.e., Moscow falls), there is still a “Russia” from which to potentially resurge.
* Expand south to the Caucasus and southeast into the steppes in order to hamper invasions of Asian origin. As circumstances allow, push as deeply into Central Asia and Siberia as possible to deepen this bulwark.
* Expand as far west as possible. Do not stop in the southwest until the Carpathians are reached. On the North European Plain do not stop ever. Deeper penetration increases security not just in terms of buffers; the North European Plain narrows the further west one travels making its defense easier.
* Manage the empire with terror. Since the vast majority of Russian territory is not actually Russian, a very firm hand is required to prevent myriad minorities from asserting regional control or aligning with hostile forces.
* Expand to warm water ports that have open-ocean access so that the empire can begin to counter the economic problems that a purely land empire suffers.
Given the geography of the Russian heartland, we can see why the Russians would attempt to expand as they did. Vulnerable to attack on the North European Plain and from the Central Asian and European steppes simultaneously, Russia could not withstand an attack from one direction — much less two. Apart from the military problem, the ability of the state to retain control of the country under such pressure was dubious, as was the ability to feed the country under normal circumstances — much less during war. Securing the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia was the first — and easiest — part of dealing with this geographic imbroglio.
The western expansion was not nearly so “simple.” No matter how far west the Russians moved on the European plain, there was no point at which they could effectively anchor themselves. Ultimately, the last effective line of defense is the 400 mile gap (aka Poland) between the Baltic Sea and Carpathian Mountains. Beyond that the plains widen to such a degree that a conventional defense is impossible as there is simply too much open territory to defend. So the Soviet Union pressed on all the way to the Elbe.
At its height, the Soviet Union achieved all but its final imperative of securing ocean access. The USSR was anchored on the Carpathians, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Urals, all of which protected its southern and southwestern flanks. Siberia protected its eastern frontier with vast emptiness. Further to the south, Russia was anchored deeply in Central Asia. The Russians had defensible frontiers everywhere except the North European Plain, ergo the need to occupy Germany and Poland.
STRATEGY OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
The modern Russian empire faces three separate border regions: Asian Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus (now mostly independent states), and Western Europe.
First, Siberia. There is only one rail line connecting Siberia to the rest of the empire, and positioning a military force there is difficult if not impossible. In fact, risk in Russia’s far east is illusory. The Trans-Siberian Railroad (TSR) runs east-west, with the Baikal Amur Mainline forming a loop. The TSR is Russia’s main lifeline to Siberia and is, to some extent, vulnerable. But an attack against Siberia is difficult — there is not much to attack but the weather, while the terrain and sheer size of the region make holding it not only difficult but of questionable relevance. Besides, an attack beyond it is impossible because of the Urals.
East of Kazakhstan, the Russian frontier is mountainous to hilly, and there are almost no north-south roads running deep into Russia; those that do exist can be easily defended, and even then they dead-end in lightly populated regions. The period without mud or snow lasts less than three months out of the year. After that time, overland resupply of an army is impossible. It is impossible for an Asian power to attack Siberia. That is the prime reason the Japanese chose to attack the United States rather than the Soviet Union in 1941. The only way to attack Russia in this region is by sea, as the Japanese did in 1905. It might then be possible to achieve a lodgment in the maritime provinces (such as Primorsky Krai or Vladivostok). But exploiting the resources of deep Siberia, given the requisite infrastructure costs, is prohibitive to the point of being virtually impossible.
We begin with Siberia in order to dispose of it as a major strategic concern. The defense of the Russian Empire involves a different set of issues.
Second, Central Asia. The mature Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were anchored on a series of linked mountain ranges, deserts and bodies of water in this region that gave it a superb defensive position. Beginning on the northwestern Mongolian border and moving southwest on a line through Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the empire was guarded by a north extension of the Himalayas, the Tien Shan Mountains. Swinging west along the Afghan and Iranian borders to the Caspian Sea, the empire occupied the lowlands along a mountainous border. But the lowlands, except for a small region on the frontier with Afghanistan, were harsh desert, impassable for large military forces. A section along the Afghan border was more permeable, leading to a long-term Russian unease with the threat in Afghanistan — foreign or indigenous. The Caspian Sea protected the border with Iran, and on its western shore the Caucasus Mountains began, which the empire shared with Iran and Turkey but which were hard to pass through in either direction. The Caucasus terminated on the Black Sea, totally protecting the empire’s southern border. These regions were of far greater utility to Russia than Siberia and so may have been worth taking, but for once geography actually helped Russia instead of working against it.
Finally, there is the western frontier that ran from west of Odessa north to the Baltic. This European frontier was the vulnerable point. Geographically, the southern portion of the border varied from time to time, and where the border was drawn was critical. The Carpathians form an arc from Romania through western Ukraine into Slovakia. Russia controlled the center of the arc in Ukraine. However, its frontier did not extend as far as the Carpathians in Romania, where a plain separated Russia from the mountains. This region is called Moldova or Bessarabia, and when the region belongs to Romania, it represents a threat to Russian national security. When it is in Russian hands, it allows the Russians to anchor on the Carpathians. And when it is independent, as it is today in the form of the state of Moldova, then it can serve either as a buffer or a flash point. During the alliance with the Germans in 1939-1941, the Russians seized this region as they did again after World War II. But there is always a danger of an attack out of Romania.
This is not Russia’s greatest danger point. That occurs further north, between the northern edge of the Carpathians and the Baltic Sea. This gap, at its narrowest point, is just under 300 miles, running west of Warsaw from the city of Elblag in northern Poland to Cracow in the south. This is the narrowest point in the North European Plain and roughly the location of the Russian imperial border prior to World War I. Behind this point, the Russians controlled eastern Poland and the three Baltic countries.
The danger to Russia is that the north German plain expands like a triangle east of this point. As the triangle widens, Russian forces get stretched thinner and thinner. So a force attacking from the west through the plain faces an expanding geography that thins out Russian forces. If invaders concentrate their forces, the attackers can break through to Moscow. That is the traditional Russian fear: Lacking natural barriers, the farther east the Russians move the broader the front and the greater the advantage for the attacker. The Russians faced three attackers along this axis following the formation of empire — Napoleon, Wilhelm II and Hitler. Wilhelm was focused on France so he did not drive hard into Russia, but Napoleon and Hitler did, both almost toppling Moscow in the process.
Along the North European Plain, Russia has three strategic options:
1. Use Russia’s geographical depth and climate to suck in an enemy force and then defeat it, as it did with Napoleon and Hitler. After the fact this appears the solution, except it is always a close run and the attackers devastate the countryside. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened in 1942 if Hitler had resumed his drive on the North European Plain toward Moscow, rather than shift to a southern attack toward Stalingrad.
2. Face an attacking force with large, immobile infantry forces at the frontier and bleed them to death, as they tried to do in 1914. On the surface this appears to be an attractive choice because of Russia’s greater manpower reserves than those of its European enemies. In practice, however, it is a dangerous choice because of the volatile social conditions of the empire, where the weakening of the security apparatus could cause the collapse of the regime in a soldiers’ revolt as happened in 1917.
3. Push the Russian/Soviet border as far west as possible to create yet another buffer against attack, as the Soviets did during the Cold War. This is obviously an attractive choice, since it creates strategic depth and increases economic opportunities. But it also diffuses Russian resources by extending security states into Central Europe and massively increasing defense costs, which ultimately broke the Soviet Union in 1992.
CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA
The greatest extension of the Russian Empire occurred under the Soviets from 1945 to 1989. Paradoxically, this expansion preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union and the contraction of Russia to its current borders. When we look at the Russian Federation today, it is important to understand that it has essentially retreated to the borders the Russian Empire had in the 17th century. It holds old Muscovy plus the Tatar lands to the southeast as well as Siberia. It has lost its western buffers in Ukraine and the Baltics and its strong foothold in the Caucasus and in Central Asia.
To understand this spectacular expansion and contraction, we need to focus on Soviet strategy. The Soviet Union was a landlocked entity dominating the Eurasian heartland but without free access to the sea. Neither the Baltic nor Black seas allow Russia free oceangoing transport because they are blocked by the Skagerrak and the Turkish straits, respectively. So long as Denmark and Turkey remain in NATO, Russia’s positions in St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Sevastopol and Novorossiysk are militarily dubious.
There were many causes of the Soviet collapse. Some were:
* Overextending forces into Central Europe, which taxed the ability of the Soviet Union to control the region while economically exploiting it. It became a net loss. This overextension created costly logistical problems on top of the cost of the military establishment. Extension of the traditional Russian administrative structure both diffused Russia’s own administrative structure and turned a profitable empire into a massive economic burden.
* Creating an apparent threat to the rest of Europe that compelled the United States to deploy major forces and arm Germany. This in turn forced the Russians into a massive military buildup that undermined its economy, which was less productive than the American economy because of its inherent agricultural problem and because the cost of internal transport combined with the lack of ocean access made Soviet (and Russian) maritime trade impossible. Since maritime trade both is cheaper than land trade and allows access to global markets, the Soviet Union always operated at an extreme economic disadvantage to its Western and Asian competitors.
* Entering an arms race with much richer countries it could compete against only by diverting resources from the civilian economy — material and intellectual. The best minds went into the military-industrial complex, causing the administrative and economic structure of Russia to crumble.
In 1989 the Soviet Union lost control of Eastern Europe and in 1992 the Soviet Union itself collapsed. Russia then retreated essentially to its 17th century borders — except that it retained control of Siberia, which is either geopolitically irrelevant or a liability. Russia has lost all of Central Asia, and its position in the Caucasus has become tenuous. Had Russia lost Chechnya, its eastern flank would have been driven out of the Caucasus completely, leaving it without a geopolitical anchor.
The gap between Kazakhstan in the east and Ukraine in the west, like the narrowest point in the North European Plain, is only 300 miles wide. It also contains Russia’s industrial heartland. Russia has lost Ukraine, of course, and Moldova. But Russia’s most grievous geopolitical contraction has been on the North European Plain, where it has retreated from the Elbe in Germany to a point less than 100 miles from St. Petersburg. The distance from the border of an independent Belarus to Moscow is about 250 miles.
To understand the Russian situation, it is essential to understand that Russia has in many ways returned to the strategic position of late Muscovy. Its flank to the southeast is relatively secure, since China shows no inclination for adventures into the steppes, and no other power is in a position to challenge Russia from that direction. But in the west, in Ukraine and in the Caucasus, the Russian retreat has been stunning.
We need to remember why Muscovy expanded in the first place. Having dealt with the Mongols, the Russians had two strategic interests. Their most immediate was to secure their western borders by absorbing Lithuania and anchoring Russia as far west on the North European Plain as possible. Their second strategic interest was to secure Russia’s southeastern frontier against potential threats from the steppes by absorbing Central Asia as well as Ukraine. Without that, Muscovy could not withstand a thrust from either direction, let alone from both directions at once.
It can be said that no one intends to invade Russia. From the Russian point of view, history is filled with dramatic changes of intention, particularly in the West. The unthinkable occurs to Russia once or twice a century. In its current configuration, Russia cannot hope to survive whatever surprises are coming in the 21st century. Muscovy was offensive because it did not have a good defensive option. The same is true of Russia. Given the fact that a Western alliance, NATO, is speaking seriously of establishing a dominant presence in Ukraine and in the Caucasus — and has already established a presence in the Baltics, forcing Russia far back into the widening triangle, with its southern flank potentially exposed to Ukraine as a NATO member — the Russians must view their position as dire. As with Napoleon, Wilhelm and Hitler, the initiative is in the hands of others. For the Russians, the strategic imperative is to eliminate that initiative or, if that is impossible, anchor Russia as firmly as possible on geographical barriers, concentrating all available force on the North European Plain without overextension.
Unlike countries such as China, Iran and the United States, Russia has not achieved its strategic geopolitical imperatives. On the contrary, it has retreated from them:
* Russia does hold the northern Caucasus, but it no longer boasts a deep penetration of the mountains, including Georgia and Armenia. Without those territories Russia cannot consider this flank secure.
* Russia has lost its anchor in the mountains and deserts of Central Asia and so cannot actively block or disrupt — or even well monitor — any developments to its deep south that could threaten its security.
* Russia retains Siberia, but because of the climatic and geographic hostility of the region it is almost a wash in terms of security (it certainly is economically).
* Russia’s loss of Ukraine and Moldova allows both the intrusion of other powers and the potential rise of a Ukrainian rival on its very doorstep. Powers behind the Carpathians are especially positioned to take advantage of this political geography.
* The Baltic states have re-established their independence, and all three are east and north of the Baltic-Carpathian line (the final defensive line on the North European Plain). Their presence in a hostile alliance is unacceptable. Neither is an independent or even neutral Belarus (also on the wrong side of that line).
Broader goals, such as having a port not blocked by straits controlled by other countries, could have been pursued by the Soviets. Today such goals are far out of Russian reach. From the Russian point of view, creating a sphere of influence that would return Russia to its relatively defensible imperial boundaries is imperative.
Obviously, forces in the peripheral countries as well as great powers outside the region will resist. For them, a weak and vulnerable Russia is preferable, since a strong and secure one develops other appetites that could see Russia pushing along vectors such as through the Skagerrak toward the North Sea, through the Turkish Straits toward the Mediterranean and through La Perouse Strait toward Japan and beyond.
Russia’s essential strategic problem is this: It is geopolitically unstable. The Russian Empire and Soviet Union were never genuinely secure. One problem was the North European Plain. But another problem, very real and hard to solve, was access to the global trading system via oceans. And behind this was Russia’s essential economic weakness due to its size and lack of ability to transport agricultural produce throughout the country. No matter how much national will it has, Russia’s inherently insufficient infrastructure constantly weakens its internal cohesion.
Russia must dominate the Eurasian heartland. When it does, it must want more. The more it wants the more it must face its internal economic weakness and social instability, which cannot support its ambitions. Then the Russian Federation must contract. This cycle has nothing to do with Russian ideology or character. It has everything to do with geography, which in turn generates ideologies and shapes character. Russia is Russia and must face its permanent struggle.
The Geopolitics of Russia: Permanent Struggle
Stratfor Geopolitical Report
October 15, 2008
Russia’s defining characteristic is its indefensibility. Unlike the core of most states that are relatively defensible, core Russia is limited to the region of the medieval Grand Principality of Muscovy. It counts no rivers, oceans, swamps or mountains marking its borders — it relies solely on the relatively inhospitable climate and its forests for defense. Russian history is a chronicle of the agony of surviving invasion after invasion.
Traditionally these invasions have come from two directions. The first is from the steppes — wide open grasslands that connect Russia to Central Asia and beyond — the path that the Mongols used. The second is from the North European Plain, which brought to Russia everything from the Teutonic Knights to the Nazi war machine.
To deal with these vulnerabilities, Russia expanded in three phases. In the first, Russia expanded not toward the invasion corridors to establish buffers but away from them to establish a redoubt. In the late 15th century, under Ivan III, Russia did creep westward somewhat, anchoring itself at the Pripet Marshes, which separated Russia from the Kiev region. But the bulk of Russia’s expansion during that period was north to the Arctic and northeast to the Urals. Very little of this territory can be categorized as useful — most was taiga or actual tundra and only lightly populated — but for Russia it was the only land easily up for grabs. It also marked a natural organic outgrowth of the original Muscovy — all cloaked in forest. It was as defensible a territory as Russia had access to and their only hope against the Mongols.
The Mongols were horsemen who dominated the grasslands with their fast-moving cavalry forces. Their power, although substantial, diminished when they entered the forests and the value of their horses, their force multipliers, declined. The Mongols had to fight infantry forces in the forests, where the advantage was on the defender’s side.
The second phase of expansion was far more aggressive — and risky. In the mid-16th century, Under Ivan IV, Russia finally moved to seal off the Mongol invasion route. Russia pushed south and east, deep into the steppes, and did not stop until it hit the Urals in the east and the Caspian Sea and Caucasus Mountains in the south. As part of this expansion, Russia captured several strategically critical locations, including Astrakhan on the Caspian, the land of the Tatars — a longtime horse-mounted foe — and Grozny, which was soon transformed into a military outpost at the foot of the Caucasus.
Also with this expansion, Ivan IV was transformed from Grand Prince of Moscow to Tsar of All Russia, suggesting the empire to come. Russia had finally achieved a measure of conventional security. Holding the northern slopes of the Caucasus would provide a reasonable defense from Asia Minor and Persia, while the millions of square kilometers of steppes gave birth to another defensive strategy: buffers.
Russia — modern, medieval or otherwise — cannot count on natural features to protect it. The Pripet Marshes were small and could in many cases simply be avoided. There is no one who might wish to attack from the Arctic. Forests slowed the Mongol horsemen, but as Muscovy’s predecessor — Kievan Rus — aptly demonstrated, the operative word was “slowed,” not “stopped.” The Mongols conquered and destroyed Kievan Rus in the 13th century.
That leaves buffers. So long as a country controls territory separating itself from its foes — even if it is territory that is easy for a hostile military to transit — it can bleed out any invasion via attrition and attacks on supply lines. Such buffers, however, contain a poison pill. They have populations not necessarily willing to serve as buffers. Maintaining control of such buffers requires not only a sizable standing military for defense but also a huge internal security and intelligence network to enforce central control. And any institution so key to the state’s survival must be very tightly controlled as well. Establishing and maintaining buffers not only makes Russia seem aggressive to its neighbors but also forces it to conduct purges and terrors against its own institutions in order to maintain the empire.
The third expansion phase dealt with the final invasion route: from the west. In the 18th century, under Peter and Catherine the Great, Russian power pushed westward, conquering Ukraine to the southwest and pushing on to the Carpathian Mountains. It also moved the Russian border to the west, incorporating the Baltic territories and securing a Russian flank on the Baltic Sea. Muscovy and the Tsardom of Russia were now known as the Russian Empire.
Yet aside from the anchor in the Carpathians, Russia did not achieve any truly defensible borders. Expansions to the Baltic and Black Seas did end the external threat from the Cossacks and Balts of ages past, but at the price of turning those external threats into internal ones. Russia also expanded so far and fast that holding the empire together socially and militarily became a monumental and ongoing challenge (today Russia is dealing with the fact that Russians are barely a majority in their own country). All this to achieve some semblance of security by establishing buffer regions.
But that is an issue of empire management. Ultimately the multi-directional threat defined Muscovy’s geopolitical problem. There was a constant threat from the steppes, but there was also a constant threat from the west, where the North European Plain allowed for few natural defenses and larger populations could deploy substantial infantry (and could, as the Swedes did, use naval power to land forces against the Muscovites). The forests provided a degree of protection, as did the sheer size of Russia’s holdings and its climate, but in the end the Russians faced threats from at least two directions. In managing these threats by establishing buffers, they were caught in a perpetual juggling act: east vs. west, internal vs. external.
The geography of the Russian Empire bequeathed it certain characteristics. Most important, the empire was (and remains) lightly settled. Even today, vast areas of Russia are unpopulated while in the rest of the country the population is widely distributed in small towns and cities and far less concentrated in large urban areas. Russia’s European part is the most densely populated, but in its expansion Russia both resettled Russian ethnics and assimilated large minorities along the way. So while Moscow and its surroundings are certainly critical, the predominance of the old Muscovy is not decisively ironclad.
The result is a constant, ingrained clash within the Russian Empire no matter the time frame, driven primarily by its size and the challenges of transport. The Russian empire, even excluding Siberia, is an enormous landmass located far to the north. Moscow is at the same latitude as Newfoundland while the Russian and Ukrainian breadbaskets are at the latitude of Maine, resulting in an extremely short growing season. Apart from limiting the size of the crop, the climate limits the efficiency of transport — getting the crop from farm to distant markets is a difficult matter and so is supporting large urban populations far from the farms. This is the root problem of the Russian economy. Russia can grow enough to feed itself, but it cannot efficiently transport what it grows from the farms to the cities and to the barren reaches of the empire before the food spoils. And even when it can transport it, the costs of transport make the foodstuffs unaffordable.
Population distribution also creates a political problem. One natural result of the transport problem is that the population tends to distribute itself nearer growing areas and in smaller towns so as not to tax the transport system. Yet these populations in Russia’s west and south tend to be conquered peoples. So the conquered peoples tend to distribute themselves to reflect economic rationalities, while need for food to be transported to the Russian core goes against such rationalities.
Faced with a choice of accepting urban starvation or the forcing of economic destitution upon the food-producing regions (by ordering the sale of food in urban centers at prices well below market prices), Russian leaders tend to select the latter option. Joseph Stalin certainly did in his efforts to forge and support an urban, industrialized population. Force-feeding such economic hardship to conquered minorities only doubled the need for a tightly controlled security apparatus.
The Russian geography meant that Russia either would have a centralized government — and economic system — or it would fly apart, torn by nationalist movements, peasant uprisings and urban starvation. Urbanization, much less industrialization, would have been impossible without a strong center. Indeed, the Russian Empire or Soviet Union would have been impossible. The natural tendency of the empire and Russia itself is to disintegrate. Therefore, to remain united it had to have a centralized bureaucracy responsive to autocratic rule in the capital and a vast security apparatus that compelled the country and empire to remain united. Russia’s history is one of controlling the inherently powerful centrifugal forces tearing at the country’s fabric.
Russia, then, has two core geopolitical problems. The first is holding the empire together. But the creation of that empire poses the second problem, maintaining internal security. It must hold together the empire and defend it at the same time, and the achievement of one goal tends to undermine efforts to achieve the other.
GEOPOLITICAL IMPERATIVES
To secure the Russian core of Muscovy, Russia must:
* Expand north and east to secure a redoubt in climatically hostile territory that is protected in part by the Urals. This way, even in the worst-case scenario (i.e., Moscow falls), there is still a “Russia” from which to potentially resurge.
* Expand south to the Caucasus and southeast into the steppes in order to hamper invasions of Asian origin. As circumstances allow, push as deeply into Central Asia and Siberia as possible to deepen this bulwark.
* Expand as far west as possible. Do not stop in the southwest until the Carpathians are reached. On the North European Plain do not stop ever. Deeper penetration increases security not just in terms of buffers; the North European Plain narrows the further west one travels making its defense easier.
* Manage the empire with terror. Since the vast majority of Russian territory is not actually Russian, a very firm hand is required to prevent myriad minorities from asserting regional control or aligning with hostile forces.
* Expand to warm water ports that have open-ocean access so that the empire can begin to counter the economic problems that a purely land empire suffers.
Given the geography of the Russian heartland, we can see why the Russians would attempt to expand as they did. Vulnerable to attack on the North European Plain and from the Central Asian and European steppes simultaneously, Russia could not withstand an attack from one direction — much less two. Apart from the military problem, the ability of the state to retain control of the country under such pressure was dubious, as was the ability to feed the country under normal circumstances — much less during war. Securing the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia was the first — and easiest — part of dealing with this geographic imbroglio.
The western expansion was not nearly so “simple.” No matter how far west the Russians moved on the European plain, there was no point at which they could effectively anchor themselves. Ultimately, the last effective line of defense is the 400 mile gap (aka Poland) between the Baltic Sea and Carpathian Mountains. Beyond that the plains widen to such a degree that a conventional defense is impossible as there is simply too much open territory to defend. So the Soviet Union pressed on all the way to the Elbe.
At its height, the Soviet Union achieved all but its final imperative of securing ocean access. The USSR was anchored on the Carpathians, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Urals, all of which protected its southern and southwestern flanks. Siberia protected its eastern frontier with vast emptiness. Further to the south, Russia was anchored deeply in Central Asia. The Russians had defensible frontiers everywhere except the North European Plain, ergo the need to occupy Germany and Poland.
STRATEGY OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
The modern Russian empire faces three separate border regions: Asian Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus (now mostly independent states), and Western Europe.
First, Siberia. There is only one rail line connecting Siberia to the rest of the empire, and positioning a military force there is difficult if not impossible. In fact, risk in Russia’s far east is illusory. The Trans-Siberian Railroad (TSR) runs east-west, with the Baikal Amur Mainline forming a loop. The TSR is Russia’s main lifeline to Siberia and is, to some extent, vulnerable. But an attack against Siberia is difficult — there is not much to attack but the weather, while the terrain and sheer size of the region make holding it not only difficult but of questionable relevance. Besides, an attack beyond it is impossible because of the Urals.
East of Kazakhstan, the Russian frontier is mountainous to hilly, and there are almost no north-south roads running deep into Russia; those that do exist can be easily defended, and even then they dead-end in lightly populated regions. The period without mud or snow lasts less than three months out of the year. After that time, overland resupply of an army is impossible. It is impossible for an Asian power to attack Siberia. That is the prime reason the Japanese chose to attack the United States rather than the Soviet Union in 1941. The only way to attack Russia in this region is by sea, as the Japanese did in 1905. It might then be possible to achieve a lodgment in the maritime provinces (such as Primorsky Krai or Vladivostok). But exploiting the resources of deep Siberia, given the requisite infrastructure costs, is prohibitive to the point of being virtually impossible.
We begin with Siberia in order to dispose of it as a major strategic concern. The defense of the Russian Empire involves a different set of issues.
Second, Central Asia. The mature Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were anchored on a series of linked mountain ranges, deserts and bodies of water in this region that gave it a superb defensive position. Beginning on the northwestern Mongolian border and moving southwest on a line through Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the empire was guarded by a north extension of the Himalayas, the Tien Shan Mountains. Swinging west along the Afghan and Iranian borders to the Caspian Sea, the empire occupied the lowlands along a mountainous border. But the lowlands, except for a small region on the frontier with Afghanistan, were harsh desert, impassable for large military forces. A section along the Afghan border was more permeable, leading to a long-term Russian unease with the threat in Afghanistan — foreign or indigenous. The Caspian Sea protected the border with Iran, and on its western shore the Caucasus Mountains began, which the empire shared with Iran and Turkey but which were hard to pass through in either direction. The Caucasus terminated on the Black Sea, totally protecting the empire’s southern border. These regions were of far greater utility to Russia than Siberia and so may have been worth taking, but for once geography actually helped Russia instead of working against it.
Finally, there is the western frontier that ran from west of Odessa north to the Baltic. This European frontier was the vulnerable point. Geographically, the southern portion of the border varied from time to time, and where the border was drawn was critical. The Carpathians form an arc from Romania through western Ukraine into Slovakia. Russia controlled the center of the arc in Ukraine. However, its frontier did not extend as far as the Carpathians in Romania, where a plain separated Russia from the mountains. This region is called Moldova or Bessarabia, and when the region belongs to Romania, it represents a threat to Russian national security. When it is in Russian hands, it allows the Russians to anchor on the Carpathians. And when it is independent, as it is today in the form of the state of Moldova, then it can serve either as a buffer or a flash point. During the alliance with the Germans in 1939-1941, the Russians seized this region as they did again after World War II. But there is always a danger of an attack out of Romania.
This is not Russia’s greatest danger point. That occurs further north, between the northern edge of the Carpathians and the Baltic Sea. This gap, at its narrowest point, is just under 300 miles, running west of Warsaw from the city of Elblag in northern Poland to Cracow in the south. This is the narrowest point in the North European Plain and roughly the location of the Russian imperial border prior to World War I. Behind this point, the Russians controlled eastern Poland and the three Baltic countries.
The danger to Russia is that the north German plain expands like a triangle east of this point. As the triangle widens, Russian forces get stretched thinner and thinner. So a force attacking from the west through the plain faces an expanding geography that thins out Russian forces. If invaders concentrate their forces, the attackers can break through to Moscow. That is the traditional Russian fear: Lacking natural barriers, the farther east the Russians move the broader the front and the greater the advantage for the attacker. The Russians faced three attackers along this axis following the formation of empire — Napoleon, Wilhelm II and Hitler. Wilhelm was focused on France so he did not drive hard into Russia, but Napoleon and Hitler did, both almost toppling Moscow in the process.
Along the North European Plain, Russia has three strategic options:
1. Use Russia’s geographical depth and climate to suck in an enemy force and then defeat it, as it did with Napoleon and Hitler. After the fact this appears the solution, except it is always a close run and the attackers devastate the countryside. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened in 1942 if Hitler had resumed his drive on the North European Plain toward Moscow, rather than shift to a southern attack toward Stalingrad.
2. Face an attacking force with large, immobile infantry forces at the frontier and bleed them to death, as they tried to do in 1914. On the surface this appears to be an attractive choice because of Russia’s greater manpower reserves than those of its European enemies. In practice, however, it is a dangerous choice because of the volatile social conditions of the empire, where the weakening of the security apparatus could cause the collapse of the regime in a soldiers’ revolt as happened in 1917.
3. Push the Russian/Soviet border as far west as possible to create yet another buffer against attack, as the Soviets did during the Cold War. This is obviously an attractive choice, since it creates strategic depth and increases economic opportunities. But it also diffuses Russian resources by extending security states into Central Europe and massively increasing defense costs, which ultimately broke the Soviet Union in 1992.
CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA
The greatest extension of the Russian Empire occurred under the Soviets from 1945 to 1989. Paradoxically, this expansion preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union and the contraction of Russia to its current borders. When we look at the Russian Federation today, it is important to understand that it has essentially retreated to the borders the Russian Empire had in the 17th century. It holds old Muscovy plus the Tatar lands to the southeast as well as Siberia. It has lost its western buffers in Ukraine and the Baltics and its strong foothold in the Caucasus and in Central Asia.
To understand this spectacular expansion and contraction, we need to focus on Soviet strategy. The Soviet Union was a landlocked entity dominating the Eurasian heartland but without free access to the sea. Neither the Baltic nor Black seas allow Russia free oceangoing transport because they are blocked by the Skagerrak and the Turkish straits, respectively. So long as Denmark and Turkey remain in NATO, Russia’s positions in St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Sevastopol and Novorossiysk are militarily dubious.
There were many causes of the Soviet collapse. Some were:
* Overextending forces into Central Europe, which taxed the ability of the Soviet Union to control the region while economically exploiting it. It became a net loss. This overextension created costly logistical problems on top of the cost of the military establishment. Extension of the traditional Russian administrative structure both diffused Russia’s own administrative structure and turned a profitable empire into a massive economic burden.
* Creating an apparent threat to the rest of Europe that compelled the United States to deploy major forces and arm Germany. This in turn forced the Russians into a massive military buildup that undermined its economy, which was less productive than the American economy because of its inherent agricultural problem and because the cost of internal transport combined with the lack of ocean access made Soviet (and Russian) maritime trade impossible. Since maritime trade both is cheaper than land trade and allows access to global markets, the Soviet Union always operated at an extreme economic disadvantage to its Western and Asian competitors.
* Entering an arms race with much richer countries it could compete against only by diverting resources from the civilian economy — material and intellectual. The best minds went into the military-industrial complex, causing the administrative and economic structure of Russia to crumble.
In 1989 the Soviet Union lost control of Eastern Europe and in 1992 the Soviet Union itself collapsed. Russia then retreated essentially to its 17th century borders — except that it retained control of Siberia, which is either geopolitically irrelevant or a liability. Russia has lost all of Central Asia, and its position in the Caucasus has become tenuous. Had Russia lost Chechnya, its eastern flank would have been driven out of the Caucasus completely, leaving it without a geopolitical anchor.
The gap between Kazakhstan in the east and Ukraine in the west, like the narrowest point in the North European Plain, is only 300 miles wide. It also contains Russia’s industrial heartland. Russia has lost Ukraine, of course, and Moldova. But Russia’s most grievous geopolitical contraction has been on the North European Plain, where it has retreated from the Elbe in Germany to a point less than 100 miles from St. Petersburg. The distance from the border of an independent Belarus to Moscow is about 250 miles.
To understand the Russian situation, it is essential to understand that Russia has in many ways returned to the strategic position of late Muscovy. Its flank to the southeast is relatively secure, since China shows no inclination for adventures into the steppes, and no other power is in a position to challenge Russia from that direction. But in the west, in Ukraine and in the Caucasus, the Russian retreat has been stunning.
We need to remember why Muscovy expanded in the first place. Having dealt with the Mongols, the Russians had two strategic interests. Their most immediate was to secure their western borders by absorbing Lithuania and anchoring Russia as far west on the North European Plain as possible. Their second strategic interest was to secure Russia’s southeastern frontier against potential threats from the steppes by absorbing Central Asia as well as Ukraine. Without that, Muscovy could not withstand a thrust from either direction, let alone from both directions at once.
It can be said that no one intends to invade Russia. From the Russian point of view, history is filled with dramatic changes of intention, particularly in the West. The unthinkable occurs to Russia once or twice a century. In its current configuration, Russia cannot hope to survive whatever surprises are coming in the 21st century. Muscovy was offensive because it did not have a good defensive option. The same is true of Russia. Given the fact that a Western alliance, NATO, is speaking seriously of establishing a dominant presence in Ukraine and in the Caucasus — and has already established a presence in the Baltics, forcing Russia far back into the widening triangle, with its southern flank potentially exposed to Ukraine as a NATO member — the Russians must view their position as dire. As with Napoleon, Wilhelm and Hitler, the initiative is in the hands of others. For the Russians, the strategic imperative is to eliminate that initiative or, if that is impossible, anchor Russia as firmly as possible on geographical barriers, concentrating all available force on the North European Plain without overextension.
Unlike countries such as China, Iran and the United States, Russia has not achieved its strategic geopolitical imperatives. On the contrary, it has retreated from them:
* Russia does hold the northern Caucasus, but it no longer boasts a deep penetration of the mountains, including Georgia and Armenia. Without those territories Russia cannot consider this flank secure.
* Russia has lost its anchor in the mountains and deserts of Central Asia and so cannot actively block or disrupt — or even well monitor — any developments to its deep south that could threaten its security.
* Russia retains Siberia, but because of the climatic and geographic hostility of the region it is almost a wash in terms of security (it certainly is economically).
* Russia’s loss of Ukraine and Moldova allows both the intrusion of other powers and the potential rise of a Ukrainian rival on its very doorstep. Powers behind the Carpathians are especially positioned to take advantage of this political geography.
* The Baltic states have re-established their independence, and all three are east and north of the Baltic-Carpathian line (the final defensive line on the North European Plain). Their presence in a hostile alliance is unacceptable. Neither is an independent or even neutral Belarus (also on the wrong side of that line).
Broader goals, such as having a port not blocked by straits controlled by other countries, could have been pursued by the Soviets. Today such goals are far out of Russian reach. From the Russian point of view, creating a sphere of influence that would return Russia to its relatively defensible imperial boundaries is imperative.
Obviously, forces in the peripheral countries as well as great powers outside the region will resist. For them, a weak and vulnerable Russia is preferable, since a strong and secure one develops other appetites that could see Russia pushing along vectors such as through the Skagerrak toward the North Sea, through the Turkish Straits toward the Mediterranean and through La Perouse Strait toward Japan and beyond.
Russia’s essential strategic problem is this: It is geopolitically unstable. The Russian Empire and Soviet Union were never genuinely secure. One problem was the North European Plain. But another problem, very real and hard to solve, was access to the global trading system via oceans. And behind this was Russia’s essential economic weakness due to its size and lack of ability to transport agricultural produce throughout the country. No matter how much national will it has, Russia’s inherently insufficient infrastructure constantly weakens its internal cohesion.
Russia must dominate the Eurasian heartland. When it does, it must want more. The more it wants the more it must face its internal economic weakness and social instability, which cannot support its ambitions. Then the Russian Federation must contract. This cycle has nothing to do with Russian ideology or character. It has everything to do with geography, which in turn generates ideologies and shapes character. Russia is Russia and must face its permanent struggle.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Anti-semitism in France - the appalling story of Ilan Halimi
This is a disgusting tale of Islamic anti-semitism in France. This poor guy was tortured to death over the course of a month and the authorities are denying the facts.
Paris: Prisoner of the Barbarians
Nidra Poller
Standpoint Mag, July/August 2009
In February 2007, a naked, emaciated, mutilated, charred and stabbed man is discovered near railway tracks in the Parisian suburb of Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois. He is taken to hospital where he is pronounced dead just before noon. Two days later, the victim is identified as Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jew who was abducted while working in a cell phone shop. He was held hostage and tortured for three weeks by a group calling itself the Gang of Barbarians in a housing estate in Bagneux, a suburb south of Paris. Within days, dozens of arrests are made. Gang leader Youssouf Fofana, who had fled to Ivory Coast, is quickly extradited and imprisoned.
The kidnap, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi vividly illustrates French society's ills in the first decade of the 21st century. The unrepentant gang leader, Fofana, who called himself (in English) the "Brain of the Barbarians", is the French-born son of immigrants from the Ivory Coast. He is a small-time thug driven by Islamic Jew-hatred. Asocial and amoral, tyrannical and seductive, cruel and clumsy, he thrives on delusions of grandeur drawn from the jihadist playbook. Having botched dozens of other attempts at extortion, he finally succeeded in committing an atrocious murder. Since 27 April, his case has been heard behind closed doors.
The 27 defendants, accused of direct or indirect involvement in Halimi's kidnap and torture, are not all Muslim. But they all allegedly participated in a crime inspired by Islamist anti-Semitism. The police were clearly determined to return Ilan to his family safe and sound. However, they worked with an outdated protocol for dealing with ransom demands, refused to accept that the gang had anti-Semitic motives, never understood their psychology and as a
result failed miserably.
It was virtually impossible to verify what little information was made available when the crime was discovered, because reporting restrictions were imposed during the long inquest. Nothing filtered out, except for the occasional story of Fofana's outrageous threats against judges, the courts and anyone else who angered him. He accused them all of being Jewish. Disingenuous ambiguity clouded the issues — was it really an anti-Semitic crime? Did it have anything to do with Islam? Today there is barely any coverage of the case because of the reporting restrictions. However, there is a Nouvel Observateur blog, run by Elsa Vigoreux, who publishes information from anonymous sources.
The case is being heard in juvenile court because two of the defendants, including Yalda, an Iranian girl who was sent to lure Ilan, were just under 18 when the crime was committed. They could have waived their rights to a trial in camera. They didn't. They could have saved Ilan's life with an anonymous tip-off to the police. They didn't.
Fofana had sent Yalda and another girl to lure Jewish victims in cell phone shops near the Place de la République. Jews had money, he told Yalda, and they stuck together. If the family can't pay the ransom, the community will pitch in. Jews, he told her, lived like kings in France while we lived in misery.
After the crime was uncovered, commentators gave an economic narrative that would hide the truth of murderous Jew-hatred flourishing in a Parisian banlieue. It wasn't really anti-Semitism, they claimed. It was simply that Fofana thought Jews were rich. The police, too, stubbornly clung to the kidnap-for-ransom scenario.
What did they make of the photo the Barbarians sent the family the day after Ilan disappeared? The photo was reproduced on the cover of Choc magazine on 18 May. Withdrawn by a court order, it still circulates on the internet. Ilan's face is completely covered with thick silver duct tape except for his broken, bleeding nose. His hands are bound with the same tape. A newspaper is propped against his chest and he is holding his car keys. ("Key" was the code word Yalda used to signal to the thugs waiting for Ilan behind the bushes.) A black-sleeved hand holds a gun to Ilan's head. Does that look like a kidnapping for ransom? Ilan's eyes and mouth are taped shut. Doesn't that indicate exceptional cruelty and clumsy incompetence? Exaggerated, erratic ransom demands ranged from €5,000 to €450,000 (£4,250-£380,000). Drop-off appointments were made and cancelled. Koranic verses were read against the background of Ilan's screams.
Although Ilan lived with his mother, the police decided that her ex-husband — and his father — should be the kidnappers' sole contact. He took as many as 50 phone calls in one day, all of them peppered with murderous threats and anti-Semitic insults. And yet the police could never trace them.
Ilan was held in a vacant apartment and then transferred to a basement before workmen came to paint the apartment for the new tenants. The duct tape was never removed from his face, his hands were constantly bound, he was naked under a flimsy robe in the dead of winter. He was fed through a straw. His toilet was a plastic bag.
Some of the gang members are charged as accessories, others with direct participation in kidnapping, illegal confinement and torture, with the aggravating circumstances of anti-Semitism. They guarded the prisoner, beat him, burned him, cut out chunks of his skin, taunted him, threatened him, deprived him of basic human needs and watched him creep slowly to inexorable death. Twenty-four days, 576 hours, 34,560 minutes of agony.
On 13 February, having failed to get the ransom money, Fofana stuffed what was left of Ilan into the boot of a stolen car, drove to a field near a railway line in nearby Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois, doused him with flammable liquid, set fire to him and stabbed him in the neck and hip.
No one knows what would have happened if the police had grasped the nature of the criminals. How many hostages have been beheaded by jihadis in recent years? Governments, armies and investigators have been stumped by this new type of violence. Maybe the Barbarians would have murdered Ilan immediately had they sensed the police hot on their trail. Nevertheless, the failure to understand the anti-Semitism behind the crime, and the inexplicable bungling of repeated opportunities to flush out the criminals, locate their hideout, trace communications and connect Ilan's abduction to previous attempts with the same target — Jews — and the same operating method cannot be dismissed.
In a riveting, heart-rending book published in April, 24 jours, la vérité sur la mort d'Ilan Halimi (24 days, The truth about the death of Ilan Halimi), Ilan's mother, Ruth, recounts her ordeal and explores the larger issues with dignity and fairness. Expressing gratitude and respect for the detectives who stood by her, she nevertheless deplores their failure to trust her intuition about the psychology of the Barbarians who transformed her beloved son into a filthy object to be tormented to death. Unable to understand the Jew-hatred spewing from the mouth of Fofana, says Ruth, agents misled Ilan's father in his communications with the kidnapper.
Shortly after the discovery of the atrocious crime, then President Jacques Chirac dispatched his personal counsel, Maître Francis Szpiner, to represent the Halimi family. But Szpiner is not known as a great friend of the Jews, having been part of the defence team of TV station France 2, which lost an appeal against a libel verdict it had won over a report about the killing of a Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Dura, in 2000. Al-Dura, who was seen cowering behind his father, became the poster boy of the second intifada.
Media critic Philippe Karsenty had been convicted of libel for writing that France 2's report of the death of al-Dura was a hoax. The Paris court ruled that the extensive evidence produced by Karsenty, including a ballistics report and a detailed analysis of the raw footage, was sufficient cause for suspicion that the scene had been staged.
In his aggressive closing argument, playing on the definition of a Zionist, Szpiner compared Karsenty to "a Jew who pays another Jew to send a third Jew to go to war against the Palestinians."
Two members of Fofana's defence team — Maître Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, the wife of Carlos "the Jackal", the Venezuelan-born pro-jihadi serving a life sentence for multiple terror attacks, and Maître Emmanuel Ludot, who represented Saddam Hussein — were interviewed on an Agence France Press video on the opening day of the trial. Angered by hecklers shouting at defendants and lawyers outside the court, they denounced political and media pressure against their client, claiming that President Nicolas Sarkozy was using the case for ignoble electoral reasons.
They also claimed that some of the plaintiffs were backed by a "certain lobby", and that blacks had been attacked by thugs from the right-wing Zionist Betar and the Jewish Defence League groups "when the Halimi family organised a demonstration". Maître Coutant-Peyre declares in the video: "Fofana is a scapegoat." A young lawyer joins them. They discuss the case. He thinks they'll be able to get the court to drop the aggravating circumstances of anti-Semitism. They joke about Maître Szpiner. Is the Elysée (the presidency) paying his fees? The young lawyer guffaws. "It's the Crif [the umbrella body of French Jewry]!" he says, provoking derisive laughter, "and the Elysée is funding the Crif." According to leaked information, Fofana subsequently dismissed Coutant-Peyre in an outburst of paranoid anti-Semitic rage, shouting, "Peyre, that's a Jewish name, isn't it?"
In the absence of reliable information about the trial, which is scheduled to run until 11 July, how can one predict the verdict? The death penalty was abolished in 1981. Life imprisonment is a relative concept. Prisons are overcrowded and dangerous criminals are often released early. Confidential sources have told me that Fofana could be "rubbed out" in prison.
Journalists who were present at the start of the trial, until a motion brought by the Halimi family to hear the case in an open court was defeated, reported that Fofana entered shouting "Allahu Akhbar" ("Allah is Great"). Asked to identify himself, he replied in mangled French, "Arabs, African armed revolt, Salafist barbarian." He gave the day of Ilan's death as his date of birth.
Will lawyers, if any are left to defend him, use Fofana's megalomaniac defiance as an argument for diminished responsibility? In 2003 a Muslim neighbour lured a Jewish DJ, Sebastien Selam, into the underground garage of their building, slit his throat, gouged out his eyes with a carving fork, went home and told his mother: "I killed my Jew, I'll go to paradise." He was released after spending a few years in a mental hospital and will apparently never be tried. The anti-Semitic motivation in that case was so thoroughly denied that commentators systematically referred to Halimi's killing as the first anti-Semitic murder in France.
Whenever immigrant youths from the banlieue are concerned, French authorities walk on eggshells for fear of igniting mass revolt. Which brings us back to Eva Vigoreux's Nouvel Observateur blog. We discern a defence strategy aimed at portraying the 26 accomplices as bit players roped in, manipulated and intimidated by Fofana. They took no pleasure in tormenting Ilan and actually tried to alleviate the cruel punishment he imposed.
Michaël Doueib, an earlier Jewish victim of the Gang of Barbarians, is disgusted by their feigned innocence. "They didn't lift a hand to save him," he says. "An anonymous phone call, that's all they had to do." Lured to the same Bagneux neighborhood where Ilan would be jailed two weeks later, tied up and mercilessly beaten, Doueib escaped because residents who heard his screams called the police.
He claims police investigators rejected his offer of information, phone numbers, descriptions and other evidence that could have led them to the gang.
Whatever the verdict, we will be left with the troubling impression that the more this evil of Jew-hatred eats into the tissue of French society, the more it will be shrouded in artificial doubts and fabricated subtleties. This secret trial leaves Ilan Halimi once again illegally confined, isolated, bound and gagged, helpless to awaken dead hearts and warn potential victims.
Paris: Prisoner of the Barbarians
Nidra Poller
Standpoint Mag, July/August 2009
In February 2007, a naked, emaciated, mutilated, charred and stabbed man is discovered near railway tracks in the Parisian suburb of Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois. He is taken to hospital where he is pronounced dead just before noon. Two days later, the victim is identified as Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jew who was abducted while working in a cell phone shop. He was held hostage and tortured for three weeks by a group calling itself the Gang of Barbarians in a housing estate in Bagneux, a suburb south of Paris. Within days, dozens of arrests are made. Gang leader Youssouf Fofana, who had fled to Ivory Coast, is quickly extradited and imprisoned.
The kidnap, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi vividly illustrates French society's ills in the first decade of the 21st century. The unrepentant gang leader, Fofana, who called himself (in English) the "Brain of the Barbarians", is the French-born son of immigrants from the Ivory Coast. He is a small-time thug driven by Islamic Jew-hatred. Asocial and amoral, tyrannical and seductive, cruel and clumsy, he thrives on delusions of grandeur drawn from the jihadist playbook. Having botched dozens of other attempts at extortion, he finally succeeded in committing an atrocious murder. Since 27 April, his case has been heard behind closed doors.
The 27 defendants, accused of direct or indirect involvement in Halimi's kidnap and torture, are not all Muslim. But they all allegedly participated in a crime inspired by Islamist anti-Semitism. The police were clearly determined to return Ilan to his family safe and sound. However, they worked with an outdated protocol for dealing with ransom demands, refused to accept that the gang had anti-Semitic motives, never understood their psychology and as a
result failed miserably.
It was virtually impossible to verify what little information was made available when the crime was discovered, because reporting restrictions were imposed during the long inquest. Nothing filtered out, except for the occasional story of Fofana's outrageous threats against judges, the courts and anyone else who angered him. He accused them all of being Jewish. Disingenuous ambiguity clouded the issues — was it really an anti-Semitic crime? Did it have anything to do with Islam? Today there is barely any coverage of the case because of the reporting restrictions. However, there is a Nouvel Observateur blog, run by Elsa Vigoreux, who publishes information from anonymous sources.
The case is being heard in juvenile court because two of the defendants, including Yalda, an Iranian girl who was sent to lure Ilan, were just under 18 when the crime was committed. They could have waived their rights to a trial in camera. They didn't. They could have saved Ilan's life with an anonymous tip-off to the police. They didn't.
Fofana had sent Yalda and another girl to lure Jewish victims in cell phone shops near the Place de la République. Jews had money, he told Yalda, and they stuck together. If the family can't pay the ransom, the community will pitch in. Jews, he told her, lived like kings in France while we lived in misery.
After the crime was uncovered, commentators gave an economic narrative that would hide the truth of murderous Jew-hatred flourishing in a Parisian banlieue. It wasn't really anti-Semitism, they claimed. It was simply that Fofana thought Jews were rich. The police, too, stubbornly clung to the kidnap-for-ransom scenario.
What did they make of the photo the Barbarians sent the family the day after Ilan disappeared? The photo was reproduced on the cover of Choc magazine on 18 May. Withdrawn by a court order, it still circulates on the internet. Ilan's face is completely covered with thick silver duct tape except for his broken, bleeding nose. His hands are bound with the same tape. A newspaper is propped against his chest and he is holding his car keys. ("Key" was the code word Yalda used to signal to the thugs waiting for Ilan behind the bushes.) A black-sleeved hand holds a gun to Ilan's head. Does that look like a kidnapping for ransom? Ilan's eyes and mouth are taped shut. Doesn't that indicate exceptional cruelty and clumsy incompetence? Exaggerated, erratic ransom demands ranged from €5,000 to €450,000 (£4,250-£380,000). Drop-off appointments were made and cancelled. Koranic verses were read against the background of Ilan's screams.
Although Ilan lived with his mother, the police decided that her ex-husband — and his father — should be the kidnappers' sole contact. He took as many as 50 phone calls in one day, all of them peppered with murderous threats and anti-Semitic insults. And yet the police could never trace them.
Ilan was held in a vacant apartment and then transferred to a basement before workmen came to paint the apartment for the new tenants. The duct tape was never removed from his face, his hands were constantly bound, he was naked under a flimsy robe in the dead of winter. He was fed through a straw. His toilet was a plastic bag.
Some of the gang members are charged as accessories, others with direct participation in kidnapping, illegal confinement and torture, with the aggravating circumstances of anti-Semitism. They guarded the prisoner, beat him, burned him, cut out chunks of his skin, taunted him, threatened him, deprived him of basic human needs and watched him creep slowly to inexorable death. Twenty-four days, 576 hours, 34,560 minutes of agony.
On 13 February, having failed to get the ransom money, Fofana stuffed what was left of Ilan into the boot of a stolen car, drove to a field near a railway line in nearby Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois, doused him with flammable liquid, set fire to him and stabbed him in the neck and hip.
No one knows what would have happened if the police had grasped the nature of the criminals. How many hostages have been beheaded by jihadis in recent years? Governments, armies and investigators have been stumped by this new type of violence. Maybe the Barbarians would have murdered Ilan immediately had they sensed the police hot on their trail. Nevertheless, the failure to understand the anti-Semitism behind the crime, and the inexplicable bungling of repeated opportunities to flush out the criminals, locate their hideout, trace communications and connect Ilan's abduction to previous attempts with the same target — Jews — and the same operating method cannot be dismissed.
In a riveting, heart-rending book published in April, 24 jours, la vérité sur la mort d'Ilan Halimi (24 days, The truth about the death of Ilan Halimi), Ilan's mother, Ruth, recounts her ordeal and explores the larger issues with dignity and fairness. Expressing gratitude and respect for the detectives who stood by her, she nevertheless deplores their failure to trust her intuition about the psychology of the Barbarians who transformed her beloved son into a filthy object to be tormented to death. Unable to understand the Jew-hatred spewing from the mouth of Fofana, says Ruth, agents misled Ilan's father in his communications with the kidnapper.
Shortly after the discovery of the atrocious crime, then President Jacques Chirac dispatched his personal counsel, Maître Francis Szpiner, to represent the Halimi family. But Szpiner is not known as a great friend of the Jews, having been part of the defence team of TV station France 2, which lost an appeal against a libel verdict it had won over a report about the killing of a Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Dura, in 2000. Al-Dura, who was seen cowering behind his father, became the poster boy of the second intifada.
Media critic Philippe Karsenty had been convicted of libel for writing that France 2's report of the death of al-Dura was a hoax. The Paris court ruled that the extensive evidence produced by Karsenty, including a ballistics report and a detailed analysis of the raw footage, was sufficient cause for suspicion that the scene had been staged.
In his aggressive closing argument, playing on the definition of a Zionist, Szpiner compared Karsenty to "a Jew who pays another Jew to send a third Jew to go to war against the Palestinians."
Two members of Fofana's defence team — Maître Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, the wife of Carlos "the Jackal", the Venezuelan-born pro-jihadi serving a life sentence for multiple terror attacks, and Maître Emmanuel Ludot, who represented Saddam Hussein — were interviewed on an Agence France Press video on the opening day of the trial. Angered by hecklers shouting at defendants and lawyers outside the court, they denounced political and media pressure against their client, claiming that President Nicolas Sarkozy was using the case for ignoble electoral reasons.
They also claimed that some of the plaintiffs were backed by a "certain lobby", and that blacks had been attacked by thugs from the right-wing Zionist Betar and the Jewish Defence League groups "when the Halimi family organised a demonstration". Maître Coutant-Peyre declares in the video: "Fofana is a scapegoat." A young lawyer joins them. They discuss the case. He thinks they'll be able to get the court to drop the aggravating circumstances of anti-Semitism. They joke about Maître Szpiner. Is the Elysée (the presidency) paying his fees? The young lawyer guffaws. "It's the Crif [the umbrella body of French Jewry]!" he says, provoking derisive laughter, "and the Elysée is funding the Crif." According to leaked information, Fofana subsequently dismissed Coutant-Peyre in an outburst of paranoid anti-Semitic rage, shouting, "Peyre, that's a Jewish name, isn't it?"
In the absence of reliable information about the trial, which is scheduled to run until 11 July, how can one predict the verdict? The death penalty was abolished in 1981. Life imprisonment is a relative concept. Prisons are overcrowded and dangerous criminals are often released early. Confidential sources have told me that Fofana could be "rubbed out" in prison.
Journalists who were present at the start of the trial, until a motion brought by the Halimi family to hear the case in an open court was defeated, reported that Fofana entered shouting "Allahu Akhbar" ("Allah is Great"). Asked to identify himself, he replied in mangled French, "Arabs, African armed revolt, Salafist barbarian." He gave the day of Ilan's death as his date of birth.
Will lawyers, if any are left to defend him, use Fofana's megalomaniac defiance as an argument for diminished responsibility? In 2003 a Muslim neighbour lured a Jewish DJ, Sebastien Selam, into the underground garage of their building, slit his throat, gouged out his eyes with a carving fork, went home and told his mother: "I killed my Jew, I'll go to paradise." He was released after spending a few years in a mental hospital and will apparently never be tried. The anti-Semitic motivation in that case was so thoroughly denied that commentators systematically referred to Halimi's killing as the first anti-Semitic murder in France.
Whenever immigrant youths from the banlieue are concerned, French authorities walk on eggshells for fear of igniting mass revolt. Which brings us back to Eva Vigoreux's Nouvel Observateur blog. We discern a defence strategy aimed at portraying the 26 accomplices as bit players roped in, manipulated and intimidated by Fofana. They took no pleasure in tormenting Ilan and actually tried to alleviate the cruel punishment he imposed.
Michaël Doueib, an earlier Jewish victim of the Gang of Barbarians, is disgusted by their feigned innocence. "They didn't lift a hand to save him," he says. "An anonymous phone call, that's all they had to do." Lured to the same Bagneux neighborhood where Ilan would be jailed two weeks later, tied up and mercilessly beaten, Doueib escaped because residents who heard his screams called the police.
He claims police investigators rejected his offer of information, phone numbers, descriptions and other evidence that could have led them to the gang.
Whatever the verdict, we will be left with the troubling impression that the more this evil of Jew-hatred eats into the tissue of French society, the more it will be shrouded in artificial doubts and fabricated subtleties. This secret trial leaves Ilan Halimi once again illegally confined, isolated, bound and gagged, helpless to awaken dead hearts and warn potential victims.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Anti-Israel bias in human rights groups
This is basically unparodiable.
Human Rights Watch Goes to Saudi Arabia
by David Bernstein
Wall Street Journal
JULY 15, 2009
Seeking Saudi Money to Counterbalance "Pro-Israel Pressure Groups
A delegation from Human Rights Watch was recently in Saudi Arabia. To investigate the mistreatment of women under Saudi Law? To campaign for the rights of homosexuals, subject to the death penalty in Saudi Arabia? To protest the lack of religious freedom in the Saudi Kingdom? To issue a report on Saudi political prisoners?
No, no, no, and no. The delegation arrived to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW's demonization of Israel. An HRW spokesperson, Sarah Leah Whitson, highlighted HRW's battles with "pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations." (Was Ms. Whitson required to wear a burkha, or are exceptions made for visiting anti-Israel "human rights" activists"? Driving a car, no doubt, was out of the question.)
Apparently, Ms. Whitson found no time to criticize Saudi Arabia's abysmal human rights record. But never fear, HRW "recently called on the Kingdom to do more to protect the human rights of domestic workers.
There is nothing wrong with a human rights organization worrying about maltreatment of domestic workers. But there is something wrong when a human rights organization goes to one of the worst countries in the world for human rights to raise money to wage lawfare against Israel, and says not a word during the trip about the status of human rights in that country. In fact, it's a virtual certainty that everyone in Whitson's audience employs domestic servants, giving her a perfect, untaken opportunity to boast about HRW's work in improving the servants' status. But Whitson wasn't raising money for human rights, she was raising money for HRW's propaganda campaign against Israel.
Someone who claims to have worked for HRW wrote to me, "I can tell you that the people on the research and policy side of the organization have little, if any, contacts with people on the donor side." If that's true, apparently this is yet another exception HRW makes for Israel: Ms. Whitson, who gave the presentation to potential Saudi donors, is director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa Division.
Also, as a Nathan Wagner comments at Opinio Juris: "Surely there is a moral difference between raising funds in free nations through appeals to ideals of universal human rights and raising money in repressive nations through appeals highlighting pressure brought against their enemies. [Moreover], the former type of fundraising does not imperil the organization's mission, but fundraising Bernstein highlights does, since any significant reliance on such funds will necessarily mute criticism of the repressive government."
Finally, some would defend HRW by pointing it that it has criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record rather severely in the past. The point of my post, though, is not that HRW is pro-Saudi, but that it is maniacally anti-Israel. The most recent manifestation is that its officers see nothing unseemly about raising funds among the elite of one of the most totalitarian nations on earth, with a pitch about how the money is needed to fight "pro-Israel forces," without the felt need to discuss any of the Saudis' manifold human rights violations, and without apparent concern that becoming dependent on funds emanating from a brutal dictatorship leaves you vulnerable to that brutal dictatorship later cutting off the flow of funds, if you don't "behave."
Human Rights Watch Goes to Saudi Arabia
by David Bernstein
Wall Street Journal
JULY 15, 2009
Seeking Saudi Money to Counterbalance "Pro-Israel Pressure Groups
A delegation from Human Rights Watch was recently in Saudi Arabia. To investigate the mistreatment of women under Saudi Law? To campaign for the rights of homosexuals, subject to the death penalty in Saudi Arabia? To protest the lack of religious freedom in the Saudi Kingdom? To issue a report on Saudi political prisoners?
No, no, no, and no. The delegation arrived to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW's demonization of Israel. An HRW spokesperson, Sarah Leah Whitson, highlighted HRW's battles with "pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations." (Was Ms. Whitson required to wear a burkha, or are exceptions made for visiting anti-Israel "human rights" activists"? Driving a car, no doubt, was out of the question.)
Apparently, Ms. Whitson found no time to criticize Saudi Arabia's abysmal human rights record. But never fear, HRW "recently called on the Kingdom to do more to protect the human rights of domestic workers.
There is nothing wrong with a human rights organization worrying about maltreatment of domestic workers. But there is something wrong when a human rights organization goes to one of the worst countries in the world for human rights to raise money to wage lawfare against Israel, and says not a word during the trip about the status of human rights in that country. In fact, it's a virtual certainty that everyone in Whitson's audience employs domestic servants, giving her a perfect, untaken opportunity to boast about HRW's work in improving the servants' status. But Whitson wasn't raising money for human rights, she was raising money for HRW's propaganda campaign against Israel.
Someone who claims to have worked for HRW wrote to me, "I can tell you that the people on the research and policy side of the organization have little, if any, contacts with people on the donor side." If that's true, apparently this is yet another exception HRW makes for Israel: Ms. Whitson, who gave the presentation to potential Saudi donors, is director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa Division.
Also, as a Nathan Wagner comments at Opinio Juris: "Surely there is a moral difference between raising funds in free nations through appeals to ideals of universal human rights and raising money in repressive nations through appeals highlighting pressure brought against their enemies. [Moreover], the former type of fundraising does not imperil the organization's mission, but fundraising Bernstein highlights does, since any significant reliance on such funds will necessarily mute criticism of the repressive government."
Finally, some would defend HRW by pointing it that it has criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record rather severely in the past. The point of my post, though, is not that HRW is pro-Saudi, but that it is maniacally anti-Israel. The most recent manifestation is that its officers see nothing unseemly about raising funds among the elite of one of the most totalitarian nations on earth, with a pitch about how the money is needed to fight "pro-Israel forces," without the felt need to discuss any of the Saudis' manifold human rights violations, and without apparent concern that becoming dependent on funds emanating from a brutal dictatorship leaves you vulnerable to that brutal dictatorship later cutting off the flow of funds, if you don't "behave."
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Come to sunny Gaza
The ASA has banned an Israeli Government Tourist Office ad because it included a map that implied that Gaza,the West Bank and the Golan Heights were recognised as being part of Israel (though why the Israeli Tourist Office would want to imply that those areas were attractive holiday destinations is beyond me).
Read the full story and see the ad here.
Read the full story and see the ad here.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Innocent Until Proven Guilty...
Peter Hitchens reports on a criminal trail that is going ahead without a jury... where's the news coverage on this?
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/06/innocent-until-proved-guilty.html
"Innocent until proved guilty
A criminal trial is to go ahead at a Crown Court without a jury. Why worry? We are told that the case is exceptional, that the decision has been taken for fear of 'jury tampering'.
What do we know about this tampering? Nothing, actually. Evidence about it has been given only in secret. I am, I have to say, unsure why this should have had to be so. Was MI6 involved? And there was, in any case, an alternative. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, rejected the other possible course - holding the trial with a jury put under protective measures. This would have cost about £6million and involved 82 police officers which the Judge said was an 'unreasonable' drain on the public purse and police time. The issue will also not be allowed to go before the House of Lords, which seems odd to me given its importance.
While delivering his judgement, The Lord Chief Justice thundered that 'In this country trial by jury is a hallowed principle of the administration of criminal justice. It is properly identified as a right, available to be exercised by a defendant.' Then he added the less thunderous get-out clause 'unless and until the right is amended or circumscribed by express legislation'. That was the important bit.
He concluded, in explanation of his 'historic' decision to breach the principles of centuries of English liberty, that 'the danger of jury tampering and the subversion of the process of trial by jury is very significant'. In this case, three men are accused of carrying out a robbery at the Menzies World Cargo warehouse at Heathrow in 2004. According to The Guardian, 'the police had been watching an employee of the warehouse and suspected a robbery was going to take place. Only one man has ever been jailed for the robbery, a supergrass who pleaded guilty after giving police information. During the armed raid six masked men rounded up members of staff at gunpoint and shots were fired at a supervisor. The robbers were caught on CCTV.'
This extraordinary change in the English justice system is allowed by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, sections 44 and 46, which came into force in 2007. The sections are quite tightly drawn, and a judge has to be convinced that tampering has taken place or that there is a grave danger of it.
Why does this worry me? Quite a lot of criminal lawyers say they would prefer trials in front of judges, point out that miscarriages of justice frequently happen with jury trial, and so on. I accept all these points, though I also know of jury trials where it is plain that the jurors have acted with subtlety and discrimination, quite possibly preventing miscarriages of justice.
My concern is that, without juries, the power of the state is far too great. And that once you have accepted one excuse for abandoning jury trial, which is costly and makes lawyers work harder for their money, you have lost the battle for the principle and it will only be a matter of time before (probably under pressure from the EU, where independent juries are largely unknown outside the British Isles) the whole idea is quietly dispensed with. In a way, the Crown Prosecution Service already functions as a sort of continental Examining Magistrate system, and 'anti-terror' law is fast undermining the principle of Habeas Corpus, increasingly permitting the prejudicial and dangerous lengthy pre-trial detention that is a feature of continental criminal procedure. Increasingly, the authorities can ruin your life without ever having to prove anything against you, and put irresistible pressure on you to cooperate in your own prosecution.
Hard cases make bad law, and the issue of criminal trials is in many ways a red herring. The outcomes of most criminal trials probably wouldn't be significantly different if we had a non-jury system. It's the principle of innocence till proved guilty that's so important. Modern rules of evidence, the general feebleness of the police and courts and the CPS, seem to me to have far more impact upon the general power of the law against criminals than the occasional alleged case of jury tampering.
While researching my most reviled and abused book A Brief History of Crime, I spent a fascinating day at the enormous Liverpool Crown Court complex, where I found what I described as 'a near-breakdown of respect for justice', including widespread intimidation of juries and witnesses, about which nobody did anything at all. The whole experience is described in the chapter entitled Twelve Angry Persons. The fault lay not in the jury system, but in the general weakness of the police and the authorities, resulting from 40 years of cultural revolution and Fabian legislation.
In the same chapter I noted a general hostility in the English state towards jury trial, disturbingly expressed in Lord Justice Auld's 'Review of the Criminal Courts' in October 2001. I warned that the Blair government was using the growth of crime under its rule as a pretext to limit liberty.
But my main point was this, and I repeat it now in a shorter form. Jury trial is a happy accident, never willingly or knowingly handed out by authority in this country, but fortunately arising out of Magna Carta and sustained by a series of important court victories since then.
The most important guarantee of freedom in the world was never 'democracy', often a threat to freedom via the tyranny of the majority. It is the existence of independent juries, and the presumption of innocence which this requires.
In a non-jury country, a trial is an assembly of servants of the state, meeting to decide what to do with somebody they already believe to be guilty. In a jury country it is a trial with an uncertain outcome, in which the Judge is compelled to be impartial and the prosecution must prove its case.
The criminal law, in these circumstances, simply cannot be used to put away people the state does not like. The powers of the police against the law-abiding are severely limited. The relation between individual and state is transformed. Faced with having to give up elections or jury trial, I would have no hesitation in saving jury trial. It is a much greater restraint on the state.
I explain in my book that juries in this country were badly weakened in the 1960s. First they were damaged by an egalitarian campaign which abolished the old property qualification, and failed to replace it (as they should have done) with a higher age limit or an educational test. This means that an 18-year-old with no experience of life and a very limited education can now ruin your life in afternoon. The property qualification ensured that experienced and mature people, with a stake in society predominated on juries. It could easily have been reformed to allow women to sit on juries in equal numbers. I think this ill-thought-out and rash decision to open juries to all but criminals and the certifiably insane might explain some of the odder verdicts in recent years.
Second, they were wounded by the introduction of majority verdicts, again on the grounds (as now, never detailed or proven) that there was a menace of jury tampering. This is immensely damaging. As the film Twelve Angry Men shows, a single determined juror can by sheer persistence and courage prevent a miscarriage of justice - in either direction. The introduction of majority verdicts means that he or she can simply be over-ridden. I am still amazed that this momentous change was pushed through with so little opposition.
Now, once again on a rather shaky and unsubstantiated pretext, the absolute right to jury trial is being salami-sliced away. If jury tampering is so serious, when are we going to see exemplary prosecutions of those involved? Have there been any such prosecutions? I have heard of none.
It is interesting that the question of cost was raised, as a reason for not adopting the alternative of special protection. A principle such as universal jury trial seems to me to be worth quite a lot of money, certainly more than we spend (say) on second homes for MPs or the armies of facilitators and outreach workers employed by local authorities? Does this country really not have £6million available to defend one of its most ancient liberties? As for 82 police officers, all you need to do is postpone a few diversity training courses and hey presto! There will be hundreds of extra officers instantly available for guard duty.
But if we are prepared, in general, to abandon justice on the grounds of cost, then the argument that jury trial is in itself too expensive will become increasingly powerful in the years to come, as we turn into a poor country."
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/06/innocent-until-proved-guilty.html
"Innocent until proved guilty
A criminal trial is to go ahead at a Crown Court without a jury. Why worry? We are told that the case is exceptional, that the decision has been taken for fear of 'jury tampering'.
What do we know about this tampering? Nothing, actually. Evidence about it has been given only in secret. I am, I have to say, unsure why this should have had to be so. Was MI6 involved? And there was, in any case, an alternative. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, rejected the other possible course - holding the trial with a jury put under protective measures. This would have cost about £6million and involved 82 police officers which the Judge said was an 'unreasonable' drain on the public purse and police time. The issue will also not be allowed to go before the House of Lords, which seems odd to me given its importance.
While delivering his judgement, The Lord Chief Justice thundered that 'In this country trial by jury is a hallowed principle of the administration of criminal justice. It is properly identified as a right, available to be exercised by a defendant.' Then he added the less thunderous get-out clause 'unless and until the right is amended or circumscribed by express legislation'. That was the important bit.
He concluded, in explanation of his 'historic' decision to breach the principles of centuries of English liberty, that 'the danger of jury tampering and the subversion of the process of trial by jury is very significant'. In this case, three men are accused of carrying out a robbery at the Menzies World Cargo warehouse at Heathrow in 2004. According to The Guardian, 'the police had been watching an employee of the warehouse and suspected a robbery was going to take place. Only one man has ever been jailed for the robbery, a supergrass who pleaded guilty after giving police information. During the armed raid six masked men rounded up members of staff at gunpoint and shots were fired at a supervisor. The robbers were caught on CCTV.'
This extraordinary change in the English justice system is allowed by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, sections 44 and 46, which came into force in 2007. The sections are quite tightly drawn, and a judge has to be convinced that tampering has taken place or that there is a grave danger of it.
Why does this worry me? Quite a lot of criminal lawyers say they would prefer trials in front of judges, point out that miscarriages of justice frequently happen with jury trial, and so on. I accept all these points, though I also know of jury trials where it is plain that the jurors have acted with subtlety and discrimination, quite possibly preventing miscarriages of justice.
My concern is that, without juries, the power of the state is far too great. And that once you have accepted one excuse for abandoning jury trial, which is costly and makes lawyers work harder for their money, you have lost the battle for the principle and it will only be a matter of time before (probably under pressure from the EU, where independent juries are largely unknown outside the British Isles) the whole idea is quietly dispensed with. In a way, the Crown Prosecution Service already functions as a sort of continental Examining Magistrate system, and 'anti-terror' law is fast undermining the principle of Habeas Corpus, increasingly permitting the prejudicial and dangerous lengthy pre-trial detention that is a feature of continental criminal procedure. Increasingly, the authorities can ruin your life without ever having to prove anything against you, and put irresistible pressure on you to cooperate in your own prosecution.
Hard cases make bad law, and the issue of criminal trials is in many ways a red herring. The outcomes of most criminal trials probably wouldn't be significantly different if we had a non-jury system. It's the principle of innocence till proved guilty that's so important. Modern rules of evidence, the general feebleness of the police and courts and the CPS, seem to me to have far more impact upon the general power of the law against criminals than the occasional alleged case of jury tampering.
While researching my most reviled and abused book A Brief History of Crime, I spent a fascinating day at the enormous Liverpool Crown Court complex, where I found what I described as 'a near-breakdown of respect for justice', including widespread intimidation of juries and witnesses, about which nobody did anything at all. The whole experience is described in the chapter entitled Twelve Angry Persons. The fault lay not in the jury system, but in the general weakness of the police and the authorities, resulting from 40 years of cultural revolution and Fabian legislation.
In the same chapter I noted a general hostility in the English state towards jury trial, disturbingly expressed in Lord Justice Auld's 'Review of the Criminal Courts' in October 2001. I warned that the Blair government was using the growth of crime under its rule as a pretext to limit liberty.
But my main point was this, and I repeat it now in a shorter form. Jury trial is a happy accident, never willingly or knowingly handed out by authority in this country, but fortunately arising out of Magna Carta and sustained by a series of important court victories since then.
The most important guarantee of freedom in the world was never 'democracy', often a threat to freedom via the tyranny of the majority. It is the existence of independent juries, and the presumption of innocence which this requires.
In a non-jury country, a trial is an assembly of servants of the state, meeting to decide what to do with somebody they already believe to be guilty. In a jury country it is a trial with an uncertain outcome, in which the Judge is compelled to be impartial and the prosecution must prove its case.
The criminal law, in these circumstances, simply cannot be used to put away people the state does not like. The powers of the police against the law-abiding are severely limited. The relation between individual and state is transformed. Faced with having to give up elections or jury trial, I would have no hesitation in saving jury trial. It is a much greater restraint on the state.
I explain in my book that juries in this country were badly weakened in the 1960s. First they were damaged by an egalitarian campaign which abolished the old property qualification, and failed to replace it (as they should have done) with a higher age limit or an educational test. This means that an 18-year-old with no experience of life and a very limited education can now ruin your life in afternoon. The property qualification ensured that experienced and mature people, with a stake in society predominated on juries. It could easily have been reformed to allow women to sit on juries in equal numbers. I think this ill-thought-out and rash decision to open juries to all but criminals and the certifiably insane might explain some of the odder verdicts in recent years.
Second, they were wounded by the introduction of majority verdicts, again on the grounds (as now, never detailed or proven) that there was a menace of jury tampering. This is immensely damaging. As the film Twelve Angry Men shows, a single determined juror can by sheer persistence and courage prevent a miscarriage of justice - in either direction. The introduction of majority verdicts means that he or she can simply be over-ridden. I am still amazed that this momentous change was pushed through with so little opposition.
Now, once again on a rather shaky and unsubstantiated pretext, the absolute right to jury trial is being salami-sliced away. If jury tampering is so serious, when are we going to see exemplary prosecutions of those involved? Have there been any such prosecutions? I have heard of none.
It is interesting that the question of cost was raised, as a reason for not adopting the alternative of special protection. A principle such as universal jury trial seems to me to be worth quite a lot of money, certainly more than we spend (say) on second homes for MPs or the armies of facilitators and outreach workers employed by local authorities? Does this country really not have £6million available to defend one of its most ancient liberties? As for 82 police officers, all you need to do is postpone a few diversity training courses and hey presto! There will be hundreds of extra officers instantly available for guard duty.
But if we are prepared, in general, to abandon justice on the grounds of cost, then the argument that jury trial is in itself too expensive will become increasingly powerful in the years to come, as we turn into a poor country."
Sunday, May 17, 2009
British MPs expenses scandal
Some interesting points made by Moore:
MPs' expenses: The House of Commons is ours, not theirs. Don't ruin it, reclaim it
Charles Moore
Telegraph Comment
15 May 2009
Our thirst for revenge over the expenses scandal is understandable but there is an alternative
...
In the last 40 years, Parliament has given away much of its authority to the European Union, quangos, bureaucracies and courts. Since 1997, the Government has grabbed greater control of the legislative timetable and therefore almost always gets its way. The great function of Parliament – to make the right laws and decide the level of taxes – has become almost nominal. And so the motive for entering the place has changed. You start as a backbencher nowadays, only to become a frontbencher.
People complain about MPs having "second jobs". They do not realise that the most common second job – and the one which produces the biggest conflict of interest – is being a minister.
If you are a minister, you lose your independence. You have to take the side of the government rather than of Parliament and people. You are in a chamber physically shaped for argument (the word "parliament" means a place where talking goes on), and yet argument is what you want to suppress. For centuries, MPs fought for parliamentary "privilege". This meant the right to vote and debate without intimidation from the king. But "the king" – whose modern equivalent is the government – has regained control. Now, when MPs talk of their privileges, they mean things like the additional costs allowance and free sausage rolls.
To start making proper laws once more, MPs should have almost no allowances, and modest wages. In return, they should be free to earn money by other means, so long as we know what those means are. They will learn much more about the rest of life than if they sit in Westminster all day and all night. The privileges they should be granted are of power, not money.
Why, for example, can the Government appoint people to public bodies (all 43,000 of them) without parliamentary approval? Why is European legislation not properly scrutinised? Why should the whips decide who chairs which parliamentary committee? Why can an MP become a minister – and therefore take "on office of profit under the Crown" – without consulting his constituents? Until the early 20th century, any MP offered a ministerial job had to fight a by-election. If you brought that rule back, the Government would think twice about swelling its "payroll vote", and the public could put the needs of the Commons before those of the executive. All possible mechanisms should change to shift the balance of power and the focus of ambition.
...
MPs' expenses: The House of Commons is ours, not theirs. Don't ruin it, reclaim it
Charles Moore
Telegraph Comment
15 May 2009
Our thirst for revenge over the expenses scandal is understandable but there is an alternative
...
In the last 40 years, Parliament has given away much of its authority to the European Union, quangos, bureaucracies and courts. Since 1997, the Government has grabbed greater control of the legislative timetable and therefore almost always gets its way. The great function of Parliament – to make the right laws and decide the level of taxes – has become almost nominal. And so the motive for entering the place has changed. You start as a backbencher nowadays, only to become a frontbencher.
People complain about MPs having "second jobs". They do not realise that the most common second job – and the one which produces the biggest conflict of interest – is being a minister.
If you are a minister, you lose your independence. You have to take the side of the government rather than of Parliament and people. You are in a chamber physically shaped for argument (the word "parliament" means a place where talking goes on), and yet argument is what you want to suppress. For centuries, MPs fought for parliamentary "privilege". This meant the right to vote and debate without intimidation from the king. But "the king" – whose modern equivalent is the government – has regained control. Now, when MPs talk of their privileges, they mean things like the additional costs allowance and free sausage rolls.
To start making proper laws once more, MPs should have almost no allowances, and modest wages. In return, they should be free to earn money by other means, so long as we know what those means are. They will learn much more about the rest of life than if they sit in Westminster all day and all night. The privileges they should be granted are of power, not money.
Why, for example, can the Government appoint people to public bodies (all 43,000 of them) without parliamentary approval? Why is European legislation not properly scrutinised? Why should the whips decide who chairs which parliamentary committee? Why can an MP become a minister – and therefore take "on office of profit under the Crown" – without consulting his constituents? Until the early 20th century, any MP offered a ministerial job had to fight a by-election. If you brought that rule back, the Government would think twice about swelling its "payroll vote", and the public could put the needs of the Commons before those of the executive. All possible mechanisms should change to shift the balance of power and the focus of ambition.
...
Friday, May 08, 2009
The Man Who Sold the World (and caused the credit crunch)
David Bowie's 'back catalogue bonds' may have started the credit crunch
By Evan Davis
He’s always been a trendsetter. But could David Bowie have caused the latest fad sweeping the nation – the credit crunch?
It may sound like a ridiculous question, but it’s not as mad as it seems.
Even when it comes to finances
He thought, “I have a lot of money coming in over the next 10 years from my back catalogue, but I’d rather have the cash now and not have to wait”.
He produced some bits of paper – Bowie Bonds – and said “whoever buys these gets my royalties”.
It meant he no longer had the money coming in but instead had a lot up front. His investors were guaranteed a good income. It was a good deal all round.
And the banks were catching on to the idea. They thought, “We have billions out there in mortgages which are going to pay us back very slowly. Why don’t we sell those and get the money now?”
So the banks started doing what
It was a complete rebuilding of what a bank does. Normally a bank borrows from people like you and I, then lends it out.
But now the bank was lending the money – and selling the loan on elsewhere.
For example, a bank loans out £100,000 for a mortgage, and does the same for 10,000 people. They’ve now lent £1billion and will be getting the cash back over the next 25 years.
So the bank creates a piece of paper, a security, and says whoever owns it will have the income from the mortgages.
It then sells the security – effectively the bundle of mortgages – for £1billion to perhaps a pension fund, which then has the mortgage income – and the bank has £1billion to lend out again.
Everybody is happy: the banks are able to lend more and more as mortgages, and there’s a conveyor belt where they lend a billion, receive a billion and sell the mortgages on.
Northern Rock were the market leaders in the
Friday, May 01, 2009
No one expects...
A rare return to impdec for me, but I feel the article below should be read by as many people as possible: (I've pasted some highlights; the whole article is here.)
"In these straitened times, it's good to know that jobs are still being created. A quango called the Independent Safeguarding Authority, which will open this October, already has a well-staffed helpline and is advertising for ICT (information and communication technologies) and finance specialists."
[...]
Under the Independent Safeguarding Authority, it will become a crime for any relevant employer to hire anyone without an ISA licence. Employers who make their own judgments about whom to trust will face a £5,000 fine. The only people to decide who is employable will be the unelected ISA board, which appears to be made up mainly of professional quangocrats and the children's lobby.
We are all suspects in the new inquisition's eyes
A safety quango will vet one in four adults in the name of child protection. It won't stop predators, but it will corrode trust
"In these straitened times, it's good to know that jobs are still being created. A quango called the Independent Safeguarding Authority, which will open this October, already has a well-staffed helpline and is advertising for ICT (information and communication technologies) and finance specialists."
[...]
Under the Independent Safeguarding Authority, it will become a crime for any relevant employer to hire anyone without an ISA licence. Employers who make their own judgments about whom to trust will face a £5,000 fine. The only people to decide who is employable will be the unelected ISA board, which appears to be made up mainly of professional quangocrats and the children's lobby.
If this sounds impossibly Orwellian, look at what has happened in Scotland since a similar scheme was created three years ago. In East Renfrewshire a father whose son suffered from Asperger's syndrome was told that he could not get on the school bus to do up the boy's seat belt without a disclosure check. After an outcry, the local council announced that children would be taught to do up their own safety belts, and that no parents would be allowed on school buses.
Paedophiles have made the bureaucrats all-powerful - except in the small matter of keeping children safe. The massacre of 16 children at Dunblane Primary School, which is often cited in Scotland, could not have been prevented by vetting. Thomas Hamilton, the gunman, was not employed by the school. He had been sacked by a Scout group that was alarmed by his taking pictures of boys. That Scout group protected its boys by using common sense - not by box-ticking.
Common sense protects children better than bureaucracy. It's like crossing a road. You can never predict accurately which cars will stop. You have to teach children to make their own judgments about when it's safe to cross. Similarly, you have to teach children to judge whom to trust and what constitutes strange behaviour. The vetting schemes that we are creating tell children to suspect everyone, and encourage adults to retreat. So children who are actually in trouble have fewer and fewer people to turn to.
I still remember the kind man who grabbed my toddler in a park when he was heading full tilt for the pond. I was heavily pregnant and could not run. But I could see his fear that I might accuse him of something. I also remember the hostility I got from a mother when I thought her five-year-old looked lost. These experiences are chilling. Ask yourself if you would stop if you saw a small child on its own. A lot of people are suddenly less sure.
Oblivious to the corrosive effects on society, the bureaucrats keep upping the numbers to be vetted. The Independent Safeguarding Authority grows bigger and bigger. Its launch has been repeatedly delayed as more complex software is devised to cope with concerns about data security. Josie Appleton, of the Manifesto Club civil liberties group, says that the cost of setting up the ISA will far exceed the estimated £84 million - five times what was first envisaged. The ISA will be a monster that assumes every volunteer granny is a monstrous paedophile. And everyone who is vetted will have to pay £64 for the privilege - £28 to the ISA on top of £36 to the Criminal Records Bureau.
The road to political oblivion is paved with good intentions out of control. More than 80 per cent of attacks on children are made by people they know. A third of sex crimes are carried out by adolescents, who will not be vetted. If the Government really has £84 million to spare it should be treating sex offenders, not subjecting millions of decent people to a modern inquisition."
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Sri Lankan cricketers attacked in Pakistan
Digraceful. Obviously Islamists the chief suspects, but remember Madrid/Aznar. And there's already this:
Gunmen shoot Sri Lanka cricketers
BBC
3 March 2009
But a Pakistani minister, Sardar Nabil Ahmed Gabol, reportedly told private Geo TV that evidence suggested the attackers came across the border from India. He said the assault came in reaction to the Mumbai attacks, and was a "declaration of open war on Pakistan by India".
---------
The guys affected. I hope they're all ok. Mendis is a phenomenon. Nobody seems to care about the Pakistani policemen killed though.
Profiles of injured Sri Lanka party members
BBC
3 March 2009
---------
What could anyone, Islamists included, have against Sri Lankan cricketers?
Gunmen shoot Sri Lanka cricketers
BBC
3 March 2009
But a Pakistani minister, Sardar Nabil Ahmed Gabol, reportedly told private Geo TV that evidence suggested the attackers came across the border from India. He said the assault came in reaction to the Mumbai attacks, and was a "declaration of open war on Pakistan by India".
---------
The guys affected. I hope they're all ok. Mendis is a phenomenon. Nobody seems to care about the Pakistani policemen killed though.
Profiles of injured Sri Lanka party members
BBC
3 March 2009
---------
What could anyone, Islamists included, have against Sri Lankan cricketers?
- Could it be their govt's foreign policy? (No, but that's what they'd be saying if England had been attacked)
- Could it be that Islamists hate sport, along with other forms of entertainment like music and cinema? Yes. (Pakistan having scored 600 we can discount irate fans)
- Could it be that Islamists are nihilist shitheads who hate everyone and want to send them to hell asap? Yes
Monday, January 19, 2009
The Politics of anti-Zionism
Another excellent article from Spiked:
"Brendan O’Neill
The politics of anti-Zionism
Today’s widespread attacks on Zionism as ‘expansionist and racist’ are historically illiterate, and not as radical as they sound.
Critics of Israel often argue that one can be an anti-Zionist without being an anti-Semite. They are absolutely right.
Criticising an ideology is not the same thing as expressing hatred towards a group of people. One of the most pernicious, implicitly censorious instincts in the current debate about the Middle East is the attempt by elements of the pro-Israel movement to label all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. The US State Department claims that today’s ‘unremitting criticism of Israel… encourages anti-Semitism’ (1). This is a cynical attempt to write off opponents of Israel as simply prejudiced, and thus not worth engaging with. We should insist on maintaining a conceptual distinction between rational criticism of Zionism and anti-Semitism.
However, while opposition to Zionism is entirely legitimate, it is worth asking what motivates the politics of anti-Zionism today. Criticism of the ‘Zionist state’ is widespread, not only in Arab regimes but throughout polite society in Europe. And the language that is used to denounce Zionism becomes shriller and more historically illiterate every day."
"Brendan O’Neill
The politics of anti-Zionism
Today’s widespread attacks on Zionism as ‘expansionist and racist’ are historically illiterate, and not as radical as they sound.
Critics of Israel often argue that one can be an anti-Zionist without being an anti-Semite. They are absolutely right.
Criticising an ideology is not the same thing as expressing hatred towards a group of people. One of the most pernicious, implicitly censorious instincts in the current debate about the Middle East is the attempt by elements of the pro-Israel movement to label all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. The US State Department claims that today’s ‘unremitting criticism of Israel… encourages anti-Semitism’ (1). This is a cynical attempt to write off opponents of Israel as simply prejudiced, and thus not worth engaging with. We should insist on maintaining a conceptual distinction between rational criticism of Zionism and anti-Semitism.
However, while opposition to Zionism is entirely legitimate, it is worth asking what motivates the politics of anti-Zionism today. Criticism of the ‘Zionist state’ is widespread, not only in Arab regimes but throughout polite society in Europe. And the language that is used to denounce Zionism becomes shriller and more historically illiterate every day."
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Sri Lanka
With the Sri Lankan army engaged in a major offensive against the Tamil Tigers, it can be a dangerious place right now for the free press:
Sri Lankan journo assassinated
Sri Lankan journo assassinated
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature
What a brilliant article, it's like a Freakonomics for evolutionary psychology instead of economics. Am definitely gonna get the the book. I'll give one of the points in full:
4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim
According to the Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, a comprehensive history of this troubling yet topical phenomenon, while suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, when religion is involved, it is always Muslim. Why is this? Why is Islam the only religion that motivates its followers to commit suicide missions?
The surprising answer from the evolutionary psychological perspective is that Muslim suicide bombing may have nothing to do with Islam or the Koran (except for two lines in it). It may have nothing to do with the religion, politics, the culture, the race, the ethnicity, the language, or the region. As with everything else from this perspective, it may have a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.
What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.
So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.
However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.
The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.
It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.
---------------
Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature
Alan S. Miller Ph.D., Satoshi Kanazawa Ph.D.
Psychology Today Magazine
Jul/Aug 2007
Why most suicide bombers are Muslim, beautiful people have more daughters, humans are naturally polygamous, sexual harassment isn't sexist, and blonds are more attractive.
Human nature is one of those things that everybody talks about but no one can define precisely. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, get upset about the influx of immigrants into our country, or go to church, we are, in part, behaving as a human animal with our own unique evolved nature—human nature.
This means two things. First, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are produced not only by our individual experiences and environment in our own lifetime but also by what happened to our ancestors millions of years ago. Second, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are shared, to a large extent, by all men or women, despite seemingly large cultural differences.
Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. In this article, however, we emphasize biological influences on human behavior, because most social scientists explain human behavior as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychological adaptations that often operate beneath conscious thinking to solve problems of survival and reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel in certain ways. Our preference for sweets and fats is an evolved psychological mechanism. We do not consciously choose to like sweets and fats; they just taste good to us.
The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct.
Adapted from Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters
1. Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
2. Humans are naturally polygamous
3. Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy
4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim
5. Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
6. Beautiful people have more daughters
7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
8. The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of
9. It's natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they're male)
10. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist
read on...
4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim
According to the Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, a comprehensive history of this troubling yet topical phenomenon, while suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, when religion is involved, it is always Muslim. Why is this? Why is Islam the only religion that motivates its followers to commit suicide missions?
The surprising answer from the evolutionary psychological perspective is that Muslim suicide bombing may have nothing to do with Islam or the Koran (except for two lines in it). It may have nothing to do with the religion, politics, the culture, the race, the ethnicity, the language, or the region. As with everything else from this perspective, it may have a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.
What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.
So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.
However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.
The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.
It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.
---------------
Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature
Alan S. Miller Ph.D., Satoshi Kanazawa Ph.D.
Psychology Today Magazine
Jul/Aug 2007
Why most suicide bombers are Muslim, beautiful people have more daughters, humans are naturally polygamous, sexual harassment isn't sexist, and blonds are more attractive.
Human nature is one of those things that everybody talks about but no one can define precisely. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, get upset about the influx of immigrants into our country, or go to church, we are, in part, behaving as a human animal with our own unique evolved nature—human nature.
This means two things. First, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are produced not only by our individual experiences and environment in our own lifetime but also by what happened to our ancestors millions of years ago. Second, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are shared, to a large extent, by all men or women, despite seemingly large cultural differences.
Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. In this article, however, we emphasize biological influences on human behavior, because most social scientists explain human behavior as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychological adaptations that often operate beneath conscious thinking to solve problems of survival and reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel in certain ways. Our preference for sweets and fats is an evolved psychological mechanism. We do not consciously choose to like sweets and fats; they just taste good to us.
The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct.
Adapted from Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters
1. Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
2. Humans are naturally polygamous
3. Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy
4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim
5. Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
6. Beautiful people have more daughters
7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
8. The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of
9. It's natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they're male)
10. Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist
read on...
Monday, December 29, 2008
Harold Pinter dies
I'm not knowledgeable enough to judge Pinter as a playwright, but I do judge his politics to be that of a dick.
Pinter and the odd literary law of geniuses with crazy politics
Minette Marrin
The Sunday Times
December 28, 2008
Harold Pinter was the greatest English playwright of the 20th century ... What amazed me, more and more, were his enraged political outbursts. However critical one might be of US policy, his furious anti-Americanism – “the most dangerous power that has ever existed” – was unworthy of an intelligent man. It is simply silly to compare American foreign policy with Nazi imperialism, as he did, and to insist that western governments are as evil as any of the worst in the world. To give his public support to the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic was unforgivable. Naturally, Pinter won the Nobel prize.
Wondering about Pinter’s dotty political positions, I began to understand an odd natural law of literature: creative writers are often silly political commentators. This is puzzling, because we tend to turn to creative writers for wisdom and understanding of the world. However, it is surprisingly often true that they have nothing sensible to say outside their fiction.
The most obvious example of this literary law is Tolstoy, one of the most understanding and observant of novelists. However, about politics he was simply silly. I am not talking about the astonishing gulf between his subtle writing about women’s feelings and his vicious treatment of his own wife; that disjunction is so common that it seems almost to be necessary to the creative mind. What I mean is the nonsense of his pamphlets and his public posturing.
Jean-Paul Sartre is another glaring example. His novels and plays may be out of fashion but there’s no doubt that he was a creative writer of talent. However, his politics were ludicrous. In his loathing of America, he supported the mass murderers Stalin and Mao, as – to my amazement – did the great poet Pablo Neruda, another Nobel laureate.
On the other silly side of the political spectrum, there is V S Naipaul, one of my favourite writers and a man of infinite subtlety in his creative work who, in public pronouncements on the state of the world, descends into nasty right-wing ranting that distresses all his admirers. The best and the worst of the 19th-century romantic poets also had daft political ideas. Graham Greene supported the Soviet Union, as did Bertolt Brecht. Martin Amis, one of the most gifted novelists since the war, found his political views parodied (very cleverly) by Bernard Levin for their childishness.
We probably shouldn’t count Ezra Pound, T S Eliot’s much-admired “better craftsman”, because he was probably mad, but as well as an inspired poet he was an active fascist in Mussolini’s Italy. Nor should we count Céline, the notorious French antisemite, who was probably mad as well. But there are plenty of sane writers, good and adequate, who confirm the rule. Of course there are writers to whom it doesn’t apply – such as Chekhov – but that may be because many of them simply chose to say little in public about politics. Perhaps there could be a New Year’s Eve party game – spot the writer without any silly political views.
...
Pinter and the odd literary law of geniuses with crazy politics
Minette Marrin
The Sunday Times
December 28, 2008
Harold Pinter was the greatest English playwright of the 20th century ... What amazed me, more and more, were his enraged political outbursts. However critical one might be of US policy, his furious anti-Americanism – “the most dangerous power that has ever existed” – was unworthy of an intelligent man. It is simply silly to compare American foreign policy with Nazi imperialism, as he did, and to insist that western governments are as evil as any of the worst in the world. To give his public support to the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic was unforgivable. Naturally, Pinter won the Nobel prize.
Wondering about Pinter’s dotty political positions, I began to understand an odd natural law of literature: creative writers are often silly political commentators. This is puzzling, because we tend to turn to creative writers for wisdom and understanding of the world. However, it is surprisingly often true that they have nothing sensible to say outside their fiction.
The most obvious example of this literary law is Tolstoy, one of the most understanding and observant of novelists. However, about politics he was simply silly. I am not talking about the astonishing gulf between his subtle writing about women’s feelings and his vicious treatment of his own wife; that disjunction is so common that it seems almost to be necessary to the creative mind. What I mean is the nonsense of his pamphlets and his public posturing.
Jean-Paul Sartre is another glaring example. His novels and plays may be out of fashion but there’s no doubt that he was a creative writer of talent. However, his politics were ludicrous. In his loathing of America, he supported the mass murderers Stalin and Mao, as – to my amazement – did the great poet Pablo Neruda, another Nobel laureate.
On the other silly side of the political spectrum, there is V S Naipaul, one of my favourite writers and a man of infinite subtlety in his creative work who, in public pronouncements on the state of the world, descends into nasty right-wing ranting that distresses all his admirers. The best and the worst of the 19th-century romantic poets also had daft political ideas. Graham Greene supported the Soviet Union, as did Bertolt Brecht. Martin Amis, one of the most gifted novelists since the war, found his political views parodied (very cleverly) by Bernard Levin for their childishness.
We probably shouldn’t count Ezra Pound, T S Eliot’s much-admired “better craftsman”, because he was probably mad, but as well as an inspired poet he was an active fascist in Mussolini’s Italy. Nor should we count Céline, the notorious French antisemite, who was probably mad as well. But there are plenty of sane writers, good and adequate, who confirm the rule. Of course there are writers to whom it doesn’t apply – such as Chekhov – but that may be because many of them simply chose to say little in public about politics. Perhaps there could be a New Year’s Eve party game – spot the writer without any silly political views.
...
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Mumbai bombings
Jews get killed, but Muslims feel vulnerable
Mark Steyn
Friday, December 5, 2008
Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, The Sydney Daily Telegraph's columnist wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline:
"British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing."
Indeed. And so it goes. This time round – Mumbai – it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims "found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion".
Oh, I don't know about that. In fact, you'd be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was "linked" to any religion, least of all one beginning with "I-" and ending in "-slam." In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations – "Islamic terrorists," "Muslim extremists" – and by the time of the assault on Mumbai found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators "militants" or "gunmen" or "teenage gunmen," as in the opening line of this report in The Australian: "An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok."
Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.
The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution "practitioners." "Practitioners" of what, exactly?
Hard to say. And getting harder. For the Wall Street Journal, Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Mumbai media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
Hmm. Greater Mumbai forms one of the world's five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An "accidental hostage scene" that one of the "practitioners" just happened to stumble upon? "I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?"
Meanwhile, the New Age guru Deepak Chopra laid all the blame on American foreign policy for "going after the wrong people" and inflaming moderates, and "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster" in Mumbai.
Really? The inflammation just "appears"? Like a bad pimple? The "fairer" we get to the, ah, inflamed militant practitioners, the unfairer we get to everyone else. At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as "ultra-Orthodox," "ultra-" in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for "strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn't have been over there in the first place."
Are they stranger or weirder than their killers? Two "inflamed moderates" entered the Chabad House, shouted "Allahu Akbar!," tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young rabbi's pregnant wife. Their 2-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mowed down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.
The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an "accidental" hostage opportunity – and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it's not a hostage situation, it's a mass murder-in-waiting. The sole surviving "militant" revealed that the Jewish center had been targeted a year in advance. The 28-year-old rabbi was Gavriel Holtzberg. His pregnant wife was Rivka Holtzberg. Their orphaned son is Moshe Holtzberg, and his brave nanny is Sandra Samuels. Remember their names, not because they're any more important than the Indians, Britons and Americans targeted in the attack, but because they are an especially revealing glimpse into the pathologies of the perpetrators.
In a well-planned attack on iconic Mumbai landmarks symbolizing great power and wealth, the "militants" nevertheless found time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city's poor in a nondescript building. If they were just "teenage gunmen" or "militants" in the cause of Kashmir, engaged in a more or less conventional territorial dispute with India, why kill the only rabbi in Mumbai? Dennis Prager got to the absurdity of it when he invited his readers to imagine Basque separatists attacking Madrid: "Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous."
And yet we take it for granted that Pakistani "militants" in a long-running border dispute with India would take time out of their hectic schedule to kill Jews. In going to ever more baroque lengths to avoid saying "Islamic" or "Muslim" or "terrorist," we have somehow managed to internalize the pathologies of these men.
We are enjoined to be "understanding," and we're doing our best. A Minnesotan suicide bomber (now there's a phrase) originally from Somalia returned to the old country and blew up himself and 29 other people last October. His family prevailed upon your government to have his parts (or as many of them as could be sifted from the debris) returned to the United States at taxpayer expense and buried in Burnsville Cemetery. Well, hey, in the current climate, what's the big deal about a federal bailout of jihad operational expenses? If that's not "too big to fail," what is?
Last week, a Canadian critic reprimanded me for failing to understand that Muslims feel "vulnerable." Au contraire, they project tremendous cultural confidence, as well they might: They're the world's fastest-growing population. A prominent British Muslim announced the other day that, when the United Kingdom becomes a Muslim state, non-Muslims will be required to wear insignia identifying them as infidels. If he's feeling "vulnerable," he's doing a terrific job of covering it up.
We are told that the "vast majority" of the 1.6 billion to 1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra's estimate) are "moderate." Maybe so, but they're also quiet. And, as the AIDS activists used to say, "Silence=Acceptance." It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush's foreign policy. He was murdered in the name of Islam – "Allahu Akbar."
I wrote in my book, "America Alone," that "reforming" Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Quran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there'll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there'll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Mumbai in the name of Allah, and that's just business as usual. And, if it is somehow "understandable" that for the first time in history it's no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, "worry about image." Not enough.
Mark Steyn
Friday, December 5, 2008
Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, The Sydney Daily Telegraph's columnist wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline:
"British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing."
Indeed. And so it goes. This time round – Mumbai – it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims "found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion".
Oh, I don't know about that. In fact, you'd be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was "linked" to any religion, least of all one beginning with "I-" and ending in "-slam." In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations – "Islamic terrorists," "Muslim extremists" – and by the time of the assault on Mumbai found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators "militants" or "gunmen" or "teenage gunmen," as in the opening line of this report in The Australian: "An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok."
Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.
The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution "practitioners." "Practitioners" of what, exactly?
Hard to say. And getting harder. For the Wall Street Journal, Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Mumbai media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
Hmm. Greater Mumbai forms one of the world's five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An "accidental hostage scene" that one of the "practitioners" just happened to stumble upon? "I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?"
Meanwhile, the New Age guru Deepak Chopra laid all the blame on American foreign policy for "going after the wrong people" and inflaming moderates, and "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster" in Mumbai.
Really? The inflammation just "appears"? Like a bad pimple? The "fairer" we get to the, ah, inflamed militant practitioners, the unfairer we get to everyone else. At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as "ultra-Orthodox," "ultra-" in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for "strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn't have been over there in the first place."
Are they stranger or weirder than their killers? Two "inflamed moderates" entered the Chabad House, shouted "Allahu Akbar!," tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young rabbi's pregnant wife. Their 2-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mowed down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.
The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an "accidental" hostage opportunity – and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it's not a hostage situation, it's a mass murder-in-waiting. The sole surviving "militant" revealed that the Jewish center had been targeted a year in advance. The 28-year-old rabbi was Gavriel Holtzberg. His pregnant wife was Rivka Holtzberg. Their orphaned son is Moshe Holtzberg, and his brave nanny is Sandra Samuels. Remember their names, not because they're any more important than the Indians, Britons and Americans targeted in the attack, but because they are an especially revealing glimpse into the pathologies of the perpetrators.
In a well-planned attack on iconic Mumbai landmarks symbolizing great power and wealth, the "militants" nevertheless found time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city's poor in a nondescript building. If they were just "teenage gunmen" or "militants" in the cause of Kashmir, engaged in a more or less conventional territorial dispute with India, why kill the only rabbi in Mumbai? Dennis Prager got to the absurdity of it when he invited his readers to imagine Basque separatists attacking Madrid: "Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous."
And yet we take it for granted that Pakistani "militants" in a long-running border dispute with India would take time out of their hectic schedule to kill Jews. In going to ever more baroque lengths to avoid saying "Islamic" or "Muslim" or "terrorist," we have somehow managed to internalize the pathologies of these men.
We are enjoined to be "understanding," and we're doing our best. A Minnesotan suicide bomber (now there's a phrase) originally from Somalia returned to the old country and blew up himself and 29 other people last October. His family prevailed upon your government to have his parts (or as many of them as could be sifted from the debris) returned to the United States at taxpayer expense and buried in Burnsville Cemetery. Well, hey, in the current climate, what's the big deal about a federal bailout of jihad operational expenses? If that's not "too big to fail," what is?
Last week, a Canadian critic reprimanded me for failing to understand that Muslims feel "vulnerable." Au contraire, they project tremendous cultural confidence, as well they might: They're the world's fastest-growing population. A prominent British Muslim announced the other day that, when the United Kingdom becomes a Muslim state, non-Muslims will be required to wear insignia identifying them as infidels. If he's feeling "vulnerable," he's doing a terrific job of covering it up.
We are told that the "vast majority" of the 1.6 billion to 1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra's estimate) are "moderate." Maybe so, but they're also quiet. And, as the AIDS activists used to say, "Silence=Acceptance." It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush's foreign policy. He was murdered in the name of Islam – "Allahu Akbar."
I wrote in my book, "America Alone," that "reforming" Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Quran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there'll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there'll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Mumbai in the name of Allah, and that's just business as usual. And, if it is somehow "understandable" that for the first time in history it's no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, "worry about image." Not enough.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Durkin on Welfare
Martin Durkin is a controversial figure. Marxist libertarian and director of Channel 4's the Global Warming Swindle. His next documentary is on the Welfare state and looks set to be just as provocative. Here is an interview he did with Frontpage magazine:
"FP: [...] Tell us your thoughts and observations in terms of welfare. Where has it caused the most devastating effects?
Durkin: To most people, I imagine, welfare seems an obviously good thing. But in fact the corrosive and iniquitous side of welfare has been evident for many decades. It’s only now that people are poking their heads out of the trench and daring to say so. You can see the devastating effects of welfare in Britain, for example, in the exponential rise in single motherhood. The figures are astonishing. In the 1950s almost all children in Britain were brought up by their natural parents. Today, only around half the children in Britain are brought up by their natural parents. Half!
FP: Why has that happened?
Durkin: To see why that happened, let me paint you a picture. In the 1950s, the typical working man and his wife In Britain lived in an income-tax free existence. They kept every penny they earned. For an unmarried teenager, there was no council flat (the ‘projects’ I think you call them), no rent rebate, no rate rebate, no housing benefit or anything else. The burden of looking after her and the child fell on her family, friends or charity. Parents who discovered their daughters were pregnant were understandably furious – because they had to pick up the tab. That’s why Dad stomped round to the family of the boy responsible, to call him to account. They boy’s family understood the full economic implications of making babies and came down on him like a ton of bricks. From the real economic relationships there arose a real moral code – the value and the cost of things were clear.
The growth of welfare benefits has been huge since that time. And within that system a pregnant girl gets special treatment (top of the state housing list etc). The fear has gone. The old idea, “Don’t, for heaven’s sake, get pregnant. It would be a disaster” has gone. For many girls, getting pregnant is a ticket to get out of the parental home. This has been the subject of detailed studies. A ten percent increase in benefits, one of them finds, tends to increase the prevalence of single mothers by 17 percent.
FP: How has the Left played a role in this development?
Durkin: This whole trend in social policy was fuelled by the anti-family views of the left. The family was bourgeois. Divorce was even celebrated (at least among the serious Left and among tougher feminists). I suppose they thought they were doing young girls a favor. If they did, they were fatted-headed idiots. The effect is disastrous for all those involved. The levels of depression, violence and criminality among lone parents (and their wayward children and transient partners) is heartbreaking. As one commentator puts it, “The evidence that lone parents – and indeed those who cohabit – are very more likely to be victims of violence is worldwide, consistent and overwhelming.” In Britain single parents are about 20 times more likely to suffer domestic violence. A child of a single parent is 15 times more likely to be abused than a child brought up by two natural parents. A child brought up by their natural mother and a cohabite (non natural father) is at even greater risk – 19 times more likely to suffer violence and 74 times more likely to be killed.
It’s awful. To catalogue in detail the full devastating effects of welfare – also for example the crippling effects on men who are out of work – would take ages.
FP: Ok, but tell us some more negative effects.
Durkin: Overall, I think in general the bigger evil effects of welfare have been enormously underestimated, even by commentators who regard themselves as more pro-capitalist in their sympathies. Welfare is the basic cause of the deleterious cultural changes we have witnessed in the West over the past 60 years.
The Welfare State, pioneered in Britain of course, has corrupted this country to its core. It has transformed the country caricatured by Noel Coward and others – essentially pretty decent, self-reliant, and plucky – into a country which is thuggish, selfish, mindless, dispirited and lost. Gone is the British stiff upper lip. Modern Britons are moaning, self-pitying inadequates. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne’er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world’s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine.
I’m sorry to sound cross about this, but I don’t think people fully realise what’s happened. Britain has, I think, the highest crime rate of any industrialised country in the world. It is twice as high as the US. The violent crime rate is higher in London than New York. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse, the highest teenage pregnancy rate and the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease in the modern industrial world. What the hell happened?
FP: So what the hell happened?
Durkin: The logic is inescapable. Each slice of do-gooder social policy has had its own tragic, unintended effects. The weight and quality of evidence leaves no room for doubt. The Welfare State has been an unremitting disaster, beyond any hope of reform. It is not that the welfare state isn’t functioning properly, it is that the welfare state is in essence degrading.
In the US, I think much the same can be said of the effects of welfare on the black community. How did we get from the nobility of Martin Luther King, to the sordid, gun-toting, rantings of the gangster rappers? Does the Left imagine that this represents liberation? Larry Elder and others have no doubt what’s to blame. The story goes back to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which had people going door to door, encouraging people to get on welfare. Now, I understand, nearly 70 percent of today’s black children are born out of wedlock.
It can be demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the modern ‘cultural trends’ which we lament have an economic cause, and are a direct result of state intervention. The Left do not see economic necessity as a proper reflection of actual human relationships, but some capitalist carbuncle. It’s clear now that in removing economic necessity from people’s lives (which is what welfare does), we risk sinking into barbarism."
"FP: [...] Tell us your thoughts and observations in terms of welfare. Where has it caused the most devastating effects?
Durkin: To most people, I imagine, welfare seems an obviously good thing. But in fact the corrosive and iniquitous side of welfare has been evident for many decades. It’s only now that people are poking their heads out of the trench and daring to say so. You can see the devastating effects of welfare in Britain, for example, in the exponential rise in single motherhood. The figures are astonishing. In the 1950s almost all children in Britain were brought up by their natural parents. Today, only around half the children in Britain are brought up by their natural parents. Half!
FP: Why has that happened?
Durkin: To see why that happened, let me paint you a picture. In the 1950s, the typical working man and his wife In Britain lived in an income-tax free existence. They kept every penny they earned. For an unmarried teenager, there was no council flat (the ‘projects’ I think you call them), no rent rebate, no rate rebate, no housing benefit or anything else. The burden of looking after her and the child fell on her family, friends or charity. Parents who discovered their daughters were pregnant were understandably furious – because they had to pick up the tab. That’s why Dad stomped round to the family of the boy responsible, to call him to account. They boy’s family understood the full economic implications of making babies and came down on him like a ton of bricks. From the real economic relationships there arose a real moral code – the value and the cost of things were clear.
The growth of welfare benefits has been huge since that time. And within that system a pregnant girl gets special treatment (top of the state housing list etc). The fear has gone. The old idea, “Don’t, for heaven’s sake, get pregnant. It would be a disaster” has gone. For many girls, getting pregnant is a ticket to get out of the parental home. This has been the subject of detailed studies. A ten percent increase in benefits, one of them finds, tends to increase the prevalence of single mothers by 17 percent.
FP: How has the Left played a role in this development?
Durkin: This whole trend in social policy was fuelled by the anti-family views of the left. The family was bourgeois. Divorce was even celebrated (at least among the serious Left and among tougher feminists). I suppose they thought they were doing young girls a favor. If they did, they were fatted-headed idiots. The effect is disastrous for all those involved. The levels of depression, violence and criminality among lone parents (and their wayward children and transient partners) is heartbreaking. As one commentator puts it, “The evidence that lone parents – and indeed those who cohabit – are very more likely to be victims of violence is worldwide, consistent and overwhelming.” In Britain single parents are about 20 times more likely to suffer domestic violence. A child of a single parent is 15 times more likely to be abused than a child brought up by two natural parents. A child brought up by their natural mother and a cohabite (non natural father) is at even greater risk – 19 times more likely to suffer violence and 74 times more likely to be killed.
It’s awful. To catalogue in detail the full devastating effects of welfare – also for example the crippling effects on men who are out of work – would take ages.
FP: Ok, but tell us some more negative effects.
Durkin: Overall, I think in general the bigger evil effects of welfare have been enormously underestimated, even by commentators who regard themselves as more pro-capitalist in their sympathies. Welfare is the basic cause of the deleterious cultural changes we have witnessed in the West over the past 60 years.
The Welfare State, pioneered in Britain of course, has corrupted this country to its core. It has transformed the country caricatured by Noel Coward and others – essentially pretty decent, self-reliant, and plucky – into a country which is thuggish, selfish, mindless, dispirited and lost. Gone is the British stiff upper lip. Modern Britons are moaning, self-pitying inadequates. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne’er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world’s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine.
I’m sorry to sound cross about this, but I don’t think people fully realise what’s happened. Britain has, I think, the highest crime rate of any industrialised country in the world. It is twice as high as the US. The violent crime rate is higher in London than New York. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse, the highest teenage pregnancy rate and the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease in the modern industrial world. What the hell happened?
FP: So what the hell happened?
Durkin: The logic is inescapable. Each slice of do-gooder social policy has had its own tragic, unintended effects. The weight and quality of evidence leaves no room for doubt. The Welfare State has been an unremitting disaster, beyond any hope of reform. It is not that the welfare state isn’t functioning properly, it is that the welfare state is in essence degrading.
In the US, I think much the same can be said of the effects of welfare on the black community. How did we get from the nobility of Martin Luther King, to the sordid, gun-toting, rantings of the gangster rappers? Does the Left imagine that this represents liberation? Larry Elder and others have no doubt what’s to blame. The story goes back to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which had people going door to door, encouraging people to get on welfare. Now, I understand, nearly 70 percent of today’s black children are born out of wedlock.
It can be demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the modern ‘cultural trends’ which we lament have an economic cause, and are a direct result of state intervention. The Left do not see economic necessity as a proper reflection of actual human relationships, but some capitalist carbuncle. It’s clear now that in removing economic necessity from people’s lives (which is what welfare does), we risk sinking into barbarism."
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