Blogoir: January

Here's an interesting one for those of you interested in the former Yugoslavia space and communism in general. What about the massed archives of the former Yugoslav secret police (UDBA)?

Part of the problem with the fomer Yugoslavia space is that there has been no popular movement in favour of pluralism. All that happened as Yugoslavia broke up was a succession of populist moves led by the communist elites in regional capitals against Belgrade. Insofar as the masses were mobilised, it was on an anti-Serb 'nationalist' basis - "Let's break from Belgrade and we'll be free!" If there were in those protests voices calling for an end to communist rule, they were at best muted.

This issue arose in Sarajevo when I was there. The Izetbegovic Bosniac/Muslim elite who took over in Sarajevo were delighted to grab whatever they could of the localformer communist secret police archives and then use that material against their enemies. The idea of throwing open the archives and breaking the psychological grip of UDBA-isation was inconceivable to these people, even though all of them had been persecuted by UDBA themselves!

This is what I said on the subject in a speech to a gathering of Bosniac intellectuals in Sarajevo 1998:

Let me offer one more example of the Bosniac leadership sending an unhappy political signal to their fellow countrymen and to the international community.

During the Yugoslav period Mr Izetbegovic and thousands of other Bosnians were persecuted by the Yugoslav secret police. According to an article in Ljiljan the post-war Communist regime actually murdered tens of thousands of Yugoslav citizens. Having survived this persecution the Bosniac leadership might have decided to follow the shining example of President Havel in the Czech Republic and open up the secret police archives to full public scrutiny.

This would have dealt a massive blow in favour of freedom and democracy. Bosnia and Herzegovina would have set the rest of Europe an example of openness, making a clean break with the repressive past.

Yet what has happened? These secret police archives are not private property. They belong to the BH state, and hence to all Bosnian citizens. But these Yugoslav secret police archives are not public. No democratic accountability has been brought in. Those archives in Sarajevo are being controlled by a narrow unaccountable group of people for cynical and reactionary political purposes.

The current situation is a disgrace. It is high time these archives were made public or at least brought under normal democratic control.

Many of you here today were spied on by the Yugoslav secret police simply for believing in God or for having liberal ideas. Why should you not see the lies and distortions they wrote about you on your file?

You Bosniac intellectuals here today will do your country a great service if you demand publicly that this happen forthwith, and certainly before the September elections.

Result? Nothing.

Nor did the High Representative take up the issue - the OHR senior folk had no background in former Yugoslavia and did not see the point in bothering.

When I was Ambassador in Belgrade the Djukanovic elite in Montenegro were another fine case, shamefully rummaging around in the UDBA archives to drag up what they claimed to be incriminating material involving me from my first Yugoslav posting in 1981/84. Liars.

So what has happened in the absence of any opening up of these archives across the former Yugo-space? In each new country the ex-UDBA elite have prospered, largely unconcerned with any threat of transparency and accountability for what they did in the communist period and thereafter.

The good news? Surely EU processes have changed things for the better eg in Slovenia, now a full EU member?

Seems not. The archives have been declassified and opened to the public. But the public are not allowed to actually see them?

The Grumpy Hermit is on the case:

A law of 2005 declassified UDBA archives and opened them to the public. They now reside at the Archive of the Republic of Slovenia. Dr Dragan Matić, the Archive’s Director, refused Mr Omerza’s request to access the archive. Dr Matić claims he consulted SOVA, the present-day secret service of Slovenia, about Mr Omerza’s request and SOVA told him to deny Mr Omerza’s request.

Zvonko Černač, Chairman of the Parliamentary Security Services Oversight Committee, which has the legal authority to access all the secret service documents, whether currently classified or not, launched an enquiry. SOVA refused to co-operate with the enquiry and has denied the Committee access to the contentious documents.

What's going on (added emphasis)?

The Cabinet and Prime Minister Borut Pahor are backing SOVA, although they too, implicitly acknowledge that SOVA and the Archive are acting unlawfully. They have drafted emergency legislation which has been submitted into a fast-track parliamentary procedure. Parliament will consider the legislation on Monday 31 January 2011.

The legislation, if approved by the Parliament, will legalize SOVA’s behaviour and will apply retrospectively. The measure has trumped everything else on the Government’s legislative agenda, including emergency measures needed to deal with the economic crisis.

The Government’s official explanation is that the measure is needed to protect the national interest, that Slovenia’s image internationally would suffer, and that certain Slovene citizens living abroad would face prosecution in their countries of residence if the information being requested were made public.

Why?

It is believed the documents contain information about the involvement in international terrorism by people who are still alive and are today powerful political leaders on the political left, as well as possibly by Slovene citizens presently living abroad.

One of those named by the media as potentially liable to be embarrassed by the disclosures is the country’s President, Danilo Türk. Specifically, questions have been raised about the extent of his knowledge and involvement in the terrorist attack on Austria in 1979.

So there it is. Once again Europe's former communists - even those feted as democrats in the EU - close ranks to hide evidence of their former dirty deeds.

This is why Stalinism is 'worse' than Nazism. Because it lives on and pollutes the European political moral atmosphere in an insidious way.

And because Europe's real democratic leaders shamefully sniff the putrid air and turn away, chattering in bright loud voices about any other subject that comes along, pretending the stench isn't there.

I remember a senior American diplomat arriving at the FCO in 1992 and describing just how busy he was helping get US food aid to a Russia left reeling after the abrupt collapse of communism. We genteel Brits were startled when he described himself as 'drinkin' from a pressure-hose'. The imagery!

Still, we're all now firmly attached to the nozzle of the pressure-hose gushing out all those articles, comments, Tweets and everything else about Egypt and what it means.

This one by Leon Wieseltier caught my eye. It drills down into what is surely a strategic failure by the Obama Administration, namely surrendering any serious leadership on the subject of 'freedom' for fear of putting at risk its softer post-Bush outreach to the so-called Muslim world.

It has some superb passages:

The wholesale repudiation of Bush’s foreign policy included the rejection of anything resembling his “freedom agenda,” which looked mainly like an excuse for war. But whatever one’s views of the Iraq war, it really does not seem too much to ask of American liberals that they think a little less crudely about democratization—not only about its moral significance but also about its strategic significance.

... It is a common error that prudence is thought about the short-term; the proper temporal horizon for prudential thinking is distant and long. Realism does not equip one for an adequate appreciation of the historical force of the democratic longing.

In this sense, realism is singularly unrealistic. It seems smart only as long as the dictators remain undisturbed by their people, and then suddenly it seems incredibly stupid.

And this:

It was a terrible mistake for Obama to make democratization seem like an “imposition,” with its imperialist implications, and to conflate it with military invasion.

The promotion of democracy is a policy of support for indigenous Egyptian, or Arab, or Muslim democrats who are just as authentic as indigenous Egyptian, or Arab, or Muslim autocrats and theocrats, and certainly more deserving of American respect. It is a policy—to borrow Gibbs’s words—of taking sides—specifically, of taking sides with peoples against regimes.

It does not create dissidents, in some sort of ugly-American conspiracy; it finds them, and then it assists them, because they are in need of assistance, and because assisting them expresses our values and our interests.

This is spot on. The astounding failure of Washington (with Brussels and EU capitals meekly tucking in behind) to articulate a strong moral and political case for regime change in Iran when so many Iranians actually wanted something like our form of pluralism has left 'the West' floundering in response to the upheavals in north Africa now.

The main problem for us and indeed for Egypt is that insofar as there is any coherent world-view in Egypt, it appears to be yet more Muslims-as-victims lumpen Islamistic ideology. The prospects of the tumult leading in the short term to something like a 'normal' democratic new form of government in Egypt must be close to nil.  

That said, for decades too long we have nodded deferentially at the different dreary national socialistic regimes sprawled across the Middle East, somehow caught between the racist view that 'Arabs can't run a modern open society' and a fear of anything which might threaten 'stability'.

The end of the Cold War in Europe was the moment for trying to offer a new reform path to the Middle East as we did over many years to communist Europe, but too much attention was sucked into the Yugoslavia fiasco. 

So if anything the problem is not that Arabs/Muslims of the region have been helpless victims of Western manipulation - the problem is that they have largely been left by us to rot in sub-standard autocracies on their own terms, give or take huge sums of defence and other support thrown at Egypt by Washington for many years. What a dismal return on all that investment.

Here is one other article on Egypt which again strikes me as hitting many right targets, this time by Paul Goodman at Conservative Home:

Imagine a series of Muslim Brotherhood-led governments in the Middle East.  Would they be more or less likely than present ones to promote equal opportunities and religious minorities?  To pursue economic reform and, yes, civil liberties?  To seek a two-state solution for Israel/Palestine? 

To back Hamas or the Palestinian Authority?  To shrug at Iran's drive for nuclear weapons?  To support the Taliban in Afghanistan, where our troops are serving?  To be better disposed to liberal democracies, as they pursue the integration of state and religion?  To back and fund Islamists in Britain who support attacks on civilians or on our allies? 

He also quotes Sir D Plumbly, formerly HM Ambassador to Cairo:

"Obviously, it is desirable to talk to Islamists if we can...But I also detect a tendency for us to be drawn towards engagement for its own sake, to confuse "engaging with the Islamic world" with "engaging with Islamism", and to play down the very real downsides for us in terms of the Islamists' likely foreign and social policies, should they actually achieve power in Egypt."

Still, that looks like the safe way to bet. Let's conclude gloomily on that note with Brian Micklethwait who as always sums it all up deftly:

My understanding is that this is not one of those enjoyable melodramas where there are Good Guys and Bad Guys, when we here in the comfortable seats (the ones outside Egypt) can all cheer the Good Guys and jeer the Bad Guys.

My understanding is that there are the Bad Guys as in the government, the Good Guys as in the people who would just love to be living in a nice civilised country which respects human rights and where there is dignity and freedom and whatever is the Egyptian for apple pie, with a thriving economy for all etc. (with no Jews or Americans screwing everything up) …

and then there are the Other Bad Guys, aka the Muslim Brotherhood, who would like nothing better than to see Egypt reduced to ruins, to take charge of the ruins, and then to ruin the ruins a whole hell of a lot more.

The Good Guys are now so angry with the first lot of Bad Guys that they either don't realise or don't care that they may be playing right into the hands of the Other Bad Guys.

Basically, we in Europe are like a group of wealthy homeowners on the smart side of the pond who have watched with disdainful unconcern the dull-witted mafia families in the slums some way across the water. Now all the mafia houses are collapsing and we grasp - too late - that the noisy violent disarray could easily affect our property values, or worse our way of life itself.

Where is Diplomatic Judgement in all this, I wonder, from the Suez crisis onwards?

Attentive readers recall that a year ago I joined a group of former British Ambassadors in setting up ADRg Ambassadors, a new panel selling professional diplomatic consulting, training and mediation skills to support 'corporate diplomacy'.

Here is what I wrote at the time.

Since then we have been busy 'building the brand' to good effect, to the point that we are now considering reorganising ourselves in a formal LLP format. Indeed, if you type 'corporate diplomacy' into Google on my Google settings at least, ADRg Ambassadors come out towards the top. Hurrah.

What, though, actually is 'corporate diplomacy'? The expression has been out there for a while without any clear understanding of what, if anything, it means.

Thus the University of Kent's Conflict Analysis Research Centre in 2009 offered a three-day course on it:

Last year I wrote about Timothy Snyder's monumental Bloodlands, the history of the carnage wreaked across central Europe by the C20's two twin collectivist totalitarianisms, Communism and Nazism.

I warned against Left collectivist apologists for Stalin such as Slavoj Zizek:

We dare not underestimate the danger which people like Zizek represent. In themselves they are moral and political nano-particles. Their true significance lies in the fact that they are spores carrying totalitarian DNA, floating hither and thither through the once balmy but now increasingly stale air of post-modern Europe, waiting to land on some new, fertile soil and start to grow again

Indeed, in some respects the supporters of the EU in its current form show that they agree with this analysis. They justify their opposition to fundamental reform  by warning implicitly or explicitly that without the European Union as it is, Europe would slump back into open conflict and paranoia.

Part of the objection to Bloodlands came from assorted Leftists who bewailed the very notion that Snyder somehow equated Communism with Nazism, thereby calling into question the validity of the 'anti-fascist' struggle.

Professor Snyder has written another piece tackling the issue more or less head-on: Hitler vs Stalin: Who Was Worse? 

But is he afraid of what he finds? Thus:

Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers.

The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did.

That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations.

What is that stray 'disconcertingly' adverb all about? What is disconcerting and to whom about the fact of communist massacres carried out for national socialist reasons?

The sheer scale of the madness - and its varying motivations - is still hard to grasp:

Beyond the numbers killed remains the question of intent. Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an ideologically-informed vision of modernization. Germany bears the chief responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism.

Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or assimilated. Such plans, though unfulfilled, provided the rationale for the bloodiest occupation in the history of the world. 

So Stalin's killings were quasi-rational (ideologically-informed vision of modernization) whereas Hitler's killings were all about a more abstract (insane?) vision of racial imperialism. How would these issues be looked at in a court of law?

I wrote about this in August 2009, but it's good stuff so let's repeat some of it now:

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.

Snyder pokes about uneasily in the intellectual rubble of our efforts to put our post-WW2 heads round all this:

During the cold war, it was sometimes hard for Americans to see clearly the particular evils of Nazis and Soviets. Hitler had brought about a Holocaust: but Germans were now our allies. Stalin too had killed millions of people: but the some of the worst episodes, taking place as they had before the war, had already been downplayed in wartime US propaganda, when we were on the same side.

We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom.

Really? Surely the conventional wisdom was and is that Hitler was by far the worse. Hence the fact that Nazi memorabilia are eschewed by decent people, whereas shiny Communist memorabilia are sold as desirable collectors' items in smart London salons.

Snyder concludes on another tentative note:

It was a war that Hitler wanted, and so German responsibility must predominate; but in the event it began with a German-Soviet alliance and a cooperative invasion of Poland in 1939. Somewhere near the Stalinist ledger must belong the thirty million or more Chinese starved during the Great Leap Forward, as Mao followed Stalin’s model of collectivization.

The special quality of Nazi racism is not diluted by the historical observation that Stalin’s motivations were sometimes national or ethnic. The pool of evil simply grows deeper...

Given that the Nazis and the Stalinists tended to kill in the same places, in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, and given that they were, at different times, rivals, allies, and enemies, we must take seriously the possibility (sic) that some (sic) of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility.

A bizarre, disappointing way to put it! As if someone is seriously asserting that there is any doubt on the matter?

Back to Common Law. If two killers conspire to kill and steal on a vast scale, the fact that the killing gets out of control or goes beyond what they planned or leads to them falling out and fighting each other is neither here nor there. They are both equally guilty of launching a criminal enterprise and share equal responsibility for anything which occurred as a result. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact falls squarely into that category.

So, which of these murdering monsters was in fact 'worse'?

Let those who wish to argue about that do so. But let's not lose sight of the key issue. That they and the ideologies they each represented were both murdering monsters.

In any case, Stalinism/communism has proved to be more pernicious. It is still not possible today in Europe to muster the common resolve to put aside a tiny fraction of EU taxpayers' money to pay for a programme to find and unearth all the mass graves of communism's WW2 and post-WW2 victims and help identify the bodies using DNA tracing.

I have raised this issue personally with William Hague. Some other EU foreign ministers are interested. Let's see if we can get some action at long last.

Because if honouring the massed European victims of European killers is not an EU 'strategic priority', what is?

A sign on a run-down barn spotted on my morning dog-walk in deepest Oxfordshire:

G R

People throwing stones

at telegraphs

will be prosecuted

Egypt faces more or less spontaneous mass unrest aimed at toppling President Mubarak, who has been in power too long for anyone's good.

Great swathes of Egypt's Internet access has been shut down. James Cowie is following:

This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.

What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet? What will happen tomorrow, on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up.

Whereas we all will be pleased to see an end to Egypt's tired national socialist regime brought about by people power, we may not be too pleased if the people with the most intense 'feelings', ie radical Islamists, take over in the confusion.

Meanwhile back in plumply prosperous Davos, President Sarkozy spells it out:

Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, he told speculators to be prepared for big losses if they bet against the euro. “[Germany’s] Chancellor Merkel and myself will never – do you hear me, never – let the euro fall,” he said.

“The euro is Europe. And Europe spells 60 years of peace. Therefore we will never let the euro go or be destroyed… To those who bet against the euro, watch out for your money because we are fully determined to defend the euro.”

Briskly put.

Yesterday in London I heard an eloquent defence of the Eurozone by one of the UK's leading experts thereon. His basic point was that it was impossible for the Eurozone to fail without a massive disruptive collapse of some sort or the other - even the hint that a country might leave the Eurozone would get its citizens wiring their money to other places, crashing the banking system.

More. If (say) Italy left the Zone and tried to benefit from cheaper exports, surely (say) France would do whatever was necessary to keep those Italian goods out?

In short, the brutal end of the single European market and the crash of sixty years of steady peaceful integration. Not something (say) President Sarkozy seems ready to let happen. 

Much more likely, our expert said, was a new determination to create in effect a new sort of Eurozone in which certain economically strong countries plus the Commission in effect ran the economies of those weaker countries in return for putting up the money to keep the weaker ones alive. The sheer weight of this phenomenon (and its core creditworthiness, based on Germanic discipline) could pose a significant competitive problem for the profligate ill-disciplined USA economy and polity in a few years' time.

Europe - reborn! With the UK left sadly outside peering through the window!

Afterwards I asked him about the implications of this new set-up for Democracy As We Have Known It. "Well, in a country of 300 million people government is bound to be a bit remote..."

Hmm.

Think about it. If (say) Germany is in effect deciding what taxes get levied in (say) Spain and what major infrastructure projects get approved or not, isn't that a form of colonialism? Hard to imagine the system not being rigged so that any spare flexibility benefits the strong Germans and not the weak Spaniards.

For how long will proud Spanish taxpayers and unemployed people be ready to take unchallenged orders from Berlin/Brussels before they 'go Egypt'?

In our new turbulent Facebook-mobilised populist world, insofar as any government system is capable of being described as 'stable' it probably finds that stability based in a popular sense of legitimacy/authenticity. Does there come a point where 'remoteness' of government simply = illegitimacy?

Would a Eurozone based on such governmental remoteness - in effect based on at best surly acquiescence  by much of the Eurozone's space - really be credible? Or sustainable?

And even if we are left peering through the window, at least we'll be free to walk away from the window and make our own minds up. Reminding me of this thought:

Someone once put it to me that the issue is rather simple.

Would the UK rather be Canada, or Illinois? An independent but (relatively small) next-door neighbour to a Big Power, or part of that power but with only an intermittent regional and almost non-existent international voice?

Maybe part of the problem is that people here on all parts of the political spectrum just aren't sure, but would like the chance to talk it through and take a vote?

Is that really so mysterious? Or 'viscerally hostile to the European enterprise'?

You non-Slavists out there must be wondering why so many Russian and Central/East European women tennis names end in -ova.

Such as Maria Sharapova:

Luckily there is a handy and quite extensive explanation on YouTube: 

Is delivered to Glenn Reynolds by Michael Yon, who knows a thing or two about military work at the sharp-end:

What I can say is that it sounds like the US Marines are waging death and destruction on the Taliban in a way the Taliban are not used to. Average patrol finds 1 IED and kills 1 Taliban and they are going night and day.

More, please.

Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhh.

The BBC is cutting some language services on the World Service:

The Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian services will be axed, as will English for the Caribbean and Portuguese for Africa, in a bid to save £46m a year

Pa kako je to uopste moguce, bre? Sramota!

One of the few (but real) advantages of moving house to a smaller dwelling is that you are firmly confronted with your own nostalgic insecurity. All around you are possessions - books, furniture, pictures, records, stuff - acquired years ago which now just won't fit.

No-one wants these things. The hassle of selling them on eBay is way beyond you.

Yet ... how can you bear to get rid of them? They are part of what defines you!

Gulp. Sigh. Off to the recycling tip.

Gone.

And the funny thing is, once they're gone you don't miss them one bit.

In fact, you actually feel rather better with fewer newer lighter things around you.

The other day I heard Lord Coe on the radio talking about the Olympic Stadium. He pitched part of his argument against the Tottenham proposal to demolish much of the stadium after the 2012 Games in terms of a zany metaphysical loyalty to memories: it would be just awful if a famed medal winner from 2012 returned to the site of his/her triumph many years in the future, only to find the stadium ... gone!

Grotesque.

I have no idea whether it makes sense all things considered to favour the Tottenham bid over the West Ham bid. Insofar as I have any personal interest, it is that the Tottenham bid if successful would move the Spurs stadium even further from where I now live, although maybe the road network would make it marginally more accessible than the current squalid White Hart Lane area.

But what makes no sense in current economic circumstances is to have a huge stadium sitting largely unused, unsuitable for football and unfillable when there are the occasional athletics competitions. And to justify the endlessly escalating cost of that by appealing to nostalgic insecurity.

Thus to the new BBC World Service language services chainsaw massacre.

Out comes the regular army of people frothed up by the BBC to bewail the fact that end of civilisation now hurtles in our general direction as these language services are ruthlessly axed.

They conjure up images of heroic people huddled round a crackly radio in a dark Balkan mountain shack, the lights dimmed and the sound turned down lest the KGB hear the Enemy's voice. Out from the radio comes a BBC programme in the local language - a unique, precious lifeline to a Better World.

All very poignant. It's just that things have, hem, moved on.

Now, even in the benighted Balkans, people do have choices. Local media outlets proliferate, including some previously set up with UK taxpayers support. And there is the ready availability of the Internet - anyone wanting different views (and different British views) now has myriad choices including free Internet radio stations and other online services. That's where young people are now - we should be investing mainly in them.

As the FCO is now taking some painful cuts, so must the BBC too. Some things, such as the UK taxpayer coughing up so that some people can read the BBC news in Serbian/Albanian/Macedonian fall into the category of nice - but no longer affordable/necessary.

Lo!, even under the wicked Coalition's appalling cuts, the BBCWS will (I gather) be enjoying much the same proportion of the FCO budget as it did in 2007/08. Shocking brutality.

So let's do some spring-cleaning and this time accept without a phoney galama that a smaller, lighter, faster BBC World Service is maybe good enough for current requirements.

One personal memory of the BBC's Yugoslav service. Back in 1980 before my first posting to Belgrade I went to call on the Yugoslav service, headed by none other than one David Wedgwood Benn, brother of.

D W Benn boasted to me that the Yugoslav service had a proud record of objectivity - it had never had an official complaint from the Yugoslav communist regime.

Great.

What a fine job it must have been doing in spreading Western values of freedom and democracy in that region of Europe. Did anyone ever get to the bottom of just how many Titoist UDBA agents sneaked in to work there over the years? 

Anyone interested in learning more about what is happening in both the UK and Poland with different forms of renewable energy (biomass, wind, waste-to-energy and so on) should get on down to the Radisson Blu Portman Hotel at 22 Portman Square. London W1 next Wednesday (26 January), for a brisk seminar organised by the British Polish Chamber of Commerce and the Conservative Friends of Poland.

It's an afternoon event - register online here. Programme here.

Poland is a most interesting case from a European energy point of view. There are plenty of communist-era legacy systems still around (and lots of coal) but with scope for making great strides towards high-end efficiency in different areas, and the ever-fascinating but not straightforward strategic aim of reducing energy dependency on Russia.

I'd like to be there but alas have another fixture at the same time - lecturing to mass'd post-graduate students at SOAS on Foreign Policy Analysis. A tricky job but someone has to do it. At least now there are gazillions of Wikileaks US diplomatic cables to use as real-life examples of what works and what doesn't. 

Unsated by Steampunk Palin, you want more buxom feisty American women transforming the world against evil men? Swing by this Guardian analysis by Madeleine Bunting of Hillary Clinton's feminist foreign policy:

On countless occasions since arriving at the state department, Clinton has asserted that the rights of women and girls are now core to US foreign policy. It's hard to imagine any British foreign secretary ever saying such a thing...

From the start Clinton left no one in any doubt where she stood: women's rights are "the signature issue" of this administration's foreign policy, she said. She mentioned women 450 times in speeches in the first five months in office. "Transformation of the role of women is the last great impediment to universal progress," she declared, and began to develop what is her standard line: women's issues are integral to the achievement of every goal of US foreign policy.

H Clinton translates this into supposedly hard diplomatic action:

Her press entourage finds itself dragged around meetings with micro-credit groups, activists and politicians – all women. It's strategic, she admitted in an interview – "It's a constant effort to elevate people who, in their societies, may not even be known by their own leaders..."

When she visited South Africa, she spent twice as much time with a women's housing project as she did with the president

This of course is somewhere between foolish and normal. On any overseas visit a senior Minister is likely to spend relatively little time with the host country's President - Presidents selfishly ration their time with non-Presidents.

But even if this was not the case here, it sends a fatuous signal - someone with her supposed influence who really wants to help poor women should be using most of her precious time to lobby senior people in the country concerned who can take decisions which make a difference, not self-indulgently media cargo-culting down in the dusty townships.

Alas there are limits to this feministic policy:

It gets nowhere in the Middle East, while Afghanistan presents a big challenge – Clinton has insisted peace cannot come at the cost of women's rights. But the signs aren't good that she can hold this line.

Hmm. Why so little progress in the Middle East? Could it perhaps be that the Obama administration dares not get involved in anything which might seem to question, hem, stern precepts of Islam? Remember Obama's strange Cairo speech and this:

In any case, what exactly makes a choice free for women in an Islamic society? Surely in many parts of the Islamic world (and some parts of the UK now) the Islamic religion works to reinforce ages-old social/cultural gender roles under which women are manifestly subservient, and dealt with via extreme violence precisely when they try to make their own choices.

If Hillary Clinton does not tackle that main global font of ideological oppression of women, the rest of her 'agenda' is largely predictable liberal social work writ large.

Her thinking of course arises from a bold radical feminist assertion that because women are something more than 50% of the globe's population, "every issue is a feminist issue". But does that mean that every issue can best be treated by feministic methods? 

As an unabashed male, I think that that approach does not help much in mainstream foreign policy. Sure, it's a marginally goodish thing if American taxpayers subsidise cleaner Third World cooking stoves and/or the UN cranks up more resolutions on the fate of women in conflict.

But the main effort of any foreign minister should be focused on stopping conflicts and creating democratic conditions in which women and men alike get to vote freely. The limp attitude of Western leaders generally in failing to have anything significant to say these days about undemocratic governments (especially in the so-called Islamic world) sets a lugubrious context in which Feminist Nanny Clintonism is presented as a serious policy tool for making a difference in hard places, when it just isn't.

Would Angela Merkel make this sort of thing her main focus were she German foreign minister? I think not. There is almost no example I can think of where deliberate 'bottom-up' empowering of poor vulnerable people has made a significant political difference quickly, unless perhaps you include the capitalistic networking effects of giving poor people mobile telephones.

It all reminds me of this:

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”.

Madeleine Bunting:

Her feminism has obviously been helpful for the Obama administration, which is anxious to redesign US foreign policy in the midst of two disastrous foreign wars. It could still reap dividends for women, but the question is: will it be quietly sidelined when no longer useful?

To which the answer is ... Yes.

Long after Clinton has departed there will be legacy budget lines in State Department and other US (and EU) government programmes aimed at helping 'women and girls'. But they will quietly shrivel over time and/or drift back to the development agencies as the issues seen as fashionable by the top leadership shift elsewhere.

In short, it is striking that on any hard issue which counts (Iran, North Korea, Middle East) there is no real sign of Clinton having a significant role - and significant policy or intellectual impact.

All in all, more faux feminism. A senior leftist Western woman politician takes up 'women's issues' - and wins gushy praise from a woman writer in the Guardian! 

Sexist stereotyping anyone?   

This isn't first century BC Egypt, when having an attractive leader might theoretically provide some kind of geo-political advantage vis a vis our standing with the Romans. I don't want to see a drawing of the former Governor of Alaska in what appears to be a leather bustier and garters...

By reading this book, I have become less sane. By having me relate this book to you, you have become less sane. By being printed onto paper, Steampunk Palin has made the world a less sane place than it was before.

All more or less true, no doubt. Mind you, the way Al Gore is depicted in this fine piece of fiction is pretty realistic.

H/t Instapundit.

Behold!

The mad logic of Dr Clare Gerada, chair of the Royal College of GPs, as reported in the Telegraph:

Dr Gerada said healthy individuals who had paid to have the jab on a private patient basis at pharmacies shared some of the blame for the shortages. Many pharmacies have offered the jab for about £15.

Dr Gerada said: “People who are not in the at-risk groups are getting [private] vaccinations, leaving less supply for us...

She called for a study looking at how many healthy people had paid to have the jab privately, to gauge “whether there should be a law that they are not allowed to have it”.

Let's get this straight.

There is medicine out there which might stop us getting sick. It was ordered in bulk by GPs, pharmacies and private companies.

Private citizens are buying some of this medicine from their own money. The government apparently did not buy enough for the NHS's needs. So now the call comes for private people to be 'banned' from paying privately for medicine sold by private companies?

The same old story. The state sets up cumbersome mechanisms which can never be accurate enough, so along comes the collectivist shriek that the state respond to its own errors by reducing rather than expanding choice for all. 

Maybe there is another, better way of looking at such matters.

When anything 'bad' happens collectivists stampede to call for 'something to be done', usually More Government.

What a strange attitude that is. It somehow assumes that everything in principle can be regulated, and that a crude cost/benefit analysis run by collectivists is invariably the way to decide what outcome is 'best'.

But it is essentially phoney if not immoral. It looks only at part of any problem and relies in a bonkers Gordon Brown way on measuring things, when not everything that counts is easily measurable. Thus crudely measurable things start to count, and subtle unmeasurable things don't count.

Take, say, freedom. The freedom we have to do good or evil means that necessarily some evil is likely to happen. That evil then happens does not mean that freedom has 'failed'. It's rather an inherent part of freedom being expressed.

All this is eloquently explained by the father of Christina-Taylor Green, the nine year-old girl gunned down by Jared Loughner. Far from using this disaster to express weakness in surrendering more private autonomy to the state, he makes a moving case for accepting the risks of living in a free society:

John Green ends by saying:

If we live in a free society like the United States where we are more free than anywhere else, we are subject to things like this happening and I think that's the price we have to pay.

Frankly, I think we would have to pay that price even if we lived in a substantially less free society. Sure, with stricter gun control, Jared Loughner might not have been able to get a gun but also, with stricter gun control, criminals would have an increased advantage against law-abiding citizens.

But that makes John Green's comments all the more impressive. He's saying that even if freedom leads to more random acts of violence against innocent people, reducing freedom is even worse.

Exactly.

How often do we over here hear even a whisper of that argument on the R4 Today programme?

New world records for drivel and shameful dishonest nonsense have been set following the Tucson shootings.

As far as I can see, the only thing President Obama wants to 'heal' is his own dismal ratings, and his speech to some extent may have done that - for a while. But the Left talking-point propaganda claim as amplified by the BBC/Guardian and others on this side of the pond that 'right-wing rhetoric' somehow contributed to the shootings is beyond grotesque.

Take Paul Krugman, whose literate analysis of the problems facing the Eurozone is overshadowed by some of the outlandish nonsense he's talked on this latest US shooting tragedy. Ann Althouse gives him the spanking he deserves:

Advocating violence is terrible, but it is also terrible to try to delegitimize vibrant criticism of the government, to have a biased view of where the least valuable speech is coming from, and to connect speech to violence when there is no connection. The truth is we should dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual and go on as before. Why should we change because a madman shot people?

Ironically, saying that a massacre can change the course of American politics encourages massacres! Why would you put such a thought into the heads of madmen? Hell, sane men might put the pieces together and plan a massacre to disrupt the work of the politicians who won the last elections. We need to turn away from the bloody slaughter and go on as before.

And what about this bizarre piece by Simon Jenkins:

Freedom of speech, like freedom of traffic, can only be defined by the curbs and regulations that make it real...If American politics is now going the way of wounding, not healing, it needs the tonic of order.

It is the great paradox of democracy. Free speech cannot exist without chains.

What?

There may be the glimmer of a point in there somewhere. But whatever it is pales into insignificance when compared to the wider point, namely that we hear a lot about the dangers supposedly posed by rhetoric of the 'toxic Right' but nothing is said about the rhetoric of the toxic Left. 

The good news is that US talk radio is about the only force on the planet which consistently confronts the Toxic Left. President Obama wisely has decided not to side with the Toxic Leftists who want to use the 'fairness doctrine' to shut down this truculent rival voice.

Implications of the Tucson shootings? None.

The USA is a big country, and by the law of averages among 300 million people a small few may contemplate assassinating politicians, a small number of them may actually try to do so and a tiny number will succeed.  

If anything the fact that these episodes are so rare shows just how 'civil' US politics are for 99.999% of normal purposes as compared to most cultures in human history. A ghastly tragedy for those involved, of course, but as Ann Althouse says the country as a whole should not start panicking. 

The supposedly liberal 'mainstream media' in the USA in this case have disgraced themselves over this obvious point by ranting against Sarah Palin for no reason whatsoever, thereby merely accelerating their own much-deserved collapse. 

You may have missed this fascinating blog entry by Jim Harvey of Allcow Communications, so here it is:

I’m not easily impressed, and I’ve often found Foreign Office types to be snooty and dismissive of those of us who work in the ‘Del Boy’ world of sales and marketing, though I was smitten in this case...

The thing that I took away from his speech, as a business speechwriter and maker, was simple and useful.  That for most speeches, it’s the impression that you leave with the intended audience that is more important than the content. Of course this isn’t news, and is not always true, but it made me think.

And if you have not had a look before, here I am on parade at TEDxKrakow last year:

This talk is awesome, if you want to listen to the way the most simplistic, kindergarten-level straw man logic rouses an educated audience to applause.

Business Model for 2011: make money from writing speeches for people who demand only the very best (and who, having failed to find that, turn to me instead).

Let the work roll in. You know it makes sense. 

After a longish pause from doing anything to this site under the throes of moving, I return after unpacking several million boxes and getting the broadband up and running. To my surprise a lot of people have been reading the site even though I have posted nothing. Hmm.

BT's performance when we moved in was (to put it mildly) vexing. Their call centres are in India (I think) and the folk there show impressive patience and expertise at trying to help stressed people thousands of miles away sort out these technical broadband problems. But it seemed to take them far too long to identify a fault on the line, following which an engineer came almost a week later and rummaged around, eventually to good effect. 

That said, my pitiful gratitude at the fact that it is all now working is enhanced by the fact that in this remote house the broadband speed is far faster, so my latest iTunes movie (the marathon Western Heaven's Gate) downloaded in a puny two hours - back at the other place it would have taken 12 or more(!).

Otherwise the usually reliable John Lewis have made a fool of themselves by delivering two posh new toasters when we ordered only one, then sending two separate people to collect the excess toaster.

Heroes of the move? UK Office Direct. I ordered a load of new files for our home office the other evening - swooosh, they arrived by FedEx the next morning. I find I have ordered the wrong size folders, under miscellaneous BT-related stress disorders - swooosh, the wrong ones are removed the next day and new ones appear. Wow.

Advice to all movers! Buy at least two Leatherman supertools and attach a bright red ribbon to them to find them amidst all the packing madness.

Greetings, world.

Just to let you know that I am still alive, more or less, albeit deep in boxes and packing paper. What's strange about moving house is that the pleasure one gets from buying things to reward oneself for working is notably less than the pleasure one gets from throwing them away.

The main problem here is that BT have let us down. Faced with the seemingly simple task of turning on our broadband link they have failed miserably, and an engineer is said to be ariving tomorrow to try to fix the problem. The inconvenience of all this is vasty, since our other connection to the Internet is via my iPad and assorted iPhones which are fine for many purposes but not for serious work such as updating this website.

Otherwise I am reliant on my laptop and dongle which seem to find the remoteness of this new house too great a challenge. Groan.

At least Crawf Minor fended off a strong challenge from a few hundred million brilliant Asian students and won an offer of a place at Cambridge to read Natural Science, or NatSci as we experts call it. Hurrah.

Back to normal service or something close to it tomorrow, I fervently hope. Or, there again, not. 

There comes a time in any house-packing process when the computer is one the last things standing unpacked and has to meet its Fate.

That moment has come.

I leave you with this wonderful piece by Victor Hanson Davis, about the Left's raging against reality in Greece, California and many other places too:

Oz is over with and the Greeks are furious at “them.” Furious in the sense that everyone must be blamed except themselves.

So they protest and demonstrate that they do not wish to stop borrowing money to sustain a lifestyle that they have not earned—but do not wish to cut ties either with their EU beneficiaries and go it alone as in the 1970s. So they rage against reality...

What strikes me is not that leftism does not work, but that when it is indulged and doesn’t work, its beneficiaries scream at the unfairness of it all—in the fashion that a theorist who claimed 2 plus 2 equals 5 blames the construct of mathematics because his equation is not true. Why don’t Germans just give Greeks the hundreds of billions of euros that they “owe” them?

That utter, profound uncivilisational irrationality is heard intoned every day on the BBC. It's running out of road, course, but when heavy ugly things run out of road they tend to crash in a heavy ugly way.

And as a very final but not unrelated treat, here is Mark Steyn summarising every key issue in the world in ten minutes:

HH: Elections 2010.

MS: The great repudiation, as the cover of the Claremont Review of Books says. And it marks what is still the distinguishing feature between the United States and other Western democracies.

Unlike what’s happening in Iceland, Bulgaria and Latvia and Greece, and France, and the United Kingdom, this was the only country where people took to the streets to say we could do just fine if the government did less for us. And that was what that vote on November the 2^nd was about.

Now, which plug in all that mass of wiring behind the desk gets yanked first? This one shoul