Tag Archives: people

Bringing Down Europe’s Last Ex-Soviet Dictator

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Long NYT magazine piece on the Belorussian opposition.

“We go into these elections not because we believe in their fairness, but because this is a chance to go to the people, to conduct a campaign door to door,” Milinkevich explained through an interpreter. “I will not say that at every door people will become less fearful immediately. But very many people, when they see others who are not afraid, who dare to tell the truth, they will start to have more courage.” For now, many people react uneasily when they encounter him, as if he were an apparition. In the consciousness of a people saturated with state propaganda and ideology, he appears as the shadowy leader of a revolutionary cadre financed by big powers abroad and committed to the overthrow of the government.

The Colour of Steel

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First of all many thanks to the kind folk of Afoe offering me the possibility of expressing my views on some European reactions to the Mittal Steel bid for the European steel giant Arcelor. By now most of you must have heard about this sitation. Mittal Steel is the world’s largest steelmaker and was founded (and is still currently run) by the Indian-born steel maker Lakshmi Nivas Mittal, the third richest man in the world.
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David Irving: My Part in His Downfall

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David Irving, as no doubt we all know, is beginning his new career as a jailbird, in the great grey walls of the Josefstadt prison next to the even greater and greyer Landesgericht between Vienna’s city hall and its university. Now, there are plenty of facile things to say about this: freedom of expression is vital, dammit!/Nazis must be suppressed!/What if he was a Muslim? But I hope to raise some others.

Total disclosure: I participated tangentially in Irving’s lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt. At the time I was a student of the world Holocaust authority, Professor Peter Longerich, who was one of the team of historians who acted as expert witnesses under the direction of Professor Richard J. Evans. Whilst Longerich was known to be preparing for one of his court appearances, he asked me to borrow various works of reference from the Bedford Library at Royal Holloway for him. I was not pleased, some time later, when the librarians demanded I pay fines on the books, although Irving’s defeat was some relief.

Irving is a liar who deserves nothing but contempt. (Richard Evans’s book on the case is strongly recommended for detail.) It cannot go unremarked that he has always chosen to “challenge conventional wisdom”, in the charitable way people put it, in front of audiences who are both already converted to his point of view and willing to pay well for confirmation of theirs. His lecture circuit – mad US militias, western European fascists, apartheid South Africa – speaks for itself, as do those who admit to financing him.

And there’s the rub. In Britain, his nonsense might just be tolerable. But this is in a sense a luxury afforded by a lack of fascists. I can think of many countries where this is so:
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The liberalism of fools?

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I cannot recommend highly enough Ken Macleod’s post (found via Crooked Timber) on how the “socialism of fools” – Engels’ description of anti-semitism – was accompanied by a sort of “liberalism of fools”, to wit, the anti-Catholicism of the pre-WWII era. Macleod, acknowledging that anti-Catholicism is rather passé these days, wonders if hatred of something else, perhaps another sect, might fill the roll as a modern liberalism of fools.

And, on a not entirely separate topic, French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo (no website, not that kind of paper) is republishing the images, along with one on its cover of Mohammed crying “It’s hard to be loved by fools”. An effort by the Conseil français du culte musulman to stop publication through the French courts was rejected on a technicality.

Chirac, however, has demonstrated that he is not, contrary to widespread belief, the biggest fool in Europe. Unlike the Danish Prime Minister, he has “condemned all manifest provocations that are liable to dangerously arouse passions.” Alas, he has only retreated to the number two slot in European political idiocy. He also said, “Anything susceptible to harm the convictions of others, particularly religious convictions, should be avoided. Freedom of expression should be exercised with a sense of responsibility.” Right on count two, wrong on count one. Responsible freedom of expression means that when you go out to offend people, you can’t claim to be surprised when they are offended. But there is little point in free speech if it is forbidden from trying to change convictions.

And round and round this totally avoidable fiasco goes.
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The cartoon row: aiming for maximum shock value

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Iran newspaper Hamshahri came up with an original plan to counter the release of Danish cartoons making fun of the prophet Muhammad and decided to hold a little cartoon contest to test the limits of free speech:

The daily paper Hamshahri said the contest was designed to test the boundaries of free speech — the reason given by many European newspapers for publishing the Prophet Mohammad cartoons.

Fair enough, you’d say? Well, not quite. The theme of the contest is the Holocaust, incidentally called an “incident”:

A serious question for Muslims … is this: “Does Western free speech allow working on issues like America and Israel’s crimes or an incident like the Holocaust or is this freedom of speech only good for insulting the holy values of divine religions?”‘ the paper said on Tuesday.

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Islam, internal discussion; pt 3

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Alex,

a) I love the term „snack thinker“. She may well be, but her narrative lends a credibility most people do not have. She’s paying a high price being who she is and as such is probably entitles to being over-the-top at times. And, of course, there’s the Dutch history of pillarisation, which radicalises this debate in my opinion.

b) I don’t think most of the people I mentioned in the email are non-Muslims. But even if, given that almost no secular religious research into Islam is being conducted in countries where it is the predominant or state religion, I don’t think dealing with Islam from this perspective is necessarily wrong. And, despite the fact that he was certainly read to often by the wrong people, Bernard Lewis does still make some important institutional points, in my understanding. If he had not, we would not see this kind of rage on the streets. All this is a complex, and mostly political, issue, much less religious. Still – even though life in the 16th century wasn’t exactly fun for a lot of people, it was the time when European societies were able to be taken to the streets and fields for principles handled solely by their principes in earlier times. If you don’t buy the argument made by some with respect to Germany, that it was “reformation” that later caused the spiritual inspection and took the political out of the public realm when collective action would have been needed to avert a political disaster, ie that reformation is, in some sense, opposed to true democratisation, then reformation is what is needed these days. It would mean the unquestioned individual and social acceptance of a modern version of “cuius regio, eius religio” , and make the Jihad of Dar al-Islam vs Dar-al-Harb a solely personal, and spiritual one, not a “geographical” or national fight. Of course, it looks once again like Europe will be this battlefield, which is even more reason to deal with Islam, and Islamic modernisation even if you’re not a Muslim.

Hot Labour Anyone?

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This post has one sovereign virtue: apart from in the current sentence it will not refer, either directly or indirectly, to the Catalan Statute. The topic it does deal with however is probably equally vital for the future of Spain. The issue is Spain’s housing boom, and the role of immigration in fuelling it. Two facts above all others stand out: Spain is currently ‘enjoying’ the longest and deepest housing boom (in the current round) among all the world’s developed economies (see this useful article from the Economist, or this one from Business Week), and Spain is also enjoying sustained rates of immigration which – at around 2% of the population per annum, may well be the most intense ever experienced in a developed economy. For purposes of comparison I could point out that Spain’s net migration rate of 17.6 per thousand in 2003 contrasts sharply with that recorded for the old European Union 15 for the same year – 5.4 per thousand – and is even well above the level recorded by Germany in the early 1990s – a maximum of 9.6 per thousand in 1992 – or by France in the early 1970s. So there is a housing boom, and there is immigration, the question is, what is the connection?
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Some Facts On Turkey And Avian Flu

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As everyone keeps saying, the important thing in circumstances like these is not to panic. But the best defence against panic is information, and after that knowledge. So here goes:

1/. The flu virus was actually first detected in the laboratories of the Turkish Agriculture Ministry on December 9 2005, despite the fact that a ministry statement on the same day denied the existence of the disease in Turkey. So when I implicitly questioned the Turkish Health Ministry version in this post on 2 January it seems I was right to be sceptical.

2/. Nearly 100 people are currently receiving treatment in suspected bird flu cases across Turkey. Since there have only been 142 confirmed cases across the globe since the H5N1 strain was first identified in 2003, the New York Times is undoubtedly right to suggest that the flu is spreading faster than expected.

3/. Elizabeth Rosenthal of the NYT is however not quite right when she says that “the Ankara cases have the most alarming implications because….. it is a relatively well-off area, where it is not the norm for humans and animals to live under one roof. ” This is a misunderstanding, since on the outskirts of Istanbul there is a large Kurdish migrant population, which basically lives in shanty towns, and in shanty towns people often keep their own hens:

Five of eight chickens owned by Ramazan and Muhittin Mentes, living in a shanty house in Ikitelli, Istanbul, reportedly died one by one after the New Year. Members of the Mentes family who ate the remaining three sick birds last Tuesday were taken by ambulance to hospital after neighbors notified officials. Members of the Mentes family immigrated to Istanbul from the Baykan district of Siirt, a southeastern Turkish province, two years ago, and have been earning a living selling lemons in the street markets.

There is a blurring of boundaries here, since many of the people affected may simply live outside the formal limits of Istanbul. However, according to this article:

The Governor of Istanbul has announced quarantine measures will be applied in the areas of Istanbul within a three kilometer radius of regions where poultry samples tested positive to bird flu.

4/ The shanty-town structure is important, since it means the bird/human interface is much larger, and thus the possibility of transmission much greater. The speed of the spread may thus not be a function of virus mutation, but rather of the high ratio of birds to humans in some areas.

There is still no evidence whatever of human/human transmission, although obviously the more human cases there are, the higher the possibility of this ocurring. The most important objective, IMHO, should be to eliminate this outbreak before a more normal human flu strain arrives, since this would provide the ideal host for the kind of mutation that none of us want to see happen.

Garden Of The Forking Paths?

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“Global imbalances matter” seems to be the favoured warcry over at Brad Setser’s blog these days (I’m not sure anyone really disagrees with the idea that they matter, all the arguing seems to be about how much and why). Recently however Brad seems to be drawing support from a rather unexpected quarter: “one part of the Economist” (well, one part is definitely better than none), the part which believes that despite what happened in 2005, 2006 will be the year of the “great dollar decline”: And why would this be? Because, of course, global imbalances do (here read the US CA deficit), in fact, matter.

Now there is another view available on this.

However this issue is more interesting, since the part of the Economist which believes that the US CA deficit will prove decisive in 2006, also seems to believe that global ageing isn’t in fact a terribly important phenomenon (and here).

The Economist seems to take the view – as Claus Vistesen puts it – that “Rich countries’ populations are shrinking … not to worry though“?

In fact Claus seems much nearer the mark than the part of the Economist which seems to be arguing that ageing doesn’t matter too much when he says:

I agree with the zest of their arguments, namely that the new realities mean that there will be fewer people in the workforce to support more old people in the future. In a global perpspective I also believe that the world would benefit from having fewer people on the whole. However, the point that escapes The Economist in the midst of their optimism is that some countries will have a hell of a lot more difficulties adapting than others, and as such these demographic trends might have a real negative effect, at least some places in the world.

Yes, I would say that this is just the point that escapes the ‘ageing doesn’t matter so much’ part of the Economist, who seem to believe that population meltdown in Japan wouldn’t be a problem since “the last Japanese will (only) die as soon as 2800.” (Actually the article on Japan is near to scandalous, since it only focuses on the legal minimum pensionable age, and misses entirely the important point that most Japanese already continue working after 65, and even by the age of 75 25% of the population are still working).

I have already posted extensively on the population turning point in Japan (and here). So now I would simply make two points. Firstly it is the age structure of the population which matters, not its size, and secondly, it is curious how all those people who seem to want to argue that the US current account deficit is the most important determinant of today’s global economy also feel themselves impelled to downplay (if not actually try to ridicule) the idea that changing global demography (from Bolivia, to Vietnam, to Turkey, to China, to France, to Germany, to Japan) has any important role to play in helping us understand current economic phenomena. I think there is a choice here: two world-views are colliding, and the paths are forking.

Sparkling Spain

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Spain’s economy is of course booming, (as it has been for the last ten years). The inflation rate is booming too. Some even go so far as to suggest that Spain should now become a member fo the G8. Spanish people are of course buying a lot more houses, indeed more housing units were built in Spain last year than in Germany, France and Italy combined, and since, as Brad Delong pointed out yesterday, as long as interest rates stay low, the housing sector can keep booming, and since in the short term interest rates in Spain will stay low, then the boom looks set to continue. Plenty of reasons then, at least for now, to break open the bubbly.

Which is what, of course, a lot of people having been doing. In Spain by bubbly people normally mean Cava, a Catalan beveridge which is really remarkably similar to French Champagne. This year, however, things may be a little different, at least in some parts of Spain, since in addition to having a smokeless celebration, many will also be having a cava-free one.

So what is this all about? Well funnily enough rather than being about Eve (whether New Year’s or Xmas), this topic is in fact much more about José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (the Spanish Prime Minister/President).
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