Blogoir: August

Here's a funny thing.

The European Union has all sorts of firm things to say - and enforce - about how we should live nicely to save the planet.

Think of all those permits off-shore oil companies need to do anything which might damage the oceanic environment. And the various Bathing Water Directives needed to keep our beaches clean. And the way Science is thrown in our faces on climate change, to make us do things we otherwise might not do

It's therefore odd that when it comes to marine life, namely fish, the EU has a different approach:

Let disaster rip!

With subsidies, to speed it up! An example of a system that has come to symbolise the worst aspects of European governance.

Still, when the last fish from European seas has been lightly fried in oil and then guzzled somewhere in Spain, we'll still have Chris Squire: 

Did you know that August in the USA is National Make-a-Will Month?

No!

So get cracking.

Is here, hosted by Slugger O'Toole.

See especially this:

The reason any real scientist wants to share their data is precisely because somebody might find something wrong with it. That is what science is - the testing of theories against evidence.

Plus which is Supreme, Court or Parliament?

As the world forgets about Honduras again, the former President's hopes of returning to power look to be ebbing. Soon the country will be looking to new elections. Hurrah.

Here is an interesting piece about how the Organisation of American States might have managed its diplomacy differently. By suspending Honduras so speedily after the so-called 'coup' took place (the argument goes), the OAS ruled options out and reduced its own freedom of manoeuvre:

The OAS Secretary-General was given 72 hours to find a solution to the Honduran situation. He might just as well have been asked to push a huge boulder up a steep mountain. There was no way it could have been achieved given the high emotion that existed on all sides.

In giving him such a mandate, the OAS General Assembly was clearly pressed into their decision by a group of countries led by Venezuela, Argentina, Nicaragua and Bolivia (the key members of ALBA) who wanted their man, Manuel Zelaya, immediately back in the Presidency whether or not he had been removed in accordance with the Honduran Constitution and law.

As an important aside, let me say in this connection that however legally correct the impeachment of Zelaya may have been, the interim regime wrong-footed itself by having the military remove him from the country.

OAS Deputy Secretary-General Albert Ramdin rightly reminded that Secretary General Insulza acted under the orders of the General Assembly which had defined his role including that he “did not have an order to talk with representatives" of the interim government. What sort of mediation could the OAS expect of its Secretary-General in that context, except to fail?

Diplomacy at its best is subtle and painstaking and maybe invisible, hence unpopular with the public at large who like to see things 'happening'. 

In a situation like this a heavy diplomatic lunge by the OAS aimed at achieving a certain result might work. But it also might not, and in fact both reduce the credibility of outside OAS-sponsored mediators and make the key people involved more stubborn.

Which is what happened.

Then, as more facts appear some capitals move back from getting too 'involved' in something which looks like a diplomatic mess they unwittingly have helped create.

Technique and all that.

Commenting on my link to Sarah Palin's arguments on tort reform, reader Daniel Simpson mysteriously asks whether I have read Private Eye?

Private Eye, for non-British readers, is a British Institution. For nearly five decades now it's been serving up a capricious mix of insider gossip, scandal and satire/wit which hits many targets but not all.

Here is its website. And the Wikipedia entry gives a good summary of its range and verve.

I always especially liked their cartoons drawn by John Glashan, such as this masterpiece:

My only encounter with Private Eye came in 1983/84 in connection with the Helen Smith story.

This, astonishingly, is still not settled. Helen was a nurse who in 1979 fell to her death from a balcony in Saudi Arabia in circumstances which were never explained to the satisfaction of her father Ron Smith, a retired police officer. Her body still(!) lies in the mortuary of Leeds General Infirmary. Background here.

Ron Smith started to investigate the issue himself and became convinced that there was some sort of cover-up going on.

Private Eye weighed in, and started to make accusations about the role of the British Embassy in Saudi Arabia handling the tragedy. In particular, it alleged a cover-up led by a (then) junior consular officer who had gone to the scene of the death soon after the Embassy had heard about it.

The officer concerned eventually sued Private Eye for libel. I got to hear about the whole business in detail because that officer was posted at the Embassy in Belgrade. It was obvious that the magazine had not made an effort to find out how an Embassy worked but instead had been excessively, er, imaginative.

Private Eye eventually lost the case or threw in the towel - my colleague won substantial (for the time) damages.

One strange episode is worth recalling.

Part of the Eye's assertions to do with the Embassy centred on the way the documents from the hospital and other Saudi authorities had been handled, especially the autopsy report. This had been written by a Pakistani doctor in specialist but not necessarily accurate medical Arabic. The then Ambassador  (one of the UK Diplomatic Service's finest Arabists) himself had translated it, to give the best possible service to the bereaved family.

It turned out that the document sent to the Embassy had had a page missing, yet by a linguistic fluke this had not been obvious when the text was being translated, so the Ambassador and everyone else did not notice the omission.

Then it became clear that a page had not been translated.

Scandal! More cover-ups!

Here is a book which (it seems) continues to insist that the truth was concealed or at least never properly investigated. 

Anyway, to answer the question: No, I have not read Private Eye in years.

Maybe I should?

Mark Steyn on Budd Schulberg:

As a 20-year-old Dartmouth student, Schulberg visited the Soviet Union and was shown its artistic glories. He fell in love with the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Stanislavski’s wayward disciple. Meyerhold loved the older stylized dramatic forms—commedia dell’arte, pantomime—and refused to confine himself to Socialist Realism. So in 1939 Stalin had him arrested, tortured and his wife murdered. He was shot by firing squad in February 1940.

How about that? Executed over a difference of opinion about a directing style...

Even today, we continue to draw a distinction between Nazism and Communism—between the bad evil and the good evil, the evil that’s philosophically sound, admirably progressive and just ran into one or two problems on the ground, like a great movie idea that went off course in development.

I have written previously here about the Two Vampires, Nazism and Communism, which - and not by some chance - were closely related:

There is a form of 'European Identity based squarely on a profound Stalin-inspired 'law of the excluded middle' attempt to cast any objection to Communism as 'essentially' support for Fascism. This Vast Lie has been remarkably successful down the decades, and still gives all sorts of cover to extremist collectivist viewpoints of different shapes and sizes.

Here is a classic explanation of why these two ideologies have so much in common.

My very final telegram from Warsaw to the FCO was called the Final Submission. It talked at some length about the unrelenting psychological pressure on the West emanating from Moscow and echoed by Leftist forces round the planet to overlook communist crimes.

Such as those of Vasili Blokhin, the most prolific murderer in human history among whose many victims were 7000 Poles shot one by one in the Katyn massacre|:

Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber—which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room"—for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against.

Blokhin—outfitted in a leather butcher's apron, cap, and shoulder-length gloves to protect his uniform, then pushed the prisoner against the log wall and shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2.25 ACP pistol...

His count of 7,000 shot in 28 days remains one of the most organized and protracted mass murders by a single individual on record.

Sigh.

It all boils down to a simple question.

Nazism's collectivist death cult was, if you like, essentially irrational if not mad, but with manic method in the madness. All that raving about blood and Jews and maggots, combined with Germanic efficiency in rounding up so many Jews and Romas and Poles and others and then destroying them.

Stalinism's collectivist death cult by contrast was ultra rational. It was based on the idea that the end (Scientific Socialism) justified any means and in any case was inevitable as the communist Wheel of History rotated. Bourgeois and other opponents simply 'had' to be eliminated.

Surely an intelligent deliberate murderer is more morally guilty than a crazy one?

Put it this way.

Imagine that Hitler and Stalin had been captured at the end of WW2 and put on trial for their crimes.

Hitler's lawyers might have been able to mount some sort of defence argument based on Insanity - that he was so crazed by that in any sense that mattered he should not be regarded as legally responsible for his actions.

Stalin surely could not claim that. The record of his iniquity and his countless justifications of it and the documentation describing it would all show that he knew exactly what he was doing and meant to to do it.

So, yes, any normal person has to 'equate' Nazism and Communism and find nothing of any true significance to distinguish them.

If anything the very nihilistic 'rationality' of Communism makes it even worse.

A conclusion terrifying to today's Marxists-Lite such as Slavoj Zizek, who makes his position clear:

• Fascism has to be proclaimed to be fundamentally worse than Communism
• since the alternative is to see Fascism as a natural reaction to the Communist threat and therefore somehow a lesser evil.
• Which is bad since it weakens a "postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity"  

Indeed. A postwar Europe based on the biggest of all Stalinist Big Lies.

Truth will out.

Have soared!

The Treasury statistics show that the UK's net contribution to the EU will increase from £4.1 billion this year to £6.4 billion in 2010/11...

Last night the Conservatives branded government "incompetence" for the rise in contributions. The Opposition said the increased payments were the result of the "selling out" of Britain's annual EU rebate by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at an EU budget-setting summit 2005.

The latest Treasury figures also show that Britain is currently the second biggest net contributor, behind Germany. The new net UK contribution of £6.4 billion is the equivalent of £257 for every household in Britain – or 3p on the standard rate of income tax.

Britain's budget rebate – won by Margaret Thatcher in 1984 – is to shrink from £5.1 billion this year to £3.3 billion in 2010/11.

You need to know more about how these mechanisms precisely work than I do to explain what is happening here. How much if any of the jump in contributions arises from eg the Pound's movements against the Euro, or other 'natural' oscillations?

Plus it was always clear (I think) that our net contributions would rise over the EU's 2007/13 Budget period, since spending by new member states such as Poland would accelerate.

Whatever.

This article reminds me that I never finished the series of postings describing/explaining the 2005 EU Budget negotiations and the leaking of my infamous email.

I started writing all this up last year when the Blog was young, ie had no readers. So if anyone among the current throng of readers is interested, the most recent posting in the series is here. Read it and the two preceding ones, as they explain the way it all works at the higher level.

Then I'll get back to finishing the story.

Guardian writer Jonathan Steele dies, and as such goes straight to Hell.

He is greeted warmly by the Devil, who praises his life's work and offers him a choice of bijou accommodation. Jonathan peers uneasily through three windows.

In the first cell is Tito, screaming as he twists impaled on a Balkan stake, his juices dripping sizzlingly into eternal fire.

In the second is Hitler, howling as he is cut to pieces atom by atom by fiendish imps.

In the third is Stalin, slurping and slobbering, with Marillyn Monroe squealing in pain on his knee as he grossly abuses her, for ever.

"Hmm. If it's all right with you I'll pass on Hitler's hell and Tito's hell and opt for Stalin's hell - that third room."

"Granted. Please, pass in my son."

Jonathan enters the room. Clang. Locked in. For eternity.

"Oh, Jonathan my dear boy, just to be clear. That is not Stalin's hell. That's Marilyn Monroe's hell..."

Silence.

Then scuffling noises.

Then a very long shriek.

* * * * *

Here is Jonathan while he is still in our midst sharing his thoughts with us about the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact :

"... the issue is still a political football" 

You know, a bit like fox-hunting or MPs' expenses, issues people kick around to pass the time.

"... the issue matters as it marks an unpleasant effort by many Baltic and central European politicians to equate Stalinism and Nazism or claim Stalinism was worse" 

Unpleasant indeed! How dare these people make this nasty, grubby claims. Such poor form. Positively vulgar. It makes me shiver to think of it. Brrr.

"In part concerned by the continuing strength of former Communist parties in the region, they use the Nazi-Soviet "equation" as a device to smear any party of the left. (The draft resolution was watered down by left groups in the European parliament.)" 

Phew. Thank goodness for left groups in the European Parliament, holding the line against any such 'equation'.

"It is also a barely disguised attempt to maintain extreme wariness, if not outright hostility, to contemporary Russia." 

Good grief, these people are just stupid. Can't they see that Putin's peace-loving dismemberment of Georgia last year was in Georgia's and Europe's best interests?

"The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact certainly showed Stalin to be as cynical as Hitler." 

I accept that Stalin was cynical. You know, like David Cameron and Tony Blair, but not quite as odious and public-schooly.

"But to jump from that to equate the two men's record or ideology does not accord with reality." 

Let's jump from cynicism to the reality of Stalin's murder of many millions of people, and then be realistic.

"Nor does it take account of the fact that Soviet policy evolved after Stalin's death so that political activity, let alone ordinary family life, in the two decades under Brezhnev was not subject to arbitrary terror." 

No, let's not mention all those tiresome communist murders. Once Stalin left communism was all not so bad, really. No, really!

"Rightwing Baltic politicians have a point in saying most other Europeans are unaware of Stalin's mass deportations from the Baltics. Perhaps 100,000 people were sent to Siberia after 1939 or when the Red Army defeated the Nazis and re-entered the region. But to believe that western Europeans did not know about the Gulag ignores the massive influence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn after his books were translated into every European language in the 1970s."  

Huh? OK, we will mention some of them. But not the mass deportations of Poles, or Katyn, or the thousands of summary murders of democrats across Eastern Europe after WW2, or the blighted lives of millions of people. Only unpleasant Rightwing (sic) people dwell on such trivia.

"There is always more to learn, and historians are always trying to re-interpret. One of the biggest areas which remains to be explored is the extent of local civilian participation in the Nazis' central European killing fields." 

Quite so. The Nazis and Soviets were merely opening the way to all that latent evil in these unpleasant central European people. In a way, a sort of much-needed therapy for them - to get it all off their chests, once and for all.

"When it comes to numbers, Hitler's record is dominant. He killed almost twice as many people as Stalin. Snyder lists the number of European Jews murdered under German auspices at 5.7 million, German starvation of Soviet citizens at about 4 million and mass reprisal killings against civilians, mainly for actual or suspected partisan activity, as at least 750,000. Stalin killed about 5.5 million Soviet citizens by starvation and had about 700,000 people shot in the prewar Great Terror." 

Can't you people do elementary maths? Hitler killed about 10 million and Stalin killed only 5 million. So Hitler was twice as bad as Stalin, duh. In fact, Stalin was 50% less bad than Hitler, well on the way to being not bad at all.

So no way can you equate them.

NO WAY.

"There is a difference between memory and history ... But, important though it is to be reminded how the Soviet authorities (until 1989) blamed their 1940 massacre of imprisoned Polish officers on the Nazis, one should not forget that in Operation Tannenberg the Nazis killed a comparable number of Polish intellectuals a few months earlier." 

No, let one not forget that. In fact, it's far more important. Because as I have already pointed out to you dullards, life under Brezhnev was not subject to arbitrary terror, only unarbitrary terror, so the fact that the Soviets kept on lying for decades about Katyn is quite beside the point.

"Is there a moral?" 

In your case, Jonathan, no. Only an immoral.

"The Baltic Way's commemoration of Molotov-Ribbentrop sent a particular message in August 1989 by breaking a 50-year taboo and expressing a widespread demand for independence. But what was right in one part of Europe at a special moment should not be extended across the continent for ever."  

For ever is the time you'll spend in that cell being rogered by whiskery vodka-reeking Stalin, my friend.

But let's agree that until the Left stops making excuses for Stalinism and the Russian government opens all the communist archives once and for all and lets the truth out, we have to assume that Moscow's overall attitudes and motives remain at best ambiguous. Hence remembering events such as these plays an essential part in defining modern Europe.

"History is too complex and sensitive to be left to politicians. First they manipulate anniversaries, then they move to textbooks, and the slide gathers speed." 

Why have you started talking about Russia all of a sudden?

* * * * *

The. Most. Catastrophically. Bad. Guardian. Article.

Ever?

Today is the 70th anniversary of one of the greatest crimes in history: the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact.

These two villains scrawled a line through a map of Europe to show who would grab what, then signed it.

Here it is in two legendary cartoons by Herblock and Low:

Sarah Palin takes a well-aimed shot at one of the key drivers of soaring health costs in the USA (and the UK) - tort litigation:

...we cannot have health care reform without tort reform. The two are intertwined.

For example, one supposed justification for socialized medicine is the high cost of health care. As Dr. Scott Gottlieb recently noted, “If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he'll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.” 

Two examples of these “economic structures” are high malpractice insurance premiums foisted on physicians (and ultimately passed on to consumers as “high health care costs”) and the billions wasted on defensive medicine.

She quotes some figures:

The average obstetrician-gynecologist (OB-GYN) delivers 100 babies per year. If that OB-GYN must pay a medical liability premium of $200,000 each year (which is the rate in Florida), $2,000 of the delivery cost for each baby goes to pay the cost of the medical liability premium.”

Seems to me she's on to something.

The more so since the more medicine is 'socialised', the fatter the target for lawyers to aim at. If the government does not have the money to pay for any judgement it loses, why, just borrow some from future taxpayers.

Where is the moral hazard in that?

Lordy.

The BBC on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact:

The pact was signed by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Russian counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, in Moscow.

It led to the carving-up of Poland between Nazi Germany and the USSR, as well as the annexation by the USSR of eastern Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and northern Romania.

The western parts of Ukraine and Belarus, formerly Polish territory, were also incorporated into the Soviet Union.

At that point, believe some historians, a war in Europe became unavoidable.

Wha-a-a-a-t??

"At that point" a war in Europe had already started. The Nazi then Soviet onslaught against Poland was short but spectactularly brutal, with mass executions and attacks on civilians already in profusion. Polish casualties ran into many scores of thousands, with the Nazi invaders too paying dearly.

Or was there 'war' only when Poland's allies finally got round to fighting?

Lots of people are watching this.

So you must too.

And if you are unfortunate enough to watch the mawkish, trashy British equivalent of this show in the coming weeks, just remember what Talent is really all about - deftness, insight and moral sensibility.

Show us, Kseniya Simonova: 

A lot of issues are a bit like living next to a mountain which is so lofty and all-dominating that you stop noticing the vast shadow it casts, fretting over which tree gives you shade instead.

Take this erudite and trenchant essay (h/t Samizdata) about the deep problems of the US economy and the Western 'social model' more generally:

All the social democracies are facing similar fiscal dilemmas at almost the same time. Pay-as-you go social insurance is just not sustainable over the long run, despite the higher tax rates in other welfare States.

Even though the United States initiated social insurance later than most of these other welfare States, it has caught up with them because of the Medicare subsidy. In other words, the social-democratic welfare State will come to end, just as the socialist State came to an end.

Socialism was doomed by the calculation problem identified by Ludwig Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Mises also argued that the mixed economy was unstable and that the dynamics of intervention would inevitably drive it towards socialism or laissez faire. But in this case, he was mistaken; a century of experience has taught us that the client-oriented, power-broker State is the gravity well toward which public choice drives both command and market economies.

What will ultimately kill the welfare State is that its centerpiece, government-provided social insurance, is simultaneously above reproach and beyond salvation...

In other words, we are like people in a canoe, bickering over who holds the paddle yet oblivious of the deeper current sending us towards the steep waterfall round the corner.

Or take the NHS. How many people need to die 'needlessly' in British hospitals before the public rise up in fury? Quite a few:

A list of hospitals that have sparked safety alerts after unusually high numbers of patients died has been published by the NHS regulator.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) revealed details of all trusts where mortality rates were high enough to require a formal investigation in the past two years.

Overall, there were 85 alerts that required investigations among trusts in England, but of those only seven were required to produce action plans to improve their care.

These included Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, where an official report published in March found that appalling emergency care had led to between 400 and 1,200 patients dying needlessly.

Hullo?!

That's up to 1200 people dying 'needlessly' in one NHS Trust area? That number is getting up to Srebrenica, nay genocidal orders of magnitude.

Official reaction? Find an acronym no-one's heard of (here CQC) to give the impression that something is happening, and if that fails whip out a general public anaesthetic in the form of the start of the football season and X-Factor.

But in a way even these examples pale into insignificance compared to the next one:

The European Commission is proposing legislation to combat cross-border VAT fraud with a new database, Laszlo Kovacs, the European commissioner for taxation, said in a statement published yesterday (18 August).

The new system, dubbed Eurofisc, would give tax authorities across the EU access to VAT-relevant data from all member states...
     
The proposal is expected to encounter opposition from some member states.  
    
Studies estimate the revenue loss through VAT fraud at €200-250 billion each year.   

Yes. You can read.

That's a figure of €200 billion lost each year.

€200 billion!

Goodness knows where that figure comes from, although it is clear that 'carousel fraud' alone costs the UK taxpayer up to £2 billion per year:

Carousel fraud, also known as missing trader intra-community (MTIC) fraud, typically occurs when a company based in another EU country sells computer chips or mobile phones to a UK VAT-registered company.

VAT is not charged on the purchase but the fraud occurs when the buyer sells on the goods ­either in the UK or EU ­ and disapears before settling the VAT liability with HMRC. Goods can often go round many times in this way in just a few months.

I first came across this problem when HM Ambassador in Warsaw, hosting a visiting team of UK experts engaging with the Poles. They told me privately that the British government dared not reveal the true scale of the problem, since the numbers involved were so large.

The point in this sort of fraud is that the fraudsters do not hold back tax money from the government. They claim back VAT from the government via complex false invoicing - basically stealing money from honest taxpayers and directly diminishing the pot available for public spending.

Identifying such a racket and proving it to the point of being able to run a successful court case and bring down the gangsters responsible is hellishly difficult, the more so as the rackets mutate and the people involved cheerily hire top-end barristers to defend them.

In my darker moments (including when Mr and Mrs Crawf grapple with VAT paperwork, as we are VAT registered ourselves), I wonder whether the whole EU is now much more than a cover for VAT fraud. Right at its policy heart is VAT, a tax which generates bureaucracy and complexity and so opens the door to abuse and corruption (and ever-greater state control) on an ungraspable scale.

Yet so sprawling and unmanageable is the problem now, and so intertwined with the way the EU works, that it is impossible to do anything about it other than pile on more complexity. No national capital dares risk the row which would ensue if it called for VAT to be scrapped and replaced with a simple sales tax (which would of course not be problem-free either).

Where was I..?

Stop being horrid, it's my turn with the paddle.

Ooo, isn't the river flowing nice and fast now...

Andrew Ian Dodge adds a further gloss in a comment on my posting below:

Yep, its me. One hopes that no one would fake being me.

I understand your point of view and needless to say respect it as its private "property". In any case your policy needs to be posted on your blog so people know

Fair enough. The Terms and Conditions of this site are already there, tucked away at the bottom of the front page and maybe should be made more prominent.

And his email makes another useful point indirectly - you really do not know who is actually doing the commenting on your site.

It would not be too difficult for anyone to crank up a plausible email address sounding like one belonging to someone else and then to start posting all sorts of disobliging things here and there, polluting the sites used to do so and creating problems for the person being 'impersonated'. Another reason why keeping an eye on comments is no more than common sense, and in any case not 'censorship'.

But there is also the 'let it rip' school of thought - allow a comment free-for-all (perhaps deleting obvious spam rubbish). This of course is maybe not a bad idea in legal defence terms - to let such a torrent of random noisy inchoate obscenity and even racism flow that no-one credibly can claim to take anything written there seriously, hence no law suits.

Reader Julian Dobson:

The sad fact is that the most offensive blogs, like the most offensive newspapers, appear to attract the most readers. That doesn't mean you have to join in

Quite so. And I don't.

But there is something in the sheer energy and stamina of the best swear-blogs, who just don't live in my world of nuance and a certain quizzical circumspection. See eg Devil's Kitchen on the Lockerbie bomber episode:

Well, might I suggest, Shane, that instead of taking this shit at face value, you go and do some research into the evidence—or lack of it—and the conduct of the trial—which was condemned by independent UN observer as bringing "the entire Scottish legal system into disrepute".

There is, you see, a very simple reason why al-Megrahi should be released:

HE DIDN'T FUCKING DO IT.

Well, that's clear then. 

Andrew Ian Dodge of the heavy metal school of politics part of the blogosphere (assuming that it is indeed that Andrew Ian Dodge) replies to my earlier posting today about the responsibility if any which bloggers have for comments posted by others on their sites:

In a word no. You post a disclaimer that you are not to be held responsible for your comments and leave it that. If you censor your comments then you become no better than the MSM sites.

I have to say that I disagree. See my firm but droll Terms and Conditions:

Most of the noise generated by Foreign Secretary David Miliband's observations on a BBC Great Lives radio programme has been linked to his words on terrorism:

Asked by presenter Matthew Parris whether there were any circumstances in which terrorism was justified, Mr Miliband said: ‘Yes, there are circumstances in which it is justifiable, and yes, there are circumstances in which it is effective.’

He added: ‘The importance for me is that the South African example proved something remarkable: the apartheid regime looked like a regime that would last forever, and it was blown down.

It is hard to argue that, on its own, a political struggle would have delivered. The striking at the heart of a regime’s claim on a monopoly of power, which the ANC’s armed wing represented, was very significant.’

Eeek.

Where to start?

On the Miliband/terrorism point, the FS was either simply wrong or missed a key point.

It is not whether terrorism is 'morally justifiable'. It is whether those who use terrorist methods to win power are more likely than not to use terror to stay in it.

Insofar as South Africa has emerged from apartheid 'peacefully' and today is in not too bad shape, it is because the ANC/SACP did not use terrorism (other than against fellow Africans which as we know did not count) on any great scale.

On the whole (and wisely, albeit at great cost) the South African masses did not rise up violently against apartheid, but let unrelenting pressures and contradictions of different shapes and sizes erode it.

In fact, if there was an ANC/SACP armed struggle at all it was against other African groupings (PAC/AZAPO/Inkatha). Which is why some 30,000 Africans and almost no 'whites' were massacred in South Africa's legendary Peaceful Transition to Democracy.

Plus the ANC/SACP/UDF in the mid-1980s had a clear policy of unleashing 'the worse, the better' revolutionary terror in the townships, with necklacings and other horrors being perpetrated by groups of demonic school-children. Hence, 20+ years later, South Africa's amazing violent crime rate.

In short, ANC/SACP terrorism did not 'blow down' apartheid. P W Botha's heart attack and the collapse of Communism in Europe did.

The BBC link to the interview coyly describes Joe Slovo as a 'leading member of the ANC and the first Housing Minister in Nelson Mandela's government'. The point, of course, is that Slovo was the leading South African communist and formal head of the 'military wing' of the ANC/SACP alliance. Slovo was at the heart of ANC/SACP policy-making for years, plus a close suck-up of Moscow and  vigorous apologist for Communism anywhere he found it.

So here we have the ghoulish spectacle of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband extolling the merits of this dark character, a great friend of his own Marxist father Ralph Miliband.

Slovo by the usual standards of Communists was something of a moderate and pragmatist. He had to be. Years of exile forced him to grasp that the South African masses were not to be mobilised for a brisk, amazingly violent surge aimed at toppling apartheid. And he seems to have been avuncular in large doses, chatting over Marxist ideology with assorted Milibands. What a great life indeed!

Yet Slovo has to bear a significant responsibility for the carnage inflicted by the SACP/ANC in the townships in its drive for sole power as apartheid ended, and the calamitous crime-rate thereafter. Not an issue I suspect the Miliband family has given much thought to, such is the Labour Party's fevered admiration for the ANC/SACP.

Plus, while Slovo was devoted to the cause of freedom for South Africans, he was openly and shamefully against freedom for those trying to cast off communism.

See how the SACP urged Moscow to suppress the pro-freedom movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Slovo later claimed to have had personal doubts about this, but fealty to Moscow was a prerequisite for leadership in the anti-apartheid struggle. And that was what counted, not some higher principle of real empowerment and freedom for all.

His ideological writings were ghastly beyond description. His famous piece Has Socialism Failed written in 1990 is a cracker of the genre. It agonizes over the ruin which has come to the classic Communist project as the Berlin Wall crashed, and meanders in a jargonised pseudo-logical way towards a purported condemnation of the 'Stalinism' which Slovo had championed for most of his life.

Avuncular Joe scratches for nuggets of Marxist hope in the wreckage:

The transformations which have occurred in Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria are revolutionary in scope. With the exception of Romania, is there another example in human history in which those in power have responded to the inevitable with such a civilised and pacific resignation?

We should remember De Gaulle's military response in 1968 when ten million workers and students filled the streets of Paris. It is not difficult to forecast how Bush or Thatcher would deal with millions in their streets supported by general strikes demanding the overthrow of their system of rule.

Huh?

Of course for Slovo Communism in fact did quite well in lots of respects:

Among other things, statistics recently published in The Economist (UK) show that in the Soviet Union - after only 70 years of socialist endeavour in what was one of the most backward countries in the capitalist world - there are more graduate engineers than in the US, more graduate research scientists than in Japan and more medical doctors per head than in Western Europe. It also produces more steel, fuel and energy than any other country (The World in the 1990s; Economist publication).

How many capitalist countries can match the achievements of most of the socialist world in the provision of social security, child care, the ending of cultural backwardness, and so on? There is certainly no country in the world which can beat Cuba's record in the sphere of health care.

Lies and/or specious drivel.

It was all just a mistake:

We believe, however, that the theory of Marxism, in all its essential respects, remains valid and provides an indispensable theoretical guide to achieve a society free of all forms of exploitation of person by person.

The major weaknesses which have emerged in the practice of socialism are the results of distortions and misapplications. They do not flow naturally from the basic concepts of Marxism whose core is essentially humane and democratic and which project a social order with an economic potential vastly superior to that of capitalism.

My own abiding personal memory of Slovo comes from 1990, a huge rally organised by the ANC/SACP in Jo'burg soon after they were unbanned. Slovo was the final speaker. The crowd had been brought to life by the late Chris Hani leading rounds of cheery Kill the Boer chants and dancing.

Slovo at last rose to speak. Perhaps the proudest moment of his career to date.

And as he started droning on, the Africans started to go home in their droves. Who was this boring old white man anyway?

Slovo on centre-stage could see for himself what was happening. The South African masses were at last voting freely, albeit with their feet. And not for him!

The more impassioned his voice as he glorified the SACP/ANC, the faster people left. It was really remarkable. By the time he finished he was almost shouting, but to desultory applause - the stadium was close to empty.

All the pro-ANC media and its white Leftist elite of course ignored this astonishing spectacle in reporting the event. It was not just appallingly embarrassing for themselves in their self-proclaimed intellectual leadership roles. Worse, far worse, it did not fit the Narrative.

Was Slovo's a 'great life'? In its own tenaciously dogmatic, blinkered, selfish blood-flecked way, perhaps it was.

Does he deserve a fawning BBC piece led by a British Foreign Secretary?

No.

If Mr Miliband is looking for a real Great Life hero, why not go for a poorly educated working man who led a true bloodless democratic revolution in the part of Europe where the Slovo and Miliband families came from?

Such as this one.

Matthew Cain asks whether bloggers have responsibilities for material posted on their blogs by others:

Yet more UK pupils are getting A grades at A-Level.

Since on the face of it there is no evidence that our progeny are smarter than we are (and plenty pointing in exactly the opposite direction), is the only explanation that the exams are getting easier? Thus:

A survey found that teachers believe A-levels have become so straightforward that monkeys could be trained to answer the questions.

The poll, for think-tank Civitas, revealed that teachers believe the systems allows the same calibre of students to achieve higher grades.

A director of A-levels from a school in the North West said: 'The A-level is not aimed at the same people as it was 30 years ago; a larger cohort must have easier exams or too many would fail.

'You could train a monkey to do the questions today!'

One in eight children achieved 3 As.

Disaster? Are we as a nation getting more dopey and (worse) thinking that we are getting smarter?

Hmm.

Yet, as the A grades are clocked up, a warm glow of satisfaction seeps through even the most cynical parent, namely me. Hey, you can only do your best, whatever the standard someone else sets.

Where a good education gets you these days: 

One thing we Brits (sic) like to do (see this blog and many others) is to pore over the ethnic and other divisions in countries beyond our fog-bound shores and try to come up with ingenious outcomes for them.

See eg Bosnia/Afghanistan/Kashmir/Cprus and so on and on. You name a conflict or problem - somewhere whirring away in the background will be a clever Brit trying to work up a 'possible solution'.

My recent postings on Bosnia have this flavour - look at the gruesome divisions in this so-called state, and how even the most basic national symbols such as flags are disputed.

Partly this is habit, drawn from the days of our imperial reach round the globe. Plus there is UK membership of the UN Security Council and many other groupings which have leadership roles in global affairs.

And, I think, we are quite good at it - British superciliousness and know-it-all attitudes are damn annoying to everyone else on Earth, but we do bring along too our unique traditions of pragmatic yet sophisticated fairness and process which help make a positive difference in many contexts.

What we are 200% Utterly Hopeless about is looking at our own divisions and contradictions in any coherent fashion.

And maybe this is itself a source of collective British genius. An ability to accept all manner of divisions and contradictions and let them play themselves out in an unplanned, improvised, quirky evolutionary sort of way.

Rather than plunge into open conflict and institutional collapse, we have all sorts of mechanisms (some formal/explicit, some informal and even unconscious) which lead us into new compromises which set new precedents and guide a way in future disputes.

All of which is a convoluted way of urging readers to read this piece and plenty more from the Britology blog if you want to see just how confused and baffling our own ideas and procedures and nomenclature are when it comes to defining 'national' issues.

Thus a demolition job on Gordon Brown's resounding defences of Britishness:

Brown refers to Scotland, Wales, N. Ireland and England (let’s get the order right) as ‘nationalities’, not explicitly as nations. This implies that there aren’t four nations in the UK but just four distinct national identities that have fused to form a single British nation.

But, ironically, this bizarre coinage makes the indigenous peoples of these islands seem like uprooted immigrants to Britain: having a nationality distinct from the nation (Britain) in which they now live. In fact, ‘nationality’ is more commonly used to refer to a person’s official national identity: their citizenship. We talk of ‘British nationality’ but of the ‘nations’ and national identities of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland (and Cornwall, for some). 

This linguistic confusion marks out the way Brown turns the realities of British national identities on their head: ‘British’ is in reality the name of a ‘mere nationality’ (citizenship, statehood).

But Brown wants to make Britain out to be a nation and the core national identity of its citizens. If Britain becomes a nation, then the ‘lesser’ term of ‘nationality’ can be applied to the UK’s historic national communities.

... The state as nation; and the nations as superseded, nationalistic ‘nationalities’. 

If that is not enough, look at the row over the National Health Service. What exactly are we talking about, folks?

And I thought Yugoslavia and its narodi and narodnosti were complicated...

So we wheezed our way up the windy hill to see the legendary White Horse near Uffington, an elegant ancient horse motif cut into the Wessex chalk uplands.

When we got there, two things immediately struck us.

First, the Horse is not obvious.

All you can see are slender lines of chalky areas surrounded by grass. The Horse is wonderful if you are high in the sky, otherwise pretty hopeless. Odd that our distant ancestors did not cut the figure into a steeply sloping area just below, where one would have seen it from on high as well as from a nearby rise. Bit of a Bronze Age failure to think sensibly about the future tourist industry?

Second, a group of trans-Atlantic-sounding New Age tourists of all known genders were perched on the hillside above the Horse. They were listening intently to a guide explaining how the CIA had funded America's scary 1950s alien invasion movies aiming to create a national mood of fear both of other nations and of Otherness in general. And the Catholic Church had for centuries whipped up fear of Nature's Spirituality, or somesuch.

Well, we never knew all that.

So, back down we went. All the wiser.