Blogoir: March

Via Ed Driscoll (who has the best hat in the blogosphere) this account from Lileks of the 1943 Nazi version of Titanic, presented by those National Socialists as explicitly anti-capitalist propaganda.

It's all on YouTube in bite-sized chunks. Here is Part 8: the wicked capitalists continue their drunken scheming as passengers start to take to the boats!

Sir Arthur C Clarke has died.

I grew up on his short stories. One sticks in my memory nearly 50 years later.

It shows how slow computers were in those days: a job which took four days could now be done by the chip in a singing birthday card almost instantly. Which is why we are moving along nicely towards creating Hal, or something like him?

This not so much short as tiny story finishes with one of the most magnificent and moving lines in science fiction:

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

A lively debate unfolding on this subject at Samizdat.

See plenty of comments on the original thoughtful post by Dale Amon, including now one from me too.

This is the Great-Grandmother of Cause and Effect questions. My answer? Spread your bets...

Every now and again one sees something which casts light on an unexpected area of human endeavour.

Such as this one about Poles returning to Poland from the UK in a way which redefines the idea of 'free movement of labour' in the EU.

Some good news from Cuba.

If the EU wants to do something useful in 'foreign policy' it should start strongly promoting this sort of latent networked democracy and so promote and prepare for Cuban Regime Change. That would have two results. It would help end the current misery there faster. And it woiuld show that we are on the side of the people, not the regime.

I suspect that nothing will be done - too many EU member states seem to think that their market niche lies in making excuses for Cuban-style socialism. Thus the EU is investing in a dying and sure to be discredited past, not a vibrant optimistic Cuban future.

This means that when the regime does collapse an historic opportunity to export to that region the noble values and practices of the EU's 'highly competitive social market economy' will be lost, as Cubans surge towards brash American-style consumerism, free at last to enjoy the benefits of globalisation.

Much like the Vietnamese, in fact. Not that everybody is happy with that.

Some good advice via Guido from Dizzy on how civil servants can blog with reduced chance of detection.

An interesting area. One of my first blog posts referred to a case of deliberate leaking by an FCO official which reached the courts where the case crashed.

Does blogging = leaking? Not necessarily. But there is evidently potential for overlap.

Voters can not expect to have their cake and eat it. If they want more or less effective goverenment, having officials who weigh up options and present them to Ministers both to take decisions and then defend them publicly is not such a bad way to run things. There has to be some arrangement made for reasonable privacy/discretion in the way those policies and decisions are worked up. If everything is open to real-time public scrutiny and attendant controversy, the chances of much useful getting done seem to me to decline.

Ditto with formal Ministerial accountability - do we want that to erode by virtue of the fact that civil servants will inevitably get sucked into step-by-step controversies if more or all of the process is made public? 

As for blogging by officials, in my view Ministers and Ministries will be wise to take a light touch in drafting digital-age rules for what civil servants can say and when.

The overwhelming mass of civil servants will never be bothered to blog. Of those who do, not all will write about their work. Of those who do that, not all will be looking to stir up trouble. Of those who do want to stir up trouble, some of that trouble will be trivial: plus, the more specific the accusations in a blog are, the more readily identifiable the source of the blog anyway, thereby acting as a brake on mischievous behaviour. 

And anyone who really wants to get out something newsworthy to affect policy will simply pass it on to a major blog or media outlet anyway, rather than rely upon what is likely to be a modestly-read blog to spread the word.

In short, a non-problem? Simple standards of common sense, mutual professional respect/trust and good manners cover almost everything that matters here - the current official FCO and other Ministry guidelines do look to be much too heavy in style and substance and so come over as ... unattractive.

Why are governments increasingly ineffective at running things?

Partly because they are besieged by complexity - every problem turns out to be connected to every other problem, hence there is no way to measure success or failure, hence ever more neurotic official attempts to 'set targets'.

But they also operate in a context in which the public are unable to discern what is important and what is not. Which is why accelerating media stupidity is such a problem. Not only does bombarding the public with nonsense create confusion. It wastes time and corrupts our available intellectual and actual resources, thereby threatening democracy which has to rely on some sort of Minimal Rationalism.

This captures it all well.

On the subject of the leaked FCO SpAd document (if that is what it is), Guido makes the following point:

"... a document produced by a civil servant, in office hours at the taxpayer's expense should by rights not be the property of the Labour Party."

A similar issue came up back in Sarajevo back in 1997, when I was having an argument about corruption with President Izetbegovic's team over the untransparent and significant overlap there between the Bosnian state institutions and Izetbegovic's party (eg why were state VIP protocol officials presiding at his party congress gatherings?). I told them that in an honest country every penny of taxpayers' money should be properly acccounted for, including eg the electricity supply being used to make the lights work in the office we were sitting in. As British money was pouring into Bosnia via the EU to help keep Izetbegovic's government afloat, we expected a strong honest performance from the Bosnian leadership.

Blank Bosnian looks.

My robustness in standing up strongly on this subject was much praised and encouraged by Robin Cook. In fact, on the very day he arrived in Sarajevo for his first high-profile visit there as Foreign Minister, the local newspapers were reporting demands from some quarters that I be PNG'd from Bosnia for briefing the UK media to raise the corruption question. 

I survived. And the principle holds.

Party materials should be printed using Party-funded paper and Party-funded electricity by Party-funded people. Unless clear exceptions are made. And explained. And upheld.

Scrupulously.

Guido helpfully draws our attention to a briefing on Europe apparently prepared by a 'Special Adviser' in the FCO.

But if this document is real it is SpAd work and in principle does not expose the poverty or otherwise of 'FCO analysis', as Guido's headline reads. Let's be accurate in such things, please.

They said that if President Bush were re-elected we would see a ruthless clamp-down on dissent and freedom of speech.

And they were right!

When I set up this site I naively thought that some people with an interest in international affairs would stumble over it and that a few of them might like to submit fair-minded comments, so a bit of grown-up dialogue on different policy issues might take place for general edification.

One or two sensible and interesting comments have been registered, and my thanks to those who have sent in their views. But by far the largest number of 'comments' are dreary spam messages of some sort aimed at selling chemicals of different shapes and sizes.

Who are the people out there who invent these tedious programmes which scour the web for new entries on Blogs such as this and then automatically deface them?

A question to which there is no ready answer, it seems. I may have to end the misery for us all and delete the Comment facility, so that if anyone is minded to write to me they can send an email and Gmail can weed out all the rubbish.

Pity, but there it is. 

One of the many Stalinist Very Big Lies still echoing on down the ages is that there can be no attempted equivalence between Nazism and Communism, since Nazism (as Extreme Rightism) was an explicitly racist ideology whereas Communism (as part of general Leftism generally) utterly repudiated racism.

This is not a dead issue.

The sort of Europe we are said to be building depends on our collective memories - especially when enormous efforts have been made - and are still being made - (a) to ensure that responsibility for certain vast crimes was not placed where it should be, and (b) to keep other memories well and truly suppressed.

This exchange between Anne Applebaum and Anatol Lieven is a forceful but gracious account of some of the issues at stake. See also Edward Lucas on the subject.

Communist anti-semitism is another complex dark subject. Here is a handy summary of Stalin's crimes in this area.

One of the many great tragedies in Poland's C20 history is that having taken over a country which had just seen most of Europe's largest Jewish population deliberately annihilated by the Nazis, the Polish Communist regime itself played a vicious anti-semitic card when it needed to see off liberal student unrest in 1968.

So well done Polish President Kaczynski in commemorating the 40th anniversary of those shameful events perpetrated by the Communists. And offering to do something now to try to put things right. 

The idea in my preceding post that the worse fate that can befall us is not erosion of our freedoms, but an erosion of the very idea of freedom reminded me of this:

The biggest problem is not that TV shows' plots are too complicated, but that shows have any plots at all.

As good now as it was then.

(Transparency Note: I met Jonah on a cruise back in 2005 and enjoyed his ideas and company. But we were not lovers.)

What to make of Jonah Goldberg’s remarkable (if long) new book Liberal Fascism? Plenty.

His basic thesis boils down to three propositions:

• First, non-trivial parts of today’s Western Leftist/progressive style and policy substance draw on collectivist totalitarian revolutionary ideologies prevalent in the early part of the last century, as espoused overlappingly by Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.
• Thus second, whereas ‘The Left’ have usurped a monopoly on calling conservatives they dislike ‘fascists’, in fact that epithet can be applied to them - probably more honestly
• The key divide in contemporary politics is not between collectivist Rightists (eg ‘compassionate conservatives) and collectivist Leftists (eg ‘it takes a village’). Instead it lies between Collectivists who insist that More State is the only answer to most problems, and people of a more libertarian frame of mind who suspect that Ever More Collective State means Ever Less Individual Freedom - and ultimately Ever Surer Ruinous Decline.

The book backs up these bold claims with a barrage of examples. Mussolini a hero with great ideas? ‘Enlightened Nazism’? Arresting thousands of people for expressing political dissent? Anti-competitive practices against the little guy by Big Business in partnership with Big Government? Promoting a healthy population by stopping ‘race degeneracy’ through the uncontrolled breeding of “swarms of black and brown and dirty-white and yellow people”?

All this and much more is spelled out in this book in excruciating, even eventually numbing detail. Not as the ravings of conservatives of different stripes but rather as the carefully worked through and noisily championed ideas of some of the greatest Left or progressive thinkers and leaders of the pre-WW2 age in the USA and across Europe, as later reanimated in the heady 1960s.

Warming to his theme, Goldberg delivers a penetrating critique of Hillary Clinton and her beliefs. He shows how they were born in some of the darker depths of American Marxist/communist activism warmly sympathetic to the Black Panthers and other violent fanatics.

He agrees that Hillary’s ideas today “are not evil. Nor do they sound fascist to modern ears – indeed, that is the whole point.” But he also insists that Hillary’s language draws directly on intellectual roots in pre-WW2 socialist/fascist collectivism and evinces creepy collectivist ambitions, eg where privacy and family life is concerned. Her “spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose” replaces the fist with the hug: “an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny”. And not so nice, when one sees injustices now perpetrated by courts operating away from public scrutiny with caring bureaucrats in the British family law area.

Goldberg describes Nazi racism as “an expression of a deeper impulse to define the individual by his relationship to the collective”. That semi-mystical vision of society is (he argues) remarkably similar to much progressive rhetoric today, which addresses fundamental questions about existence (eg re the environment) by insisting (a) that they can only be answered collectively; and (b) that the state alone can and must turn collective ideas into action. He agrees (of course) that important parts of the Right too yield to these totalitarian temptations.

Goldberg concludes that the only reliable, principled answer to autocratic tyranny and tribalised yearnings for supremacy of the working class (Communism), the nation (Mussolini Fascism) or the race (Hitler Nazism) lies with another approach. With those who believe in private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how to live within these guidelines. These core principles are “the only true radical political tradition in a thousand years”.

In his discussion with Glenn Reynolds on an Instapundit podcast, Goldberg says that too many Conservatives choose to take the easiest pot-shots at the areas where Leftism is obviously weak. He wanted to hit Leftists on one of their most ambitious and now hardened lies, including their denial of any overlap between Communism and Nazism/Fascism.

He succeeded. Hence the Howls of Rage (or studied bafflement – see eg a snarky headline review by Michael Mann at Amazon.com) from different Leftist/liberal positions:

• As anyone knows, Hitler’s Nazism was (it is said) quite different from Mussolini’s Fascism
• But in any case it is an outrageous banal lie to claim that either of them were socialist movements with plenty in common with Soviet communism or other authentic socialist strains of thought of the time (Note: see also this refreshingly honest defence of a key Stalinistic bastion: anything which hints that Fascism and Communism were ‘as bad as each other’, or even that Fascism was a response to a Communist threat, weakens “a post-war European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity”.)
• Even if there were ‘errors’ and obvious collectivist elements in earlier Left-progressive thinking, so what? Times were different then. Those mistakes have been corrected by the Left, although of course not by the Right.
• As evidenced by Hillary’s wise and far-seeing policies on the one hand, and bone-headed Bushitlerism on the other
• So either Goldberg is talking self-evident partisan nonsense
• Or he is just malevolently ignorant.
• Most likely both.
• QED. Stupid book.

Yet a nerve has been touched. The book’s original print-run of 18,000 copies has turned into an eleventh edition – now at 188,000 copies and going strong.

Back in 1998/99 I had a mid-career break at Harvard. The best course I joined at the Kennedy School was led by Jeff Eisenach (who helped launch the Progress and Freedom Foundation and is now at Criterion Auctions, working on cutting-edge issues of markets and competition policy).

Eisenach took us back a century and more to the first days of emerging heavy mass production, and described how Machine Age images entered our thinking and terminology. He brought out just how hard it is now to grasp the scale of the extraordinary emotional impact brought about by all that unprecedented new Bigness.

Huge impersonal machines. Stunning machine noise. Unimaginable machine speeds. Warfare waged by machines. Machines flying. All from European and American white-skinned genius, leaving supposedly primitive blacks and browns and yellows trailing far behind.

These inventions and the social upheaval they brought amazed intellectuals and caused a whole new way of political thinking to emerge: that society too was in essence a single vast machine, capable of (and indeed depending on) being regulated and controlled by the intellectual elite. Human beings became ‘the masses’, mere cogs toiling for a collective ‘higher’ purpose.

Eisenach’s point (and maybe an extension of Jonah Goldberg’s analysis too) was that after an Age of Heaviness we are entering a new and quite different digitally democratised Age of Lightness and Smallness. An age of Mass Differentiation, not Mass Standardisation, in which metaphors of biology (swarming, exponential growth) and not metaphors of Newtonian mechanics (inputs and outputs, balance of payments) are now more apt. In these circumstances Big Unwieldy Government as it developed for Machine Age management purposes becomes a serious obstacle to fluid social change and growth, not the main solution.

A vast subject. For now suffice to say that Goldberg is dead right. Communism, Nazism and Fascism alike were ideologies based on Machine Age Bigness. They shared an explicit socialist/collectivist core, aimed at submerging the individual in a choreographed mass. They all promoted revolutionary violence and calculated lies to try to seize the moment and control the past, the present and future.

Goldberg accordingly does humanity a favour by setting down a detailed reminder of just how far those same ruinous collectivist ideas (and to a degree methods and policies) appealed in democratic societies too. And why the turmoil of two World Wars led to the dramatic expansion in the role of the state and so helped bring a lot of those ideas into democratic practice, with consequences for us all today which are partly benign – but also partly not benign at all.

In short, Goldberg puts back on to the table core questions of political life:

Where might we need collective action to deal with issues which individual action can not solve?

And if we need collective action, is the State the best or only way to get good results?

To be continued 

I have been invited to take part in a debate in London later this year to discuss the proposition that "Western Policy in the Balkans since 1991 has been a Disaster".

As someone involved in formulating part of that policy I am down to argue against this proposition. What to say?

The strong case for those who argue that it was a disaster is easy to make. War. Ethnic Cleansing. Siege of Sarajevo. Srebrenica and other unbelievable atrocities. More War. Mass explusions. NATO bombing. Failure to catch Karadzic and Mladic. Some EU countries recognise Kosovo - others don't.

Phew. All (or most) brought about (or at least not prevented) by sustained Western dithering at a high level?

Masses of literature on all this. Brendan Simms' book which lambasts British policy at the time is worth reading (not just because he interviewed me at the FCO as he was writing it).

How to answer all this?

I need to think. But let's at least agree that the Balkan disasters of the past two decades are part of a wider drama of Bad Leaders. And how best to respond to them.

Bad Leaders are people who from ideology and/or mental instability accumulate formidable amounts of power, then (a) refuse to quit the scene after a reasonable time, and (b) start to brutalise and empoverish their own people and/or export instability.

These people are extremely hard to shift. By virtue of their Very Badness they are largely free from limits and disciplines of the sort our leaders have to respect. Bad Leaders draw on reserves of wickedness, corruption and improvisation which we can not match. Plus they control massive if not dominant domestic media firepower.

What to do about them? Tricky: 

• They thrive on external criticism from pro-democracy countries, as it allows them to play a facile but vociferous populist card: "The world is against us - and we stand firm against this neo-imperialist bullying!"
• Sanctions against the country concerned? "Bring 'em on! They'll degrade the local honest middle class and empower my gangster pals very nicely, thank you."
• Sanctions against Bad Leaders personally? "Pshaw. I don't want to travel to your nasty countries anyway!"
• Isolate them? "Great - now I can get on with being Bad without interruptions!"
• Engage with them through 'dialogue'? "Excellent - I knew they'd come back to me in the end! They always do..."
• Actively support the local democratic opposition? "See?! I told you so. Foreign meddling in our domestic affairs. Oh, and what a pity that human rights troublemaker's cousin had that nasty car accident..."
• Topple a Bad Leader and help an outstanding democratic leader come to power instead? "You think that you have defeated me ... but are you sure?" 

Ultimately (which can be a very long time) the misery somehow ends and more normal processes start again. Having been exhorted by whey-faced liberal do-gooders not to throw our weight around and try to topple the gangster regime concerned, Western governments are now urged to throw large amounts of taxpayers' money at mopping up the mess someone else created. Ho hum.

(I once sent a telegram to London from Sarajevo, the punchline of which was:"we have no choice but to hang in here. The locals know very well that if we try to extricate ourselves they'll start to cause massive trouble again - and it will be on TV". HM Treasury were not amused.)

So. If Western policy towards the former Yugoslavia collapse was a disaster, at least this time round it was not a Total Catastrophe.

And if anyone has some good ideas on how to shift Bad Leaders, please get in touch: mail@charlescrawford.biz    

More hitherto uncollated rock 'n' roll echoes from the arcane world of diplomacy.

By which I mean some sort of reference to actual diplomatic practice, not a passing word such as in Cheap Trick's "I Love you Honey but I Hate your Friends":

That limp wristed two-fisted diplomat
Better draw a map, to see where he's at

Or Elvis Costello's "Green Shirt":

Never said I was a stool pigeon
I never said I was a diplomat
Everybody is under suspicion
But you don't want to hear about that

Or even "Blinded by the Light" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band:

Madman drummers bummers indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat,
In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way in to his
hat.

Try instead the rarified atmosphere of high-level international relations as in Frank Zappa's "Rhymin' Man":

A few years later, legend says,
Rhymin' man made a run for Prez
Farrakhan made him a clown,
Over there near Hymie-Town
Said he was a diplomat --
Hobbin' an-a-knobbin' with Arafat
Castro was simpatico,
But the U.S. voters, they said: "No!"

And Michelle Shocked's impressive reference to the theory and practice of diplomatic immunity:

Oh Streetcorner Ambassador
It seems so clear to me
The more you are ignored
It's called diplomatic immunity

Not to forget immigration policy - George Harrison's magnificent "Awaiting on You All":

You don't need no passport
And you don't need no visas
You don't need to designate or to emigrate
Before you can see Jesus

More to follow.

Background on the fascinating saga of my leaked email back in 2005 which was splashed over the front page of the Sunday Times.

What do EU Budget negotiations and Clint Eastwood have in common?

Lots.

Once upon a time the EU decided that it needed a new Treaty to move itself on to the 'next stage' of development. So a 'Constitutional Treaty was drafted. And as there were controversial questions about its impact on national sovereignty, in some countries calls for a referendum became noisy.

Thus it was in 2004 that then PM Tony Blair announced that 'the British people would have the final say' on the Treaty. This was included in the 2005 Labour Manifesto: