Blogoir

A lively effort is being mounted to raise money to secure the release of one Nick Hogan, who has been imprisoned here in the UK for not paying a £3000 fine and a further £7000 in costs for failing to stop people smoking in his pub.

Try Old Holborn, who has set up a PayPal button. Nearly £4000 has been raised in little over 24 hours.

Galling as it is to have to pay money into the coffers of the state to get Nick Hogan free when he arguably should not be in prison, it will be an impressive sign of libertarian people power if he is quickly released when the money to pay his fine is raised.

What I strongly object to is the definition of a privately owned pub as a 'public place' under the relevant legislation. Just because the public have 'access' to a pub does not mean that it should be treated as a public place. The public are welcome to walk in and see what they like and dislike before deciding (or not) to stay.

If a landlord wants to allow people to smoke or take their clothes off or otherwise amuse themselves on property he owns, anyone not liking it may leave. Market forces can decide how far pubs and other establishments make provision for eg smokers and/or non-smokers alike.

This tendency by the state to usurp private property rights for 'public' purposes is utterly obnoxious, whether it applies to pubs or sport. See this piece on Football Socialism.  

Yesterday in London I was on the stage at the Polish Cultural Centre in West London for a discussion about Solidarity - Thirty Years After.

Others on the panel were Wladyslaw Frasyniuk (former top Solidarity activist and former political prisoner turned politician) - someone whose lively intelligence has left him an influential but quixotic player in Polish politics.

And Dougie Rooney, current President of the Trades Union Congress and a strong supporter of nuclear power.

Wiktor Moszczynski, press officer for the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, presided.

In my own remarks I shamelessly grabbed the opportunity to tease Dougie Rooney and remind the audience, not that most of the people there needed reminding, how the rise of the Solidarnosc movement in Poland in the 1980s had been a ghastly embarrassment for the British Left in general and the TUC in particular.

For many years senior Labour Party and trades unionists had been trooping to Moscow to ask for unobtrusive support from the Soviet leadership in their class struggles in the UK. In an epic act of national betrayal, Edward Kennedy too had travelled to Moscow in the mid-1980s secretly to ask for Moscow's help in defeating Ronald Reagan.

Not to mention that further back in 1920 assorted trades unions in England had mobilised to stop the British government sending weapons and supplies to newly independent Poland, then under attack from the Red Army whose avowed aim was to conquer Poland then move on to Berlin, Paris and London.

"Hands off Russia" had been the progressive cry, just when revolutionary Marxist Russia was greedily laying its own hands on as many territories as it could.

So, I said, there was a long tradition of both useless Useful Idiots and dangerous Useful Idiots in the Labour Movement, who had hated the fact that Polish workers were having the temerity to stand up for freedom against the Soviet empire, and so were threatening 'detente'.

Such attitudes ran deep in British society by the 1980s. By then Soviet Communism was like the weather - it was just there, for better or worse. I had had a problem in the FCO for echoing the Evil Empire language of Ronald Reagan in a speech I had drafted for Sir Geoffrey Howe. All sorts of people popped up pompously to intone that that sort of inflammatory rhetoric was likely to be 'destabilizing'.

Yet the Soviet Union was an empire, and it was (more or less) evil.

Luckily the arrival of Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had created a far-sighted vision for looking at Soviet Communism which created new realities on the ground far beyond these limp official cluckings.

In Reagan's wonderful phrase, "My idea of the Cold War is that we win, they lose." Which was what had happened.

I said that it was not surprising that the British Left had been hopelessly confused on the whole question. Run a Google search now and you see all sorts of squabbles still echoing on between the social-democratic Left, the Communist Left, the Trotskyist Left and the Really Trotskyist Left over who did what to whom back then.

And how appalling it had been for all of them that Margaret Thatcher was greeted by huge crowds of cheering Polish workers in Gdansk after defeating the Miners here in the UK.  

John Prescott (who knows a few things about British socialist and union politics) had found it all very hard to take, as he told me on one of his visits to Warsaw a few years back. Not only had many Poles seen Margaret Thatcher as a vision of hope. Much worse, the new Solidarity members coming to UK for fraternal consultations had all been pointy-head academics, not a real shipworker among them! 

I made one other point which perhaps was less comfortable to Polish ears.

Namely that on the one hand Poland rightly prided itself now on the huge sense of national unity and democratic but disciplined Christian principles which Solidarity came to represent. See eg this meeting itself.

But that mythic representation of Solidarity sat uneasily with the fact that millions of Poles had been more or less loyal to the Communist regime, whose agents and informers had penetrated to the top of Solidarity and indeed the Catholic Church. 

Hence continuing bitter feuding today over the 'deal' done with the Communists in the late 1980s.

Did Solidarity under malevolent influence of senior traitors within its own ranks pull its punches and let the Communists tip-toe away far too easily? And even if that was the case, did Poles now want to force through the final unmasking of all those double-agents in Solidarity and Church ranks?

This prompted shouts of Yes! from a small but noisy contingent of younger Poles in the audience, who appeared to blame Frasyniuk and other Solidarity veterans for the fact that so many young Poles still did not have jobs in Poland, and suspected that Lech Walesa had been a double agent...

* * * * *

It is all 30 years ago now. Ancient History.

Lech Walesa himself is still only 67. All being well he'll be around for Solidarity's 50th birthday party in 2030.  

John Mauldin of Thoughts from the Frontline writes a powerful weekly email on economic and investment themes to which one million people have subscribed.

As have I.

Because it is free.

His latest one is superb, disentangling different expert pessimistic and not-so-pessimistic analyses about the problems of the Eurozone, Greece and Spain in particular.

What I liked about this essay was the way he looked hard and fairly at rival views of unquestionable professional integrity, trying to find common ground and exploring the deeper reasons why they diverge.

He writes with tight precision:

... the valuation of the euro is not in and of itself a reason for the euro to disappear. At one time it was $.82. Then over $1.60. All currencies fluctuate, some more than others. What destroys them is political malfeasance.

What would put the euro at risk of a bad political decision?  A Greek bailout without serious conditions would be the one thing that could be a very bad start to a downward spiral. If Greece is bailed out, then why not Portugal or Spain or Ireland? What about the emergency room crisis that is Austrian banks?

The line has to be drawn, and it has to be a hard line.

On Spain he quotes another top analyst, Ray Dalio:

... Spain's external debts, have exploded without a significant offset of external assets. On net, Spain owes the world about 80% of GDP more than it has external assets.

As a frame of reference, the degree of net external debt Spain has piled up in a currency it cannot print has few historical precedents among significant countries and is akin to the level of reparations imposed on Germany after World War I.

We don't know of precedents for these types of external imbalances being paid back in real terms.

Heavy stuff. Don't subscribe unless you aren't feeling weak.

Meanwhile Soeren Kern at Pajamas Media explores how the leftist Spanish ruling class are blaming Anglo-Saxon economics for their rotten situation. And, that old stand-by when you have run out of intelligent things to say, conspiracies:

“Spain is the victim of an international conspiracy to destroy the country’s economic status, and then, the euro,” he said. “Nothing that is happening, including the apocalyptical editorials in foreign media, is just chance.”

Well, that is true. Hard to imagine articles in newspapers and magazines about Spanish recklessness being created by ad hoc atoms of ink randomly settling on the page.

But it misses the main point. Namely this staggering graph in the WSJ showing why for some 40 years the USA's federal government too has been on (and remains on) a reckless binge:

The small cheer in all this horror is that the US Democrats, main drivers of government profligacy, are running scared. The Tea Party tendency is focusing hard on this issue, to fine effect.

It is only a small cheer. Since the scale of the problem is now so daunting that it is hard to see good options for dealing with it. Stephen Spreuill looks at what the Republicans might include by way of policy ideas to start the decades-long trudge back to sanity.

What goes up, goes up and up and up before there is a crash or a total breakdown, when it comes down. The Eurozone is inherently less rational a phenomenon than the dollar, and so it will face its existential crisis sooner.

An elegant essay by Theodore Dalrymple on legendary lofty US economist J K Galbraith.

Needless to say, what caught my eye was reference to a book JGK wrote in 1958, Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia.

As a fine, prosperous East Coast liberal from a democracy, JKG was disinclined to see what if anything might be wrong with these one-party communist states:

The main function of what Galbraith writes is to minimize the horrors of Communism, upon which he has hardly a word. Indeed, strict political control never intrudes much on his consciousness when he is in the Communist world. “I have generally avoided quoting by name my Polish . . . sources in this account,” he writes. “This is not because I have any great fear of compromising them. Many people . . . take no small pride in speaking plainly and do so without evident restraint.”

Other priceless observations follow. Noticing the drabness with which people are dressed, Galbraith remarks that it “may be the problem of socialism. Planners can provide for everything but color, and they cannot allow for that because so much of it is associated with idiocy great and small. In any case, the people of Poland have more liberty than variety.”

Under Soviet-imposed socialism you are free, Poles!

Free, that is, in general, which is the main thing. Just not in particular, which could be most disadvantageous.

One of the great advantages of Galbraith-style planning is the elimination of “idiocy great and small,” of the kind that people are apt to embrace when they have the choice. The solution: eliminate choice. You can have any color you like, so long as it’s chosen by the philosopher-king.

Later he went to China and somehow missed the fact that millions of people had been wiped out in the Cultural Revolution and preceding famines caused by Mao's policies:

Nor was Galbraith interested in who the Red Guards were or what they actually did. The fate of individual people was far beneath his notice, which explains why his anecdotes are so rarely interesting, let alone illuminating. His is a humanitarianism without a human face.

The point now?

Galbraith has come back into fashion: not only his ideas, which imply the need for a huge and expanding class of redemptory politicians and bureaucrats to save people from a fate that would be wretched without them, but his aristocratic assumption of unchallengeable moral superiority, written in his prose as it appears to be written on President Obama’s face.

How delightful to be so generous, so very right all the time, and yet make a fortune and stay at the Ritz!

Read the whole piece - a deft demolition of JKG's bewilderingly idiotic idea that business/markets are inherently ruthless, governments inherently benign:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats.

The decay of the Climate Change movement has reached the point where those of us politely pointing to some of its deep contradictions are no longer the 'denialists'. Rather the denialists are those who insist that the wheezing pantechnicon must roll onwards even as its wheels start to fall off.

It all got just too dodgy:

Likewise, in the years since Syed Hasnain “speculated” about glacial melt, the BBC, the CBC, CNN and thousands of newspapers around the world have hired specialist Environmental Correspondents on lavish salaries. Yet not one of them gave any serious examination to the claims of the IPCC report, or the “science” on which they rested...

... By 2008, Syed Hasnain’s decade-old casual chit-chat over the phone to a London journalist had become “settled science,” so Dr. Pachauri’s company TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) approached the Carnegie Corporation for a grant to research “challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalayan glaciers,” and was rewarded with half a million bucks. Which they promptly used to hire Syed Hasnain.

In other words, professor Hasnain has landed a cushy gig researching solutions to an entirely non-existent global crisis he accidentally invented over a 15-minute phone call 10 years earlier.

As they say in the glacier business, ice work if you can get it.

The problem remains simple. To generate the 'global concern' needed to achieve 'global action'', political leaderships in a number of key countries (UK to the fore) frothed up the issue beyond all reasonable political and scientific limits.

This, by the way, is another reason for the problems now facing the FCO in London. It fleetingly had as Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, who made up for her inexperience in international relations by trying to turn the place into a campaigning organisation for Climate Change, skewing resources and achieving a step-change in dumbing down proper foreign policy work.

Sooner or later this project was bound to collide with reality, in one shape or form:

For better or worse, the global political system isn’t capable of producing the kind of result the global warming activists want.  It’s like asking a jellyfish to climb a flight of stairs; you can poke and prod all you want, you can cajole and you can threaten. 

But you are asking for something that you just can’t get — and at the end of the day, you won’t get it.

Note! All of which is not to say that there is no long-term problem with the impact human economic development has on the environment.

Insofar as that is demonstrated and accepted, the best chance to do something about is to be totally transparent about the science, create incentives for investment in lower energy products and processes, and be a lot less insistent on unfeasibly large 'global' collectivist schemes involving state-to-state financial transfers which will end up creating waste and corruption.

Update: a neat analysis from Tim Worstall who (as usual) cuts through a lot of blather:

We’ve also read our Bastiat you see: look for what is hidden, not just what is in plain sight.

Our argument, the rational one, is not that we should do nothing: it’s that what is being done is the wrong thing.

Another look at Ayn Rand, this time dwelling (reasonably) on her Russian roots and their literary impact on her books.

That said, I think Anthony Daniels misinterprets a number of the examples he quotes from her novels to make his point, namely that Rand was clever and perceptive but above all intolerable if not oppressive. She may well have been in real life, but the reasons he gives based on the books often do not work.

Still, worth a read for the Russian literary and psychological angles.

Now and again (and again) I rail against the Precautionary Principle (PP) as do others:

Once you get past the table-pounding, any rationale for rapid emissions abatement that confronts the facts in evidence is really a more or less sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle: the somewhat grandiosely named idea that the downside possibilities are so bad that we should pay almost any price to avoid almost any chance of their occurrence...

The precautionary principle is a bottomless well of anxieties, but our resources are finite — it’s possible to buy so much flood insurance that you can’t afford fire insurance.

The PP pops up in all sorts of guises, usually involving someone else's money being spent by force to achieve an outcome which otherwise might not happen.

A classic one as heard on the BBC is the lament of someone in a remote Scottish village, insisting that the sole telephone box be kept open even though almost no-one uses it:

"What if a hitch-hiker had an accident and that telephone was the only way to call help?! You're heartless! How dare you put human lives at risk just to save a little money!"

Drivel.

This sort of howl of primitive indignation is not easy to answer in practice. No politician wants to say:

"Sure, I maybe am putting a life at risk by not subsidising that remote telephone kiosk. But I judge that risk to be pretty small.

Oh, and the money saved by not paying for that kiosk can go to countless other public or even private services where the likelihood of saving lives is rather higher. So get lost".

That sort of reply has the supreme virtue of being true and sensible, but the obvious downside that when the media then roll in a corpse of someone lost for lack of handy immobile telephone communication, the politician looks and feels pretty ghastly. Give them the bloody kiosk, and let's move on.

In other words, irrationality suits too many people too much of the time, especially when we can all borrow from our doltish grandchildren to pay for it. Hence the drama of out-of-control compounding government debt.

What is so dishonest about the PP is its selective use.

Thus many of those who clamour for socialistic health-care refuse to acknowledge that under such systems top-end medicine and other benefits are going to be lost, and that even though everyone is covered (good) there will be many people (rich and poor) who will die (bad) because procedures are unavailable because unaffordable.

All outcomes have pros and cons. It's all about costing the choices in a coherent and sustainable way.

And about educating the public to look at 'risk' intelligently. A hopeless task, it seems.

Of course the huge advantage of socialistic healthcare is that the top people who preside over it can always call in doctors from different, more flexible systems elsewhere in case of emergency, even if the mass of citizens is denied that opportunity.

Some animals are more equal than others.

Ed Miliband, 'climate secretary', declares war on climate change sceptics:

"I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there," he said.

"We know there's a physical effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to higher temperatures, that's a question of physics; we know CO₂ concentrations are at their highest for 6,000 years; we know there are observed increases in temperatures; and we know there are observed effects that point to the existence of human-made climate change. That's what the vast majority of scientists tell us."

Mashed potatoes.

The whole point, as he must be assumed to know, is not that there are consequences of human activity on the planet, but rather how dealing with them over long time periods is sensibly to be costed. In other words, is it better to adapt as we go along, or impose vast new controls and costs now 'just in case'?

The game is up. As more and more heavy lumps of nonsense fall from the IPCC and associated parts of the climate industrial complex with dull thuds, more and more voters are going to opt for adaption rather than mitigation. Since, given the manifold uncertainties and ambiguities (and yes sheer dishonesties) in this business now emerging every day, that is the smart thing to do.

And lo, our deadly enemy the meaningless precautionary principle (PP) promptly rears its evil head:

"There are a whole variety of people who are sceptical, but who they are is less important than what they are saying, and what they are saying is profoundly dangerous," he said.

"Every­thing we know about life is that we should obey the precautionary principle; to take what the sceptics say seriously would be a profound risk."

Simply not true.

Why? Because he applies the PP when it suits him - and ignores it when it doesn't.

He has not costed the 'risks' of adverse impacts of the policies he proposes, and of countless other mass calamities which are foreseeable but whose likelihood is impossible sensibly to calculate, and then tried to weigh all that against the risks he chooses to champion.

Or as someone wrote a while back:

All this bureaucratic rubbish stemming from twisted versions of PP is part of a deep process of self-inflicted Stupidisation. What is scary is that it is like a malignant virus infecting the deepest parts of the operational public policy process in all sorts of unpredictable and unexpected and ultimately irrational ways.

Why? Because let's be honest. Of course we need to think about what we do. But in the process of weighing options and trying to choose a reasonable way forward, over-focus on PP tends to empower those with high-energy neurotic anxieties and/or bizarrely lurid busybody imaginations, and compels taxpayers to waste astonishing sums of money accordingly.

Whatever.

Let's just stop worrying about all these Marxist Milbandish imponderables and instead rely on the ineffable wisdom of Dr Rajenda Pachauri, Climate Guru Supreme, who has graced the planet with a novel containing lots of smutty bits.

“Sanjay saw a shapely dark-skinned girl lying on Vinay’s bed. He was overcome by a lust that he had never known before … He removed his clothes and began to feel Sajni’s body, caressing her voluptuous breasts.”

Enough to melt your glaciers, that one.

Just when you were thinking that I am a lone voice among former British diplomats lamenting the plummet in intellectual coherence and standards within the New Labour FCO, here is another one.

He has sprung into action after seeing this strange article by David Miliband in the New Statesman in which the Foreign Secretary tries to put the Taliban in context by comparing them to the Vietcong:

The Vietcong were a broad, deeply rooted, popular movement tapping into nationalist feelings throughout the country and society, and their appeal and legitimacy ultimately proved superior to that of the South Vietnamese regime. The Taliban have limited appeal due to their ethnicity, geography and the recent memory of their brutal, reactionary misrule. Afghans fear their return...

Any normal person might agree that the Taliban are vicious and primitive, but note the carefully drafted, rather romantic if not lyrical way the Vietcong are portrayed, their 'appeal and legitimacy' being contrasted with the 'reactionary' Taliban. (Didn't Hitler lead a broad, deeply rooted, popular movement tapping into nationalist feelings throughout the country and society?)

And maybe my memory is a bit wobbly these days, but did not a large number of South Vietnamese 'fear' the Viet Cong-style communists and try to run away from them?

Luckily we have people around who know the answer.

Such as Derek Tonkin, British Ambassador to Vietnam 1980-82, who has been moved to submit a Comment:

David Miliband is seriously mistaken if he believes that the "Viet Cong", a pejorative name which the Americans gave to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, either won the battle for the minds of the population of South Vietnam or played any serious role in the defeat of the South Vietnamese forces.

By the time the Americans had withdrawn their troops from Vietnam by the end of March 1973, the Viet Cong had effectively been neutralised to the point that they were no longer a serious military threat. South Vietnam was lost as a result of a premeditated invasion in violation of the 1973 Paris Agreements by regular North Vietnamese forces in which the Viet Cong played only a marginal role.

The reaction of the South Vietnamese population to the North Vietnamese invasion was one of general horror and despair, epitomised in the "Convoy of Tears" from the Central Highlands in March 1975 and the tens of thousands who in subsequent months sought to escape from South Vietnam by boat and of whom as many as one third are thought to have perished at sea...

That is pretty conclusive?

Of course as a little boy David Miliband soaked up his Marxist father's love for Vietnamese Communists and his opposition to the US military effort to stop them:

In 1967 he wrote in the Socialist Register that "the US has over...a period of years been engaged...in the wholesale slaughter of men, women and children, the maiming of many more" and that the United States' "catalogue of horrors" against the Vietnamese people was being done "in the name of an enormous lie.

Remember David Miliband's gushing tribute to Joe Slovo, another die-hard communist and Miliband family friend?

Dismal? Banal? Dishonest? I can't make up my mind.

Guido rightly lambasts the Fabian Society for their erstwhile adoration of the pseudo-science of Eugenics - the corrupt ideology beloved by snooty middle class intellectuals which was a sort of cross-breed of über-Darwinianism with Nietzschean/Germanic ideas of Supremacy.

See also the merciless analysis of this odious 'progressive' doctrine and its highbrow supporters in Liberal Fascism.

I mention this because I have downloaded the fab Stanza reading software on to my iPhone. And through it I have been busy piling up lots of free e-books, including various early works by P G Wodehouse (of course) but also essays and novels of G K Chesterton.

The Father Brown detective stories are strangely improbable yet a valiant effort to write clever mysteries with impeccable theological top-spin.

The Queer Feet is a witty one - a crafty robber turns up at a posh club dinner and tries to steal the valuable silverware, tricking the waiters by pretending to be a guest, and tricking the guests by pretending to be a waiter. Father Brown cracks the case by hearing his footsteps as he rushes jerkily from one mode to another. 

Here is an extended 1922 essay by Chesterton demolishing Eugenics once and for all. He seemed to think that the sobering effect of WW1 had ended its influence but of course it lasted in various forms well after that, with H G Wells famously calling for born again enlightened Nazism in a speech at the Oxford Union in 1932.

Anyway, get Stanza and get as many G K Chesterton free e-books as the various free e-book purveyors offer.

Sparkling uncompromising and profound writing, a bracing change from so much of the shifty post-modern 'theory' of our own dark times. 

Back in Moscow in 1994 or thereabouts I asked a top Russian foreign policy pundit what would happen to Ukraine, then languishing in a deacying post-communist stupor.

"We'll just buy it," came the sardonic reply.

But what about less obvious places, such as Nauru, which has just recognised Abkhazia and S Ossetia as independent states, fulfilling a key Nauru foreign policy priority namely for its vote to be up for sale?

Thus:

A new player has emerged in the roiling political theater of the Caucasus: the tiny, destitute Pacific island nation of Nauru, which on Tuesday became the fourth country to formally establish diplomatic relations with Abkhazia, effectively recognizing its sovereignty...

Nauru, an eight-square-mile rock in the South Pacific with about 11,000 inhabitants, was no pushover, according to the influential Russian daily newspaper Kommersant. In talks with Russian officials, Nauru requested $50 million for “urgent social and economic projects,” the newspaper reported, citing unnamed Russian diplomats.

When in doubt on such issues turn to Mark Steyn, who unlike me knows a high percentage of the population of Nauru and eruditely links this subject to various musicals:

In the early Nineties, I met a couple of bigwigs from the capital, Yaren, in London when the Nauruan government, in the wake of Cats and Les Miserables and Phantom Of The Opera, decided to invest in a British musical about Leonardo written by a couple of guys whose only hit song was the long ago Number One “Concrete And Clay”. Oh, come on. You must remember:

Which was literally the situation the bird-pooped-out Nauruans found themselves in.

But there is also this:

First, Russia’s imperialist ambitions are an issue that resonates far beyond Russia’s backyard. Australia has been concerned for some time about a China/Taiwan competition to, in effect, buy up hastily decolonized Commonwealth territories in the Pacific. It will have a terribly corrupting effect on the region’s politics if Russia is determined on a piece of the action.

Secondly, we underestimate the importance of sub-jurisdictions. Nauru is sovereign but not quite independent:  Its Appellate Court rulings can be overturned by the High Court of Australia, a country to which Nauru also contracts its national defense. Why would they object to Abkhazia entering into similar relations with Russia?

But look at the other side, too: Poti sits on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, and Georgia has just sold a 51 per cent stake in the port to Ras Al Khaimah, one of the United Arab Emirates, to run it as a “free industrial zone”.  Like the bankrupt Dubai, Ras Al Khaimah is also a sub-national jurisdiction. These are cross-currents in the undertow of the Big Pond: Arab money, Russian ambition, Chinese subversion, and emerging statelets susceptible to all three.

You’ll notice who seems largely irrelevant to all of the above: us. America and its allies. In a globalized world, the west defers increasingly to the transnational institutions, without apparently even noticing the destabilization by key players at sub-national level.

Foreign Policy in the twenty-first century: stop me and buy one...

“The concrete and the clay beneath my feet begins to crumble…”

A very powerful piece in the Guardian/Observer (yes!) decribing the grisly fate of official useful idiot Malcolm Caldwell, whose banal self-delusion about communist crimes led to his banal murder in Pol Pot's Cambodia.

But this is astounding - can it really be true?

The UN-supported court (ECCC) investigating communist crimes has appointed a hard-core Australian Leninist to lead ... the victims unit:

Somehow the link between Marxist-Leninist ideology and communist terror has never been firmly established in the way, for instance, that we understand Nazi ideology to have led inexorably to Auschwitz.

As if to illustrate the point, earlier last year the ECCC announced that Helen Jarvis, its chief of public affairs, was to become head of the victims unit, responsible for dealing with the survivors, and relatives of the dead, of S-21.

Jarvis is an Australian academic with a longterm interest in the region, who was recently awarded Cambodian citizenship. She is also a member of the Leninist Party Faction in Australia.

In 2006 she signed a party letter that included this passage: "We too are Marxists and believe that 'the ends justify the means'. But for the means to be justifiable, the ends must also be held to account. In time of revolution and civil war, the most extreme measures will sometimes become necessary and justified. Against the bourgeoisie and their state agencies we don't respect their laws and their fake moral principles."

Jarvis refused to speak to me about these matters. But Knut Rosandhaug, the UN's deputy administrator for the tribunal, said that the administration "fully supports" her. In this sense, although she was never a Pol Potist herself, Jarvis shows that the spirit of Malcolm Caldwell has survived the last century. It lives on in the conviction that the ends justify the means, and in the manner that liberal institutions can house the most illiberal outlooks.

Strewth.

Looking for something decent to do this Spring?

Join a really worthwhile Projects Abroad initiative to excavate unmarked graves of victims of communism in Romania: 

Due to drastic governmental budget cuts, the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania is in danger of no longer being able to do its work of finding the victims of the communist regime, and is in need of our volunteers’ help...

The institute now needs help on the first of their projects taking place at the end of March and start of April 2010: the excavation of a common grave on Muntele Mare, in the Apuseni Mountains in Romania. This is where a resistance camp consisting of 5 anti-communist fighters (one of them a pregnant woman) was stormed by the communist secret service forces in the 60’s. The defenders were murdered and buried together.

It reminds me of this useful advice to Slavoj Zizek:

Luckily for Europe, many countries which laboured under Stalinism are now free; their representatives can speak out against this sort of thing in a way most politicians in Old Europe can not imagine doing.

It is no surprise that S Zizek as a leading supporter of an oh-so-fashionable Stalinist defence team comes from former non-aligned' communist Yugoslavia: a country which wriggled out from the worst excesses of Stalinism, later collapsing not because there were serious intellectual forces opposing communism as such but rather because of populist mobilisation based on ethnic exclusivism and partly driven by sheer gangsterism.

Zizek is a Marxist philosopher who dwells on the level of ideas. If he wants to study aspects of the allegedly Enlightenment tradition of Stalinism in a way both more dialectical and materialistic simultaneously (and rather closer to home than the European Parliament), he need only walk down the road in Slovenia.

And start digging. 

Here are my ten entries for this year's Orwell Blog Prize:

14/01/2009      http://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/art740

17/03/2009      http://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/art859     

03/05/2009      http://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/art928     

17/06/2009      http://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/anonymous-bloggers-at-work-     

26/06/2009      http://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/a-musty-needy-eu-speech           

04/08/2009      http://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/NRWKVL599211           

21/09/2009      http://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/russia-s-foreign-policy-psycholgy-contd-   

30/10/2009      http://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/even-yet-more-further-labour-kaminski-nonsense

15/11/2009      http://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/european-foreign-policy-v-the-iron-laws-of-physics

20/12/2009      http://www.charlescrawford.biz/blog/copenhagen-climate-summit-um-not-un

These are a decent sample of my output this year, some more analytical than others. I have tried to put together a list of postings which are well written, sharp, have something a bit unexpected to say and in general reflect my humble hopes to emulate the finest Orwell writing tradition.

If anyone out there remembers any other posting from 2009 which was especially striking and engaging, please let me know asap. I still have a week or so to change my entries if I want to do so. But I get only ten shots...

Talking of George Orwell, I was looking at the last passages in Animal Farm today. 

Look at this towering, slyly nuanced speech by the Farmer as he and the Evil Pigs cut the Final Deal, the other animals peering glumly through the window at the merry party inside.

The deftness of touch and the implicit and explicit sense of them all knowingly wallowing in their greedy ruthless cynicism might be describing, say, the way the Blair/Brown elite dined with the EU elite and explained to loud guffaws how they had denied the UK the promised vote on the Lisbon Treaty referendum:

Let's look on the bright sider and assume that this year the ghastly North Korean regime implodes, leading to pell-mell reunification.

Then what?

In particular, who pays the huge bill to start to put right the mess:

Either the citizens own the state, or the state owns the citizens.

In the latter case there are no citizens. Only serfs.

The modern state tells us what not to do and sets conditions on what we can do. But it so far has not sought to demand that contracts be made between private citizens.

Since any such contracts would not be contracts. They would have no moral authority. The state would have nationalised private integrity and freedom of choice.

And any attempt to impose such pseudo-contracts in a democracy surely will be unconstitutional?

So much for the USA. What about the UK?

Yesterday I heard how Health & Safety tyrants had pored all over a tent-hire business, asserting in oppressive and intrusive detail exactly how tents should be erected lest the business be operating 'illegally'.

Or try this horror:

New-style inspections have already attracted criticism because of the emphasis on making pupils feel “safe” – one of the watchdog’s three priorities.

Some schools have reported being marked down because fences around playing fields were too low or inspectors were able to gain access to the building without being asked for identification

This is an overtly fascistic agenda. To nationalise 'safety' in such a way that only the state can decide what it is or is not.

The correct answer from a head teacher when one of these odious Ofsted people appears at a school without fences and security cameras is to say the following:

The children here feel safe and are safe because we are teaching them the institutions and values of a free society, where the great mass of law-abiding people live honourable lives.

We want them to be brought up in a society where people trust each other and to manage the risks intelligently - that is the basis for authentic democratic safety.

You by contrast want to put people in little boxes. You live off creating a nervous sense of weakness and insecurity, of suspicion and state-sponsored unease.

You are oppressing and dividing us. You and your neurotic grasping bureaucracy are morally unsafe. We hate you and what you represent.

Now get out of this school and never come back. Or I'll set the children on to you.

That should be a resoundingly cheery way to start 2010.

Another Browser link, this time to a fascinating interview with Stephen Lucas, a heavyweight expert on Soviet Law.

This is well worth reading since it casts some light on an area largely neglected in Western analysis of Communism, namely the way the Soviet regime tried to give legal effect to its ideological dogmas.

For example, the catastrophic collectivisation of agriculture:

... law was used as a pretext for going to the countryside and expropriating grain, how it was used as an engine for change from peasant subsistence farming to mass collectivisation.

In March 1929 the notorious article 107 of the criminal code in 1929 was widely applied to those hoarding grain. You got three years’ “deprivation of freedom” for the crime of deliberately increasing prices by “buying up grain” or by “not putting it on the market” (ie, delivering it to the government) and you were also subject to “full or partial confiscation of your property”.

And yet everybody was hoarding grain because the state was seizing as much as possible for the towns, there was nothing otherwise to eat and you feared for your next harvest or supply of grain...

Not so sure about this:

The demise of the Soviet Union was the demise of a country underpinned by a concept, an ideology, an alternative vision – socialism. It was an evangelical empire posing questions about how best to manage an economy, the extent to which the state provides social welfare, the scope of human rights and the importance of the arts and science.

That said, it was also an empire with a darker side. But since 1991 it seems like we have lost something when it comes to politics – lost the enthusiasm to debate about the bigger questions and to worry about whether there is a better alternative –  ideology seems to be missing. The mere existence of the Soviet Union almost seemed to provide a counter ideological force that helped us to question and frame the nature of how we in the West choose to live.

The great hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, 'the man who stopped the motor of the earth'. The bold idea is that when the greatest creative minds of society go on strike, the system inexorably breaks down.

Pretty fanciful?

No. In fact the Soviet Union came up with a better way to run this experiment on our behalf. It murdered tens of thousands of its great minds and stopped the rest from being truly creative.

And, yes, after some seventy years of this madness in 2001 the spluttering Soviet motor finally simply seized up, and the whole system keeled over.

Laws and all.

No great loss - apart from all those millions of its victims.

A busy few days for old-fashioned diplomacy, with China taking no obvious notice of British and other pleas for clemency in the case of Akmal Shaikh, and the Tehran regime hauling in the British Ambassador Simon Gass to issue dire warnings about a 'slap in the face' from Iran.

Some thoughts. First, Akmal Shaikh.

Mr Shaikh was well known to the British Embassy consular team in Warsaw when I was Ambassador, as he was then living in Poland and often pressed the Embassy to intervene in his different battles with the Polish authorities. I do not remember getting involved myself in all this. Anyone keen to find out more can run an FOI request and see what emerges.

The Polish media have been looking at Mr Shaikh's life and times in Poland. See eg this piece by TVN which mentions that the Lublin police held Mr Shaikh on charges relating to driving while under the influence of alcohol - and threatening terrorist attacks. And this other report from Polska newspaper:

He was married to a resident of Lublin. He came from London in 1998 and offered the city fathers to start an airline, among other ventures. He would turn up at the town hall every six months, each time with new ideas.

In 2005 for example he decided to build a huge mosque. He presented his initiative to the then councillor Dariusz Jezior but the latter showed no interest in the idea. Since that time Akmal kept sending him SMS threats. - I will bring people from Pakistan, terrorists who are more ruthless and will do what needs to be done - Akmal wrote to the councillor who eventually brought the case to the police. 

Hmm.

Once Mr Shaikh was convicted in China on drug smuggling charges and faced execution, the British government had a dilemma. How best if at all to intervene?

Various options were available:

• do nothing, and hope that Chinese justice might end up leaving him spared execution
• press publicly for clemency
• press privately for clemency
• try to get others (eg the EU) to take up the issue

The way most likely to fail in such cases is to press frequently, noisily and publicly, since that means that any act of clemency by the other side will look to have been done under humiliating foreign pressure. Former diplomat-turned-politician George Walden (who served in China) sums up the issues here well, and looks back at some awkward history.

That said, if a veritable global storm of protest can be generated - as in the case of the Sharpeville Six in South Africa - that approach can work.

Part of the problem here is that most countries, even (especially?) those without serious democracy, like to maintain that their legal systems are independent of political influence. So it is easy for the authorities to shrug their shoulders and say primly, "Sorry, we'd love to help - but alas our hands are tied. You British of course understand, since your own independent judiciary is rightly feted as an example to us all".

Which is why HM Government strove to pitch the arguments in terms of possible room for manoeuvre within the Chinese system itself, pressing the point that Mr Shaikh had rights which (arguably) had been denied.

But that too was a double-edged sword - did the Chinese want to accept that their own system made errors?

What about getting others to weigh in? A deathly hush from the EU's new High Representative Baroness Ashton? In any case, other leaders are usually loath to get involved in such national cases - they do not like pumping out synthetic indignation when they have no real way of identifying the true facts of the case for themselves.

Over in China the Embassy will have been busy trying to decide and advise where if at all pressure might most persuasively be applied. National or regional level? Justice Ministry or eg more politically via the Prime Minister's office? How best to pitch the 'tone'? Unfailingly polite if not deferential? Or with a sense of anger and some sort of hints that China/UK relations will suffer if the 'wrong' outcome arises?

In London the calculation was rather different. How to balance the best chance of success - more or less completely silent diplomacy - with clamour from the family and various NGOs that HMG needed to do 'more' to secure a reprieve? In the end as many as 27 different appeals by Ministers (with a personal one from Gordon Brown) were made. Too many to be wise - and perhaps even so many as to be annoying?

In this dismal case nothing was likely to work, and nothing did work.

Hence now sharp public diplomatic exchanges between London and Beijing, with the Chinese Ambassador summoned for a difficult meeting with FCO Minister Ivan Lewis and China telling London to 'mend its ways'.

Hence the FCO left is brooding on its failure here and the earlier bitter words between London and Beijing after the Copenhagen fiasco:

In both cases the Foreign and Commonwealth Office appears to have considerably overestimated its leverage with the emerging superpower, convinced until it was too late that China was so desperate to avoid public criticism that it would yield to private pressure. A wholesale change of direction is ruled out but senior government figures admit to feeling shaken by the twin failures.

“Changing our China strategy into one of non-engagement or isolationism is neither credible nor desirable and would be counterproductive,” said a government source. “But do we wake up this morning with a little less trust on our side? Yes, we do.”

Yesterday on BBC Radio Five Live plenty of people were telephoning in to say that Mr Shaikh deserved no mercy, and that the UK too should bring back the death penalty.

A Lib Dem MP said that the Government had done all it could and proclaimed himself simply lost for words to know what the answer was.

Maybe it depends on the question?

Who said this?

In 1989 I made a trip to England. I was hosted by Prime Minister [Margaret] Thatcher at her residence at Chequers for official talks and she invited me personally up to the attic.

There, in the attic of this ancient, ancient palace, there were many antique relics -- it was like in a theater. And there was a big table and on that table there was a folder, an old, brown folder. Do you know whose folder that was? I said, "How could I know?" And she said, "Napoleon's." "I've never brought a French person here," she said.

Imagine, 200 years had passed. France and England are in one union. World War I passed. World War II. The modern friendship. But still, everyone has a different opinion about that. For the English, he was a murderer and a man who brought a lot of harm. For the French, he was a hero. And you have to respect that, mutually.

When and under what conditions do we leave the past to mind its own business and no longer prey upon the present?

The Summit starts.

Has the hacking/leaking of all those mails made any difference?

Some pro-Summit people are saying that it must have been done 'deliberately' to try to mess up the Summit. By ... sinister music ... the Russians?

Yet that argument makes sense only if it assumes that the material was in fact damaging in some way, in which case the fact that it was revealed surely is a good thing anyway?

Tim Worstall:

The current unknown in climate science is not each detailed part of it. Certainly, I’m (for what zero amount my opinion is worth) happy with what each of those groupuscules is coming up with as the pointillist detail of their specialty. The current unknown is how it all fits together: specifically, what is climate sensitivity?

What is the sum of all of these different interactions….which is the important thing we want to know in trying to work out how bad (or how trivial) it’s all going to be.

And that working is indeed being done by a very small group. At most some hundreds and the influential people seem to be well under one hundred in number. Even if it’s not conspiracy here, certainly it’s possible to have groupthink…as we’ve seen at CRU.

The vast show continues.

But it looks safe to bet that US Senators will be very cautious about agreeing any new treaty with tough articles like this one plonked on their desk.

It looks closely at the scientific proof problems involved in two big areas:

• proving that the earth is warming now
• and proving that this is something different from normal cycles of earlier pre-industrialised warming, especially those in the recent past (ie the past thousand years or so)

If the numbers are uncertain and ambiguous, how best to make the case to 'prove' nasty man-made climate change?

Play up current warming - and play down earlier warming. Which means massaging some complex figures.

But how to measure earlier warming anyway?

Welcome to the mysterious world of proxy data.

Bottom Line?

It may be that the world is warming in a new (and mainly bad) way because of man-made or man-caused emissions, even though we can not prove it conclusively. If so, it is much better to focus hard on being less wasteful and adapt as we go, rather than than lunge into incredibly expensive and even oppressive new schemes based on 'evidence' we would not accept when eg agreeing that a new drug might safely be marketed.

How best to incentivise all that?

An issue for economists, not climate scientists.

Leaving aside possible criminal charges involving attempts to avoid FOI requests, there are all sorts of legal options in the UK and US alike for people wanting to challenge the way public funds have been invested in academic work on Climate Change which (it seems) fails to meet respectable standards of integrity.

In a word, lawsuits.

Back in the world of diplomacy, here is another former British Ambassador in Moscow (Sir Rod Lyne being busy on the Chilcot Inquiry), Sir Tony Brenton, describing the way the Copenhagen process will work in practice:

Sometime towards the end of the Copenhagen climate conference, Michael Zammit Cutajar, a Maltese diplomat and conference chairman, will gather 20 or so people into a back room of the Bella Conference Centre for an all-night session (or two) to do the deal. All the noise and the posturing, the 20,000 delegates, the lobbyists, the dramatic green demonstrators, the 180-page legal negotiating text, will be shut outside.

Those 20 people — representatives of the world’s key climate-change governments — will have in front of them perhaps a ten-page text. They will agree, or not, on greenhouse gas emissions limits for developed countries, financial assistance for developing countries and emissions constraints that developing countries are willing to take on in exchange for that assistance.

If they find agreement they will sell it to the wider conference and then to the wider world. It will set our course for at least the decade to come.

Nicely put.

And of course at this level of abstraction the issues become less about Climate and more about psychology and bluff.

Each of those twenty people will be desperate to avoid being blamed for a Failure. So pressure to strike some sort of deal - any deal - is huge. This will tend to override common sense and the fact that it is not their money they are planning to give away. 

Most of them will know little about the science, or about the economic theories on how best to pay now for benefits (and costs) which might accrue many decades in the future.

Instead, a murky game of bluff.

Non-whites will be insisting that whites have basically caused the problem and that whites basically have to pay for fixing it.

Whites will be saying that even if that is the case, the non-whites can't expect much if they too do not take on a fair share of stopping pollution as it soars in the fast-developing parts of the developing world.

Sulky accord of some sort having been reached on those points of principle, they then start haggling over the price. No doubt with a cynical thought at the back of their minds that all that zany Climategate stuff is going to reduce even further the Obama Administration's appetite and capacity to do too much on the legislative front.

Promises and undertakings and targets will all be established, with everyone knowing that the chances of them being reached in practice are modest.

Some people will be better at convincing others of their sincerity in making the attempt to hit those targets.

Other people will be better at being obdurate to the bitter end, just to see what size bung they can be thrown to sign up.

The result? Tony Brenton again:

So outright failure is unlikely. But it is equally unlikely that Copenhagen will get us right around the climate corner. The probability has to be, at best, an interim deal with lots of work still to do.

Which rather assumes that there is agreement on what has to be done and why it well help. Will the current Consensus start to unravel in the months and years to come in those courtrooms?

If you have got this far and want More, read this excellent post over at Devil's Kitchen by Pedant-General which talks through the logic of the whole business at some length.

In particular P-G looks at the central question: even if we are sure that Climate Chnage is Bad and we think that human action can make it better, should we act boldly now (mitigate) or merely adapt as we go, keeping our options open?

Thus

• the worse the climate situation is, the greater the cost of mitigation and the more attractive it is to go for adaptation. This is the oddity with the Stern Report. If his numbers are correct, we're either doing enough for mitigation already or we shouldn't be doing it at all. As the shrieking gets louder, the costs of mitigation inevitably rise and the argument gets stronger AGAINST mitigation.
  

  Something for those twenty lucky souls to chat about during the coffee break.

• Finally we get to the politics and the Bjorn Lomborg position. Even if it is all ghastly, there are many more important things to do with our resources. Millions really actually will die from preventable water-borne diseases, malnutrition and malaria and we really actually can do something about those. Buggering about with the climate, although it definitely will be expensive, is desperately uncertain both in terms of its effectiveness and the lives it will save. That's not a good trade off.