Friday, July 03, 2009

Take the Inverse of the Times

One of those spats that from time to time give the literary world the appearance of animation has just occurred. Alain de Botton has published a book on the subject of work, and someone dismissed this book in the loftiest manner in a review in the New York Times. So lofty was this reviewer that he has enraged Alain de Botton enough to write a response. He cursed the reviewer with the words, “I will hate you until the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.”

Now Alain de Botton is quite a friend of mine, and I know him to be mild-mannered, modest, and full of humor. He is also formidably intelligent and wide-ranging. Needless to say, the New York Times reviewer is totally unknown, ignorant, and uses this column as an opportunity to preen himself, like most of those who write for that paper. And that is why Alain ought not to have lost his temper, but be grateful for this bad review, because it must mean that he has written a good book.

In old Soviet days, the reader of Pravda was obliged to interpret things by simply reversing whatever the paper was saying about them as it was only reporting the party line. So it is with the New York Times book reviews. An apparatchik in charge of that section equally makes sure to cleave to the party line, which in this case involves 100-percent political correctness plus worship of popular culture. Any good or original book is certain to be ignored there, side-lined, or given to some wretch for a hatchet job. Speaking for myself, I take it that the snubbing or boycotting my books have received in the New York Times over the years is evidence that I must be on the right lines, and praise there would make me anxious that I hadn't thought through what I was writing. Now when Mark Steyn published his wonderfully rumbustious book America Alone, it was on the New York Times bestseller list for six months but never got a review there nonetheless. Let's all buy Alain's new book, and get it too on their bestseller list, for another loud laugh at the small-mindedness of these comrades.  

07/03 09:12 AM Share

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Mullahs Make Mistakes

06/28 01:39 PM Share

Thursday, June 18, 2009

People Power

These are heart-stopping times in Iran. Two rival blocs are jockeying for power, two mass movements capable of mobilizing hundreds of thousands on the streets. No way exists of measuring numbers and giving victory to the larger. One bloc or the other is likely to make a mistake, and that will settle it.

In this plight in 1979 the Shah made the mistake of ordering his troops to open fire, on a scale not enough to terrify everyone but only to enrage them. In the Shia practice, moreover, the dead are commemorated after a certain period, and these commemorations were the occasions for yet larger and more and more violent demonstrations. So the Shah fell, the Islamic Republic of Iran took his place, and the world has had to deal with militant Islamism at the cost of much fighting and many lives.

It is possible, even likely, that the ruling mullahs will repeat the Shah's mistake and try to settle the issue of who has power by ordering the troops or secret police to fire on the demonstrations. In that case, the loyalty of the troops becomes the question of the moment. Already there are reports that some secret policemen have gone over to the protesters.

When the orthodox Communists staged their coup against Gorbachev in August 1989, Boris Yeltsin put himself at the head of the protesters, famously climbing on to a tank to address the crowd. The troops under General Grachev had already been called out by the Communists. But Yeltsin had telephoned Grachev to plead with him not to give the fire orders. Telling the story afterwards, Yeltsin said he heard Grachev sigh into the receiver at the burden of responsibility. The troops withdrew. Yeltsin said of this call to Grachev, “He was deciding not only his fate, but also mine. And the fate of millions of people.”

Who says that the individual and his choices do not count in the making of history?  A repeat of that fateful exchange is surely taking place in Tehran, and the fate of millions once more hangs on how it is resolved.

06/18 07:34 AM Share

Friday, June 12, 2009

1984 in 2009

Sixty years ago, George Orwell published 1984, and I can think of no work of fiction in the past century with a comparable influence right across the world. Plenty of writers had already warned about the twin horrors of Nazism and Communism, and many of them had first-hand experience of these totalitarianisms. Orwell was telling a story about what it would be like to live in such a nightmare society. From the novel's opening sentence in which the clocks are striking thirteen, the reader finds himself in the grip of an imagination so true and so detailed that it has far more power than any political tract could have.

At that time editor of the Times Literary Supplement, my father had received a proof copy of the book. I remember the well-known critic Raymond Mortimer coming to the house to say how important this book was and to ask how the TLS was going to review it. Overhearing the excitement, I managed to get my hands on this proof but could read only a little before I had to return to school. When I then asked for 1984 in the school library, the librarian, a desiccated figure by the name of Mr. Cattley, said it was “filth,” and reported me. My 12-year-old self was scared, but “You must forgive Mr. Cattley,” said the master in charge, “he is a very simple soul.” (Incidentally, Orwell had been a scholar at the school and another of the masters had been his contemporary. This man was bald, with a strange blotch or even growth on his scalp, rumoured to have been caused by Orwell pouring chemicals on him in the laboratory. We used to pester him, “Please sir, tell us what Orwell was like, was he good at science?”)

The love-making of Julia and Winston, it is true, stands out as pure escapism from everything around, so appealing (and thus upsetting to poor Mr. Cattley) because it is the one remaining individual experience.  Privacy allows them to be happy and free at least temporarily from state control — which is why it cannot be tolerated and the supervising tele-screens and the Junior Spies are ubiquitous. Winston is always searching for other things that might free him, for instance, nursery songs or well-made artifacts from the past. The really frightening element in 1984 is the manipulation of the past, the whole social record, even language itself, so that truth and reality become irrecoverable and Big Brother can make of them what he likes. A Western historian at a conference, so the story goes, once said that the future is unpredictable, to which a Soviet historian replied that for him the past was unpredictable.

The Left has tried, and still does spasmodically, to pretend that the novel is not really anti-Soviet. But 1984's Big Brother is undoubtedly Stalin, and the figure of Goldstein is Trotsky. Orwell had lived through such murderous events as the Communists turning on the Trotskyists and anarchists in the Spanish civil war, and the Hitler-Stalin pact. It is particularly penetrating to have invented the phrase of the Two Minute Hate to describe the totalitarian mechanism for falsifying public opinion to suit the ends of power. Two Minute Hates occur all the time. Just look at the way the Left switched from supporting Israel to lambasting it, or how the Shah's pro-American Iran converted overnight into Khomeini's anti-American Iran.

To travel in old days in Soviet Russia and the Soviet bloc was to find oneself deep in 1984. The hopelessness of daily life was exactly as Orwell had captured it. How sinister it was too, how thoroughly Orwellian. Everyone was against everyone else; under the all-encompassing propaganda about progressiveness there was no communal or social spirit, only the Party. One of the compulsory Intourist or KGB guides once told me proudly that she had renounced her mother for failing to be a Communist. “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.” Orwell's imagination had been exactly right.

Orwell agonized over the writing of the book, and he was anyhow stricken with the tuberculosis that killed him six months after publication. Drugs to cure the disease had just become available in the United States, and had Orwell been a different character he might have procured them but seems instead to have thought this would be exercizing privilege. At that time, France and Italy appeared likely to go Communist, and in both countries extremists in the Party were ready for a coup. The Soviets occupied East Germany, were isolating West Germany, provoking the Berlin airlift, and opening the whole German future to doubt. The fact that the worst did not happen does not detract from Orwell's vision. 1984, it seems to me, had the effect of saving the English-speaking intelligentsia from the Communist snares and delusions rampant on the continent of Europe, and any future totalitarian society will be obliged to ban it just as the Soviet Union did. That’s an immortal achievement.

06/12 12:00 PM Share

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The Cedar Freeze

Grimly foreboding though the Middle East looks, things could be worse. For instance, the general election in Lebanon has left the country almost exactly unchanged. Things will stagger on as before in all their contradictions and dangers. The coalition of Fouad Siniora, comprising Christians and Sunnis, has the slight majority required to govern.  The opposition, Hezbollah, the Shia party, is really only a foreign-policy arm of Iran, and quite a few Lebanese Shias are brave enough to defy it.  Most observers thought it would win, but it got only 58 seats in a parliament of 120. Enough to be wreckers but not to form a government. That passes for good news in these parts.

Hezbollah’s leader is Hassan Nasrallah, and he offers an outstanding example of the kind of men who come to the top in Arab and Muslim politics. He knows exactly how to obtain arms and financing, how to organize his supporters into a militia that will jump to do whatever he wants on pain of death and disgrace. He’s a perfect miniature of the one-man ruler that this system of politics invariably throws up. Within hours of the election results, he made a distinction between a parliamentary majority and a popular majority. In plain language he is reserving the right to use force if he sees advantage in doing so. More blunt still, a spokesman of his lays down that the Siniora majority must promise not to question Hezbollah’s role or the legitimacy of its weapons. That means reserving another right, namely to fight Israel again, when convenient.

Hezbollah only has its numbers thanks to General Michel Aoun, another outstanding example of the kind of men who thrive in an absolute political system like this. A renegade Christian, a warlord, Aoun fought for years against Muslims, in the end fleeing to Paris as an exile. Throwing his lot in with Hezbollah is purely and simply a careerist move, quite natural, however unnatural it may look. A Lebanese Christian friend of mine sends him e-mails imploring him to abandon personal aggrandizement that could bring down the whole country. There is never an answer, needless to say.

The Lebanese election freezes the situation, unless or until the imminent and more decisive election in Iran heats it up again.

06/10 06:59 AM Share

Monday, June 08, 2009

Europe's Backlash

Britain is engulfed in political turmoil. And about time too. Prime Minister Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair two years ago, and has shown consistently poor judgement ever since. For reasons that must stem from a narrow and self-regarding character he is unable to admit to mistakes, but always justifies them, thus reinforcing these poor judgements. In local elections in England (i.e. not Wales or Scotland), his Labour Party has been more or less wiped out, left without control of a single council even in its heartlands.

In simultaneous elections for the European parliament in Brussels, Labour has done even worse. In a very minimal turnout of 34 percent, Labour received only 15 percent of the vote, lower than the Conservatives by a long margin and UKIP — the United Kingdom Independence Party, a ramshackle single-issue party aimed at getting the country out of the European Union. Third, after UKIP! This is really unprecedented. Socialism itself is becoming a thing of the past.

Also unprecedented for Britain is the election to the Brussels Parliament of two members of the British National Party, which undoubtedly has a fascist core. Sir Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader of the 1930s, never succeeded in having a member of his party elected to parliament. Nick Griffin, today's fascist leader, is a good deal less intimidating than Mosley, an uncharismatic man without much powers of speech or intellect. But the Brussels Parliament is elected by proportional representation, and the BNP will therefore find quite a like-minded fascist bloc in it, comprised of various nationalities, including now Hungary which in the Jobbik Party has a real throwback to the 1930s.

However, this voting pattern does not derive from nostalgia for Hitler and Mussolini, but far more simply from the way that every European government has bent over backwards to favor Muslim immigrants over local populations. In one country after another, the government has privileged Muslim immigrants in matters of welfare benefits, housing, communal subsidies, concessions over customs that are illegal and brutal but supposed to be untouchable because sanctioned by Islam, and even in the practice of law. The ensuing Islamization of the continent is the source of immense popular anger, hitherto unexpressed. Put another way, European governments may have had benevolent intentions towards Muslims, but in practice they prove to be efficient fascist-making machines.

06/08 07:08 AM Share

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Obama in Egypt

President Obama has been signaling since well before his election that he would be making an important address to the whole Muslim world. Expectation had therefore been aroused that the United States is about to change its policy in the Middle East and perhaps everywhere with a Muslim population. There was widespread but largely unspoken anxiety that the Islamic element in his family tree might give precedence to emotion over national interest. The post-election interview with al-Arabiyya television and the bow to the Saudi King in London seemed ominous omens. I think I was hardly alone in expecting bad things when at last Obama arrived in Cairo, the venue chosen to broadcast what is in his mind about Muslims.

A new beginning for the relationship between the Unites States and Muslims, that is what he puts on offer. A certain high rhetorical style is becoming his trademark and it allows him the appeal almost of preaching, able to switch from sounding tough to appearing frail — an unusual gift in a politician. This speech has an element of apology, with its implicit acceptance that the United States is responsible for the bad old relationship, and surely that is how most of his Muslim listeners will take it. It’s all George W. Bush’s fault, is it not? The Arabic language greeting, and several references to the Koran, will have served to suggest to his listeners that really he is one of them. And under cover of this bit of play-acting, he advised tolerance, repudiation of violence, rights for men and women, and a carefully measured move towards democracy and universal values.

In reality, one good reason why there is no democracy is that the United States has been a steady supporter over decades of authoritarian regimes, for instance in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. George W. Bush made serious attempts to bring democracy to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, and look how unpopular that made him. Obama does not propose stopping the supply of advanced weaponry which actually keeps in power Arab dictators and allies who are prime obstacles to everything he is asking for, democracy included. Humbug? Probably not. The situation is just more complex than he allows.

Another flaw in the reasoning is the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian stand-off. No progress is possible unless and until Hamas forswears violence, but that means tackling Iran as it is orchestrating that violence. He offered no practical proposals about to do this, only reiterating that Israel has to stop settlements on the West Bank, something about which Obama seems to be obsessing. Israel dismantled its settlements on the Gaza Strip and instantly was repaid with terror. Iran anyhow wants a one-state Islamist solution, and that is another issue too complex to be raised in Cairo.

The speech was shown in full on Egyptian television, and listeners everywhere in whatever languages can hardly doubt Obama’s well-meaning intentions (an exception is Osama bin Laden who at the very same moment chose to put out his Islamist counter-proposals). The audience applauded. President Obama smiled, he waved, but as he left the platform he seemed mysteriously frail. On balance, he probably did not much good, but no harm either.

06/04 12:54 PM Share

Monday, June 01, 2009

Amos Elon, R.I.P.

Amos Elon was one of the most prominent Israeli writers. He's just died at the age of 82. By coincidence, we were both born in Vienna, where his father was a businessman, and my father had gone as a concert pianist. There was a sense that we were two of a kind, who should have been arguing in a café late into the night, except that the Nazis and the Communists had stolen the life we might have led as though characters in a novel by Arthur Schnitzler or Joseph Roth. Amos's last and finest book, The Pity of It All, is about the tragic interaction of Germans and the Jews in their midst, and it is filled with a kind of historic regret that mass-murder was the end of it.

So — some vignettes. I was a correspondent in the Six Day War in 1967. I called on Amos in Tel Aviv. Exhausted, he just wanted to sleep. He'd been in the Sinai, a junior officer in a jeep with General Avram Joffe, a large and rumbustious figure who'd been surveying the battlefield through field-glasses. When the Egyptians began firing at them, Amos told how he had taken cover by lying on the floor, but General Joffe remained upright, and Amos heard him say, “God, war is so boring!” The Duke of Wellington at Waterloo couldn't have bettered it.

Then at the time of the first Gulf War, with Saddam Hussein threatening to burn half of Israel, Amos appeared on Austrian television. Walking to his hotel in Vienna after the program, he passed a bookshop with a lighted window containing a mass of Middle East material. Standing there, a little old man said to Amos that he hoped Saddam would drive the Jews into the sea. Rather dismayed, Amos asked him why. Because then, came the unexpected answer, some of the Jews might come back to Vienna, and life would become interesting and tolerable once more.

Amos was a man of the Left, contentious and caustic. For reasons I could never quite fathom, I had some special license to debate with him, pressing him to admit the false assumptions, inconsistencies, and follies of the Left, and especially the belief that the famous two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation is practical politics rather than the Utopian fantasy it so clearly is. It really was as though we were out-of-date cosmopolitans from a Viennese café. One day I was about to go on a National Review cruise and he was about to go on a similar cruise for The Nation. He suggested that the two cruises ought to meet on the ocean like pirates and do battle, all of us naturally wearing formal evening dress and black tie.

06/01 10:03 AM Share

Monday, May 25, 2009

A Serious Menace

The news that North Korea has just exploded another nuclear device is a heavy slap in the face for President Obama. The explosion was underground, but as big as Hiroshima. Obama pleads for a world free from nuclear weapons, and holds out the prospect of diminishing the stock held by the United States. He proposes more of the six-nation negotiations on the issue begun under President Bush but which got nowhere, indeed strengthened the hand of North Korea. That state is a tin-pot dictatorship held together by fear and oppression, but instead of collapsing as it ought to, it has become a serious menace.

We know that North Korea was in the process of building the nuclear weapons’ facility in Syria that Israel bombed and destroyed — it therefore has an active foreign policy on behalf of what used to be called the axis of evil.  North Korea is intimately connected with the Iranian nuclear weapon now thought to be in the final stages of production. This April, North Korea launched a long-range missile that flew over the Pacific. And maybe things are coming together. Holding out that famous open hand of his, President Obama expects to negotiate Iran into desisting with its nuclear development. The only realistic alternative is a military strike by the United States or Israel, or both. But in that event, North Korea might freeze the situation by brandishing its nuclear weapon on behalf of Iran.

Time is running out. The more sincere Obama is, the more naïve he seems.  

05/25 02:04 PM Share

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

‘In the name of God, go’

The mood in Britain is unlike anything I have experienced. The electorate is enraged by the conduct of its representatives. Some members of parliament daren’t show their face, a former Labour foreign secretary has been booed by a television audience, and a Conservative member has had a brick heaved through her office window. It is all about expenses, fraudulent claims, tax evasion, making private fortunes by looting the public purse. Worse still, much of it has been legitimate, within what MPs are calling “the system,” and that is what is provoking the revulsion and rage.

It turns out that the Blair-Brown Labour government could not bring itself to raise salaries for MPs, but instead set up “the system” of allowances that were privileged and kept secret. An MP could claim thousands of pounds more or less on his own say-so, with shaky receipts for dubious expenditure, and the result is that some have built property portfolios worth a million pounds or more. Some of the claimants were already rich in their own right, others used to be poor. All but a handful have been shamelessly greedy, and brought disgrace upon themselves and Westminster. The spectacle of them pretending that “the system” is to blame, or that they made accounting mistakes and are offering now to return ill-gotten gains has added elements of farce.

Supervising this milking of “the system” was Michael Martin, the Speaker. In the early days of Tony Blair, this man was press-ganged into a job for which he was unfit. An old hardline socialist and trade-union man, he saw himself as defender of entitlements rather than liberty and proper government. He put in outrageous claims for himself and his wife. He did his very best to suppress information about the embezzling and spivery going on under him, in the classic manner of a trade unionist getting whatever he could for his comrades. Someone leaked the facts and figures to the Daily Telegraph, which has been publishing them for the past fortnight. Demonstrating folly and arrogance, Speaker Martin tried to cover up, seeking to set the police on whoever leaked rather than on malefactors. He has personally insulted the handful of MPs who had the courage to criticize him. The Telegraph exposes MPs who have claimed a range of things from porn videos, bath plugs, and dog food up to horse manure, building work to eliminate dry rot from a home, and clearing the moat of a stately manor house. The revelations have been appalling. People ordinarily do not live like this.

Yesterday a motion of no-confidence in the speaker came before the house. A number of MPs called for his resignation. One of them likened the moment to the debate in 1940 when Leo Amery borrowed Cromwell’s rebuke to parliamentarians, “In the name of God, go,” and so got rid of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Speaker Martin gave an evidently insincere apology, fluffed his words, couldn’t read his statement, and had to refer to his clerk about procedure. The media of course had a field day.

Today Speaker Martin resigned in a speech lasting half a minute and without apology, forced out as he should have been long ago. The last speaker to suffer this indignity was Sir John Trevor, in 1695, for taking bribes. Prime Minister Gordon Brown knew the outline of the MPs’ misdemeanours if not the details, and if the speaker implicates him the scandal may not stop at this point. The Mother of Parliaments has had to endure a lot in its history, but previous rogues like Charles James Fox or Horatio Bottomley at least had a certain style. This lot are just tawdry.

05/19 02:44 PM Share

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The English Schindler

On May 19, Sir Nicholas Winton will be celebrating his hundredth birthday. My colleague Jay Nordlinger, always quick to praise those who deserve it, reminded me of this man. He did something memorable in the last months of peace in 1939, when the Nazis were dismembering Czechoslovakia and it was clear that soon they’d begin persecutions. Winton was then aged 29, and a stock-broker’s clerk, not someone special but a person as ordinary as any other. He went to Prague, set up an office there, and organised eight trains that brought Jewish children to London. These children needed sponsors, papers, and funding, all of which Winton arranged. The ninth train was due to leave on September 3, the day war was declared, and therefore it was cancelled. The 250 children who would have been on that train were soon murdered.

Winton saved 667 children in all, though sometimes this figure is given as 669. There’s been some recognition. Books have been written about him, and films made, and he’s been called the English Schindler. The Queen knighted him, Vaclav Havel decorated him, and the Czechs proposed him for the Nobel Peace Prize. It so happens that a few years ago I caught him on a television programme, being interviewed by David Frost, he of the Nixon tapes. Frost brought in Alfred Dubs, one of the children saved, and who has made a success of his life in England, becoming a member of the House of Lords. Winton kept his composure even during this emotional encounter. His modesty is as exemplary as his conduct. He says of himself, “I just saw what was going on and did what I could to help.” The reward of the virtuous, according to the psalmist, is a long life, and that’s the case here. Happy Birthday!

05/14 09:17 AM Share

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

The Two-State Solution Is No Solution

In a few days Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be meeting President Obama in the White House. There is something imperial, almost Roman, about these occasions. The satrap of some distant province is coming to bend the knee in obeisance to the emperor wearing a laurel crown. Last time Netanyahu visited as prime minister, Bill Clinton was in the emperor’s role, and he let it be known that he greatly resented the visitor’s independence of mind. Wasn’t this arrogant fellow really just a petitioner, and didn’t the emperor have only to snap his fingers to have his way?

Nobody knows what is going on in the head under Obama’s laurel crown, but the vice-president and the national security advisor are among well-placed personalities to declare that the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock is about to be broken. They are going to put pressure on Israel to accept the famous two-state solution; peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians will follow once they live in states side by side. In the background, voices are prophesying that Israel will have similar negotiations with Syria, and that the United States and Iran are going to lie down together the way lions and lambs do, according to the psalmist in a rare liberal mode.

You hardly need to be a Middle East expert to realise that none of this is probable. Recent concessions by Israel — evacuating southern Lebanon or Gaza, for example — have merely opened new areas for terrorism against it. Like other Arab societies, the Palestinians are so irrevocably divided between secular nationalists and Islamists that they are in a state of latent civil war. Besides, both Palestinian parties are so richly subsidised by outsiders that neither truly wants a state and the demands of government that this would involve — better, easier, more continuously rewarding, to make nuisances of themselves and be paid for it. Syria makes the return of the Golan Heights a pre-condition of any talks. Iran has arrested, tried, and sentenced Roxana Saberi, only to release her, a cat-and-mouse game that allows the mullahs to conclude they can do whatever they like to anyone, and Obama is an imaginary emperor whose feet are clay.

The two-state solution is, anyhow, an anachronism. The failure of the Oslo accords and the character of Yasser Arafat killed the whole idea. The one conceivable move at present is to return to pre-1967 conditions, and for Egypt to have the Gaza Strip and Jordan the West Bank. The snags involved might be surmountable. But right on cue, here comes King Abdullah of Jordan to say at the top of his voice that Israel and the Palestinians must make peace immediately, and failure to do so means a war with a year or 18 months. No responsible leader should hold out such a threat — but let that pass, the king doesn’t really mean it. Palestinians already comprise three-quarters of his population, and he is fearful of acquiring the West Bank and a couple of million more. The threat of imminent war is a way of issuing a caution, “If the Israelis won’t have the Palestinians, I’m not having them either; get them off my back.” In other words, he’s anticipating that whatever Obama ordains won’t work out, and he’s not the only one to be doing so.

05/12 10:10 AM Share

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

‘Only Connect’

“Only connect,” was the advice that the novelist E. M. Forster gave to anyone who wishes to understand the world. He wasn’t a very forceful personality, but the advice remains sound. And recent events have provided a rather startling illustration.

In September 1933, Josef Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, arrived in Geneva to address the League of Nations. He stayed in a smart hotel and gave a press conference to admiring journalists. His purpose was to claim that Nazi persecution of Jews was justified. Jews had too much power and influence, and, besides, they weren’t German and had no right to be in the country. (I owe this information to Flight from the Reich. Refugee Jews, 1933-1946, a thoughtful study just published by the historians Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt.)

In April 2009, Mahmud Ahmedinejad, the Iranian president, arrived in Geneva to address the United Nations, the successor to the League of Nations. He too stayed in a smart hotel and gave a press conference to admiring journalists. His purpose was to claim that Muslim aggression against Jews was justified. Jews have too much power and influence, and besides they have no right to be in a country of their own.

Only connect, eh?

05/06 09:20 AM Share

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Emperor Jones

When the decline of Britain comes to be properly recorded by some future Edward Gibbon, the name of Jack Jones will feature prominently. He has just died at the age of 96, In his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s he was General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union with its 2 million members, and a representative, almost a caricature, of intransigence, selfishness and militancy in the name of the workers. How he loved class warfare! And how he laid down the law to Prime Ministers Wilson and Heath, both of them apparently defenseless to deal with so rigid, so Stalinist, a figure. He obliged them to agree to a social contract in spite of the contradiction in it, namely that money was evil but it still had to be taken from everyone else and given to workers. He was one of the master-minds of the British economic disaster of those decades. Paul Johnson nicknamed him “Emperor Jones.”

A man in this mold, it always seemed to me, had to be a Communist, and more than that, a Soviet agent. Always drably dressed, sporting a proletarian cloth cap, he spoke in a voice loaded with both monotony and menace. This presentational style of being a Puritan revolutionary was surely imitated from those he admired in the Kremlin. Other trade-union leaders accused him of being a Soviet agent, but this he always liked to deny. Truth-telling has never been in the playbook of such types.

One clue was that he had volunteered for the Spanish civil war, and risen out there to be a commissar in the British Battalion, responsible for “political and moral education and vigilance.” That word “vigilance” conceals the fact that as commissar he had the power to send men to the firing squad. You didn’t get a job like that unless you were a loyal Muscovite Communist.

The obituaries, of course, fawn over him. To the Guardian, Jones had “unflinching integrity” — that’s a perfect specimen of the kind of euphemism Leftists come up with for a hard-line Communist. The BBC, now guaranteed to be off-beam, rather comically suggested he enjoyed “vigorous contests” with management. The Times spoke of his “left-wing affiliations” — another polished euphemism — but conceded that he was “a good hater.” Even the Daily Telegraph found him “dedicated to the Socialist ideal of Each for All and All for Each.”

At which point Oleg Gordievsky has lost patience. Famously, he was the KGB colonel and resident in London who defected. Since then, he’s been reminding the country how dangerous the Soviets and their agents were. Now he has written a letter to the Daily Telegraph to state that he had been the case officer for Jones and his wife, also a Comintern agent since the 1930s, and he had given Jones “a small amount of cash.” (So much for the Puritan revolutionary.) Gordievsky also read the volumes of his files, now in the KGB archive. We have to be grateful that Jones did not have the chance to practice in Britain the role of commissar he’d learnt in Spain.

04/28 10:01 AM Share

Monday, April 27, 2009

A Salute to the Boys from Italy

I happen to have just passed through Pisa airport, hardly one of Italy’s largest, and observed a unit mustering there. The men were wearing green shoulder flashes with the initials ISAF and underneath them some Arabic script. I asked several what the initials stood for, but nobody quite knew — I for International, AF for Armed Forces, but S? And in English too? It was obvious where they had been posted but they did not really like to say so. Kabul, Afghanistan. I did not like to ask what exactly their mission was. The Italian armed forces tend to receive a bad press, but these men were in great spirits, very soldierly, well turned out, calm and collected as they enjoyed a farewell pizza and espresso. They were also busy with mobile telephones, a new bit of kit since my army days and one that must change conditions in the field by keeping them in touch with home. Men over military age are a bit suspect when they say they wish they were younger and could go campaigning too, but that is just what I thought, with a surge of solidarity for these men and the task ahead of them. 

04/27 10:09 AM Share

Monday, April 20, 2009

Send Iran a Message: Don't Mess with the U.S.

The sentence of eight years in prison just passed on Roxana Saberi in an Iranian court is a travesty. She is the 31-year-old with dual Iranian and American citizenship, accused of somehow obtaining classified information and passing it to American intelligence. What position was she in to obtain such information? And how could any facts be established when her trial lasted just one day?

President Obama so far has restricted himself to denying that she engaged in espionage. Mrs. Clinton avers herself “deeply disappointed.” Such politeness, such self-control — and how misplaced! Words, mere words. They appear to have no insight at all into the political culture confronting them. For months, they have been preparing the ground for some sort of negotiation in order to establish a friendly relationship with Iran, and at pains to stress how anxious they are for this. To the mullahs, that means the Americans want something, and the question therefore is how much can they be made to pay for it. This phony arrest has been staged for the sake of the information it will reveal about the thinking in Washington, or in plain language, how complete is the collapse of American morale and will.

Obama and Clinton should demand Roxana's release, summon all the international help available, impose whatever sanctions will harm Iran, and maybe dispatch a fleet if only as a show of strength. Maybe even arrest a few more of the Iranians in Iraq posing as diplomats but who really are engaged in espionage. Never mind what the surrender-monkey Europeans do or say. Otherwise the mullahs will conclude that they can mess with the United States as much as they like, and there are no costs in doing so. They'll push Hezbollah and Hamas to fight — they have just been caught promoting a Hezbollah coup designed to destabilise Egypt. After that, they'll suddenly boast that they've been lying all along, and do have the nuclear weapon. What's happening to Roxana shows that soon Americans and everybody else might not be safe in that part of the world.

04/20 01:59 PM Share

Thursday, April 16, 2009

This Is a Test

The case of Roxana Saberi is extremely troubling. She has dual American-Iranian nationality, and in the eyes of the Iranian authorities that fits her up perfectly for a political experiment. According to press reports, she was freelancing for the American broadcaster National Public Radio until 2006 when she had her credentials revoked. Since then, she has been in Tehran preparing for a master's degree and doing research for a book. Earlier in the year she was arrested, charged with buying a bottle of wine and, of course, being a spy. At a one-day trial she was found guilty, and is now in the dreaded Evin prison awaiting her sentence.

This is an issue with precedents in other totalitarian settings. In 1935, for instance, a British nurse on secondment to a hospital in Frankfurt was walking home after duty. Uniformed Nazi storm-troopers waylaid her in the street and beat her up. Informing the British government, the British consul, Dr. Max Auwe, spelled out how serious this episode was. The fact that the storm-troopers were in uniform showed that they wished to be identified as acting for the Nazi regime. The Nazis wanted to find out whether the British would react strongly to such a provocation or cave in. When Dr. Auwe insisted on a policy of strength, he was fired from his post. Months later, the British government signed the Anglo-German Naval Treaty that gave Hitler his fleet and became the stepping-stone for the disastrous policy of appeasement. The failure to defend a British nurse who had been deliberately attacked, the Nazis rightly judged, signified that the British were in no frame of mind to defend the national interest, but could be pushed to make huge and devastating concessions.

So it is exactly with Roxana Saberi. The Iranians are testing the frame of mind in Washington. They have heard President Obama lamenting over past American policy, and offering change, indeed pleading for friendship. Negotiations are in the air. It is even being suggested that in the event of agreeing to negotiations the Iranians need not suspend their nuclear development, hitherto a condition for proposed talks. The mullahs are in the process of discovering whether Washington might be willing to make further concessions. Hillary Clinton has expressed “deep concern” over Roxana Saberi, and if weasel words of the kind are the sum total of Washington's response then the conclusion will be that the United States can be pushed into abandoning its national interest and instead pursuing a policy of appeasement of the mullahs, in spite of their warmongering quite as evidently as the Nazis.

04/16 09:28 AM Share

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

McPoison

The name of Damian McBride was virtually unknown in Britain, except to a small circle of political insiders, and some of them already called him McPoison. That nickname will now stick for the rest of his life, a reminder of disgrace and shame. For some time this man has been in charge of communications for Gordon Brown, the prime minister, with an office in Downing Street and a six-figure salary courtesy of the taxpayer. Brown likes to parade a fine set of morals on every conceivable occasion, stressing that he is the son of an upright Scottish clergyman, boasting that he himself is whiter than white, and that sleaze in his administration would not be tolerated because he has values (a favorite word of his, spoken with a strange little twist of his mouth). All this release of morality, it turns out, is for external consumption; for internally he has been directing McBride to release rats from the sewer.

The Conservatives had apparently been winning the battle for public opinion in the blogosphere. Therefore McBride decided to launch a website, to be titled Red Rag, on which he would put lies and innuendoes to denigrate these political opponents. To a colleague and like-minded spin-doctor, also a Labour insider and advisor, by the name of Derek Draper, he sent samples, involving disgusting sexual fictions about Conservative leaders, including David Cameron and George Osborne. They also fabricated stories about Mrs. Osborne’s state of mind. Absolutely totally brilliant, Draper chortled to McBride. The pair were evidently certain that this filth would stick and win them the election to be held next June. It is inconceivable that they did this without at least the knowledge of Brown, and quite likely his approval, whether open or tacit. Brown used to consult McBride daily, and Draper was invited to Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence.

A Conservative blogger somehow learnt about all this, and exposed it. The scandal is rocking Britain. At first Brown and the others tried to cover up, pretending that this was all juvenile, and never intended for publication. That could not wash. McBride has been duly fired. Brown tries to plead ignorance. The Conservatives are pressing for an apology, but moral Mr. Brown will do no more than express regret.

In the centuries of British parliamentary and political life, hard things have often been said and cruel deeds done, but the cut and thrust did not involve deliberate and considered destruction of rivals through deception and lying and sexual scurrilities concocted behind the scene like this. Previous socialists would not have sunk so low, but such complete disregard for principle in the pursuit of power is nonetheless the outcome, the necessary culmination, of socialism.

04/14 03:35 PM Share

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Obama and the King

President Obama’s tour round the world has been absolutely surreal, as he could not stop making promises he is in no position to fulfill, or apologizing for perceived American misdemeanors he is in no position to prove, never mind redress. Surely the unforgettable highpoint of this festival of illusion was in London, when Obama encountered King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. It’s an accepted courtesy to royalty to make a little nod with the head, but film and photographs show Obama bending from the waist in a gesture of humble obeisance, as it were, acknowledging his inferior status. And there were the rest of us foolishly thinking that the whole purpose of the republic set up by the founding fathers was that its representatives would be on equal footing with monarchs. Obama further has gone out of his way to praise a so-called “peace” initiative proposed some years ago by King Abdullah. This calls for Israel to give the Palestinians everything they demand, including the return of all refugees. According to Obama, Israel would be “crazy” not to do what King Abdullah specifies, although this means that it must dissolve itself.

At the Arab summit just held in Qatar, King Abdullah had quite the opposite experience. Where Obama fawned, Muammar Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya these many years, showed open disrespect for the king, telling him to his face in front of assembled Arab power-holders, “It has been proven that it is you who have lies behind you and the grave ahead, and it is you who were created by the British and protected by America.” And he went on, “I am an internationalist leader and the dean of Arab rulers and the King of African Kings, and the Imam of Muslims, and my international stature does not permit me to descend to any other level. Thanks.” Gaddafi then walked out and visited the local (and superlative) museum of Islamic art. All right, Obama needn’t talk in that comically high-flown idiom, but it would be nice if he stated firmly and unmistakably that he’s the leader of the free world, and therefore that he’s the true internationalist, and as such has no call to bow and scrape to absolute rulers and despots.

Today’s news is that three Pakistanis have just been publicly beheaded in Saudi Arabia, bringing to twenty the number of those executed in that country so far this year. And an American president bows to the man ultimately responsible for that?

04/08 10:06 AM Share

Thursday, April 02, 2009

A World Candy Committee?

President Obama and Dmitri Medvedev have met and put out a joint statement. Quite like old times, eh? The USA and the USSR divvying up the globe. But times have changed, and, in any case, Medvedev is a cipher, conjured into the Kremlin by Vladimir Putin who is today's Strong Man of Russia.

Diplomats naturally employ a language of boiler-plate, and this statement is a fine specimen of it. “We agreed . . . ” the paragraphs begin, and then “We will strive . . . ” the subsequent paragraphs continue. What a lot of alternate agreeing and striving! The two of them are to “demonstrate leadership in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world.” Next please: “We committed our two countries to achieving a nuclear free world while recognising that this long-term goal will require a new emphasis on arms control and conflict resolution measures.” New emphasis, really? In boring fact, the Russians are completing the process of making Iran a nuclear power, and protecting North Korea's nuclear armaments as well as rebuilding their former empire by subterfuge and force. What leadership? What reduction?

Apparently lost in mutual admiration, Obama and Medvedev are also going immediately to sort out the world's economic crisis, to bring al Qaeda and the Taliban to heel, to stop terrorism, to end the narcotic trade, in short, to ensure sweetness and light in a dozen other festering issues — as the statement lengthened I was expecting to learn that the World Candy Committee had been set up for the benefit of everyone under 18. Incidentally, all the agreeing and striving has to be over and done with by this July. Of course.

Could it be that Obama only put his name to this preposterous statement in the hopes of building up a possible rival to Putin? But I fear he meant it sincerely and it's sending shivers down my spine.

04/02 12:13 PM Share