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There are two big China stories doing the rounds today. In no particular order, there is the one about IBM selling its personal computer operation to a Chinese corporation, and there is the one about how the EU is planning to end its arms embargo on China.
Concerning the ending of the EU arms embargo, the EU Referendum blog (linking to this Times Online story today) has this to say:
As we have pointed out many times on this Blog (see for instance, here),the embargo has become one of the most sensitive geo-political issues, with the United States worried that its European allies will be arming a country that it sees as a potential military rival.
And, as we have also reported, China is spending billions of dollars upgrading its military capability and is rapidly becoming an economic superpower. Now The Times notes that Washington is concerned that East Asia remains militarily unstable, with China threatening Taiwan and North Korea threatening South Korea.
The US is worried that Europe will sell China advanced technology, such as over-the-horizon-targeting systems (guided by Galileo GPS signals) that would enable the Chinese military to strike American ships hundreds of miles out in the Pacific.
The Times also notes that Congress already is planning legislation that would ban the Pentagon from trading with any country that makes military sales to China and, as we have observed (here) is already making technology transfers difficult.
At the moment, the War on Terror is going well in this sense, that no mega-horror stories of the sort feared immediately after 9/11 have actually materialised. (Whether that is because the War on Terror has been conducted from our side with dazzling brilliance, or because it was superfluous, I leave the reader to decide. A bit of both would be my guess.) There have been some horrible killings, but no mega-death bomb explosions or plagues of the kind that we all have feared. Which means, unless the Islamofascists prove to have more life (by which I mean death) in them than now seems likely, that the world, and the people of the USA in particular, now have some attention to spare for what is surely going to be the big confrontation of the next few years, namely the rivalry for the global number one spot between the USA and China. China now has semi-sane economic policies, and a billion odd people semi-thriving under them. And America is … America. Quite a confrontation, I am sure we would all agree.
No doubt the EUrocrats will argue, if they have not started arguing already, that this IBM deal proves what hypocrites those silly Americans are for fussing about them doing business with the Chinese too. But cheap computers that China already perfectly well knows how to make are one thing; such things as hi-tech guidance systems for Chinese rockets are quite another.
Maybe this will be the moment when Americans finally decide in large numbers what an anti-American operation the EU is – as opposed to just a bunch of loser countries that count for nothing, whether they get together or whether they stay separate. Time was when the USA saw the EU as a bastion against the USSR. But imagine what Americans will make of people whom they regard as helping their enemies. What a change it would make (is making?) if everyday Americans were to take against (are taking against) the EU, and decide that they would like it, shall we say, crumbled.
Unless, of course, the EU is just dangling the ending of the arms embargo in front of everybody, prior to doing a deal with the USA that will leave everyone smiling and shaking hands, and the EU (having agreed to perpetuate the arms embargo indefinitely) suddenly being the USA’s good buddy again.
As a libertarian, I expect to be told (again) by other libertarians that I am not a libertarian, this time for not condeming all embargoes absolutely, regardless of who against and of what. Which I can live with. I might even be persuaded that the world would be improved if the Chinese government could now buy all the weapons it wanted from anyone it wanted. I doubt it, but give it a try if you want to. But one thing I do know. I absolutely do not want to find myself a citizen of a nation state (EUrope) which the USA decides is its enemy. Whatever ends up happening with this embargo, today I felt that possibility move a little closer.
The Democratic Leadership Council, a faction of the US Democratic Party, is calling for the resignation of Kofi Annan as the only way to restore the UN’s credibility. The litany of condemnation includes:
Annan’s handling of the fallout over the past week has done nothing to improve his perceived credibility: He has refused requests from congressional committees for access to the United Nation’s 55 internal audits and other reports, or for the chance to interview U.N. officials who oversaw the program, saying that it would interfere with the Volcker inquiry. That inquiry is expected to release an interim report in January. The full report could take another year and cost as much as $30 million — to be funded with leftover cash in the oil-for food program.
The British diplomatic response as reported by the BBC is to condemn Americans as a “lynch mob”. Someone supposedly called “Lord David Hannay”, a former British diplomat is defending Kofi Annan from those redneck peasants (including the DLC).
Apart from the fact that calling someone “Lord David Hannay” is a most improper form of address, it turns out that this creep was “first secretary of the negotiating team for entry into the EC” according to the UN’s global security website. So if anyone got kickbacks for betraying the British fishing industry or agriculture, or the excessive payments by British taxpayers to the European Economic Community (as it was called then), Lord Hannay should know who got the brown paper envelopes. He may even know a thing or two about the massive fraud going on at the European Commision, as he worked there, but I prefer to believe that he is simply blind to the wrong-doing of others.
It seems that a bi-partisan alliance of critics of the UN may be forming in the US Congress. Obviously some Rebublican sceptics want the UN reformed others want it abolished. What the DLC report suggests is that the less blinkered supporters of transnational government can see that getting rid of Annan is their best hope for restoring credibility.
Shame that the BBC and “Lord David Hannay” are such provincial ignoramuses that they don’t get the message.
I am attending a wedding tomorrow, of the daughter of a school friend (the other daughter is my god daughter), and this got me thinking about Muslims and Muslim weddings, which are, or so I have been persuasively told, not like our weddings.
When we marry, we marry outside our family, and our weddings are thus gatherings involving and uniting two families, and what is more two families who probably had nothing to do with one another until the bride from one and the groom from the other brought them together. Our marriage customs are, in the patois of the anthropologists, “exogamous”. We marry outside the clan.
Muslims, on the other hand, by custom, marry within their own clans, and a Muslim wedding is thus a gathering of and a celebration of just the one family, together with its various friends and hangers-on. Arab marriage customs are “endogamous”.
As one of my favourite intellectuals – a French anthropologist called Emmanuel Todd, known to the Anglo-Internet mostly for his bizarre opinion that the Euro-economy is racing ahead of the US economy, but better than that at anthropology, trust me – puts it, in his brilliant book (which fully lives up to its amazingly confident title) The Explanation of Ideology:
From Morocco to Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, a single family form dominates, its unique trait being preferential marriage between paternal parallel-cousins. Typical of the Muslim world and not simply of the Arab one, this characteristic can be observed in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and among Berbers of Algerian or of Morocco. …
This does not apply to all Muslim societies, because Islam conquered some non-endogamous societies on its perimeter in its early time of military supremacy. But it does apply to the Muslim heartland.
Here in the West, alliances and cooperative ventures that go beyond mere clan membership are commonplace. You may not like, for example, the Labour Party, but at least its upper echelons are not confined to people who are all related to one another. Yet Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to take one particularly famous example, was ruled by a clan all of whom lived in one town, and old habits die hard.
One result (among many) of this peculiar fact is a society in which them and us remain permanently divided. Islam, in Islamic minds, is irreconcilably divided from the rest of us, and similar them/us divisions afflict Muslim society itself. We in the West indulge in plenty of themming and ussing, so to speak. I am, after all, doing it in this posting. But the Islamic version of this habit is now, I think it is fair to say, far more absolute.
This could have been a very, very long posting, but I will keep it short and just say that I think this explains a lot.
From Mark Steyn, a crystalline summation of the reasons to fight Islamist terrorism here and now, rather than later:
So we’re living through a period of extraordinarily rapid demographic and cultural change that broadly favors the Islamists’ stated objectives, a period of rapid technological advance that greatly facilitates the Islamists’ objectives, and a period of rapid nuclear dissemination that will add serious heft to the realization of their objectives. If the West – and I use the term in the widest sense to mean not just swaggering Texas cowboys but sensitive left-wing feminists in favor of gay marriage – is to survive, it will only be after a long struggle lasting many decades.
The Islamist ideology is profoundly inconsistent with life as we now live it in the West (which includes all that libertarians hold dear, as well as much that we like to decry). Indeed, it is hard to find any aspect of their ideology that is consistent with the West. Because Islamism is inherently exclusionary and expansive (unlike, say, Buddhism), it cannot coexist in the long run with the West, so conflict at some level is inevitable. In a purely cultural and economic contest, the Islamists were doomed, which undoubtedly explains their decision to escalate their struggle with the West to the level of terminal violence.
Steyn notes that demographics indicate that the Islamists are not going to just fade away. Further, unlike crackpot groups in times past, modern transport and communications technology means that Islamists cannot be held at a safe distance from Western societies. So much is historical fact.
Based on what we have seen to date, and setting aside the question of WMDs altogether, I am quite comfortable with the conclusion that the Islamists pose a threat to liberty that cannot be ignored or tolerated. The demonstrated ability and willingness of Islamist terrorists to inflict catastrophic damage on Western societies will eventually lead to either the subjugation of those societies or to their transformation into defensively closed and unfree societies.
I think the question of whether to deal with Islamism on less than a war footing was settled on 9/11/01. The only remaining question is how best to win this war.
Our own Natalie Solent posted a really good piece at her personal blog last night, about the fact that many, many bad things continue to be done to the world, but that the difference is that they are soon liable to be done with equal relentlessness everywhere, spread around the world evenly, in a way that will make it much harder to notice and complain. Time was when evil was done with maximum ferocity in country A, but hardly done at all in countries B and C, and the evil done by the evil was eventually obvious to all, even to those at first most inclined to support it. Sometimes it was even easier than that:
… To help you along to this conclusion the goddess History primly laid out several countries split into communist and non-communist sections so that you could watch one half sink and one half rise and draw appropriate morals. …
But not any more. Will the day come when that same goddess ordains that we are all to be governed by the same benign, suffocating, righteous, repressive elite, and no comparisons between them ruling and them not ruling will possible, because everywhere will be theirs?
What I fear is that a time will come when there will be no significant examples of difference left in the world. That possibility is still far off but for the first time in history the technology is in place for it to happen. Think about that. …
She mentions that extraordinary moment in history, notable for the fact that hugely important and portentous things were made to not happen:
I am haunted by the tale of the fleets of Zheng He, recounted in Guns, Germs and Steel. China’s vast program of exploration, greater than anything Europe ever had, was turned off click! because of some otherwise obscure quarrel between two factions at court. The reason that there was only one switch was that China was unified.
And the worry is that, unlike the blood-sodden grindings and thrashings of evil in the twentieth century, the clicks we are about to be subjected to will be inaudible.
It is a beautiful and melancholy piece. David Carr rewritten by Jane Austen. It contains at least another half dozen sentences I wanted to copy and paste here, but since it is all there, go there, and read it all.
The United Nations is seen by many, idiotarians and some otherwise quite reasonable people, as the nearest thing we have, in these modern times, to some sort of institution with ‘divine’ authority. I am sick of hearing about how the United States or UK or any other country is evil because it is acting without authorisation from the UN. It is therefore with glee that I relay any news showing that behind the edifice of self-righteousness and vast amounts of funds is all too human and corrupt an institution.
The Inter Press Service News Agency reports that the United Nations has been hit by a rash of new complaints about sexual abuse of women and children by peacekeepers, civilian staff and humanitarian organisations operating either with the blessings of the world body or under the U.N. flag. In May the news wrote about a UN probe into reports of sexual abuse by Congo staff, but things have ‘progressed’ since then.
A system-wide investigation was triggered by a report from Annan, who says that six out of 48 U.N. agencies operating in the field have received reports of new cases of sexual exploitation or abuse, mostly by blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers, during 2003.
The agencies that received the complaints include the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the U.N. Children’s Fund, the World Food Programme and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Margaret Stanley of Ireland said:
Sexual exploitation, including all forms of trafficking and related offences, particularly in the case of vulnerable persons dependent on international aid, is completely unacceptable.
Rosemary McCreery, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Resources Management, specifically singled out the sexual abuse perpetrated by civilian, police and military contingents in Kosovo and in the Bunia region in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). McCreery said preliminary internal investigations this year had revealed ”widespread abuses” in DRC.
The ‘Washington Times’ also reported that a soon-to-be-released book by current and former U.N. employees contends that Bulgarian peacekeepers in Cambodia in the mid-1990s were actually former convicts who agreed to serve six months in the Southeast country in exchange for their freedom at the end of their term. The Bulgarians were “drunk as sailors” and “rape vulnerable Cambodian women”, according to the book, Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story From Hell on Earth. Bulgaria’s ambassador to the United States has denied the allegations.
The investigation into such allegations are not examplary either and several delegates are complaining that the world body is not doing enough. Karen Lock of South Africa said:
The secretary-general’s report had not elaborated extensively on measures taken to improve the conditions of refugees and vulnerable communities. It was hoped that those measures would be reported in greater detail to the appropriate inter-governmental bodies.
So we have oil for food or rather oil-for-terror and money for UN officials and assorted politicians, humanitarian aid that dare not speak its name and a sanctimonious veneer that gives tranzis and Guardianistas of all shades opportunity to draw on moral ‘authority’ for their deranged vision for the world.
Ben Hammersley has put a bounty on Kofi Annan’s head.
Annan is an object of undeserved worship, and the way to treat objects of undeserved worship is to blow raspberries at them. This Bounty Bar makes a fine raspberry. I make that three incompatible metaphors. Salutations to Photoshop, and to Normblog for the link.
Kofi Annan has perfected the Holy Man style of public performance. He speaks very quietly, in that exquisitely enunciated African accent, and people just take if for granted that he is a Good Man and a Good Thing. But Per Ahlmark (linked to by Instapundit) shows him to be a less than perfect human being. He describes the inaction and treachery of the UN, as lead by Annan, in first promising, and then failing, to protect the Bosnian Muslims from the Serbs. But, he continues:
No one should be surprised by the UN’s inaction, because only the year before it had demonstrated utter incompetence in facing the fastest genocide in history – the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in just 100 days. UN forces in Rwanda in 1994 were Annan’s responsibility before and during the crisis.
Annan was alerted four months before Hutu activists began their mass killings by a fax message from Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general commanding UN forces in Rwanda. Dallaire described in detail how the Hutus were planning “anti-Tutsi extermination”. He identified his source “a Hutu” and reported that arms were ready for the impending ethnic cleansing.
Dallaire requested permission to evacuate his informant and to seize the arms cache. Annan rejected both demands, proposing that Dallaire make the informant’s identity known to Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, even though the informant had expressly named the president’s closest entourage as the authors of the genocide blueprint.
This is the man who is being seriously proposed as the next ruler of Iraq, because he would be an improvement.
Annan, Ahlmark makes clear, is an object of religious worship, a human repository of millenarian hopes, rather than a man who has earned the adoration he basks in.
A similar error of false adoration was made by the more elderly admirers of Kofi Annan, when younger, with that other African Holy Man of severe actual unholiness, Julius Nyerere. As with Nyerere, it is hard to tell what proportion of Annan’s catastrophic blunders to attribute to sheer stupidity, and how much to actual wickedness. I suspect a combination of the two in the form of a murderously stubborn stupidity, which combines intellectual mediocrity with an immoral unwillingness to admit to error, possibly all floating in the same delusions as those that engulf the minds of his worshippers, but perhaps caused by mere vanity.
Robert Mugabe is another such. Although, having a slightly more severe and steely public persona, he is more readily identified as the mass murderer that he is. He should have gone to RADA. At the very least he should lose the Hitler moustache.
The vision Kofi Annan personifies with such theatrical precision is that of a single, infinitely benign World State, which will cure all ills, correct all injustices, right all wrongs, and put down the mighty from their seats. Allelujah. Especially those horrid Americans. That this same man might be an ill, a perpetrator of injustice, a wrongdoer and far too mighty one, and that the vision he personifies might be a road to ruin of our entire species, starting with its poorest and most unfortunate, and that those ghastly Americans may in fact be energetically rescuing the human race from a great and self-sacrificial folly with no good purpose to it whatever, is a thought that is simply not bearable to the World Statists. So they caste it aside. Mere evidence has nothing to do with it. To cease from the worship of Kofi would mean changing their entire way of thinking and believing and feeling, and that they will not do, no matter how much blood soaks their altar.
David Renwick is scornful of the 52 diplomats who signed a letter denouncing Tony Blair’s Iraq policies, and is equally scornful of those who described this letter as a revolt by The Establishment:
The fact that the letter was not signed by a couple of hundred other former ambassadors, including this one, was thought scarcely worthy of mention.
So who were these signatories?
Many of the signatories were former Arabists in the Foreign Office, affectionately known as the Camel Corps. Some members of the Corps have shown a tendency over the years to develop a quite passionate attachment to the Arab world that, unfortunately, has not always been reciprocated by the Arabs. They have tended to concentrate on the crimes of the Israelis, rather than those of the Palestinians. Most of us would prefer to be more even-handed.
Stephen Pollard is even more scornful. He links to a piece by Andrew Roberts in the Times which says that whenever the Foreign Offices protests like this it tends to be wrong:
TONY BLAIR should be delighted that no fewer than 52 former diplomats have written to him to say that his Middle Eastern policy is “doomed to failure”. Whenever a collective view has developed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office it has been only a matter of time – and usually not long, either – before it has been proved spectacularly wrong.
So the 52 are either wrong because they aren’t the majority view at the Foreign Office, or because they are. But either way, they are definitely wrong.
Pollard also links to Melanie Phillips, who is even more scornful. To her the Camel Corps is also “The Establishment”.
The main personal consequence for the 52 diplomats of having put their heads above the parapet like this has been to draw attention to all the financial interests they have which predispose them towards saying what they have said.
Personally, I am not surprised that people have financial interests in alignment with their opinions. Most of us prefer to make money doing things we believe in. And if these guys believe in making friends with Arabs … For me, the question is, not: Who paid them to say this? It is: Are they right?
Clearly a great deal of the anti-Americanism that now afflicts this world is stupid, malevolent, small-minded, cowardly, a mask behind which lurks Marxist or sub-Marxist cretinism, and generally ridiculous. But I want to suggest now that some of it may be rational, and even wise.
Consider the phenomenon of a classroom full of semi-unruly school children, who, when confronted with a new teacher, proceed to ‘test’ that teacher.
A common interpretation of such behaviour is that children “want” or “need” boundaries. That was not my experience. The fewer damn boundaries I faced when I was a child, the happier I was, and this was never more true than when I was stuck in a damn classroom, being made to attend to some stupid intellectual rigmarole that did not interest me or did confuse me or annoy me.
But what all children do want to know is simply, what kind of teacher is this? Like babies who find out how things are put together by trying to take them apart, children try to break a teacher, simply to find out what he is made of. If it turns out that he is indeed the sort of teacher who is going to put in place lots of those boundaries, well, this may be very bad news. But, whether they need such boundaries or not, most children want to know about them, so that they can then proceed with true assumptions in place in their minds about how things are going to be from now on, until this guys goes, and someone else shows up and there is another testing session.
Testing is even more necessary if a new teacher declares his desire to be nice, to allow freedom, to let children choose how they behave, what they will learn etc.. He will find himself being tested to destruction. Teachers get set upon like wounded deer being savaged by wolves.
Here the common explanation is that children behave like wolves because, basically, they are wolves.
Again, I dissent. A classroom full of children confronted by a new, liberal, nice, permissive teacher will, again, need to know where they truly stand with such a person. It is not that children do not like freedom, deciding what they will learn, how they will behave, etc. It is simply that children want very much to know, if such declarations are presented to them, whether they are in fact true, or just pious utopian drivel which will collapse in the face of the first serious challenge, or in the face of the first real decision made by a child which the permissive teacher actually does not approve of.
But there is another even more basic problem with permissive, nice teachers. The problem with a nice teacher is that there are other forces in play which threaten to destroy niceness besides nasty teachers who are only pretending to be nice. There are also the other nasties in the classroom, and a nice teacher is all too likely to be especiallyl bad at restraining these nasties. So why get your hopes up when Mr Nice Teacher makes his first nice speech? On the contrary, join the nasties and try to destroy him, again, to see what he is made of. If he then shows himself both willing and able to quell such a rebellion, good, then it looks like he might be trustworthy, a teacher whose protestations of niceness from now on might be worth betting on. If not, then best to find out now.
Here is a case where the children who are tempted to bet on the new regime do indeed need boundaries – boundaries to protect them.
There is nothing crueller for a child than having his hopes aroused, only to have them dashed by the feebleness of the very person who promised him all these wonders. Nothing is more cruel for a bottom-of-the-pecking-order child in a school to be presented with a utopian manifesto of niceness, to believe it, and then to find that actually it is not true.
Well, you can see where I am going with this, I am sure. To the point where I hardly need to spell it out. But I will anyway. → Continue reading: Anti-Americanism as teacher testing
International news agency Reuters reports that a van, containing Arabic language tapes and detonators, has been searched close to the scene of today’s mass murders in Spain. So far, the authorities have maintained that the atrocities were the handiwork of terror group ETA, but there could be a possibility that Islamo-fascists had a hand in this affair, possibly even to the point of directing the operations.
The truth is that no-one can be certain for sure, and we must be mindful about jumping to conclusions. But given Spain’s support for the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, and Spain’s proximity to north Africa, there is a serious possibility that Islamists may have played a part in this.
There is also the worrying thought that terror groups, who have come under growing pressure from law enforcement agencies and the military since 9/11, are becoming more desperate and hence willing to co-operate with those they would have previously ignored.
If true, it makes the sneering article by Simon Jenkins in today’s Spectator, in which he mocks Blair’s concerns over global terror networks and their access to WMDs, not only wrongheaded, but frivolous in the extreme. London, Paris, Berlin or Rome could be next. Nothing to worry about eh, Simple Simon?
A black day for Spain. My heart goes out to the people of that wonderful country.
Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism
Peter Schweizer
Doubleday, 2002
“It’s surprising what you can accomplish when no one is concerned about who gets the credit.” This lettered sign stood on Reagan’s desk during his presidency and since it reflected his attitude, he cannot have worried much that his own part in the downfall of Communism has been seriously underestimated, a judgement which Peter Schweizer labours to correct in this book. For its theme, Reagan’s War, was the war against communism. By leaving out other aspects and events which did not touch on it – Israel, the Palestinians, the Lebanon, the Falklands, or the home economy – an exaggerated impression may have been given of Reagan’s singlemindedness. Even the inclusion of the assassination attempt, so nearly successful, is with an emphasis on Reagan’s belief that he had been preserved by God to conduct this war.
Reagan began political life as a Roosevelt-admiring Democrat. He had been aware of the attempt by communists to dominate and subvert the American film industry as early as 1946 and become involved in countering it, almost certainly sidetracking his career as a film star. The Korean War (1950-3) reinforced his attitude and, while still a Democrat he campaigned for Eisenhower, though disappointed later by his lukewarm anti-communism, and even less impressed by Nixon. This was also the time when anti-anti-communism became intellectually fashionable, Reagan encountering it when he was hired by General Electric to host and act in GE Theatre on television. Travelling round the country as the company’s roving ambassador to its plants and business contacts he was able to give speeches entirely based on his own views, unhampered by any kind of censorship. Schweizer distances Reagan from Senator McCarthy, who, he mentions, was initially supported by John F. Kennedy and never censured by him (p. 37). Reagan met Nancy Davis, who became his second wife (after his first wife Jane Wyman left and divorced him) through being asked to exonerate her of communist connections, apparently a case of mistaken identity. → Continue reading: “Reagan was the main author of the victory …”
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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