In case you are wondering, there is a difference. Fools, for example, are a group of senators who could not tell the difference between an ass and stonewalling a confirmation process for a SCOTUS associate justice. A fear of flying, on the other hand, is something some people have and some people fake so they can help in stonewalling a confirmation process for a SCOTUS associate justice. The difference should be obvious, but for some strange reason - other than the 24/7 drivel of the mainstream media - it isn't.
There are other things that should have been obvious from the moment that the substance of life-long trauma of Dr. Blasey Ford was leaked to the WaPo. One, it was timed for maximum effect with the same objective as the false claim of a fear of flying. Two, there was no freaking way a claim like the one levelled against Brett Kavanaugh could be substantiated. The only material witness to the alleged assault on the high-schooler, was a friend of the accused and by the artful scenario, an accomplice in the act, and therefore someone hugely unlikely to corroborate the thirty-six year old trauma of the distraught doctor. The other two (three ?) people present in the house had nothing substantial to add since by Dr. Ford's own testimony she did not share with them the horror story. But this, of course, assume, that neither of the two would-be rapists bragged in their presence and colored the outrage perpetrated in the upstairs bedroom. Therefore, a thorough FBI investigation would be needed to confirm that no-one other than Dr. Ford remembers anything about a party sometime in the summer of 1982, somewhere around Washington D.C. Surely, this could not be done in a week, since now there is already another credible victim claiming that the prospective SCOTUS associate justice at another party had his dick in her face, literally and figuratively. You see, Anita Hill, had the disadvantage of fighting Clarence Thomas alone, and therefore never quite managed to make people comfortable with the notion that she followed him from job to job, despite all the petty harassments because she had no other career options open to her. The internet and #MeToo wasn't around and therefore the twisted sisters' were limited in generating mass assaults on the politically undesirable favoured by the basket of deplorables. But you can't stop progress, even though this surely is the smelly sort that George Orwell said "causes bluebottles to flock to a dead cat".
Like the real fear of flying, the foolishness of GOP senators relates to a loss of nerve. Instead of quickly assessing the situation, concentrating on the leak from senator's Feinstein's office and discrediting the preposterous and contradictory claim that the Kavanaugh's accuser wanted to remain anonymous, they allowed themselves to be shanghaied into a Monty Pythonesque Flying Circus. Now, in the third week of the melodrama, the senators will have to rely on the clean bill of health of the nominee by the FBI investigation, which is by no means assured. All it would take at this point is some ambitious, closet Clintonite in the ranks (preferably a woman of color), to uncover some untold tale of debauchery relating to excessive beer consumption in the judge's sophomore year for this sorry saga to come to a sad end.
There are very few middle-of-the-road, and intelligent conservative voices that have this story right. The always-entertaining Jim Kunstler, who has most things right, went a step too far when he dismissed the alleged incident as "awkward teenage necking". No, I would not go there. The woman might really believe in the reality of the incident, and we do not know her background to cast aspersions. I would say, though, that if this incident was really the most serious traumatic sex event of her life, then she has lived a charmed life. Tucker Carlson's line I like; he is direct and as usual cuts through the nonsense. He and Mark Steyn understand the problem well. Unfortunately, most of the commentators in the middle and on the respectable right are just ....having a fear of flying.
The respected Canadian commentator Lorne Gunter is one who would have it both ways. He deplores the lack of process in delivering the Ford charges before the Senate committee, but he cannot bring himself to dismiss them precisely because they cannot be handled by a process that can claim impartiality and integrity. He says, "[It] does not diminish these allegations that they are for an attack more than three decades old." He is dead wrong. Not only is this allegation (a single one, of a minor sexual assault) diminished by the nearly two generations that transpired between it allegedly occurring and now, it is unequivocally "lapsed". It simply cannot be belabored in a manner that would do justice to a fair and impartial process. Period. End of story. The only reason that one would want to raise this incident in any public forum with such a delay is to impugn the character of the person against whom such charges are brought - outside of a judicial process. Mr Gunter evidently wants to play the gentleman here, but unfortunately, the committee hearing accusation against Mr.Kavanaugh does not proceed by standards of civility, and the writer cast himself into the role of a gentleman who gives away too much. His plea, to preserve the presumption of innocence, is miscast and frankly, foolish, because he is giving it away by agreeing to a crazy process. It appears to be a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Mr Gunter protests procedural changes to Canadian criminal law (Bill C-51) which further erode the rights of the accused in cases of sexual assault. But he does not understand that this is just a step in dismantling the legal framework which began long ago. In Canada, for example, we no longer have the doctrine of "recent complain" in sex crimes, which allows inquiry into why a complaint about an old incident was not raised earlier. Mr Gunter appears to subscribe to it, even though it severely disadvantages the defense in real cases, let alone the kind brought forth against Brett Kavanaugh.
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Tuesday, May 1, 2018
Who Is Afraid of Virgin Wolves ?
Just in case you have been wondering who informs the Washington elites of the unfolding events north of the border, I have found out that one of the wise women is Melissa J. Gismondi. Her clippings.me website tells us that Melissa uses her training as a historian to inform her analysis of contemporary issues. She has over seven years of experience writing and editing digital and print content for diverse audiences.
There might be a problem with the first sentence of her intro, but what the heck, who cares about syntax these days. No, it is not important; it only adds colour to the mental efforts of Melissa who holds a PhD in American history. But, if you are curious, just a handful of clippings of her contributions to major media outlets will give you a good idea just where her head is at: Are Canadians really less racist than Americans?, Can students who engage in sexual or romantic relationships with their professors avoid being exploited?, When it comes to white supremacy, historians can't stand on the sidelines, Why media obsession with male charisma has to stop. I don't know how you but I feel assured after perusing a few of her journalistic creations that they are not really meant for "diverse audiences" unless of course she means that her politics are what is required for all genders, races, and altars worshipped.
Melissa's take on the last month's Toronto sidewalk terror incident has been sold to The Washington Post. She believes she knows what drove Alek Minassian's anger and a rented van to plow a busy metropolitan boulevard that Monday. She writes...until very recently white men in patriarchal societies such as Canada and the United States didn't have "incel" complaints, because they enjoyed relatively free access to women's bodies. Indeed, the seething rage that allegedly fueled Minassian's terror comes from women gaining more control of their bodies, thanks to decades of activism. In the process, they're denying white men an old privilege to which many still feel entitled: sex whenever they want it. From there, Melissa goes on to say that if in the past rape was prosecuted it was to protect women as men's property, and that white slave owners and "Euro-American colonizers" saw the slave and indigenous women as their prize to take.
In other words, Melissa asserts that there are large, historical wrongs behind the horrific but, as police indicated, isolated, attack, motivated by a very personal sort rage against the world. However, was no indication in the only artifact fact by Minassian available that he was raging against women - exclusively. His Facebook note prior to the attack names both sexually active sides, the Chads and Stacys, as the object of his wrath. Nor is there any indication that he, or most "incels" for that matter, have a beef with feminism as such. They appear to be climbing walls simply because they don't get laid and are scorned by their peers as social retards. This poses no problem for the social justice warrior, though. If social justice complaint does not exist, it can be manufactured. Since this is a terrorist attack story that is not Islamic it can be easily be converted into an illustration of alt-right white male supremacy/privilege, slavery and oppression of native women in North America. And of course it is not just Melissa Gismondi. There were several commentators in the mainstream media with a matching narrative. The Southern Poverty Law Center immediately latched onto the "Incel Ideology" idea.
It is really a sad commentary on the state of the Western academia to see someone with a PhD in history to be grossly ignorant on the basics of the subject matter she expounds on. Melissa Gismondi apparently does not understand anything about the English Common Law and its development. She says that the crime of rape was occasionally prosecuted [in most of American history] so long as the woman was white and behaved as women were expected to behave. That is not true as is not true that the woman's body was not hers to violate (since it was a chattel of her husband or property of her male guardian). This is an unbelievable libel not just on the sense of law, order and fairness (or good morals, if you want) but on the whole "white" Western civilization. It would take Ms. Gismondi not more than a quick look into the Blackstone's Laws of England (1765-69) to educate herself that rape, raptus mulierum was a "public wrong" , not a private one. She would learn in a few seconds that the outrage was not perpetrated against the woman's guardians but against the female part of his majesty's subjects. Unlike the old Roman or the Mosaic laws, the law of England has recognized the inviolability of a person (habeas corpus) for eight hundred years. To have carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will, violated her body and no one else's! This principle has been universal in Anglo-Saxon legal history. Ms Gismondi and the left-wing academic lunatics she speaks for are clueless. Blackstone cited Henry of Bratton, a thirteen-century jurist who ruled on the King's Bench that violating even a prostitute (!!!) was a crime. His brilliant and clever argument refuted the notion that since a prostitute sold her body for money she had no regard for it. Bratton ruled that the state of mind of the woman could not be known to the assailant - beyond her protest that is - and therefore she could be in fact on her way to rehabilitation. Besides, said the just man, the law of England does not judge so hardly of offenders, as to deny them retreat even from common strumpets. I marvel at the idea that the best among the white supremacists knew that no meant no, even if she was a hooker, as early as the thirteenth century.
No, the "incel" social media phenomenon does not relate to anything in the cultural mainstream of the West. The involuntary celibate men (and some women), are simply a new label and form of communication for social and sexual marginals. They are not as a rule violent; it has been argued by competent psychologists that the rare outbursts of violence within that group points to issues other that their sexual frustration. Most likely, it is serious mental health issues (beyond, say, spectrum autism) that account for murderous assaults like those of Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian. The latter's Facebook post recalls the first known intentional vehicular mass murder by a young Czech woman, Olga Hepnarová in 1973, who like the two men transparently suffered from persecutory delusions. If there is a larger social issue behind the Toronto tragedy then it is the all-too-real decline of the traditional masculine virtues in our society, such as honour, self-control, courage, thoughtfulness and compassion. These would naturally act as a potent inhibitor of gross antisocial oubursts. But even if we managed to recapture a positive male self-image, even we had male leaders who would show character and integrity, even then we would see extreme cases of marginal behaviours. They will be with us always. The only difference is that we would be confident in the goodness of men, and see the nastiness and poverty of spirit of those who would take a terrible but isolated tragedy as an excuse to malign the whole gender of one race.
Melissa's take on the last month's Toronto sidewalk terror incident has been sold to The Washington Post. She believes she knows what drove Alek Minassian's anger and a rented van to plow a busy metropolitan boulevard that Monday. She writes...until very recently white men in patriarchal societies such as Canada and the United States didn't have "incel" complaints, because they enjoyed relatively free access to women's bodies. Indeed, the seething rage that allegedly fueled Minassian's terror comes from women gaining more control of their bodies, thanks to decades of activism. In the process, they're denying white men an old privilege to which many still feel entitled: sex whenever they want it. From there, Melissa goes on to say that if in the past rape was prosecuted it was to protect women as men's property, and that white slave owners and "Euro-American colonizers" saw the slave and indigenous women as their prize to take.
In other words, Melissa asserts that there are large, historical wrongs behind the horrific but, as police indicated, isolated, attack, motivated by a very personal sort rage against the world. However, was no indication in the only artifact fact by Minassian available that he was raging against women - exclusively. His Facebook note prior to the attack names both sexually active sides, the Chads and Stacys, as the object of his wrath. Nor is there any indication that he, or most "incels" for that matter, have a beef with feminism as such. They appear to be climbing walls simply because they don't get laid and are scorned by their peers as social retards. This poses no problem for the social justice warrior, though. If social justice complaint does not exist, it can be manufactured. Since this is a terrorist attack story that is not Islamic it can be easily be converted into an illustration of alt-right white male supremacy/privilege, slavery and oppression of native women in North America. And of course it is not just Melissa Gismondi. There were several commentators in the mainstream media with a matching narrative. The Southern Poverty Law Center immediately latched onto the "Incel Ideology" idea.
It is really a sad commentary on the state of the Western academia to see someone with a PhD in history to be grossly ignorant on the basics of the subject matter she expounds on. Melissa Gismondi apparently does not understand anything about the English Common Law and its development. She says that the crime of rape was occasionally prosecuted [in most of American history] so long as the woman was white and behaved as women were expected to behave. That is not true as is not true that the woman's body was not hers to violate (since it was a chattel of her husband or property of her male guardian). This is an unbelievable libel not just on the sense of law, order and fairness (or good morals, if you want) but on the whole "white" Western civilization. It would take Ms. Gismondi not more than a quick look into the Blackstone's Laws of England (1765-69) to educate herself that rape, raptus mulierum was a "public wrong" , not a private one. She would learn in a few seconds that the outrage was not perpetrated against the woman's guardians but against the female part of his majesty's subjects. Unlike the old Roman or the Mosaic laws, the law of England has recognized the inviolability of a person (habeas corpus) for eight hundred years. To have carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will, violated her body and no one else's! This principle has been universal in Anglo-Saxon legal history. Ms Gismondi and the left-wing academic lunatics she speaks for are clueless. Blackstone cited Henry of Bratton, a thirteen-century jurist who ruled on the King's Bench that violating even a prostitute (!!!) was a crime. His brilliant and clever argument refuted the notion that since a prostitute sold her body for money she had no regard for it. Bratton ruled that the state of mind of the woman could not be known to the assailant - beyond her protest that is - and therefore she could be in fact on her way to rehabilitation. Besides, said the just man, the law of England does not judge so hardly of offenders, as to deny them retreat even from common strumpets. I marvel at the idea that the best among the white supremacists knew that no meant no, even if she was a hooker, as early as the thirteenth century.
No, the "incel" social media phenomenon does not relate to anything in the cultural mainstream of the West. The involuntary celibate men (and some women), are simply a new label and form of communication for social and sexual marginals. They are not as a rule violent; it has been argued by competent psychologists that the rare outbursts of violence within that group points to issues other that their sexual frustration. Most likely, it is serious mental health issues (beyond, say, spectrum autism) that account for murderous assaults like those of Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian. The latter's Facebook post recalls the first known intentional vehicular mass murder by a young Czech woman, Olga Hepnarová in 1973, who like the two men transparently suffered from persecutory delusions. If there is a larger social issue behind the Toronto tragedy then it is the all-too-real decline of the traditional masculine virtues in our society, such as honour, self-control, courage, thoughtfulness and compassion. These would naturally act as a potent inhibitor of gross antisocial oubursts. But even if we managed to recapture a positive male self-image, even we had male leaders who would show character and integrity, even then we would see extreme cases of marginal behaviours. They will be with us always. The only difference is that we would be confident in the goodness of men, and see the nastiness and poverty of spirit of those who would take a terrible but isolated tragedy as an excuse to malign the whole gender of one race.
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
Putin's Propaganda Blunder
I am a known Putin admirer, and on the discussion boards I have been accused of being his bot and/or his bootlicker. Well, let them say what they will. I like Vladimir Vladimirovch when he is smart and down-to-brass-tacks which is most of the time. I don't like the stupid, manipulative banter in politics which is what is currently being served in the West twenty-four seven. Putin is a welcome relief from that. He talks common sense and that is why he comes across loud and clear - across languages (though I still have some Russian). On the other hand, while I admire the Russian president, I don't idolize him. He is human and makes mistakes like all of us. I hope he will not make another mistake of the sort he made last month.
Masha Gessen is one of the Moscow journalists who was not killed or maimed for being critical of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, even though she was a lesbian activist in and spread the most ridiculous tale about his corruption, an alleged selfie called Putin Black Sea Palace. But a miracle happened. When she was sacked by a popular magazine for ignoring one of Putin's public relations stunts, she received a personal call from him with an invitation to visit him in the Kremlin. What transpired during her interview with the Russian president is certainly worth the read. That Masha has a hostile animus toward Vladimir Vladimovich I think comes out loud and clear. Other than the late Zbig Brzezinski, I can't think of anyone who would describe Putin as shallow, self-involved, not terribly perceptive, and apparently very poorly informed. Strangely, or perhaps not, from what I have seen, this would be how I would describe Masha Gessen, who has since moved to the U.S. and milks her Putin envy and Kremlin twenty-minute expertise for all it is worth. Do not get me wrong; I am not saying that Masha is not bright - she is - but like some women on the public scene she suffers from the Hillary Complex, that is, a hopelessly exaggerated view of her own importance and abilities. If she really knew Putin's habits she would have known he always comes prepared for interviews and so he certainly knew everything that mattered about her (especially her book on himself published in the West) and the effect the encounter would have on the perception of him when the word gets out about her Kremlin visit. So, dear Masha, you were played.
I never thought I would agree with anything that Masha Gessen had to say about Vladimir Putin. But, we live in a strange world where strange things happen. So I do agree with her that the president wants to wage a rhetorical war with the U.S. without too many coffins. Naturally, I don't mean it as an exercise laced in Schadenfreude, and I certainly would not use the word coffin in the punchline. It's a way too morbid way to make the point even if you are Alexei Balabanov and you have a scary tale to tell about a Russian soul warped by murderous Soviet authoritarianism. (His 2007 horror movie used a Soviet-era euphemism for a military coffin - "Cargo 200"). Nor do I see Putin as someone who wants to engage in war propaganda to collect brownie points on the nasty Russian right, to wit, among the village butchers and pub brawlers, where, Gessen apparently believes, lie Putin's natural political affinities. All that aside, her bottom point is valid. Putin has unadvisedly engaged in goading the West as a way to compensate perhaps for what Russia can deliver on the battlefield at the present time. I am speaking above all about the annual address to the Federal Assembly, he delivered on March 1st of this year. This must be the strangest speech Vladimir Putin has ever delivered, or the strangest one I ever heard, at any rate.
I was aghast: I could not for the world of me understand why a leader of a nuclear superpower but a second-tier economy harassed for years by barrages of sanctions from the West would want to parade in public an array of new super-sophisticated offensive weapons. Who really needs to know this - if it is real ? And, pardon me for being Captain Obvious here, would not this be feeding into a known Putin stereotype ? Or say, give credence to the view that Russia is an "existential threat to the U.S."? Hello? And Putin would not just talk about the weapons systems but actually show clips of how these monstrous killers "against which there the West has no defense" work in animated simulation on a giant screen behind his rostrum. The show had a distinct air of unreality. The introduction of each of the new weapons (and the ICBM known in the West as "Satan") was greeted by a loud applause in the audience. There was a cluster of nuclear vehicles descending on Florida (hmmm....) and cruise missiles deftly zigzagging around the U.S. defense system. Even Putin's closing punch line: "they did not want to listen to us before, but they will have to listen to us now" was a truly foolhardy optimism. All it did is recall the naïve Soviet propaganda faithfully tracking the progress of time to the inevitable final victory of communism in the world. These weapons are not a bluff, assured Putin his mesmerized audience, as though his saying he was not bluffing, assured also everyone he was not misleading his audience about the state of readiness of these systems in the aggregate.
The most disconcerting aspect of Putin's speech was that, he, the former high-ranking intelligence officer and experienced statesman evidently did not take into account the most likely response in the West to his message. He should have known that the speech would be dismissed as, one, a way to bolster his domestic support among the pessimistic sort of patriots and the wilder, too-soft-on-the-West yahoos on the eve of election to get them to show up to vote, two, an unrealistic appraisal of the new weapons' system readiness, and three, and most importantly, as "threats" to the security of the West. I simply refuse to believe that the Russian president believed his low-budget large-screen demo would bring the West to the negotiating table. And indeed, NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu immediately denounced the speech as "bellicose" and "unprovoked", and repeated the ridiculous lie that the Polish and Rumanian ABM batteries are designed to protect against "ballistic missiles from outside of the Euro-Atlantic area", meaning Iran. The Russians have long known that these so-called defensive systems are in fact easily convertible to an offensive platform and their target is Russia and no-one else.
Worse still, within few days of the speech Britain cooked up the Skripal sorry saga in Salisbury and another chemical attack false flag in Douma. Russia's intelligence got wind of the latter, and threatened a vigorous response through the Chief of General Staff general Gerasimov in case a fake chemical assault should prompt a military response from the West. It is hard to run away from the impression that the missile attack on Syria, and pretty much everything else that has followed in Russia's relations with the West in the weeks since the address of the Russian president to the Duma, directly relates to the speech, and its implied threat that frankly resembled more a drunken sailor's bragging than the smart and indomitable Putin we have come to know and rely on.
In several of my discussions on the Web I have been challenged for my perception that Putin meant to "threaten" the West. Naturally, it is in the eye of the beholder, and there though I consider myself Russia's friend, I am a Westerner. I grew up in Prague and have my own perception of the Russians lack of insight in grasping their own aggressive impulses. It was registered by professor T.G.Masaryk (later the first president of Czechoslovakia) who went to Yasnaya Polyana and reported later that Leo Tolstoy, the great apostle of peace and non-violence, regularly slapped around his servants silly. On the same subject, we even had a joke about a Soviet advisor in Africa who "solved" a problem in deciding whether a prisoner of his client army was a dangerous spy. He asked the prisoner to slap his face. The prisoner did and the advisor shot him dead. When the clients asked him why he shot the prisoner he said: 'bezopasnostj prezhde vsevo' (security above all!). They were perplexed: 'no, what we meant to ask is why you asked him to slap your face before shooting him?' He replied: 'tovarishchi, my nikogda agressory'. (Comrades, we are never the aggressors!) I recalled the old chestnut when I read about Nikki Haley's recent posturing: Russia will never be our friend. We'll slap them when we need to. Of course that speaks of a different problem, but by all means, let us stay away these slap fests. They do not add any value.
Staging propaganda events is perhaps necessary but they should be done intelligently. The March 1 speech was far from smart propaganda, unlike, say, inviting Masha Gessen to Kremlin for a tea and a friendly tête-à-tête. Putin was threatening and the sooner he realizes he made a mistake and paid for it by being taken down a peg or two in his international stature, and having Russia's economy further damaged, the better for all of us.
Masha Gessen is one of the Moscow journalists who was not killed or maimed for being critical of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, even though she was a lesbian activist in and spread the most ridiculous tale about his corruption, an alleged selfie called Putin Black Sea Palace. But a miracle happened. When she was sacked by a popular magazine for ignoring one of Putin's public relations stunts, she received a personal call from him with an invitation to visit him in the Kremlin. What transpired during her interview with the Russian president is certainly worth the read. That Masha has a hostile animus toward Vladimir Vladimovich I think comes out loud and clear. Other than the late Zbig Brzezinski, I can't think of anyone who would describe Putin as shallow, self-involved, not terribly perceptive, and apparently very poorly informed. Strangely, or perhaps not, from what I have seen, this would be how I would describe Masha Gessen, who has since moved to the U.S. and milks her Putin envy and Kremlin twenty-minute expertise for all it is worth. Do not get me wrong; I am not saying that Masha is not bright - she is - but like some women on the public scene she suffers from the Hillary Complex, that is, a hopelessly exaggerated view of her own importance and abilities. If she really knew Putin's habits she would have known he always comes prepared for interviews and so he certainly knew everything that mattered about her (especially her book on himself published in the West) and the effect the encounter would have on the perception of him when the word gets out about her Kremlin visit. So, dear Masha, you were played.
I never thought I would agree with anything that Masha Gessen had to say about Vladimir Putin. But, we live in a strange world where strange things happen. So I do agree with her that the president wants to wage a rhetorical war with the U.S. without too many coffins. Naturally, I don't mean it as an exercise laced in Schadenfreude, and I certainly would not use the word coffin in the punchline. It's a way too morbid way to make the point even if you are Alexei Balabanov and you have a scary tale to tell about a Russian soul warped by murderous Soviet authoritarianism. (His 2007 horror movie used a Soviet-era euphemism for a military coffin - "Cargo 200"). Nor do I see Putin as someone who wants to engage in war propaganda to collect brownie points on the nasty Russian right, to wit, among the village butchers and pub brawlers, where, Gessen apparently believes, lie Putin's natural political affinities. All that aside, her bottom point is valid. Putin has unadvisedly engaged in goading the West as a way to compensate perhaps for what Russia can deliver on the battlefield at the present time. I am speaking above all about the annual address to the Federal Assembly, he delivered on March 1st of this year. This must be the strangest speech Vladimir Putin has ever delivered, or the strangest one I ever heard, at any rate.
I was aghast: I could not for the world of me understand why a leader of a nuclear superpower but a second-tier economy harassed for years by barrages of sanctions from the West would want to parade in public an array of new super-sophisticated offensive weapons. Who really needs to know this - if it is real ? And, pardon me for being Captain Obvious here, would not this be feeding into a known Putin stereotype ? Or say, give credence to the view that Russia is an "existential threat to the U.S."? Hello? And Putin would not just talk about the weapons systems but actually show clips of how these monstrous killers "against which there the West has no defense" work in animated simulation on a giant screen behind his rostrum. The show had a distinct air of unreality. The introduction of each of the new weapons (and the ICBM known in the West as "Satan") was greeted by a loud applause in the audience. There was a cluster of nuclear vehicles descending on Florida (hmmm....) and cruise missiles deftly zigzagging around the U.S. defense system. Even Putin's closing punch line: "they did not want to listen to us before, but they will have to listen to us now" was a truly foolhardy optimism. All it did is recall the naïve Soviet propaganda faithfully tracking the progress of time to the inevitable final victory of communism in the world. These weapons are not a bluff, assured Putin his mesmerized audience, as though his saying he was not bluffing, assured also everyone he was not misleading his audience about the state of readiness of these systems in the aggregate.
The most disconcerting aspect of Putin's speech was that, he, the former high-ranking intelligence officer and experienced statesman evidently did not take into account the most likely response in the West to his message. He should have known that the speech would be dismissed as, one, a way to bolster his domestic support among the pessimistic sort of patriots and the wilder, too-soft-on-the-West yahoos on the eve of election to get them to show up to vote, two, an unrealistic appraisal of the new weapons' system readiness, and three, and most importantly, as "threats" to the security of the West. I simply refuse to believe that the Russian president believed his low-budget large-screen demo would bring the West to the negotiating table. And indeed, NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu immediately denounced the speech as "bellicose" and "unprovoked", and repeated the ridiculous lie that the Polish and Rumanian ABM batteries are designed to protect against "ballistic missiles from outside of the Euro-Atlantic area", meaning Iran. The Russians have long known that these so-called defensive systems are in fact easily convertible to an offensive platform and their target is Russia and no-one else.
Worse still, within few days of the speech Britain cooked up the Skripal sorry saga in Salisbury and another chemical attack false flag in Douma. Russia's intelligence got wind of the latter, and threatened a vigorous response through the Chief of General Staff general Gerasimov in case a fake chemical assault should prompt a military response from the West. It is hard to run away from the impression that the missile attack on Syria, and pretty much everything else that has followed in Russia's relations with the West in the weeks since the address of the Russian president to the Duma, directly relates to the speech, and its implied threat that frankly resembled more a drunken sailor's bragging than the smart and indomitable Putin we have come to know and rely on.
In several of my discussions on the Web I have been challenged for my perception that Putin meant to "threaten" the West. Naturally, it is in the eye of the beholder, and there though I consider myself Russia's friend, I am a Westerner. I grew up in Prague and have my own perception of the Russians lack of insight in grasping their own aggressive impulses. It was registered by professor T.G.Masaryk (later the first president of Czechoslovakia) who went to Yasnaya Polyana and reported later that Leo Tolstoy, the great apostle of peace and non-violence, regularly slapped around his servants silly. On the same subject, we even had a joke about a Soviet advisor in Africa who "solved" a problem in deciding whether a prisoner of his client army was a dangerous spy. He asked the prisoner to slap his face. The prisoner did and the advisor shot him dead. When the clients asked him why he shot the prisoner he said: 'bezopasnostj prezhde vsevo' (security above all!). They were perplexed: 'no, what we meant to ask is why you asked him to slap your face before shooting him?' He replied: 'tovarishchi, my nikogda agressory'. (Comrades, we are never the aggressors!) I recalled the old chestnut when I read about Nikki Haley's recent posturing: Russia will never be our friend. We'll slap them when we need to. Of course that speaks of a different problem, but by all means, let us stay away these slap fests. They do not add any value.
Staging propaganda events is perhaps necessary but they should be done intelligently. The March 1 speech was far from smart propaganda, unlike, say, inviting Masha Gessen to Kremlin for a tea and a friendly tête-à-tête. Putin was threatening and the sooner he realizes he made a mistake and paid for it by being taken down a peg or two in his international stature, and having Russia's economy further damaged, the better for all of us.
Sunday, May 14, 2017
Instead of Brexit Repeats Why Not a Smarter Europe?
In my on-line discussions with American fans of Marine Le Pen discussing her last Sunday's loss several issues kept returning undigested. One was the idea that to save France, (and the cultural traditions of other European nations) the nation states must return in toto, that is they need to exit the EU and destroy it. This is extremely naïve. Mind you, this would not really be surprising coming from Americans, but surely it was from Le Pen and the Front National. In the past, I praised Marine for political acumen, especially her ability to avoid extremist positions (despite the label being pinned on her) and her push to get her movement into the mainstream. However, it appears now that since the Regionals in 2015 she has gone the way of other European "protest movements", which assure themselves of remaining on the fringes of political life by saying and doing stupid things. Take for example the proposal of Geert Wilders to ban the Qur'an in the Netherlands as "hate literature". The idea was criticized even from within the ranks as outlandish, to which Geert replied, in a standard defense, by saying that "you have to demand more than you know you can get".
To me however, this is precisely why Wilders' PVV will remain the pariah in Netherlands despite growing apprehension of Europe committing suicide by immigration which threatens not just the culture and traditions but social welfare of the "native Europeans" (a notion which has already been equated with Nazism and racism by the EU matriarchs). The home-grown Dutch will simply conclude that Wilders is too much of a twit to lead the country, and the "extra" bubble of support - that he gets after each Islamist atrocity - goes "poof".
But there is a bigger issue, in fact the elephant in the room in both the Dutch and French spring elections: Ne/Fre/xit. The problem of the populist Europe is that it took first the (phoney) threat of Grexit and then the real Brexit as a start of an inevitable massacre whereby the monster-chicken of EU would be cut up back to completely sovereign states, each proud and free with defended borders and national economy and presumably twenty-seven spanking-new European embassies. Big mistake!
Brexit will not be repeated because there is no other island nation in Europe with a history like Britain's and its unique ties to Europe. Europe is a continent which was once dominated by a few dynastic houses competing for supremacy first on its territory and then the globe. When in a world war one of those houses was denied and scrapped, a new political movement soon sprang up in the
abolished Empire with a dominance ideology which repeated a world war in a generation. After the war, the EU logically evolved from a struggle for global dominance by the US and USSR, i.e. states outside of the traditional inner political orbit of Europe. First, the economic and then the political integration of Europe made sense. It was foreseen by political visionaries like Georges Clemenceau and the first Czechoslovak president T.G. Masaryk between the wars. Masaryk, whose wife was an American suffragette, spoke of the desirability of United States of Europe to prevent wars and to build on the common purpose of the continent's Judeo-Christian culture. Sure, made sense then and makes sense now. It is somewhat ironic that the anti-EU populist movements find so much common ground in their conferences. They really do look like a new Nationalist Internationale.
So, hopefully when Marine Le Pen sobers up from her stinging defeat by an empty-headed political mannequin, she will reflect on the depth of folly of "demanding more than you know you can get". The EU and Eurozone are here to stay and France will stay in them. Too much has been invested in European integration and most people feel comfortable in it (even if they complain). That should be a starting point.
Then perhaps one can start to push for a reform in the way EU sees itself as a hyper-concentrated political monolith and take it down a few pegs, especially the monstrous ideological pseudo-shrine where noone prays but the self-serving elites. Devolve some of the regulatory powers back to the member nations. As for national borders, they should remain but the emphasis should be on common European interests. Instead of AfD wanting to protect Germany's borders and Front National the French, then perhaps what seems a more rational, and efficient solution in protecting both from barbarian invasions is protecting the Schengen border. No ?
Clearly, what is needed in Europe is much smarter political thinking than we see right now. The popular anti-elitist movements need to forget about abandoning the EU. It's there for a reason, and it may yet show itself a powerful tool in protecting the common interests of the Europeans. Call for reform, cut out the crap, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
To me however, this is precisely why Wilders' PVV will remain the pariah in Netherlands despite growing apprehension of Europe committing suicide by immigration which threatens not just the culture and traditions but social welfare of the "native Europeans" (a notion which has already been equated with Nazism and racism by the EU matriarchs). The home-grown Dutch will simply conclude that Wilders is too much of a twit to lead the country, and the "extra" bubble of support - that he gets after each Islamist atrocity - goes "poof".
But there is a bigger issue, in fact the elephant in the room in both the Dutch and French spring elections: Ne/Fre/xit. The problem of the populist Europe is that it took first the (phoney) threat of Grexit and then the real Brexit as a start of an inevitable massacre whereby the monster-chicken of EU would be cut up back to completely sovereign states, each proud and free with defended borders and national economy and presumably twenty-seven spanking-new European embassies. Big mistake!
Brexit will not be repeated because there is no other island nation in Europe with a history like Britain's and its unique ties to Europe. Europe is a continent which was once dominated by a few dynastic houses competing for supremacy first on its territory and then the globe. When in a world war one of those houses was denied and scrapped, a new political movement soon sprang up in the
 |
| T.G.Masaryk |
So, hopefully when Marine Le Pen sobers up from her stinging defeat by an empty-headed political mannequin, she will reflect on the depth of folly of "demanding more than you know you can get". The EU and Eurozone are here to stay and France will stay in them. Too much has been invested in European integration and most people feel comfortable in it (even if they complain). That should be a starting point.
Then perhaps one can start to push for a reform in the way EU sees itself as a hyper-concentrated political monolith and take it down a few pegs, especially the monstrous ideological pseudo-shrine where noone prays but the self-serving elites. Devolve some of the regulatory powers back to the member nations. As for national borders, they should remain but the emphasis should be on common European interests. Instead of AfD wanting to protect Germany's borders and Front National the French, then perhaps what seems a more rational, and efficient solution in protecting both from barbarian invasions is protecting the Schengen border. No ?
Clearly, what is needed in Europe is much smarter political thinking than we see right now. The popular anti-elitist movements need to forget about abandoning the EU. It's there for a reason, and it may yet show itself a powerful tool in protecting the common interests of the Europeans. Call for reform, cut out the crap, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
Trump Cans Comey CNN Goes Gorilla
Neither item of the news is surprising, really. The head of FBI should have been gone day one of Trump administration for incompetence and overstepping his mandate. His handling of the Clinton email saga was atrocious, whichever way you want to look at it. In the Democratic version of the beef, his "re-opening" of the investigation into Clinton two weeks before the election day, was a capital offense (,and in the extreme form of denial, one of two major causes of her losing the vote on November 8th). In the Republican one, Comey in the summer gave a pass to a blatant breach of security and unconscionable handling of government secret documents by the former Secretary of State Clinton. Only last week, the FBI director raised some eyebrows again when it was revealed during the Senate hearings that the some of the classified emails on Huma Abedin husband's laptop did not get there via backup (accepted as a bona fide explanation, and by the disseminated by the Bureau in news releases) but via transmission over public network (obviously unencrypted) to secure a hard copy. So two GOP beefs against Comey, against one Democratic one.
No sooner the news of firing Comey hit the airwaves, CNN had its take on it, which went on like this: "Trump fired Comey because the FBI was getting closer and closer to him. This was a cynical, Nixonian ploy to get the DOJ off Trump's back on his wheeling dealing American democracy away to Putin. "
Nothing surprising in this for the ongoing congressional investigations into Russian interference in last year's US election, which has come straight out of Kafka. Perhaps only Jeff Toobin, one of the CNN regulars who usually keeps his head above silly babblefests, who this time went completely bonkers, fuming about the absurdity of Trump's "firing Comey in May 2017 because he was nasty to Hillary in October 2016", an obviously stupid way to try to get rid of the Inquisitor just as he was to confirm the Bureau has incriminating evidence of the Donald fellating Putin. Toobin, turning colors kept bleating the instant litany of the Dems, that this act was to sabotage The Investigation (which has so far produced absolutely nothing that would warrant interest), and that a special prosecutor was needed who would be impartial, which in translation means: ready to conclude the prosecution of the president without facts to the satisfaction of the combined force of Democrats and NeverTrumpers and get the sorry SOB out of the White House where he had no business to be in the first place.
Of course, I am a cynic and therefore do not believe that the canning of Comey had to do with the botched Hillary-Abedin investigation. But unlike Toobin, I think the official case for getting rid of him is good and solid. The real reason though that Trump finally got his fill of the FBI chief is, I have convinced myself, because both of them know that Trump has not been investigated by the FBI, and Comey during the Senate hearing last week played stupid and chose to dance around it when he could have simply and truthfully said: "No, president Trump himself is not being investigated by the FBI". That would have been the end of the despicable charade. There was no collusion between Trump's team and Russia because the pathetic little non-items on Michal Flynn, Carter Page, Roger Stone or Paul Manafort that have bubbled up are far, far from anything even resembling some unseemly conspiracy. Now, to believe that with the sentiments that Washington and the mainstream media have toward the sitting president, the blatant effects of some vast Manchurian candidate conspiracy would have been hidden this long strikes me as far stupider than believing Trump fired Comey because of his inept handling of the Hillary Clinton emails investigation.
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Christie Blatchford cockeyed on Aleppo (too) !
No, I am not obsessed with Christie Blatchford: I swear! It's just that it so happened as I was busy with my Czech blog since summer, that she is the focus of my writing here back-to-back. Something caught my eye in her writing on Friday, and I think I need to make a few points.
We live in parallel universes. It seems more and more self-evident. The amount of irreducible moral values that we share has shrunk to almost nothing; critical thought has been has been banished out of almost any discourse; to demand balanced view of anything in the social or political sphere, you may as well admit that you are "in the other camp". This is because we operate increasingly in a binary world of white against black, and most people (starting with generation X-ers, but even more so with the millenials) no longer process the world based on what they digest by scavenging information from various sources, but simply plugging into ONE virtual reality that obsesses with a selection of real and imaginary outrages against THEM and THOSE who declare themselves believers in that virtual reality out of sense of kinship. No dissent is allowed. If you have doubts about the basic tenets of the belief system you are an agent of EVIL, or at best you are still in denial.
There is no way you can convince the batshit crazy feminist troopers on campus that there is no world-wide male conspiracy against women or a culture of rape that every dick knows and lies about. There is no way one can reason with them and increasingly no way one can reason with the academia administrators who - if not in sympathy - are plainly intimidated by them. No way the famous Rolling Stone campus false rape accusation (there was a number of less-publicized similar cases before) would convince any of the troopers of the need to tone down the inane rhetoric if not to spend their creativity and energy in more useful social projects.
Similarly, you cannot convince anti-Putin fanatics to drop their idiotic narrative in which he is a murderer of domestic political opponents, invader and oppressor of foreign countries, and a commander in chief of a grand army of hackers. There is always the insane pitch that will sooner or later arrive in any of these virtual reality information channels. In the campus statistical follies, it has arrived with the conviction that one in four women on campus has been sexually violated. On the other front, this past week we learned that Putin was "personally" involved in the hacks. It could not have been otherwise; no-one in Russia could have ordered the hacks but Putin. But what is this saying? People who don't know anything about Russia - let alone about Putin's Russia - automatically assume that this axiom must hold even though it should obvious to any modestly smart intelligence officer that someone high up might have (just might have) want to protect the boss and order the hacks to curry favours because he knew (or thought he knew) that Putin would be pleased with that sort of activity. It also would give him a way out - it's called "plausible deniability". That is a possibility, right? But by the pedestrian logic deployed here, it must have Nicholas who ordered the assassination of Rasputin. No-one in Russia, the theory goes, would have had the nerve to take bake cakes with potassium cyanide at the court without the express permission of the Tsar. Would he ? Vozmozhno? But interestingly this childish assertion about Putin masterminding anything nefarious in Russia, has become a blood sport. Kovtun and Lugovoy, the murderers of the former KGB agent Litvinenko in London in 2006 likely had had a clearance from Putin, Lord Owen concluded in a pathetic inquiry into the death of the émigré. This of course opens the door for someone like Terence McKenna to claim there is no doubt Putin did it, and that he did it cover his tracks in the murder of Politkovskaya which Litvinenko alleged. Our journalistic standards at work.
With Christie Blatchford, it astonishes me to learn that she is willing to lap up much of the mainstream media garbage that one reads about Syria in general and Aleppo in particular. It is very clear that she has no alternative source of information about the place and what is going on in there.
She excuses herself at the start of her National Post piece (Aleppo Needs Us, 16/12/2016) saying she is "certainly no foreign policy wonk".
That's Christian of you, Christie! But what do you think you have to contribute here other than repeating the revolting and insane lies, which equate the bad things wrought by Assad (and his friend Putin) to the monstrosities of people who massacre and terrorize civilians on grand scale. Isn't the narrative that you and the Western media propagate the very guarantee of more death, destruction and misery, that Syria's people presently suffer? Did you do some sanity check on some of the things you allege the government side does? Like "chemical weapons" ? You know that the evil Assad gave those up three years ago? Don't you ? (You evidently missed the Seymour Hersh's piece that no major outlet would initially publish in the U.S.) At any rate, you should know, that the only undisputed use of chemical weapons in the five-year war came from the rebel side. Very few people would argue with this on the basis of facts. As for barrel bombs, well it's a brutal weapon and it was used by Assad, although I am still missing evidence that it was used "on civilian population" indiscriminately. I am pretty sure that the Syrian dictator would be less generous in providing warning that hell is going to rain down on houses with people in them than the Israeli's were in Gaza. But that the use of barrel bombs seems to have been limited to places (like the vicinity of Damascus or Homs) from which rockets were fired on civilian areas under government control. Now, if you went as far as listening to Assad himself talking about his tactics in trying to dislodge the fanatics from heavily populated areas toward open spaces, you might have learned something. The Evil Man has actually won a great deal of popularity in Syria as a "protector" and in the internal dislocations over 80% of the displaced population migrates to the government-controlled areas. Now if you asked , "how much relief do these people (over four million of them) get from the UN" you would be asking the right question. But you are not asking that. Actually you are not asking anything (like Robert Fisk is, e.g.) You come to lecture, and lecture about something you personally have no background in, either as a first-hand experience or in absorbing some credible in-depth information on the conflict. I am talking about judicious weighing of the alternatives, not the phoney ceasefires, peace proposals which by now everyone knows are just a smoke screen for the continued license to wage war on Syria. Boris Johnson has no solution for Syria. After he said that Russia could be guilty of war crimes in Syria, someone retorted that only "an idiot" would see the two sides of the conflict in terms of moral equivalence. And there are only two sides! The non-jihadi militants have never been a factor in the fighting! Now what about the sudden surge of ISIS in eastern Syria after the Iraqis and the allies opened up a corridor for thousands of fighters to escape through, and the sudden reversal of Obama in signing an arms waiver for the rebels? Any connection there, you think?
So I would forget about getting rid of Assad! It's not anyone's call to make but the Syrians'. If one wants to help one should diversify a bit one's reading and seeing: try Eva Bartlett or Vanessa Beeley. Too bad that in the English-speaking world I have not found a writer like Tereza Spencerova who sends dispatches to the Czech weekly Literary News. She has a great sense of what is going on on the ground and a way to make the landscape speak out in a way that is both believable and touching without melodrama. Here is an interesting excerpt from one of her blogs (translated from Czech):
"I had the opportunity to visit one of the improvised refugee camps a few kilometers from Aleppo, on the grounds of a former textile factory. There was a flood of women covered in black; some had their faces covered as well, except eyes. The eyes were empty. No mourning, no celebrating. One man from the Red Crescent tried to convince them over a bullhorn from a warehouse ramp that it is not against Allah's will to allow their children to be vaccinated against all manner of diseases. Al-Qaeda forbade this as a conspiracy of the West to uproot Islam. In the meantime their men fought over unleavened bread Syrian soldiers were distributing from trucks. It was a view of human beings who have no idea what is going on around them, or what will be, humans with a single desire to survive the present, which in the shock from any radically new situation is, well, an automatic reflex.
I tried to find out - in vain it turned out - if people from East Aleppo were more inclined to practice a very conservative form of Islam before the war or if they accepted the new ways as a part of their "Stockholm syndrome" from their captors, al-Qaeda. In any case, it was a horrific scene. In the middle of (relatively) cosmopolitan and civilized Syria, suddenly materializes a scene from Middle Ages - a Kandahar.
But the West does not care about these people any more - they were of interest only when they were under Russian or Syrian bombardments, and until anyone knew who they were. Now, when they are out - in the daylight, so to speak - no one can pretend they represent the masses struggling for democracy in Syria, and hence the Western humanitarian and other organizations lost their interest...but is anyone surprised?"
We live in parallel universes. It seems more and more self-evident. The amount of irreducible moral values that we share has shrunk to almost nothing; critical thought has been has been banished out of almost any discourse; to demand balanced view of anything in the social or political sphere, you may as well admit that you are "in the other camp". This is because we operate increasingly in a binary world of white against black, and most people (starting with generation X-ers, but even more so with the millenials) no longer process the world based on what they digest by scavenging information from various sources, but simply plugging into ONE virtual reality that obsesses with a selection of real and imaginary outrages against THEM and THOSE who declare themselves believers in that virtual reality out of sense of kinship. No dissent is allowed. If you have doubts about the basic tenets of the belief system you are an agent of EVIL, or at best you are still in denial.
There is no way you can convince the batshit crazy feminist troopers on campus that there is no world-wide male conspiracy against women or a culture of rape that every dick knows and lies about. There is no way one can reason with them and increasingly no way one can reason with the academia administrators who - if not in sympathy - are plainly intimidated by them. No way the famous Rolling Stone campus false rape accusation (there was a number of less-publicized similar cases before) would convince any of the troopers of the need to tone down the inane rhetoric if not to spend their creativity and energy in more useful social projects.
Similarly, you cannot convince anti-Putin fanatics to drop their idiotic narrative in which he is a murderer of domestic political opponents, invader and oppressor of foreign countries, and a commander in chief of a grand army of hackers. There is always the insane pitch that will sooner or later arrive in any of these virtual reality information channels. In the campus statistical follies, it has arrived with the conviction that one in four women on campus has been sexually violated. On the other front, this past week we learned that Putin was "personally" involved in the hacks. It could not have been otherwise; no-one in Russia could have ordered the hacks but Putin. But what is this saying? People who don't know anything about Russia - let alone about Putin's Russia - automatically assume that this axiom must hold even though it should obvious to any modestly smart intelligence officer that someone high up might have (just might have) want to protect the boss and order the hacks to curry favours because he knew (or thought he knew) that Putin would be pleased with that sort of activity. It also would give him a way out - it's called "plausible deniability". That is a possibility, right? But by the pedestrian logic deployed here, it must have Nicholas who ordered the assassination of Rasputin. No-one in Russia, the theory goes, would have had the nerve to take bake cakes with potassium cyanide at the court without the express permission of the Tsar. Would he ? Vozmozhno? But interestingly this childish assertion about Putin masterminding anything nefarious in Russia, has become a blood sport. Kovtun and Lugovoy, the murderers of the former KGB agent Litvinenko in London in 2006 likely had had a clearance from Putin, Lord Owen concluded in a pathetic inquiry into the death of the émigré. This of course opens the door for someone like Terence McKenna to claim there is no doubt Putin did it, and that he did it cover his tracks in the murder of Politkovskaya which Litvinenko alleged. Our journalistic standards at work.
With Christie Blatchford, it astonishes me to learn that she is willing to lap up much of the mainstream media garbage that one reads about Syria in general and Aleppo in particular. It is very clear that she has no alternative source of information about the place and what is going on in there.
She excuses herself at the start of her National Post piece (Aleppo Needs Us, 16/12/2016) saying she is "certainly no foreign policy wonk".
That's Christian of you, Christie! But what do you think you have to contribute here other than repeating the revolting and insane lies, which equate the bad things wrought by Assad (and his friend Putin) to the monstrosities of people who massacre and terrorize civilians on grand scale. Isn't the narrative that you and the Western media propagate the very guarantee of more death, destruction and misery, that Syria's people presently suffer? Did you do some sanity check on some of the things you allege the government side does? Like "chemical weapons" ? You know that the evil Assad gave those up three years ago? Don't you ? (You evidently missed the Seymour Hersh's piece that no major outlet would initially publish in the U.S.) At any rate, you should know, that the only undisputed use of chemical weapons in the five-year war came from the rebel side. Very few people would argue with this on the basis of facts. As for barrel bombs, well it's a brutal weapon and it was used by Assad, although I am still missing evidence that it was used "on civilian population" indiscriminately. I am pretty sure that the Syrian dictator would be less generous in providing warning that hell is going to rain down on houses with people in them than the Israeli's were in Gaza. But that the use of barrel bombs seems to have been limited to places (like the vicinity of Damascus or Homs) from which rockets were fired on civilian areas under government control. Now, if you went as far as listening to Assad himself talking about his tactics in trying to dislodge the fanatics from heavily populated areas toward open spaces, you might have learned something. The Evil Man has actually won a great deal of popularity in Syria as a "protector" and in the internal dislocations over 80% of the displaced population migrates to the government-controlled areas. Now if you asked , "how much relief do these people (over four million of them) get from the UN" you would be asking the right question. But you are not asking that. Actually you are not asking anything (like Robert Fisk is, e.g.) You come to lecture, and lecture about something you personally have no background in, either as a first-hand experience or in absorbing some credible in-depth information on the conflict. I am talking about judicious weighing of the alternatives, not the phoney ceasefires, peace proposals which by now everyone knows are just a smoke screen for the continued license to wage war on Syria. Boris Johnson has no solution for Syria. After he said that Russia could be guilty of war crimes in Syria, someone retorted that only "an idiot" would see the two sides of the conflict in terms of moral equivalence. And there are only two sides! The non-jihadi militants have never been a factor in the fighting! Now what about the sudden surge of ISIS in eastern Syria after the Iraqis and the allies opened up a corridor for thousands of fighters to escape through, and the sudden reversal of Obama in signing an arms waiver for the rebels? Any connection there, you think?
So I would forget about getting rid of Assad! It's not anyone's call to make but the Syrians'. If one wants to help one should diversify a bit one's reading and seeing: try Eva Bartlett or Vanessa Beeley. Too bad that in the English-speaking world I have not found a writer like Tereza Spencerova who sends dispatches to the Czech weekly Literary News. She has a great sense of what is going on on the ground and a way to make the landscape speak out in a way that is both believable and touching without melodrama. Here is an interesting excerpt from one of her blogs (translated from Czech):
"I had the opportunity to visit one of the improvised refugee camps a few kilometers from Aleppo, on the grounds of a former textile factory. There was a flood of women covered in black; some had their faces covered as well, except eyes. The eyes were empty. No mourning, no celebrating. One man from the Red Crescent tried to convince them over a bullhorn from a warehouse ramp that it is not against Allah's will to allow their children to be vaccinated against all manner of diseases. Al-Qaeda forbade this as a conspiracy of the West to uproot Islam. In the meantime their men fought over unleavened bread Syrian soldiers were distributing from trucks. It was a view of human beings who have no idea what is going on around them, or what will be, humans with a single desire to survive the present, which in the shock from any radically new situation is, well, an automatic reflex.
I tried to find out - in vain it turned out - if people from East Aleppo were more inclined to practice a very conservative form of Islam before the war or if they accepted the new ways as a part of their "Stockholm syndrome" from their captors, al-Qaeda. In any case, it was a horrific scene. In the middle of (relatively) cosmopolitan and civilized Syria, suddenly materializes a scene from Middle Ages - a Kandahar.
But the West does not care about these people any more - they were of interest only when they were under Russian or Syrian bombardments, and until anyone knew who they were. Now, when they are out - in the daylight, so to speak - no one can pretend they represent the masses struggling for democracy in Syria, and hence the Western humanitarian and other organizations lost their interest...but is anyone surprised?"
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Team Women Rocks Means Team Men Sucks?
Oh dear, it's Christie Blatchford! Here is a journalist whom I have long considered the voice of reason among women, one who had her female libido dominandi firmly in check. Well wouldn't you know: somewhere, at some point the FCS (female chauvinist sow) will bubble up even in her.
To hell with you, Christie! Why does the courageous and successful showing of Canada's women's soccer team have to invite the silly "comparison" with the lack of overall medal production from men? (Team Women Rocks, Ottawa Sun, 21/8/2016) What is to be gained by that ? It is not even that monumental battle of sexes in tennis in which a top woman professional beat the pants off a male champ, alas, twenty years after his competitive career in which time he turned pudgy and developed a heart condition. What possible satisfaction can someone derive from the fact that one's women's Olympic team wins close to three out of four medals for the country? It is the greatest female-male disparity among nations of the developed world. What can women possible gain from the poor showing of their male team-mates? Another rung on the ladder of pride?
Before Rio, I never saw Christie write on soccer. From the way she writes about the game, what she focuses on and what exercises her, it seems clear she is out of her depth and does not have a clue of what is going on. No, the popularity of Marta is not anywhere near that of Neymar in Brazil, even though the two are soccer prodigies. Seasoned soccer fans do not compare compulsively the leading men with women in the sport or, for that matter, whether women are fairly represented among football hooligans. It's like in all other sports: people compare the competitive qualities of players in their own milieu.
I love watching women's tennis. The idea of comparing Serena Williams with Novak Djokovic does not enter into my mind because I am sane. One heard comparisons between the "quality" of soccer during women's world championships on US TV networks in the 1990's and the view was that women play soccer better than men. But anyone who knew the style of women's soccer then (and I played it competitively in my youth) would laugh that off. The women's game was still in its infancy and often resembled unstructured "swarms" such as you would see on a pitch among boys under thirteen. There was no real competition because other than US colleges (under Title IX.) no-one even had a national-level soccer program. Women's game made enormous leaps since then, and the matches are now great fun to watch even for the connoisseurs.
I like the Canadian women's soccer team very much. It has spunk, strong desire to win, and ability to grind out difficult matches. But let's not get carried away: the squad still punches above its weight. In team strategy and tactics, and most players' individual technique, it still has a way to go to catch up with the six top teams in the world.
As for the men/women disparity in podium production in Rio, Christie Blatchford would do us all a great service if she looked seriously into what I suspect are great disparities in funding between the two genders that promote women's sports over men's in Canada. Google searches for sources of funding consistently find number of programs specifically for women but none for men. I have heard from several sources that many men coaches in Canada now distinctly prefer to train women because that's where the money is and success guarantees more of it. My hunch is (based on watching CBC commercials) that the corporate sponsors also go for the brownie points in shelling more money to women's athletes. So it looks, a least based on anecdotal evidence that men athletes chez nous are distinctly second class citizens. And one only needs to recall what Simone de Beauvoir said on the lack of women's intellectual achievements: 'The point to be grasped here is that if you are brought up as an inferior, you will become an inferior'.
To hell with you, Christie! Why does the courageous and successful showing of Canada's women's soccer team have to invite the silly "comparison" with the lack of overall medal production from men? (Team Women Rocks, Ottawa Sun, 21/8/2016) What is to be gained by that ? It is not even that monumental battle of sexes in tennis in which a top woman professional beat the pants off a male champ, alas, twenty years after his competitive career in which time he turned pudgy and developed a heart condition. What possible satisfaction can someone derive from the fact that one's women's Olympic team wins close to three out of four medals for the country? It is the greatest female-male disparity among nations of the developed world. What can women possible gain from the poor showing of their male team-mates? Another rung on the ladder of pride?
Before Rio, I never saw Christie write on soccer. From the way she writes about the game, what she focuses on and what exercises her, it seems clear she is out of her depth and does not have a clue of what is going on. No, the popularity of Marta is not anywhere near that of Neymar in Brazil, even though the two are soccer prodigies. Seasoned soccer fans do not compare compulsively the leading men with women in the sport or, for that matter, whether women are fairly represented among football hooligans. It's like in all other sports: people compare the competitive qualities of players in their own milieu.
I love watching women's tennis. The idea of comparing Serena Williams with Novak Djokovic does not enter into my mind because I am sane. One heard comparisons between the "quality" of soccer during women's world championships on US TV networks in the 1990's and the view was that women play soccer better than men. But anyone who knew the style of women's soccer then (and I played it competitively in my youth) would laugh that off. The women's game was still in its infancy and often resembled unstructured "swarms" such as you would see on a pitch among boys under thirteen. There was no real competition because other than US colleges (under Title IX.) no-one even had a national-level soccer program. Women's game made enormous leaps since then, and the matches are now great fun to watch even for the connoisseurs.
I like the Canadian women's soccer team very much. It has spunk, strong desire to win, and ability to grind out difficult matches. But let's not get carried away: the squad still punches above its weight. In team strategy and tactics, and most players' individual technique, it still has a way to go to catch up with the six top teams in the world.
Saturday, May 21, 2016
On Cultural Belonging
It is not easy to explain one's attachment to the place to which one was born, and why a child's picture of the world etched in one's soul for life cannot be torn from that one place one calls home. It is in everyone of us, regardless where we come from. We instinctively deal with the kaleidoscope of the world at large through a prism that was given to us and to which we belong. We don't know why. It is just the way we humans are and no amount of good-intentioned or hateful preaching will change this.
I saw the picture during my visit to my native Czech Republic in June of last year. I laughed my head off at the ingenious cleverness of its author. But there was distress in that laughter. You will note that the characters to the left are leaving the scene in a hurry. The village woman runs away from the characters entering from the right in a panic. That much can be read from the picture by anyone, anywhere in the world. But I will not be able to reproduce that which ignites the neurons in my brain in a way that causes me to go ape momentarily and send spasms to places around my diaphragm.
I can explain how the collage has been constructed, and I already did that. I can show you the original plate and you will find it to the right of the text here. I can tell you all that you need to know about the original illustrator and I am going to do that. I can also tell you about the fleeing figures in the collage chosen to replace of the cast in the original. All of that I can do and you probably will get an inkling of what was going on in the mischievous mind of the person who modified the picture. But it will not be enough to create the "cultural shock" that your brain will produce if you are a Czech by birth and grew up in the land and if you as a child (and an adult after) learned how to imagine the world painted by the artist.The artist's name is Josef Lada and he was famous enough in the world to have had an asteroid named after him. Lada was a naivist painter and prolific illustrator of books for children even though he became best known as the illustrator of Jaroslav Hašek's Good Soldier Švejk.
Dear Farzana
This is an open letter sent to Farzana Hassan at Easter, taking issue with her apologizing for Islamic terror to Christians:
Dear Farzana Hassan,
I was
touched by your Easter/Passover offer of apology for violent jihadism (Ottawa
Sun 25/3) though I think it is a rhetorical exercise which does not does not
match the value of the regular contributions of yourself, and the likes of Salim
Mansur, Tarek Fatah, Raheel Raza, and others. Actually, I believe it is counter-productive
to your (and their) posture, for which I am personally grateful, as your
perspective gives hope, that maybe, just maybe, we can stay “civilized” without
rivers of blood in the streets. Because, I have this terrible hunch, that this
is where we are headed.
So let me say this: You do not
represent the larger Muslim religious community by dint of the fact that you
are a believer. You cannot possibly have an intelligent reply to a Toronto imam
with islamist connections all over the world, who says that. It is as though a German emigré in 1938 Paris wanted to
apologize to Jews on behalf of Germans for Kristallnacht unleashed by the
Nazis. The sad fact is that the majority of Muslims today are as much led by
their Islamist elites (with the same goals, but different methods of a) trying
to achieve them, and b) disguising them) as Germans were led wholesale by
Hitler in the thirties. The problem with
you speaking “for the Muslim community at large” is that inevitably some clever
islamist propagandist (say ‘Reza Aslan’), will come around and say that the
fact Raheel Raza does not wear hijab and that you feel ashamed for what ISIS
does in the Levant, is a proof positive that women under Islam are free to do
as they please. You know Ben Affleck’s
moral indignation about “stereotyping” Islam and Muslims. You are simply a proof to him that the vast
majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but in fact, peace-loving and friendly
folk, so much so, that some misguided sisters are even willing to apologize for
the homicidal psychos who misread their Koran, and think that when it says “go
and cut off the heads of the kuffar” that it means one should buy an airplane
ticket to Istanbul and then cross by bus to Syria, to do God’s will there
by cutting off the heads of the kuffar.
You see, I may shock you by
saying this, but islamism is only a secondary problem here. The real problem
speaks through as the Ben Afflecks, les
Belge who lower the threat level
forty-eight hours after a jihadi massacre in their capital, and our idiot minister
for immigration who sets the limit of refugees to be admitted into Canada in
2016 proportionally to that of Germany’s last year’s million of them, where
they overran the social service capacities almost everywhere. John McCallum
says we need 300,000 of them this year because our labour force ages. But we still have over 7% unemployment, and
it is 13% among youths. How does mass immigration (at this moment !) help that
problem ? What is it that forces that sort of drooling idiocy ? I am sure it is not pressure from political
Islam.
No, the West’s problems are deeply
internal and its response to political islamism, is but a symptom of an
underlying disease which openly invites external catalysts for the destruction
of its institutions and values. It is
very interesting to observe how this disease manifests itself. It never ceases
to amaze me how certain points of view –
and in my mind those that should be ‘common-sense’ among us - do not make it
through the mass media outlets, and if they do, they are immediately “owned” by
the elitist pseudo-liberal shibboleths.
Or, how the supposed ‘cures’ of the disease are always dumb and not
doable. For example, Trump’s vowing to stop immigration of “Muslims,… until we
figure out what is going on ?” But
Donald, how can anybody aspire to be the president of the United States and not
have figured out what is going on in the Middle East, ahead of his inauguration
? Pray, tell ! Why is it not obvious to
the Donald that this is a stupid idea, and that he should have advocated
instead “minimal immigration from the Middle East”, until the civilized world
cleans the place up and restores a measure of civility there? Why is it not obvious to Ted Cruz, that
“surveillance of Muslims” is an overkill ? He could have simply said that
mosques and political organizations should be monitored for islamist propaganda, and
jihadi advocates thrown out of the country. No ? Why would that not be ‘radical’
and ‘anti-establishment’ enough ? Perhaps,
someone should be asking why some American citizens need to organize themselves
in an organization which wants to have “relations” with America based on their
religion ? Isn’t the name “Council on
American-Islamic Relations” (CAIR) a
self-described misapprehension how a country like the United States operates ? You are a bloody American citizen: who the hell
gives a damn about what you worship, as long as you behave like an American ? Duh!
But, as I said, the problem runs
much deeper than islamism. Actually, islamism can only thrive with a
severely self-damaged democracy, which agrees to replace the idea of citizenry
with equal access to the institutions of governance, by “identity politics” which
claim that this is impossible and disadvantages by design their particular
group, that is discrimniated against and seeks to create special relations with
the state to reverse the perceived historical molestations. Under communism,
this practice of differential treatment of individuals based on belonging to a
certain social group was known as ‘nomenklatura’. Needless to say, this system, creates a sense
of injustice and oppression in groups that do not rank high or are openly despised
and excoriated as the “problem”. In time, nomenklatura, destroys people’s
loyalty to the social order, and causes deep
disdain for it. This, in the nutshell, is the secret of Donald Trump’s
popularity.
The problem however runs even
deeper than that. The global economy has changed everything. The one unpreceived effect is the decline of
the value-add accelerators of the GDP, vis-à-vis services and above all
resources. The US dominated the world economically between the world wars and
three decades after because of its unmatched industrial base, highly skilled
and well-paid labour, and cheap energy and raw materials. This situation has
changed drastically in the last thirty years. Manufacturing has moved out of
the US, because of labour costs, and raw materials – oil especially – became
relatively expensive, or at any rate, allowed the “resource based” economies,
and “low-cost labour” economies to surge ahead and dramatically change the
relationships among the major players. The US has become net importer of both manufactured goods and energy. Again, much of the
growth of the political clout of Islam is due to the financial clout that the
Saudis and Gulf states. They simply have no tradition of a productive industrial
economy, (and the social development that goes with it ) or view of
manufacturing as the creator of wealth. They are socially backward, but extremely
rich, and with the US economy in the boondocks (never mind the Dow Jones
Potemkin village) , much of what we observe in the US and Europe as a
culturally suicidal policy vis-à-vis the world of Islam, is actually the
function of the financial clout of the Sunni Xanadu states, buying political
influence in Washington (and through Washington in Brussels). There is no two
ways about it. That the two parties in
the US so much resemble each other in foreign policy, may not need explanation
other than the king and emirs pay both of them. Finally, the inequalities in wealth in the US
have become simply too great, and resemble more and more the inequality of
feudal societies. This again foists a
sense of injustice, distrust and disgust especially among the young, who it
seems mostly abandoned the classical dream of American Way of Life. (Note that
CAIR is very active in the Social Justice movements, and advertizes Islam as a
system with social egalitarian roots – which it hasn’t been since the death of
the Prophet.)
So allow me to be skeptical. I am appreciative of your gesture, but it is not from you that one should seek a sense of contrition. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe that sense helps at all in resolving our problems. It is not the islamist terrorists that should preoccupy us most. It is my lawyer friend who believes that the problem is a direct consequence of imperialist aggression of the West in the Middle East. When I asked her if she read the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, she had no idea what I was talking about. I told her I was talking about us as a culture which can babble about human rights from dawn to dusk but no longer has any idea what that is, a culture which no longer stands for anything, and a culture which has no idea what is going in the world around it. Someone should apologize for that but I have no idea who that should be.
So allow me to be skeptical. I am appreciative of your gesture, but it is not from you that one should seek a sense of contrition. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe that sense helps at all in resolving our problems. It is not the islamist terrorists that should preoccupy us most. It is my lawyer friend who believes that the problem is a direct consequence of imperialist aggression of the West in the Middle East. When I asked her if she read the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, she had no idea what I was talking about. I told her I was talking about us as a culture which can babble about human rights from dawn to dusk but no longer has any idea what that is, a culture which no longer stands for anything, and a culture which has no idea what is going in the world around it. Someone should apologize for that but I have no idea who that should be.
Friday, July 17, 2015
Peace With the Ayatollahs in Our Time?
Times they are a'changin' et plus ça change... Little less than three years ago I blogged in support of Israel and Netanyahu, and affirmed that Iran under the ayatollahs (with Ahmanidejad as prez) were an existential threat for the state of Israel and therefore the West should exert max pressure on Iran to abandon its nuclear superpower ambition.
In the time intervening, a number of things have happened in the region. The foolish jerk at the helm in Tehran was replaced by a generally more acceptable figure - who though maintaining hostile posture to the sliver of Mediterranean referred to as 'the Zionist entity' among the theocratic elders - nonetheless seems to be doing the ayatollahs' bidding in the matter ex obligo rather than out of deeply-held conviction. It could be, as Bibi says, that Rouhani is superbly crafty in disguising the depth of his homicidal intentions, or it could be that the PM of Israel is exaggerating when he is not talking rubbish.
No, the tentative agreement with Rouhani which effectively (on paper at least) stops and rolls back (!) the means to build nuclear bombs is not Munich 1938 simply because the deal signed in Vienna was structured (on paper again) a quid pro quo arrangement, and not a unilateral concession to an aggressor. Hitler did not have to give up anything for getting the Sudetenland. He simply gave a vague promise not to seek any further territorial expansion and consult with Chamberlain when something bothered him.
There is further issue with the lame comparison. Iran is expanding its influence in the region, not its territory. That is different from Nazi Germany's aims. Most importantly Iran's gains in prestige came as a direct consequence of the US letting loose its reins in Iraq after it destroyed its political structure without assuring a working administrative model to keep whole the artificial modern entity. Obama acceded to a ham-handed Shia-dominated political elite, without insisting on safeguards for the sizeable Sunnite minority. A little later, the US (and Israel) supported armed and violent international jihad against a relatively stable, even if oppressive, regime of Bashar al-Assad. The strife was against Assad was fueled practically from the start by Islamic sectarianism and terrorism. If Tehran militias showed up to prop up an ally's regime, it is in a very different scenario than Hitler's minions blowing up neutral Austria, and foisting unrest in the German-speaking borderland of Czechoslovakia. For most part, Iran's influence in the region grew in the mirror of the current US administration's hapless evacuations and dithering. Iran has been only filling a power vacuum created in the region by Obama's ill-advised anti-imperialist posturing.
Naturally, with certified fools at the helm of the juggernaut, I would have my doubts about secretary Kerry's ability to negotiate a very good deal with Iran. Maybe a different US administration might have gotten better terms. Except again: the US is not alone in the world with deeply vested interests in nuclear non-proliferation. This was EU3 + 3, or P5 + 1 negotiating team, and the agreement reflects the shift in the world balance of power. The deal has accomplished what it set out to do: it has very significantly reduced Iran's capacity to weaponize nuclear energy in the foreseeable future. Mohammad Javad Zarif has solemnly signed a document which says in the preamble: "Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons." That is a significant statement. Would there be any plainer way to denounce the country's ambition to own a nuclear bomb? It is only words, true, but certainly a pledge worth testing. So, the smart money would be on monitoring Iran's compliance, not by trying to scuttle the agreement, as Israel's government and the GOP have set out to do.
There is further issue with the lame comparison. Iran is expanding its influence in the region, not its territory. That is different from Nazi Germany's aims. Most importantly Iran's gains in prestige came as a direct consequence of the US letting loose its reins in Iraq after it destroyed its political structure without assuring a working administrative model to keep whole the artificial modern entity. Obama acceded to a ham-handed Shia-dominated political elite, without insisting on safeguards for the sizeable Sunnite minority. A little later, the US (and Israel) supported armed and violent international jihad against a relatively stable, even if oppressive, regime of Bashar al-Assad. The strife was against Assad was fueled practically from the start by Islamic sectarianism and terrorism. If Tehran militias showed up to prop up an ally's regime, it is in a very different scenario than Hitler's minions blowing up neutral Austria, and foisting unrest in the German-speaking borderland of Czechoslovakia. For most part, Iran's influence in the region grew in the mirror of the current US administration's hapless evacuations and dithering. Iran has been only filling a power vacuum created in the region by Obama's ill-advised anti-imperialist posturing.
Naturally, with certified fools at the helm of the juggernaut, I would have my doubts about secretary Kerry's ability to negotiate a very good deal with Iran. Maybe a different US administration might have gotten better terms. Except again: the US is not alone in the world with deeply vested interests in nuclear non-proliferation. This was EU3 + 3, or P5 + 1 negotiating team, and the agreement reflects the shift in the world balance of power. The deal has accomplished what it set out to do: it has very significantly reduced Iran's capacity to weaponize nuclear energy in the foreseeable future. Mohammad Javad Zarif has solemnly signed a document which says in the preamble: "Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons." That is a significant statement. Would there be any plainer way to denounce the country's ambition to own a nuclear bomb? It is only words, true, but certainly a pledge worth testing. So, the smart money would be on monitoring Iran's compliance, not by trying to scuttle the agreement, as Israel's government and the GOP have set out to do.
I don't buy the heated rhetoric from Jerusalem and the Republicans. The cries of a catastrophic, cataclysmic miscue of the part of Obama, the EU, Russia and China, are way too ...well, let's say it, 'flakey'. And if you listen carefully, the complaint is all over the place. Mark Steyn says that the Vienna accord is far worse than Munich because Chamberlain's motives were honourable! Iran can't be trusted - everybody is supposed to know that. But can US be ? Susan Rice admitted to Wolf Blitzer that some of the unfrozen funds could be used to support terrorism. Krauthammer wrings hands over the giveaway in lifting the conventional arms embargo that is years away. Wake up idiots ! The ayatollahs are not behind the shooting in Chattanooga yesterday. Yes, there is Iranian terrorism. But the Iranian brand of terrorism also - and for the moment prevalently - terrorize ISIS (in Syria, Kurdistan and Anbar province of Iraq), and al-Qaeda (in Yemen) from which the US and the rest of the world benefits. And it appears that the Iranian troopers (beside the Kurdish Peshmerga) are the only credible ground force in the region fighting the real scourge that butchers tens of thousands, enslaves millions and destroys priceless and irreplaceable cultural treasures in the cradle of human civilization. And they will be, at least until the next president of the USA wakes up and realizes that ISIS has to be destroyed immediately, and Iraq needs to be "maintained" pacified by a credible US threat capable of smashing within weeks any sectarian nonsense that bubbles up. The Armageddon-thumping ayatollahs have become the symbol of American weakness. But they too are mortal. Let us give ourselves a chance to see the next thing that comes out of the great civilization of Persia.
Friday, July 10, 2015
United by lower Grexpectations
Catching
up the last two weeks with the history of the Greek debt, I am left with the
strongest hunch that ‘crazy’ is the new mainstream. It appears that if some
nonsense overwhelms the body politic, the antidote will almost certainly be product
of another politicized form of craziness.
The most informing thing about the €380 billion that Greece owes is that the country does not have the means not just repaying, but servicing it in a meaningful way. All fiscal plans by the Greek government, including the one currently under consideration by the EU, project a magical turn in the country’s economy and the filling of state coffers as a result of minimum additional funds Athens can wrestle from the financiers, in return of promise to implement an effective austerity regime, the very thing that the majority of Greeks have vehemently opposed ever since it was set as a condition of further aid in 2009. The electorate first opposed it covertly, then openly, by voting in a radical Left government which considers the lenders blood-sucking terrorists. By all appearances, the EU banksters and the Left lunatics have come to an amicable agreement this week, thanks mainly to France’s left liberal cave-in to the Syriza’s implied suggestion that Angela Merkel is a new incarnation of Inspecteur Javert.
In times of reason, premier Tsipras’ dealing hand would be in laughed off and he would be exposed as a hopeless s**t-disturber and demagogue. But in times of ‘crazy’ he holds the high card. The ace in his hand is Greece-is-a-victim psychobabble. To be sure, there are some things in his posturing in which I find more than a grain of truth. The financial crisis in Greece has started as toxic private, not public, debt. The fable that the financial collapse originates in Greek civil servants’ retiring en masse with full pension in their mid-fifties, is just another example of counter-crazy. I don’t subscribe to the theory that high unemployment is a contagious outbreak of mass laziness among the drinking classes. I really do feel sorry for the ordinary, below-euro-average Greek sweating hours in the ATM lineups. But all the same: Tsipras’ complaint doesn’t work for the same reason Senator Mike Duffy’s hope for sympathy is vain. As one cannot claim to be manipulated into accepting bribes, one cannot wash one’s hands of money one accepts as loans, by simply arguing that the lender has too much of it. But for now, it looks Tsipras’ gamble has paid off and his referendum, if not wishing away the debt, means more bailouts and another postponement in paying it.
So, what gives? Tsipras’ victory may be short-lived. He made Germany dance to his tune but the anger and frustration with Greece remains. The country is by all accounts bankrupt. Anything, at this point – and under the prevailing rules of engagement – will be but a band-aid and short pause to government IOU’s and the return to drachma. The retardant of the Greek collapse (or better, the end of masking it) is now the IMF following the crazy policy of the US (and EU) towards Russia. The illusion of unity seems of paramount importance in trying to wall off Russia from Europe. But reality has a way of asserting itself. Europe is divided, not united. Greek is bankrupt with minimal prospect of recovery in the continuing charades around its debt. The volatile Middle East and Africa pose the real security danger to Europe, not Russia. So, as always, it is pay me now or pay me later.
'''
ETA (Jul 13): Tsipras' 'victory' was short-lived indeed. It appears that Wolfgang Schauble's view of Greece won the day when it came to the nitty-gritty of actual negotiations and Syriza had to back out of the negotiating 'mandate' it claimed was given to it by the referendum. In the end, the Hansa concept of EU prevailed over the Mediterranean bazaar view. Greece - for the time it remains in the Eurozone - will operate as German banking protectorate. Will Tsipras' politically survive this? The cynic would say, 'no problem, the Greeks understand the nature of the comedy, in which it does not really matter who leads it.' The outcome will be the same.
The most informing thing about the €380 billion that Greece owes is that the country does not have the means not just repaying, but servicing it in a meaningful way. All fiscal plans by the Greek government, including the one currently under consideration by the EU, project a magical turn in the country’s economy and the filling of state coffers as a result of minimum additional funds Athens can wrestle from the financiers, in return of promise to implement an effective austerity regime, the very thing that the majority of Greeks have vehemently opposed ever since it was set as a condition of further aid in 2009. The electorate first opposed it covertly, then openly, by voting in a radical Left government which considers the lenders blood-sucking terrorists. By all appearances, the EU banksters and the Left lunatics have come to an amicable agreement this week, thanks mainly to France’s left liberal cave-in to the Syriza’s implied suggestion that Angela Merkel is a new incarnation of Inspecteur Javert.
In times of reason, premier Tsipras’ dealing hand would be in laughed off and he would be exposed as a hopeless s**t-disturber and demagogue. But in times of ‘crazy’ he holds the high card. The ace in his hand is Greece-is-a-victim psychobabble. To be sure, there are some things in his posturing in which I find more than a grain of truth. The financial crisis in Greece has started as toxic private, not public, debt. The fable that the financial collapse originates in Greek civil servants’ retiring en masse with full pension in their mid-fifties, is just another example of counter-crazy. I don’t subscribe to the theory that high unemployment is a contagious outbreak of mass laziness among the drinking classes. I really do feel sorry for the ordinary, below-euro-average Greek sweating hours in the ATM lineups. But all the same: Tsipras’ complaint doesn’t work for the same reason Senator Mike Duffy’s hope for sympathy is vain. As one cannot claim to be manipulated into accepting bribes, one cannot wash one’s hands of money one accepts as loans, by simply arguing that the lender has too much of it. But for now, it looks Tsipras’ gamble has paid off and his referendum, if not wishing away the debt, means more bailouts and another postponement in paying it.
So, what gives? Tsipras’ victory may be short-lived. He made Germany dance to his tune but the anger and frustration with Greece remains. The country is by all accounts bankrupt. Anything, at this point – and under the prevailing rules of engagement – will be but a band-aid and short pause to government IOU’s and the return to drachma. The retardant of the Greek collapse (or better, the end of masking it) is now the IMF following the crazy policy of the US (and EU) towards Russia. The illusion of unity seems of paramount importance in trying to wall off Russia from Europe. But reality has a way of asserting itself. Europe is divided, not united. Greek is bankrupt with minimal prospect of recovery in the continuing charades around its debt. The volatile Middle East and Africa pose the real security danger to Europe, not Russia. So, as always, it is pay me now or pay me later.
'''
ETA (Jul 13): Tsipras' 'victory' was short-lived indeed. It appears that Wolfgang Schauble's view of Greece won the day when it came to the nitty-gritty of actual negotiations and Syriza had to back out of the negotiating 'mandate' it claimed was given to it by the referendum. In the end, the Hansa concept of EU prevailed over the Mediterranean bazaar view. Greece - for the time it remains in the Eurozone - will operate as German banking protectorate. Will Tsipras' politically survive this? The cynic would say, 'no problem, the Greeks understand the nature of the comedy, in which it does not really matter who leads it.' The outcome will be the same.
Monday, March 9, 2015
Why Does Putin Kill Kittens ?
Because of the way MMOs (major media outlets) report on certain realities in the world these days, the question in the headline needs to be grasped first on the merits of its utility. It does not really matter if Vladimir Vladimirovich destroys cuddly domestic pets, or whether such accusation is stupid beyond belief. We have the means to validate whatever beliefs by the wonders of communications technology. The thing to grasp here is whether it is useful to believe that Putin kills kittens. And the finding would be - I guess - yes it is useful. It is useful to believe that because it makes available certain options which the US foreign policy would not normally enjoy.
Now here again I need to pause and digress. I realize that to say anything about anything in terms of norms in our time is felt by the intellectually destitute squatters occupying main street to be deeply abnormal, as they would no doubt describe efforts to be normal as being patriarchal or heterosexist or dinosaural. So, it is really hard to imagine what normal options in US foreign policy would be to begin with in this particular bubble of here-and-now. Especially, since the women who run (which at this juncture means animate) US foreign policy from Michelle Obama down to Mary Harf are not exactly the blushing types. But let us just say that in the olden days, say before Reagan's amiable senility set the policy tone, one would not badmouth foreign dignitaries unless one meant business, that is to say, one really meant to kill the sons-of-bitches. But not even then. Churchill omitted Hitler's titles (even the sarcastic Herr) when referring to him only after the war started.
Not so in our times. For Hillary Clinton whose demeanor epitomizes the contemporary lack of personal culture, not to say norms of diplomatic protocol, Putin is KGB psycho or Hitler or whatever the brainwave washes up on the spikes of her tongue. She does not mean to kill the son-of-a-bitch when she accuses him (a soulful Russian) of lacking a soul. She just does her politico version of twerking for the evening news. He is smart; he'll figure out it isn't for real - it's only for the masses hungering for some exciting news from a woman who cannot be wrong. If she says that Putin (Warning : a graphic description ahead may be disturbing to some readers !) skins the poor critters alive it must be so. And if it rings true in the feeble American grasp of the world that, as Jen Psaki said that the population of Crimea was 'forced to go to the polls facing a false choice' in a 2014, then the claim that the Russian president has vivisectionist tendencies offers tantalizing possibilities in extending NATO to the gates that obsessed the Russian chauvinists since the time immemorial.
So, yes, Putin kills kittens. And we have a proof that ! Well actually, like with the proof of columns of Russian military hardware entering Ukraine, it is more or less in the eye of the beholder. But that does not matter. Let the RT and one of the Rands blow into the wind all they want. The US Senate had a proof of Russian tanks invading Ukraine. We have a proof of Putin killing kittens. It may not be available quite in a consumable packaging but we are all adults and we are sophisticated about the world we live in. And since women rule and the Duchess of Cambridge is into killing kittens as well, the real question is, WTF am I talking about? Ah, yes, the world where women rule !
Now here again I need to pause and digress. I realize that to say anything about anything in terms of norms in our time is felt by the intellectually destitute squatters occupying main street to be deeply abnormal, as they would no doubt describe efforts to be normal as being patriarchal or heterosexist or dinosaural. So, it is really hard to imagine what normal options in US foreign policy would be to begin with in this particular bubble of here-and-now. Especially, since the women who run (which at this juncture means animate) US foreign policy from Michelle Obama down to Mary Harf are not exactly the blushing types. But let us just say that in the olden days, say before Reagan's amiable senility set the policy tone, one would not badmouth foreign dignitaries unless one meant business, that is to say, one really meant to kill the sons-of-bitches. But not even then. Churchill omitted Hitler's titles (even the sarcastic Herr) when referring to him only after the war started.
Not so in our times. For Hillary Clinton whose demeanor epitomizes the contemporary lack of personal culture, not to say norms of diplomatic protocol, Putin is KGB psycho or Hitler or whatever the brainwave washes up on the spikes of her tongue. She does not mean to kill the son-of-a-bitch when she accuses him (a soulful Russian) of lacking a soul. She just does her politico version of twerking for the evening news. He is smart; he'll figure out it isn't for real - it's only for the masses hungering for some exciting news from a woman who cannot be wrong. If she says that Putin (Warning : a graphic description ahead may be disturbing to some readers !) skins the poor critters alive it must be so. And if it rings true in the feeble American grasp of the world that, as Jen Psaki said that the population of Crimea was 'forced to go to the polls facing a false choice' in a 2014, then the claim that the Russian president has vivisectionist tendencies offers tantalizing possibilities in extending NATO to the gates that obsessed the Russian chauvinists since the time immemorial.
So, yes, Putin kills kittens. And we have a proof that ! Well actually, like with the proof of columns of Russian military hardware entering Ukraine, it is more or less in the eye of the beholder. But that does not matter. Let the RT and one of the Rands blow into the wind all they want. The US Senate had a proof of Russian tanks invading Ukraine. We have a proof of Putin killing kittens. It may not be available quite in a consumable packaging but we are all adults and we are sophisticated about the world we live in. And since women rule and the Duchess of Cambridge is into killing kittens as well, the real question is, WTF am I talking about? Ah, yes, the world where women rule !
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Islamic Quiz for Andrew Coyne
In my mother tongue, there is a word with a revealing etymology. The adjective "pitomý (-á, -é)" translates as "stupid", "obtuse", "insipid". In the old Slavonic, the word "pitati" meant "to feed", and gave rise to the Czech adjective whose original meaning was "well-fed" or "sated". From there it migrated to the modern meaning most likely on the observation that people who have no want tend to become dull-witted by the same token. Interesting. I tend to agree and believe that statistically this would bear out. I observe that if you live in peace and prosperity your hunger for both diminishes as a function of actually living in a peaceful and prosperous society. After a while, it becomes hard to imagine anything but the reality of your comfort. This intensifies the dullness in the perception of the world that convinces many of the well-fed that there is no immediate danger to us from some people cutting heads of other people in the Middle East and parts of Africa. There is no danger coming from jihadis at all and they will be nice like us, if only we feed them and then leave them alone. There is no danger of their atrocities materializing here (we are all well fed !) so we will not be intimidated into reducing immigration from the head-cutting regions of the globe. Many in the Western intellectual elite live with the I-am-ok-Jack syndrome and not all them are necessarily overweight like Michael Moore.
An example of classical pitomost (a noun derived from pitomý) comes in Andrew Coyne's last week's column in National Post (The case for watching our words on Islamism, 21/2/2015), in which he muses over the different take on the Islamic terror by Stephen Harper and Barack Obama. Well, muses probably is not the right verb. Fiddles, would describe it better. The foolishness of Coyne's rhetorical exercise makes itself felt almost immediately. Says he: There are, it would seem, three questions to be answered: what is in fact the relationship, if any, between Islam and terrorism; what do authorities believe is the relationship; and what do they say they believe. The peculiar insistence on the right that politicians insert the word “Islamic” before “terrorism” would appear to stem from a belief that anything else is an abdication from the “truth,” that there is “something about Islam” that explains the proliferation of terrorist groups claiming to act in its name. No, actually there is only one question. If the Obama administration does not think there is any link between terrorism and Islam why did it accord the corpse of Osama bin Laden, the mass murderer of Americans, the right to be buried according to the Islamic tradition ? It would appear to someone not in the habit to twist truth into ideological pretzels there most definitely is a connection between Islam and terrorism, or Islam and a universalist, supremacist ideology. I wager that nine out of ten Canadians and Americans would agree with that proposition, even though many in the same breath would repeat the established bromide that most Muslims are not terrorists or approve of terrorist methods. But the problem of course is that many Muslims while not approving of terrorism in fact desire a global Islamic society and support political organizations and social networks whose goals are overtly or covertly to establish a world Islamist rule over Non-muslims. The terrorism of such ambition - as I wrote before - is implied. Not to see this, or pretending that this ideology does not exist is of course willful blindness borne of what I called here pitomost.
It is in the lack of discernment that would deny the hulking political ideology of Islamism that makes naifs like Andrew Coyne a truly sad sight of our time. He expounds the silly deconstructionist argument recently used by Ben Affleck (arguing with Bill Maher) that wishes to assert that Islam, as a religion, is so differentiated that one cannot really say anything that would stick as a label for the whole caboodle. This argument is as pitomý as pitomý could get. Imagine, if you will, Coyne or Affleck saying that forty years ago about another ideology manifestly hostile to the West - communism. How could one even begin to conflate the Soviets and Maoist China, the Stalinists and the Trockyists, with the anti-Bolshevik followers of Rosa Luxemburg ? How could one compare the saintly martyrs like Antonio Gramsci and Karl Liebknecht to vicious genocidal animals of Lavrenti Beria's or Pol Pot's ilk ? Did not Lenin explicitly condemn the violent red anarchism that became the hallmark later of the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof gang ? How could one say anything valid about communism that would apply to all communists ? And yet somehow the brains in the West were able to distill the essence of that ideology and its practical effects and decide that this is not how we want live (and have our women dress). How could that be ? With all that variety of the communist belief ? But the West did protect its culture and traditions from the red menace and it slowly died (or morphed into something much more benign, as in China).
So in truth, there is something like modern political Islamism and it sprang from the head of a single 19th century thinker, and contemporary of Karl Marx. Andrew Coyne does not know his name and by all appearances he knows nothing about his philosophy and the man's career. Andrew Coyne does not know him because he does not find his name anywhere in the tons of dimwitted columns written by, or recited on TV, by people like himself who are completely ignorant of the matters that come to bear on one of the most serious and also sadly, ridiculous, challenges our civilization faces. Andrew Coyne does not the name of this luminary (and wily mountebank) even though he was a well-known figure at the courts of Europe, and in Persia, a man that saw the potential of the Islamic world well ahead of his time and who passionately defended it in polemics against one of Europe's leading intellectuals of the day, Ernest Renan. He fought the British on the side of the Sepoy in 1857 Indian uprising, and later advised the shah on dealings with the British. His anti-British attitude recommended him to the Tsar, and he was allowed to proselytize Islam in the Russian Central Asia as a bulwark against the encroaching rival imperialism. So who was he, Andrew? More clues: He acquired a pupil who adored him, but in some ways was smarter and better positioned than his teacher, in a replica of what Friedrich Engels was to Karl Marx. The Islamist "modernizing" philosophy of his pupil, who became the Grand Mufti of Egypt created the corner stone of the political movements of the Muslim brothers in Egypt, and its first leaders Hassan Al Bannah, Sayyid Qutb, and reformers like Muhammad Rashid Rida and Abul A'la Maududi who founded the Jamaat e-Islami party in British India. The belief of the Mufti was that the old, passive religion of Islam must be converted into a modern political movement, one that can challenge and replace the Western model of government. He called it the "cutting head of religion with the sword of religion". The teacher and his pupil gave the world the term "salafiyya" which became the central piece of the modernizing Islamist philosophy, much like "the dictatorship of the proletariat" was to Marxism-Leninism.
So who were the two men ? Andrew Coyne apparently does not know but he knows it is a mistake for Mr Harper to oppose allowing quasi-religious face covering during Canadian citizenship ceremonies. He writes with a truly foolish abandon: "Merely referring to “Islamic extremism” or “jihadism” would be unobjectionable in itself. But when coupled with recent, needless interventions in such volatile debates as whether the niqab may be worn at citizenship ceremonies, it suggests at best a troubling indifference to the importance of symbols and the need for those in power to go out of their way to reassure those in minority groups that they have not been targeted." No, Andrew, you have it ass backwards ! The niqab was all but extinct two generations ago in the Islamic world, or at any rate, it would be associated with the most retrograde cultural forms of that religion. No educated, urbane Muslim two generations ago would compel his wife to wear this abominable declaration of social inferiority and denial of public identity. No self-respected Muslima, at any rate one exposed to the 20th century idea of civil society would wear one. If it made an astonishing comeback, it is because it has been tolerated not just as a statement of protest against Western values and traditions, but as a calculated provocative denying of the jurisdiction a modern secular state over Muslims. So, it goes without saying that Muslims who would deplore or berate the Prime Minister for his stance on the niqab during citizenship ceremonies, are not the kinds of Muslims willing to accept the fundamental principles of a modern multicultural society whose existence presupposes a set of common secular values respected by everyone regardless of religious faith. More to the point that I am trying to make here:`to someone who is not pitomý it would be clear as day that people who are hostile to the secular order will not be satisfied by the next concession they claw from spineles politicos via the multitude of media mudheads. To someone who is not pitomý, insisting that our cultural values be observed, including the equal status of women, will not make the Muslim community as a whole more hostile to Canada and deliver more of the peaceful Muslim flock to the terrorist wolf-packs. Bien au contraire ! Muslims not overtly or secretly favouring the caliphate would support the requirement of ladies showing their faces in public.
An example of classical pitomost (a noun derived from pitomý) comes in Andrew Coyne's last week's column in National Post (The case for watching our words on Islamism, 21/2/2015), in which he muses over the different take on the Islamic terror by Stephen Harper and Barack Obama. Well, muses probably is not the right verb. Fiddles, would describe it better. The foolishness of Coyne's rhetorical exercise makes itself felt almost immediately. Says he: There are, it would seem, three questions to be answered: what is in fact the relationship, if any, between Islam and terrorism; what do authorities believe is the relationship; and what do they say they believe. The peculiar insistence on the right that politicians insert the word “Islamic” before “terrorism” would appear to stem from a belief that anything else is an abdication from the “truth,” that there is “something about Islam” that explains the proliferation of terrorist groups claiming to act in its name. No, actually there is only one question. If the Obama administration does not think there is any link between terrorism and Islam why did it accord the corpse of Osama bin Laden, the mass murderer of Americans, the right to be buried according to the Islamic tradition ? It would appear to someone not in the habit to twist truth into ideological pretzels there most definitely is a connection between Islam and terrorism, or Islam and a universalist, supremacist ideology. I wager that nine out of ten Canadians and Americans would agree with that proposition, even though many in the same breath would repeat the established bromide that most Muslims are not terrorists or approve of terrorist methods. But the problem of course is that many Muslims while not approving of terrorism in fact desire a global Islamic society and support political organizations and social networks whose goals are overtly or covertly to establish a world Islamist rule over Non-muslims. The terrorism of such ambition - as I wrote before - is implied. Not to see this, or pretending that this ideology does not exist is of course willful blindness borne of what I called here pitomost.
It is in the lack of discernment that would deny the hulking political ideology of Islamism that makes naifs like Andrew Coyne a truly sad sight of our time. He expounds the silly deconstructionist argument recently used by Ben Affleck (arguing with Bill Maher) that wishes to assert that Islam, as a religion, is so differentiated that one cannot really say anything that would stick as a label for the whole caboodle. This argument is as pitomý as pitomý could get. Imagine, if you will, Coyne or Affleck saying that forty years ago about another ideology manifestly hostile to the West - communism. How could one even begin to conflate the Soviets and Maoist China, the Stalinists and the Trockyists, with the anti-Bolshevik followers of Rosa Luxemburg ? How could one compare the saintly martyrs like Antonio Gramsci and Karl Liebknecht to vicious genocidal animals of Lavrenti Beria's or Pol Pot's ilk ? Did not Lenin explicitly condemn the violent red anarchism that became the hallmark later of the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof gang ? How could one say anything valid about communism that would apply to all communists ? And yet somehow the brains in the West were able to distill the essence of that ideology and its practical effects and decide that this is not how we want live (and have our women dress). How could that be ? With all that variety of the communist belief ? But the West did protect its culture and traditions from the red menace and it slowly died (or morphed into something much more benign, as in China).
So in truth, there is something like modern political Islamism and it sprang from the head of a single 19th century thinker, and contemporary of Karl Marx. Andrew Coyne does not know his name and by all appearances he knows nothing about his philosophy and the man's career. Andrew Coyne does not know him because he does not find his name anywhere in the tons of dimwitted columns written by, or recited on TV, by people like himself who are completely ignorant of the matters that come to bear on one of the most serious and also sadly, ridiculous, challenges our civilization faces. Andrew Coyne does not the name of this luminary (and wily mountebank) even though he was a well-known figure at the courts of Europe, and in Persia, a man that saw the potential of the Islamic world well ahead of his time and who passionately defended it in polemics against one of Europe's leading intellectuals of the day, Ernest Renan. He fought the British on the side of the Sepoy in 1857 Indian uprising, and later advised the shah on dealings with the British. His anti-British attitude recommended him to the Tsar, and he was allowed to proselytize Islam in the Russian Central Asia as a bulwark against the encroaching rival imperialism. So who was he, Andrew? More clues: He acquired a pupil who adored him, but in some ways was smarter and better positioned than his teacher, in a replica of what Friedrich Engels was to Karl Marx. The Islamist "modernizing" philosophy of his pupil, who became the Grand Mufti of Egypt created the corner stone of the political movements of the Muslim brothers in Egypt, and its first leaders Hassan Al Bannah, Sayyid Qutb, and reformers like Muhammad Rashid Rida and Abul A'la Maududi who founded the Jamaat e-Islami party in British India. The belief of the Mufti was that the old, passive religion of Islam must be converted into a modern political movement, one that can challenge and replace the Western model of government. He called it the "cutting head of religion with the sword of religion". The teacher and his pupil gave the world the term "salafiyya" which became the central piece of the modernizing Islamist philosophy, much like "the dictatorship of the proletariat" was to Marxism-Leninism.
So who were the two men ? Andrew Coyne apparently does not know but he knows it is a mistake for Mr Harper to oppose allowing quasi-religious face covering during Canadian citizenship ceremonies. He writes with a truly foolish abandon: "Merely referring to “Islamic extremism” or “jihadism” would be unobjectionable in itself. But when coupled with recent, needless interventions in such volatile debates as whether the niqab may be worn at citizenship ceremonies, it suggests at best a troubling indifference to the importance of symbols and the need for those in power to go out of their way to reassure those in minority groups that they have not been targeted." No, Andrew, you have it ass backwards ! The niqab was all but extinct two generations ago in the Islamic world, or at any rate, it would be associated with the most retrograde cultural forms of that religion. No educated, urbane Muslim two generations ago would compel his wife to wear this abominable declaration of social inferiority and denial of public identity. No self-respected Muslima, at any rate one exposed to the 20th century idea of civil society would wear one. If it made an astonishing comeback, it is because it has been tolerated not just as a statement of protest against Western values and traditions, but as a calculated provocative denying of the jurisdiction a modern secular state over Muslims. So, it goes without saying that Muslims who would deplore or berate the Prime Minister for his stance on the niqab during citizenship ceremonies, are not the kinds of Muslims willing to accept the fundamental principles of a modern multicultural society whose existence presupposes a set of common secular values respected by everyone regardless of religious faith. More to the point that I am trying to make here:`to someone who is not pitomý it would be clear as day that people who are hostile to the secular order will not be satisfied by the next concession they claw from spineles politicos via the multitude of media mudheads. To someone who is not pitomý, insisting that our cultural values be observed, including the equal status of women, will not make the Muslim community as a whole more hostile to Canada and deliver more of the peaceful Muslim flock to the terrorist wolf-packs. Bien au contraire ! Muslims not overtly or secretly favouring the caliphate would support the requirement of ladies showing their faces in public.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
