Second Thoughts About the Good War _ Common Review Winter 2009
By Ian Williams
Books discussed in this essay:
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World
By Patrick Buchanan
Crown, 544 pages, $29.95
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization,
By Nicholson Baker
Simon & Schuster, 576 pages, $30
Chamberlain and the Lost Peace
By John Charmley
Ivan R. Dee, 257 pages, $27.95 (clothbound 1989)
Churchill: the End of Glory: A Political Biography
By John Charmley
Harcourt, 742 pages, $34.95 (clothbound 1993)
1940: Myth and Reality
By Clive Ponting
Ivan R. Dee, 273 pages, $24.95 (clothbound 1991)
Armageddon: The Reality Behind the Distortions: Myths, Lies, Illusions of World War II
By Clive Ponting
Random House, 376 pages, $27.50 (clothbound 1995)
Nicholson Baker and Patrick Buchanan are neither kindred spirits nor ideological soulmates. They occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum, the former a gifted writer of fiction who has given himself in recent years to the cause of preserving newspaper archives, the latter a bruising culture warrior who began his career as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon. Although the duo of Baker & Buchanan alliterates in promising ways, one cannot really imagine them dancing very well together.
It is a surprise, then, and an opportunity for reflection, to find both provoking outrage for debunking the accepted notion of World War Two as the ultimate in just wars. In contrast to the general acceptance among scholars and historians that the First World War was a costly, disastrous mistake, our popular vision of World War Two is one of a crusade so virtuous as to be beyond criticism—a struggle, yes, between good and evil. It is Studs Terkel’s “Good War” waged by Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.” In this narrative, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt stand side by side for democracy against the original Axis of Evil, dictators Hitler, Mussolini, and the Emperor Hirohito, whose designs of world domination had to be stopped, by whatever means necessary.
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Drawing attention to Churchill’s manifold imperfections may seem iconoclastic in the United States, where many American conservatives have indeed made him an icon and even liberals hold residual warm feelings for FDR’s transatlantic partner. However, in Britain, these sorts of attacks on that cigar-smoking brandy-toper merely represent the resurgence of what is practically a folk tradition. After all, they voted him out of office in 1945, in a landslide defeat, right on the heels of his greatest triumph.
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I’ve had personal experience of these mixed feelings. During the 1960s, my Christmas vacation job was in the head post office in the Port of Liverpool. Most of my fulltime colleagues were war veterans, who found the uniform and hierarchy of the postal service comforting. Early one chilly morning, I sat in a red General Post Office van, waiting with the rest of the gang to go down to the docks, waiting for one tardy worker.
The driver poked his head in and lamented that Churchill would have sorted out the latecomer. The former sergeant by the door asked, deadpan, “Churchill? Wasn’t he the one who said that Tobruk wouldn’t fall?” His companion took up the theme. “No—it was Singapore, wasn’t it?” A third chipped in, “No, wasn’t he the guy who got all the Aussies killed at Gallipoli?” Yet another demurred, “No, he was the one who sent the army against the miners in Tonypandy.”
And so it went around the van, giving me graphic evidence of why Churchill’s feet of clay had marched him to electoral defeat as the country celebrated military victory.
Don’t get me wrong—these men were proud of victory in World War Two. Given a choice between Neville Chamberlain and Churchill they had no doubts – but then given a choice in the 1945 election between Clement Attlee, the Labour Party leader, and Churchill, they were equally certain, despite Churchill’s scurrilous attempt to liken his wartime coalition partners to the Gestapo.
On both sides of the Atlantic, our historical vision has an inherent tendency towards a Manichean, and in the English-speaking world, a Panglossian frame. As the victors, we tend to accept uncritically that everything was for the best. The war made the United States the world’s unquestionably strongest power, while for the British there was the vicarious comfort of the alleged special relationship, along with the consolation that they had given their all for a good cause.
However, the simple fact that the American president and the British prime minister stood side by side with Josef Stalin suggests the need for generous doses of doublethink to maintain the myth uncritically. Any serious study reveals the gray complexities of the titanic struggle, which Clive Ponting, the British whistle-blowing civil servant turned author, calls “Armageddon.” As Humpty Dumpty put it, the question was, “Which is to be Master – that’s all.” And the war certainly resolved that question for the Axis powers. Most of us would assume that for all their manifest faults, we are better off that way. Baker and Buchanan demur.
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Even if we disagree with their conclusions, They both raise general ethical and particular historical questions that deserve to be thrashed out. How far can nations go to avert a threatened evil? Do measures such as embargos and bombing that harm civilians fatally compromise a “just war?” How far can one compromise with evil to secure peace? In the particular historical application, was an alliance with Stalin justified—and was he really the lesser evil? Should the United States have joined in the war? Could Britain have made peace with Hitler, and would doing so have preserved the British Empire? And the question certainly not posed by Patrick Buchanan: would that preservation have been a good thing for Britain, the Empire or the world?
Baker and Buchanan pose the questions starkly in black and white binary terms, but any rational answers are not so clear, certainly not as clear as those they imply or state. In real politics, “fuzzy logic” applies as circumstances shift. Lord Halifax, former foreign secretary and wartime ambassador to the US, epitomized the empirical strain in British foreign policy that is now reviled as appeasement. He commented, “The world is a strangely mixed grill of good and evil,” and “for good or ill we have to do our best to live in it and not withdraw into the desert because of the evil, like the ancient anchorites.” (Charmley, Chamberlain 66)
Such a policy emanates naturally from an offshore island, short of resources and weakened by two colossal conflicts in a few decades in the nearby continent. Buchanan retrospectively advocates just such a pragmatic approach for Britain. He thinks that Churchill’s belligerently anti-German approach stopped a desirable deal between Germany and Britain, which would have left the latter its Empire in return for Berlin ruling Europe. However, the pragmatic real-politik that Buchanan posits for Britain is a thin cover for his crusading zeal. Such a deal would have enabled the “Christian” powers as he refers to them to defeat or contain the real enemy – Stalin. Buchanan follows and extends the furrows ploughed by John Charmley and other revisionist historians to make Churchill almost single-handedly responsible for the conflict and the consequent dissolution of the British Empire and triumph of the Soviets in Eastern Europe.
From behind the security of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as buffers, one can see why America Firsters and their modern descendants like Buchanan, or indeed with a bar sinister for illegitimate descent, Baker, can take such highly Manichaean views. These two books in conjunction revive memories of a distinctive American lineage: of the mass movements that united Nazi sympathizers, Communist Party supporters, and pacifists in trying to keep the United States out of the war.
From opposite political poles, Baker and Buchanan converge in regarding World War Two as an unnecessary and avoidable conflict.
As the saying appropriately has it, the devil is in the details, which during World War Two sadly did include Allied mass bombings of civilians, violations of neutrality, active or tacit support for ethnic cleansing, blockades that starved civilians, betrayal of allies, and naked displays of national self-interest—all of which both belabor in detail. They provoke thought, even as they disturb.
Baker eschews pragmatism. War itself is evil, the Second World War no less than others, and his villains are both Churchill and Roosevelt, who with Machiavellian cunning engineered an un-necessary war, and fought it with amoral brutality. Human Smoke is much more readable than Buchanan’s, although both would have benefited from more thorough fact-checking. Leaving aside for a moment his implicit endorsement of conspiracy theories such as Roosevelt setting Pearl Harbor as a trap for the Japanese, someone should surely have noticed in aBaker’s book, (p. 457) that for the SS Struma to be sunk in the “Baltic” sea after being chsed from Istanbul would have entailed a highly unlikely trip up the Volga. Baker could also usefully have mentioned that Germany that declared war on the USA after Pearl Harbor, not vice versa. It was far from sure that the reluctant Congress, with a preponderance of Buchanan and Baker’s political ancestors, would have responded to the Japanese attack with a declaration of war on Germany.
Editing out tendentious repetition could have shortened Buchanan’s work into a more readable form. And like Baker, he needed an editor paying more attention to the facts. In Buchanan’s old school Cold War perspective, the Soviets can do no right—ever. For example, he charges that in the Warsaw Rising of 1944, the Polish Home Army rose on Soviet signals, which is simply not true. While the Soviets certainly did not try too hard to support the rising that the London-based Polish government-in-exile, the Home Army had risen on signals from London to forestall the Red Army’s “liberation” of the city. The rising was a brave but essentially cynical risk of the city and its population to achieve that end.
Similarly, Buchanan gives Hitler a free pass for the bombing of Guernica, depicted so memorably by Picasso, claiming that it was to support military operations and thus no precedent or excuse for the subsequent Allied bombings of cities, through which, Buchanan asserts, Churchill would play a “lead role in Western man’s reversion to barbarism.” (Buchanan 399) More accurately, and less hampered by affection for Spain’s Fascist dictator Francisco Franco, Baker cites Hermann Goering on Guernica. The German Luftwaffe commander called that action “a pity,” but also insisted, “we had nowhere else to try our machines.” (Baker 69) Of course, Buchanan, given his soft spot for Franco (elsewhere he has described him as a “soldier-patriot” (syndicated column 9/17/89 and “Catholic savior” (Right from the Beginning) could live with that. Most others would not.
Buchanan has no reticence about using tendentious commentary or drawing such controversial conclusions in his narrative. In some ways, this is refreshing, since it gives the many skeptical readers something to react against. Baker’s is almost insidiously sneering in its effect, since he is insinuating rather than stating a case. He presents carefully selected facts and invites us to draw our, or rather his, conclusions from them. It is reminiscent of the wilder fringes of the web that marshal factoids and quotes torn out of context and without reference or analysis to support various causes.
Still, despite their agendas, both successfully challenge our preconceptions. Buchanan points out that the peace terms after World War One deprived millions of Germans (not to mention others) of their right to self-determination. Even though the post-Versailles states of Czechoslovakia and Poland have been retrospectively sanctified by Nazi aggression, there was indeed no ethical argument against voluntary Anschluss, unification, with the ethnic Germans in Austria, Sudetenland, East Prussia, the Polish Corridor and so on. Even the socialists in the Saarland voted to reunite with Germany. They were not coerced into it. Indeed, one of the points that John Charmley convincingly makes is that British leaders’ appreciation of how insupportable and unsustainable the Versailles boundaries were in the wake of the Great War disarmed their opposition to Hitler’s expansionism.
It is equally true that the Western allies’ willingness to violate the neutrality of Belgium, of Norway, Denmark, and Portugal under the exigencies of war was precisely the charge made against defeated Nazis at Nuremburg. The Soviets’ record was even worse, with their trampling on Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Rumania and other states.
One of the problems for both Baker and Buchanan is that it takes delicate treatment to blacken the reputations of accepted heroes without implicitly, or even explicitly, whitewashing their antagonists. Buchanan does not typically do delicacy, and Baker, whose novels often showcase his gift for nuance, chooses in this book to abandon subtlety altogether with his demonization of Churchill. Buchanan has the clearer ideological agenda. While most British see the postwar welfare state and national health service as worthy consolations for the travails of war, Buchanan laments that because of Churchill’s war, Britain “faced socialism at home.” (415)
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Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War lays out its wares in its title. His frequent caveats about the evil of Hitler look like ritual invocations to avert hostile reaction to the drift of his argument—which is that the Nazi leader was a lesser evil.
Buchanan persistently sees the silver linings in Hitler’s stormtrooper clouds. He describes Hitler’s apprehensions over Austrian Nazi provocations (318) and the march into the Rhineland and deduces that he did not want war with the West. (310) He repeats his disclaimer, ”For what happened to the Jews of Europe, Hitler and his collaborators . . .bear full responsibility” (310)] he says, for the record, but then ruins his disavowal by trying to imply blame elsewhere. He cavils, “But was the Holocaust inevitable? Could it have been averted?” (ibid) Well, yes, by an earlier defeat of the Nazis, not by making peace and giving them the free hand in the East.
He argues that the belligerence of Churchill drove Hitler to war, leading in turn to a baneful result: the downfall of the British Empire and the rise of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. It is true, as Buchanan contends, that in 1939 Stalin’s regime had far more blood on its hands than Hitler’s much more visible but, at the time, less sanguinary crimes. One can almost sympathize with Buchanan’s puzzlement at the difference in treatment. Partly of course, it is retrospective absolution. Once Stalin had become an ally, in fact the main driver of the war effort, the West owed some considerable gratitude, even if the convenient amnesia about his enthusiastic honoring of the 1939 pact with Hitler may have gone too far.
Buchanan is on surer ground when he castigates Churchill for taking Stalin at his word, at least about elections and freedoms for the nations he signed over to the Soviet sphere. However, Stalin did deliver on a number of war promises, maybe most notably in Greece where Churchill and the British showed equal insouciance about local wishes. It is worth stressing that Roosevelt was even more partial to Stalin, in effect ganging up with him against his British ally. Of course, Churchill was as dedicated as Buchanan to the lost cause of preserving the British Empire—to which the Soviet Union posed little or no direct threat at this stage—but which Roosevelt and the United States, as Clive Ponting and Buchanan both detail, were effectively dismantling.
Although Stalin’s record was certainly quantitatively worse and more murderous than Hitler’s by 1939 and indeed up to 1941, the Nazis certainly made up for lost time afterwards. In contrast, Buchanan implies that Hitler was the lesser evil, in part because Communism was more exportable than Nazism. He points out the limitations of the appeal of Aryanism and its contrast with the more universal aspirations of the Communists.
Looking at the authoritarian regimes that emulated the Nazis, this is a highly arguable point. (p 345) Italy, Spain, Rumania, Japan, Bulgaria were quite acceptable as allies despite their manifest lack of Aryan bloodlines. However, the exportability of communism did depend on its romantic ideal of equality, so its supporters could pass off the “excesses” as aberrations, while Hitler’s ideology of race and blood was itself explicitly based on excess.
Arch-appeaser Neville Chamberlain ruined his reputation with his sound bites of “peace with honor” and “peace in our time”—which Charmley points out he immediately regretted—but he does indeed deserve a rehabilitation that Buchanan oddly fails to offer. According to Charmley, in cabinet discussions he talked of threatening Hitler with a two-front war, (p170 Charmley) “not in order to save a particular victim but to pull down the bully,” which is surely the point, despite Buchanan’s invective against guaranteeing Poland against German attack. The Polish regime was anti-Semitic, undemocratic and intransigent but the guarantee represented a line in the sand for international peace and order—which Hitler crossed.
Having regretted Chamberlain’s guarantee to Poland and the ensuing declaration of war, Buchan then attacks Churchill for not suing for peace in 1940. Strong partisan prejudice often marshals contradictory arguments. In this vein, Buchanan suggests that Hitler only invaded Russia to force Britain to a peace treaty, but then elsewhere he suggests that a peace treaty with Britain would have let Hitler attack Stalin and sort out the Bolsheviks.
Clearly, the Nazi leader was eventually going to attack the Soviet Union regardless of the non-aggression pact, even though Stalin honoured it to the letter, to the extent that Communists in the USA agreed with Buchanan about the inhumanity of the British blockade starving German workers. Consequently, only a very foolish British government would trust guarantees from either Berlin or Moscow. Equally, though it may be true that Hitler did not want war with Britain, the missing adverb is surely “then.” In fact, as his multiple aggressions suggested, Hitler took whatever opportunities were offered for expansion.
He insists that Germany posed no immediate threat to the United States and elaborates on the Germany’s lack of long range bombers, without reckoning on Werner Von Braun and his work, which was intended to get missiles to his future home, nor the work of the German nuclear researchers. He asserts that (334) Stalin used the two years of the Pact “to build the tanks, planes and guns and conscript the troops that stopped Hitler at Leningrad.” Well, up to a point. Those would be the planes destroyed on the ground and the tanks, guns and troops that the Wermacht captured with such ease in the first few weeks of war because Stalin made the same mistake as Buchanan occasionally does—taking Hitler’s expedient promises seriously.
The feasibility of peace between Britain and Nazi Germany goes to the nub of the question. Buchanan insists that peace (one is tempted to add “with honor”) was achievable, and points to the armistice that allowed Vichy to keep the French Navy. However, since the alternative to a French Navy confined to port may have been one that sailed off to join the Royal Navy, this was as much politic as politeness on the Führer’s part. Perhaps a better reference would have been to the Vichy’s reactionary domestic policies in emulation of the Nazis.
One suspects that a less vindictive Hitler, prepared to return prisoners and lift the occupation, could have turned France in the same way that the Allies turned Italy in 1943. In fact, Buchanan’s implicit assumption is that Hitler was a rational actor and a man of his word. In fact, he already had a consistently murderous record, from the night of the Long Knives, through Kristallnacht and onto his culling of the inmates of mental hospitals. In contrast with Stalin, who was generally content to keep his butchery domestic, Hitler showed every sign of wanting to expand his terror. More significantly, after Munich, he broke every promise he made to the British.
Buchanan asserts that Hitler stopped the Panzers (326) and in effect let the British escape from Dunkirk, which fails to explain why the Luftwaffe attacked the evacuating ships furiously. In fact, Ponting points out that the British let the French cover their retreat, and that it was the French Army that stopped the Wermacht long enough for the British to evacuate, leaving most of their French allies and defenders behind.
Buchanan’s nostalgia for the British Empire as a bulwark of Christendom, even at the cost of handing over Eastern Europe to Hitler, also challenges logic. His assumption that Germans in the Sudetenland and the Polish Corridor deserved self-determination but that the Indians, Burmese, and Africans did not betrays a bedrock racist assumption. This is scarcely mitigated by his description of Churchill’s racist diatribes against Indians (356) which provided cogent reasons why the Empire was as undesirable as it was unsustainable.
Quite apart from any ethical moral aspects, the challenge of defending a far-flung empire, many of whose subjects were restless and did little to contribute to the wealth or defence of the mother country, stretched the already parlous British finances. Indeed, Britain might well have been better off abandoning its imperial pretensions sooner. Certainly if India had been given the Dominion status that Churchill resisted so tenaciously, it may have become like Canada or Australia in sentimental attachment, but the only way to keep it as a colony would have been to take Hitler’s advice, and progressively shoot the leaders of the Congress Party.
However, as Buchanan explains, the greatest enemy of the Empire was in fact the USA. He complains that, “When Britain was in her darkest hour, FDR shook her down for every dime,” (p 408) and goes on to quote one of Churchill’s memorable lines: “we are not only to be skinned but flayed to the bone.” [ibid) He also quotes Grenfell on the “extraordinary paradox that Britain’s principal enemy was anxious for the British Empire to remain in being, while her principal ally, the United States, was determined to destroy it.” (409) For the record, Buchanan’s political antecedents, the America-Firsters, certainly did not object to the process!
However, quite apart from exercising his retrospective adhesion to the America-Firsters, his staunch anti-communism, and his equally staunch Catholicism, Buchanan has written a tract for our times, a polemic against the “Churchillian” aspects of neo-conservativism. He concludes that Bush, who, damningly, possesses “a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office,” (423) has led the United States to the same position as Britain was: “A superpower past her prime, with enemies rising everywhere.” He adds that, “There is hardly a blunder of the British Empire that we have not replicated . . . America is as overextended as the British Empire in 1939.” (423) He has a point, but many people have as little enthusiasm for an American empire as they did for its British predecessor.
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Baker’s “Human Smoke” takes a pacifist tilt at the same targets, not least in sharing Buchanan’s touching faith in the Führer’s diplomatic integrity. Baker cites Charles Lindbergh’s disquiet with the pacifists—alongside whom he campaigned against war with Germany. Perhaps more of the Pacifists should have reciprocated that discomfort.
Baker’s book reads like a Dos Passos novel with its cut and paste technique. It eschews commentary—but also elides some relevant facts, Baker directs the narrative as surely as any overt editorializing would. Sometimes the sound of silence is deafeningly loud. His omission of Hitler’[s declaration of war on the United States, not vice versa, relays his political bias. His choice of material suggests that he blames Roosevelt equally with Churchill for the war, without showing too much concern for the fate of empires, Soviet or British, or indeed the fate of Europe if Hitler had had a free hand.
Baker implicitly states that Pearl Harbor was contrived by FDR to get America into the war, (p445) which almost makes one anticipate his next work on how the World Trade Center was not really hit by planes. In his afterword, he asks, “Was it a ‘good war?’ Did waging it help anyone who needed help? Those were the basic questions that I hoped to answer.” (473) However, his question, like those Buchanan asks, is rhetorical, as he immediately answers, (p. 315) “Had Britain not given the war guarantee, and not declared war over Poland, Western Europe might have avoided war altogether. And was the war worth it?”
His book is dedicated to “the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists . . . They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan and stop the war happening. They failed, but they were right.” (474) In essence, Baker makes a moral equivalence between aggressive and vicious warmongers and those who choose to meet that kind of aggression with force. George Orwell, who managed to be mercilessly critical of Allied conduct while supporting the war, commented appositely, that, “Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval, but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States.” (Notes on Nationalism)
In his obituary essay on Gandhi, who is frequently cited by Baker, Orwell praised the Indian pacifist because he “did not take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins.”
(Reflections on Gandhi)
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Fifteen years ago, the ultra-Tory minister Alan Clarke caused a major flurry when, in reviewing Charmley’s work, he suggested that an Anglo-German alliance in 1940 would have made the world a better place. (Buchanan 316) It is along these lines of thinking that Buchanan uses Clark as a bludgeon against Churchill for refusing peace overtures: “the war went on too long, and when Britain emerged the country was bust. Nothing remained of assets overseas. Without immense and punitive borrowings from the U.S., we would have starved. The old social order had gone forever. The empire was terminally damaged.” [Buchanan 316) Neither Buchanan nor Clark pause to consider that for many British voters, and many subjects of the empire, these latter two results were a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Still, Charmley’s efforts to rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain’s battered reputation are worth considering. In Charmley’s argument, Chamberlain indeed understood the unique threat posed by Hitler, but he also appreciated the financial and military weakness of the Allies. The facts Charmley summons help to rescue the reputation of Chamberlain from the outer darkness to which Labour and Churchillian Tories have jointly exiled it. In contrast to his historic reputation as an appeaser, Chamberlain was in fact emulating Theodore Roosevelt, talking softly while growing a big stick. Even while negotiating at Munich, he was allocating scarce resources to rearmament, bringing online the Spitfires and Hurricanes that won the Battle of Britain. Astonishingly, from 1935 to 1939, British defense spending rose by forty percent annually, even while the country was paying off the highest per capita debt in the world—incurred by the struggle of World War One. Such military expenditure was unsustainable, which is why if there were to be war, it had to be quick. Far from being unprepared and naïve, the British authorities had made a shrewd and accurate assessment of the probability of war in 1939.
They had already concluded that they did not have the military resources to fight in both the Pacific and in Europe. A more besetting problem facing London was the complete absence of any guarantees from the United States. Britain’s lean finances also shaped the methods against which Baker and Buchanan protest so much. In World War One, the blockade, no matter how brutally, had worked and made effective use of Britain’s biggest military asset, the Royal Navy. Now, at the outset of World War Two, there was no way that Britain could in any reasonable time develop the size of army it had eventually deployed in World War One, and that led to the decision to rely on airpower—which would eventually culminate in the mass civilian bombings that Baker and Ponting especially revile.
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Books that propose a world better off without World War Two can only lead into the hypothetical realm of “What if?” What we do have is very strong evidence about the direction and form of an unopposed Hitler regime. Chamberlain’s exasperation after Munich was solidly based on Hitler’s breach of promise, both about the integrity of the rump Czechoslovakia, and more broadly, his false disclaiming of future territorial claims in Europe. As Ponting quotes Hitler declaring at the very start of his rampage, “Once I conquered a country, should I ever restore its freedom? What for? Whoever spent his blood has the right to rule.” (P 249) Equally, his counterproductive savagery and exploitation of his Polish and Soviet conquests constitute a real-time demonstration of the shape of his New World Order. Despite his late start, he soon overtook Stalin in horror and terror, to the extent that even the Poles could regard the Red Army’s arrival as comparative liberation.
Once it was clear that there was no speedy end in sight, the British could indeed have done what Buchanan implies they should have done. An agreement with Hitler would certainly have cost Churchill his job, and it would have guaranteed the “Empire” for a short time. However, defeated or stalemated empires are fragile things.
Buchanan asks, was the sacrifice “done willingly as an act of martyrdom? Or was it rather the result of British blundering on a colossal scale.” (313) There was indeed blundering, but Ponting answers Buchanan’s question with clarity, pointing out that “1940 marked the final and decisive shift of power in the world from Britain to the US.” (Ponting 1940 215) It was neither martyrdom nor blundering, but rather a voluntary abdication on Britain’s part. On 22 August 1940, after Dunkirk and the French defeat, the British cabinet met to consider the numbers, which showed that Britain did not have its own resources to continue the struggle for much longer. (Ponting 1940 p 10) The Cabinet decided to fight on, hoping Micawber-like that something would turn up, even if it meant, in Churchill’s words, “giving the United States, if necessary, a lien on any and every part of British industry.”
Roosevelt took up the offer. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau unilaterally announced a fire sale of every British asset, individual or public in the United States, and indeed in Canada and Latin America as well. While Congress was passing the Lend Lease bill, Great Britain had only £3 million left in its reserves and had to borrow from the Belgian and Czech governments in exile. (Ponting 1940 p 213)
It was not as Quixotic a gesture as Buchanan puts it, nor as blindly bellicose as Baker would have it. Britain was not in a financial position to use peace as breathing space to rearm. At peace it would not have qualified for the tightly restricted American loans and support it secured when it was in Washington’s interest to keep London fighting.
Orwell In his essay “The Lion and the Unicorn” Hitler’s offer could only be made “treacherously, with a view to conquering England indirectly or renewing the attack at some more favourable moment.” Indeed Clive Ponting observes that World War One leader Lloyd George expected that without backing from the United States, Great Britain would have to sue for a compromise peace – with himself playing the role of Petain, the revered war leader who could cut the deal.
In the end, Churchill and Roosevelt were every bit as Machiavellian and steeped in Realpolitik as Baker and Buchanan show them to be. Nevertheless, remembering what Halifax said, the world is a better place because they were not anchorites, and knew how to operate in an evil world. Pace Joan of Arc, saints do not usually win wars. We should be glad that for all their moral failings, Churchill and Roosevelt, each of whom could have given lessons to Machiavelli, were in the appropriate places at the right times.
In large part, Western Europe has for over sixty years enjoyed peace and prosperity, along with the highest standards of human and civil rights in the history of the world, at least in part because the British cabinet made that decision on August 22 1940. Was it worth it? Yes, absolutely.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Madoff, robber of the rich but no Robin Hood
Bernie Madoff is stranger than fiction
The saga of the Wall Street swindler is a bizarre story of justice delivered, and justice still denied
Comments (74)
Ian Williams
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 March 2009
As mega-swindler Bernie Madoff prepares to plead guilty to fraud charges that will likely land him life in prison, I am reminded of my longstanding writer's dictum: "All the best stories are true." Even down to his name and its appropriate pronunciation – made off (as in, with people's money) – Bernie's tale smacks of nominal determinism.
It would be difficult to invent a character like Madoff, who so triumphantly rolled together Catch 22's Milo Mindbender and Ben Jonson's Alchemist with a sort of portmanteau Nigerian email scam artist. The essential ingredients of their successes are other people's gullibility, and their own greed.
Those two can be a powerful combination. It is very likely that absent the global credit crunch, Madoff would have been able to maintain his scam for many years more, since he had previously managed to keep his investors very happy. It was not his conscience that pricked him into 'fessing up – but rather urgent calls, motivated by the credit crisis, asking for $7bn redemptions that he could not meet.
There is also a deep mystery about just how much was lost. The oft-quoted $50bn apparently is the sum of how much people thought they had. It would be the equivalent of the Alchemist's victims claiming not just the gold they had put in, but all the gold he had persuaded them he could transmute from base metal.
Another thing the Madoff case reminds us of is the fact that wealth, even purloined, has its privileges. Madoff has been out on bail – but had he been a poor African-American burglar he would be cooling his heels in Riker's Island. And unlike most common thieves, Madoff has reportedly been wearing an armoured vest for his court hearings – which, unless he has been banking for the Russian or Italian-American mafia, seems unnecessary.
It is precisely because wealth offers (sometimes unfair) privileges that public vituperation for Madoff has been somewhat limited. After all, any widows and orphans he robbed were very rich ones, hoping to get richer: Madoff's entry threshold for investments was a million dollars, and investors begged him to take their money.
Rich people being robbed is not exactly the stuff of tragedy, and recent events have put the theft into perspective. Sure, Madoff's total lifetime take is certainly more than the bonuses Wall Street Bankers awarded themselves (which the taxpayers now have to pay for). Yet those same greedy, incompetent bankers collected those bonuses based on their mastery of the financial universe – so if Madoff pocketed some of their cash, it may only mean that there is in fact some justice in the world. Just look at the so-called hedge fund managers who collected commissions and management fees to feed the Alchemist's furnace with their clients' money.
The unfortunate thing is that even those feeder funds had significant minimum investments – and across the world of Anglo-American neoliberal economics, the bankers' antics have destroyed the savings and pension funds of millions of hard-working people. The bankers who swindled them should be facing 150-year sentences along with Madoff, instead of gliding on taxpayer-financed golden parachutes.
Madoff's acceptance of that 150-year deal – instead of entering into the plea-bargaining that his wealth and prominence would have "entitled" him to – raises serious questions, especially given his lack of visible remorse and reports of his repeated attempts to safely stash his loot. Unless he has a bolt hole to an alternative dimension, or is about to conveniently fall into the murky waters of New York's East River only to surface elsewhere in disguise, what motives can one ascribe to such a larger-than-fiction character?
I would wager that a recent medical report has led the 70-year-old Madoff to expect that he will serve even less of the 150 years than a broader actuarial assessment would indicate. If I were writing the plot line, he would come back from surgery, call in his sons, explain that the game was up in every sense and advise them to denounce him to the authorities, confident that his family would be well looked-after.
Of course, if I am wrong, and Madoff serves significant time, I hope he has a lot of engaging company. Starting with all the Wall Street bankers.
The saga of the Wall Street swindler is a bizarre story of justice delivered, and justice still denied
Comments (74)
Ian Williams
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 March 2009
As mega-swindler Bernie Madoff prepares to plead guilty to fraud charges that will likely land him life in prison, I am reminded of my longstanding writer's dictum: "All the best stories are true." Even down to his name and its appropriate pronunciation – made off (as in, with people's money) – Bernie's tale smacks of nominal determinism.
It would be difficult to invent a character like Madoff, who so triumphantly rolled together Catch 22's Milo Mindbender and Ben Jonson's Alchemist with a sort of portmanteau Nigerian email scam artist. The essential ingredients of their successes are other people's gullibility, and their own greed.
Those two can be a powerful combination. It is very likely that absent the global credit crunch, Madoff would have been able to maintain his scam for many years more, since he had previously managed to keep his investors very happy. It was not his conscience that pricked him into 'fessing up – but rather urgent calls, motivated by the credit crisis, asking for $7bn redemptions that he could not meet.
There is also a deep mystery about just how much was lost. The oft-quoted $50bn apparently is the sum of how much people thought they had. It would be the equivalent of the Alchemist's victims claiming not just the gold they had put in, but all the gold he had persuaded them he could transmute from base metal.
Another thing the Madoff case reminds us of is the fact that wealth, even purloined, has its privileges. Madoff has been out on bail – but had he been a poor African-American burglar he would be cooling his heels in Riker's Island. And unlike most common thieves, Madoff has reportedly been wearing an armoured vest for his court hearings – which, unless he has been banking for the Russian or Italian-American mafia, seems unnecessary.
It is precisely because wealth offers (sometimes unfair) privileges that public vituperation for Madoff has been somewhat limited. After all, any widows and orphans he robbed were very rich ones, hoping to get richer: Madoff's entry threshold for investments was a million dollars, and investors begged him to take their money.
Rich people being robbed is not exactly the stuff of tragedy, and recent events have put the theft into perspective. Sure, Madoff's total lifetime take is certainly more than the bonuses Wall Street Bankers awarded themselves (which the taxpayers now have to pay for). Yet those same greedy, incompetent bankers collected those bonuses based on their mastery of the financial universe – so if Madoff pocketed some of their cash, it may only mean that there is in fact some justice in the world. Just look at the so-called hedge fund managers who collected commissions and management fees to feed the Alchemist's furnace with their clients' money.
The unfortunate thing is that even those feeder funds had significant minimum investments – and across the world of Anglo-American neoliberal economics, the bankers' antics have destroyed the savings and pension funds of millions of hard-working people. The bankers who swindled them should be facing 150-year sentences along with Madoff, instead of gliding on taxpayer-financed golden parachutes.
Madoff's acceptance of that 150-year deal – instead of entering into the plea-bargaining that his wealth and prominence would have "entitled" him to – raises serious questions, especially given his lack of visible remorse and reports of his repeated attempts to safely stash his loot. Unless he has a bolt hole to an alternative dimension, or is about to conveniently fall into the murky waters of New York's East River only to surface elsewhere in disguise, what motives can one ascribe to such a larger-than-fiction character?
I would wager that a recent medical report has led the 70-year-old Madoff to expect that he will serve even less of the 150 years than a broader actuarial assessment would indicate. If I were writing the plot line, he would come back from surgery, call in his sons, explain that the game was up in every sense and advise them to denounce him to the authorities, confident that his family would be well looked-after.
Of course, if I am wrong, and Madoff serves significant time, I hope he has a lot of engaging company. Starting with all the Wall Street bankers.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
The Union makes us all strong!
Ending America's labour pains
Hilda Solis's confirmation as US labour secretary brings three decades of unfair union-bashing to a close
* Ian Williams
*
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 February 2009
President Barack Obama is exceeding the modest expectations that some of us had for him. His appointment of Hilda Solis as secretary of labour marks the end of three decades of unbridled union-bashing, which saw the degree of unionisation in the American labour force plummet. She is an explicit supporter of unions – a far cry from Ronald Reagan's having the PATCO organisers led away in shackles.
While being "pro-business" has never been a bar to political advancement in Washington, being accused of being pro-labour has all too often been the political equivalent of paedophilia. Though Republicans have been natural, one might add phobic, union-bashers, even Bill Clinton took union money and votes and then denounced them as "special-interest groups" (unlike, say, the bankers, whose money he took and whose interests he cultivated). Emulating Clinton, Tony Blair did the same in Britain – refusing to roll back much of Margaret Thatcher's anti-union legislation and demanding exemptions from EU regulations that gave workers more protections (despite Blair's alleged Europhilia).
The National Labour Relations Board, set up by Franklin Roosevelt to help workers unionise, claims that it is enforcing the statute that "guarantees the right of employees to organise and to bargain collectively with their employers, and to engage in other protected concerted activity with or without a union, or to refrain from all such activity". But for years that last phrase has covered most of their practice. Certainly employers have spent untold millions in the gums of NLRB enforcement actions.
The right in the US are the ideologues, while most union members are pragmatic, lacking the long-term political objectives that used to be common to unions elsewhere in the world. Yet American conservatives and employers display a pathological fear of the unions, Big Labour, that Europeans find difficult to understand.
Unions may not be on par with "terrorists" or "communists", but they are close. "Staying union free is a full-time commitment", asserts the Wal-Mart training manual – and the company has been prepared to close plants rather than recognise or negotiate with a union. In common with other employers Wal-Mart deploys a phalanx of expensive, union-busting lawyers and consultants, prepared to litigate exhaustively against any adverse NLRB decision and to pre-empt any attempt to unionise.
They have benefited from the common American folkway in which millions of ragged-trousered philanthropists benignly approved of pro-wealthy legislation – because they saw themselves as millionaires-in-waiting, rather than employees. It is likely that as they ruefully contemplate the ruins of their home equity, 401(k)s, savings and credit lines, they will be less charitable and think about their own welfare. Who knows: the next time legislators seek to ban political contributions from union dues, they might counter with a demand for a shareholder vote on donations to politicians.
This Anglo-American model has demanded unfettered freedom for bankers and senior management – from government, shareholders and employees alike – while keeping as many restrictions as possible on unions. There is a clear connection between that model and the declining living standards of most working families as the rich got greedier and richer.
As executives surrounded themselves with billions of dollars of incentives, and equal amounts in golden parachutes and retirement pay-offs, their spokespeople from the Chicago school preached that workers needed the whip to work effectively, and that for the economy to work they should be hired for a pittance and fired at the drop of a hat.
While there is growing realisation that the enrichment of the few helped bring about the current crisis, it is time to stress that the other part, the immiseration of the many, is also a major cause. Low salaries meant high credit, which meant high risk.
In fact, the Chicago school always wilfully overlooked the wise words of their alleged prophet Adam Smith, who, like Henry Ford in his early days, equated high wages with high productivity.
So it is refreshing to see the economists who warned about the coming crisis stepping up and stating the obvious: that American adherence to union rights as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Labour Organisation conventions is not just a moral issue, but an economic issue as well.
Obama should put his full weight behind the Employee Free Choice Act as an essential part of his stimulus package. In fact, he should add to the various bailout plans a prohibition against the recipients' funds being spent on anti-union organising.
Hilda Solis's confirmation as US labour secretary brings three decades of unfair union-bashing to a close
* Ian Williams
*
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 February 2009
President Barack Obama is exceeding the modest expectations that some of us had for him. His appointment of Hilda Solis as secretary of labour marks the end of three decades of unbridled union-bashing, which saw the degree of unionisation in the American labour force plummet. She is an explicit supporter of unions – a far cry from Ronald Reagan's having the PATCO organisers led away in shackles.
While being "pro-business" has never been a bar to political advancement in Washington, being accused of being pro-labour has all too often been the political equivalent of paedophilia. Though Republicans have been natural, one might add phobic, union-bashers, even Bill Clinton took union money and votes and then denounced them as "special-interest groups" (unlike, say, the bankers, whose money he took and whose interests he cultivated). Emulating Clinton, Tony Blair did the same in Britain – refusing to roll back much of Margaret Thatcher's anti-union legislation and demanding exemptions from EU regulations that gave workers more protections (despite Blair's alleged Europhilia).
The National Labour Relations Board, set up by Franklin Roosevelt to help workers unionise, claims that it is enforcing the statute that "guarantees the right of employees to organise and to bargain collectively with their employers, and to engage in other protected concerted activity with or without a union, or to refrain from all such activity". But for years that last phrase has covered most of their practice. Certainly employers have spent untold millions in the gums of NLRB enforcement actions.
The right in the US are the ideologues, while most union members are pragmatic, lacking the long-term political objectives that used to be common to unions elsewhere in the world. Yet American conservatives and employers display a pathological fear of the unions, Big Labour, that Europeans find difficult to understand.
Unions may not be on par with "terrorists" or "communists", but they are close. "Staying union free is a full-time commitment", asserts the Wal-Mart training manual – and the company has been prepared to close plants rather than recognise or negotiate with a union. In common with other employers Wal-Mart deploys a phalanx of expensive, union-busting lawyers and consultants, prepared to litigate exhaustively against any adverse NLRB decision and to pre-empt any attempt to unionise.
They have benefited from the common American folkway in which millions of ragged-trousered philanthropists benignly approved of pro-wealthy legislation – because they saw themselves as millionaires-in-waiting, rather than employees. It is likely that as they ruefully contemplate the ruins of their home equity, 401(k)s, savings and credit lines, they will be less charitable and think about their own welfare. Who knows: the next time legislators seek to ban political contributions from union dues, they might counter with a demand for a shareholder vote on donations to politicians.
This Anglo-American model has demanded unfettered freedom for bankers and senior management – from government, shareholders and employees alike – while keeping as many restrictions as possible on unions. There is a clear connection between that model and the declining living standards of most working families as the rich got greedier and richer.
As executives surrounded themselves with billions of dollars of incentives, and equal amounts in golden parachutes and retirement pay-offs, their spokespeople from the Chicago school preached that workers needed the whip to work effectively, and that for the economy to work they should be hired for a pittance and fired at the drop of a hat.
While there is growing realisation that the enrichment of the few helped bring about the current crisis, it is time to stress that the other part, the immiseration of the many, is also a major cause. Low salaries meant high credit, which meant high risk.
In fact, the Chicago school always wilfully overlooked the wise words of their alleged prophet Adam Smith, who, like Henry Ford in his early days, equated high wages with high productivity.
So it is refreshing to see the economists who warned about the coming crisis stepping up and stating the obvious: that American adherence to union rights as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Labour Organisation conventions is not just a moral issue, but an economic issue as well.
Obama should put his full weight behind the Employee Free Choice Act as an essential part of his stimulus package. In fact, he should add to the various bailout plans a prohibition against the recipients' funds being spent on anti-union organising.
Truth..the secret weapon against Bush
Seeking the truth about the Bush years
Trying Bush cronies for war crimes won't fly, but Patrick Leahy's truth and reconciliation commission could help restore justice
* Ian Williams
*
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 March 2009
I still remember with a frisson of horror being in a hall full of nice American liberal types deeply concerned about the atrocities in Bosnia. There was a wave of indignation when they learned that the Hague tribunal on Balkan war crimes would not be able to pass death sentences.
A similar, one might say, almost conservative, vindictiveness greeted Senate judiciary committee chair Patrick Leahy's suggestion for a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the Bush administration's alleged crimes against the US constitution and international law. The left wants prosecutions and imprisonments.
It would indeed be satisfying to apply the constitution (under which, one may remember, ratified international treaties are part of the law of the land) to people who clearly treated it so scornfully. President Barack Obama's declaration that his administration would not torture, and would not violate the Geneva conventions implicitly conceded the force of the accusations against his predecessors.
Sadly, however, short of the highly unlikely handing over of George Bush, Dick Cheney and company to the International Criminal Court, it is almost inconceivable that any such trials would take place. The US supreme court that awarded Florida and the presidency to Bush, not to mention the whole chain of judiciary below, is somewhat unlikely to find a former president guilty. If they had been more effective, they would have over-ruled many of the illegal acts even as they were being committed.
Indeed, the courts have shown signs of such overt partisanship, especially but not exclusively those who veer to the right, that even if there were trials, their results would not have common public acceptance. Acquittal or committal would be seen as political favouritism or persecution.
Leahy's proposal would, assuming he can get enough well-respected non-partisan figures to sit on his commission, be a far more constructive process, which could demonstrate just how much the law and constitution were jettisoned after 9/11. Its results would not just be a demonstration of criminality but also a warning for the future.
Above all, if, as Leahy suggests, there would be no threat of prosecution, except refreshingly for perjury, then subpoenaed witnesses will be less able to take the roving Karl Rove road. Rove, along with Harriet Miers, has indeed agreed to testify to Congress about the firing of US attorneys, but only on condition that communications with the president are covered by executive privilege.
Without immunity, many officials may take that route, and the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination, to weasel their way out of telling the truth. Indeed, with a promise of immunity, no matter how much that upsets the liberal Savonarolas, there is almost an incentive to spill the beans, since anything they clam up about could indeed be the basis for prosecution.
Leahy's commission should not just concentrate on the acts of government. It should also examine the complicity of other actors, including the many in the media who after 9/11 cheered on and condoned acts of government – even though, as John Yoo's recently surfaced opinions for them indicate, they were next on the list. As it was, his proposals about the media did not materialise. After all, who would bother muzzling a toothless dog.
Obama should not only endorse Leahy's proposal, which would surely expose the unprincipled and, dare one say, un-American, behaviour of the party now opposing his economic proposals, he should go farther. A truth commission into how the US and global economy was brought to this pass would indeed need to be bipartisan, since its roots go back through so many administrations, not least Bill Clinton's.
But think how instructive it would be in analysing and dissecting the dogmas that ruined a super-power, not least when the opposition (and indeed some in his own party) have shown no signs of abandoning the dogma. Admittedly, they are so dogmatic, it would have to be truth and ridicule rather than reconciliation, but it would serve to make sure that never again would a bunch off crackpot zealots be allowed to run the nation.
Trying Bush cronies for war crimes won't fly, but Patrick Leahy's truth and reconciliation commission could help restore justice
* Ian Williams
*
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 March 2009
I still remember with a frisson of horror being in a hall full of nice American liberal types deeply concerned about the atrocities in Bosnia. There was a wave of indignation when they learned that the Hague tribunal on Balkan war crimes would not be able to pass death sentences.
A similar, one might say, almost conservative, vindictiveness greeted Senate judiciary committee chair Patrick Leahy's suggestion for a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the Bush administration's alleged crimes against the US constitution and international law. The left wants prosecutions and imprisonments.
It would indeed be satisfying to apply the constitution (under which, one may remember, ratified international treaties are part of the law of the land) to people who clearly treated it so scornfully. President Barack Obama's declaration that his administration would not torture, and would not violate the Geneva conventions implicitly conceded the force of the accusations against his predecessors.
Sadly, however, short of the highly unlikely handing over of George Bush, Dick Cheney and company to the International Criminal Court, it is almost inconceivable that any such trials would take place. The US supreme court that awarded Florida and the presidency to Bush, not to mention the whole chain of judiciary below, is somewhat unlikely to find a former president guilty. If they had been more effective, they would have over-ruled many of the illegal acts even as they were being committed.
Indeed, the courts have shown signs of such overt partisanship, especially but not exclusively those who veer to the right, that even if there were trials, their results would not have common public acceptance. Acquittal or committal would be seen as political favouritism or persecution.
Leahy's proposal would, assuming he can get enough well-respected non-partisan figures to sit on his commission, be a far more constructive process, which could demonstrate just how much the law and constitution were jettisoned after 9/11. Its results would not just be a demonstration of criminality but also a warning for the future.
Above all, if, as Leahy suggests, there would be no threat of prosecution, except refreshingly for perjury, then subpoenaed witnesses will be less able to take the roving Karl Rove road. Rove, along with Harriet Miers, has indeed agreed to testify to Congress about the firing of US attorneys, but only on condition that communications with the president are covered by executive privilege.
Without immunity, many officials may take that route, and the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination, to weasel their way out of telling the truth. Indeed, with a promise of immunity, no matter how much that upsets the liberal Savonarolas, there is almost an incentive to spill the beans, since anything they clam up about could indeed be the basis for prosecution.
Leahy's commission should not just concentrate on the acts of government. It should also examine the complicity of other actors, including the many in the media who after 9/11 cheered on and condoned acts of government – even though, as John Yoo's recently surfaced opinions for them indicate, they were next on the list. As it was, his proposals about the media did not materialise. After all, who would bother muzzling a toothless dog.
Obama should not only endorse Leahy's proposal, which would surely expose the unprincipled and, dare one say, un-American, behaviour of the party now opposing his economic proposals, he should go farther. A truth commission into how the US and global economy was brought to this pass would indeed need to be bipartisan, since its roots go back through so many administrations, not least Bill Clinton's.
But think how instructive it would be in analysing and dissecting the dogmas that ruined a super-power, not least when the opposition (and indeed some in his own party) have shown no signs of abandoning the dogma. Admittedly, they are so dogmatic, it would have to be truth and ridicule rather than reconciliation, but it would serve to make sure that never again would a bunch off crackpot zealots be allowed to run the nation.
Neither the Yarmulke or the Durban
Ian Williams: We can’t be selective about human rights or their abuses
March 12, 2009 Tribune
NEXT month Geneva will host “Durban II”– the United Nations’ review of its 2001 conference on racism. Listening to the hysterical demands for a boycott from die-hard pro-Israeli writers, you would think it was a reconvened Nuremburg rally. So far, Israel and Canada have said they will stay away. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi is considering it.
There are some serious issues that deserve to be raised the conference. Some Islamic states are trying to criminalise “projecting negative, insulting and derogatory images of religions and religious personalities” and the introduction of “a code of ethical conduct” for the media. The attempt is outright wrong and almost guaranteed to give ammunition to Islamophobes. But since the issue is being conflated by pro-Israeli boycotters, let us remember that only the House of Lords saved Britain recently from a racial and religious hatred bill which was, was much stronger than the Islamic amendment. Only a few years ago, Britain found a poet guilty of “blasphemous libel”, although it abolished the offence last year. Canada still has it in its criminal code with a two-year sentence. But such pernicious ideas are best fought on the conference floor.
Those calling for a boycott include John Bolton, George Bush’s choice to represent the United States at the UN, who has never seen anything good about a UN conference or resolution. In the Jewish Chronicle, Melanie Philips, one of the conductors of the boycott chorus, splenetically described the coming “hatefest”, which she claimed, “is shaping up to be a vicious and racist onslaught against the human rights of the Jewish people. Its draft declaration singles out Israel for vilification. It accuses it of committing ‘apartheid’, a ‘crime against humanity’ and ‘a form of genocide’. It says the Palestinians are the victims of Israeli oppression, implies that Zionism itself is racism, and calls for the end of Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and (as in Durban I) for the ‘right of return’ for Palestinians, which would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.”
It is worth examining her allegations in detail. It was appropriate for the first conference to be in Durban. The South Africans have a detailed knowledge of apartheid, the most elaborately articulated system of racism in history. It is remarkable how many of the anti-apartheid leaders recognise it being practiced in the West Bank. It is true that they may be somewhat prejudiced since Israel was a major partner of the old apartheid regime, but it will be a foolhardy critic who accuses Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and other human rights icons of anti-Semitism. Even apartheid did not have segregated roads, the West Bank settlement’s contribution to modern racism, echoing the parody in the old television comedy The Goodies in which blacks and whites had to hop on the appropriate-coloured stripes of a Zebra crossing.
The “right to return” for Palestinians was enshrined in the resolutions that admitted Israel to the UN, and was accepted by Israel at the time. It is certainly less exceptionable than a “right to return” for Jews whose connections to the land are far more tenuous.
It is accepted by every nation in the world, not one of which now hosts an embassy in Jerusalem, that the city is occupied. The International Court of Justice has ruled that the separation wall is illegal. The UN accepts that the settlements are illegal and in violation of the Conventions. It is true that the accusation of genocide is a stretch – but so it has been in many recent abuses of the term from Bosnia to Darfur, where it has become synonymous with mass murder.
The elision between the Jewish people and Israel was always a stretch, but even more so now when so many prominent Jewish community leaders such as Gerard Kaufman have recoiled in horror from the identification. “My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count”, Sir Gerald told the House of Commons in January.
Such sentiments expressed by anyone else would lead to pre-emptive charges of anti-Semitism. In Kaufman’s case, it put him up there with “Jews for Genocide”, as Phillips termed those Jews whose universalist ethics rise above a defensive tribalism on the incursion into Gaza. Philips concluded: “It is the UN and the architects of Durban II who are the racists and murderous bigots. Denounce this sick farce, and pull out now.”
There is no doubt that many Islamic states are covering their own sins at home – and their spinelessness in the face of American support of Israel – with their fervent attempts to condemn the latter. However, it is also true that the descriptions of racism in the document would apply to Israel’s conduct whether or not the Jewish state was singled out by name – which is why the boycotters are pre-emptively trying to devalue its outcome. Human rights apply to both Jews and Muslims and they include the freedom of speech and the consequent right to be critical of any religion.
March 12, 2009 Tribune
NEXT month Geneva will host “Durban II”– the United Nations’ review of its 2001 conference on racism. Listening to the hysterical demands for a boycott from die-hard pro-Israeli writers, you would think it was a reconvened Nuremburg rally. So far, Israel and Canada have said they will stay away. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi is considering it.
There are some serious issues that deserve to be raised the conference. Some Islamic states are trying to criminalise “projecting negative, insulting and derogatory images of religions and religious personalities” and the introduction of “a code of ethical conduct” for the media. The attempt is outright wrong and almost guaranteed to give ammunition to Islamophobes. But since the issue is being conflated by pro-Israeli boycotters, let us remember that only the House of Lords saved Britain recently from a racial and religious hatred bill which was, was much stronger than the Islamic amendment. Only a few years ago, Britain found a poet guilty of “blasphemous libel”, although it abolished the offence last year. Canada still has it in its criminal code with a two-year sentence. But such pernicious ideas are best fought on the conference floor.
Those calling for a boycott include John Bolton, George Bush’s choice to represent the United States at the UN, who has never seen anything good about a UN conference or resolution. In the Jewish Chronicle, Melanie Philips, one of the conductors of the boycott chorus, splenetically described the coming “hatefest”, which she claimed, “is shaping up to be a vicious and racist onslaught against the human rights of the Jewish people. Its draft declaration singles out Israel for vilification. It accuses it of committing ‘apartheid’, a ‘crime against humanity’ and ‘a form of genocide’. It says the Palestinians are the victims of Israeli oppression, implies that Zionism itself is racism, and calls for the end of Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and (as in Durban I) for the ‘right of return’ for Palestinians, which would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.”
It is worth examining her allegations in detail. It was appropriate for the first conference to be in Durban. The South Africans have a detailed knowledge of apartheid, the most elaborately articulated system of racism in history. It is remarkable how many of the anti-apartheid leaders recognise it being practiced in the West Bank. It is true that they may be somewhat prejudiced since Israel was a major partner of the old apartheid regime, but it will be a foolhardy critic who accuses Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and other human rights icons of anti-Semitism. Even apartheid did not have segregated roads, the West Bank settlement’s contribution to modern racism, echoing the parody in the old television comedy The Goodies in which blacks and whites had to hop on the appropriate-coloured stripes of a Zebra crossing.
The “right to return” for Palestinians was enshrined in the resolutions that admitted Israel to the UN, and was accepted by Israel at the time. It is certainly less exceptionable than a “right to return” for Jews whose connections to the land are far more tenuous.
It is accepted by every nation in the world, not one of which now hosts an embassy in Jerusalem, that the city is occupied. The International Court of Justice has ruled that the separation wall is illegal. The UN accepts that the settlements are illegal and in violation of the Conventions. It is true that the accusation of genocide is a stretch – but so it has been in many recent abuses of the term from Bosnia to Darfur, where it has become synonymous with mass murder.
The elision between the Jewish people and Israel was always a stretch, but even more so now when so many prominent Jewish community leaders such as Gerard Kaufman have recoiled in horror from the identification. “My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count”, Sir Gerald told the House of Commons in January.
Such sentiments expressed by anyone else would lead to pre-emptive charges of anti-Semitism. In Kaufman’s case, it put him up there with “Jews for Genocide”, as Phillips termed those Jews whose universalist ethics rise above a defensive tribalism on the incursion into Gaza. Philips concluded: “It is the UN and the architects of Durban II who are the racists and murderous bigots. Denounce this sick farce, and pull out now.”
There is no doubt that many Islamic states are covering their own sins at home – and their spinelessness in the face of American support of Israel – with their fervent attempts to condemn the latter. However, it is also true that the descriptions of racism in the document would apply to Israel’s conduct whether or not the Jewish state was singled out by name – which is why the boycotters are pre-emptively trying to devalue its outcome. Human rights apply to both Jews and Muslims and they include the freedom of speech and the consequent right to be critical of any religion.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Follow the Money
Follow the money
Ian Williams wants his money back
back
Speculator, IR magazine February 2009
As I sat having my hair cut in the salon in Grand Central Terminal recently, I asked my barber where all the affluent customers who usually crowded the place were. He reported that half of them no longer came. They had lost their jobs, and Wall Street’s haircut had translated into no haircuts in Grand Central. But what happened to the clippings? Where did the money go? Into another dimension, down a wormhole or into the accounts of the looters?
Lots of people lost lots of money by buying dubious financial instruments. But they gave that money to someone for something. Money from retail investors and pension funds went to banks and other institutions happily conspiring to take commissions and other fees as they sold duff funds or auction-preferred-rate securities down the line to the public.
So where did all that money go? The factories, stores, homes, warehouses and mines still exist. There is no real shortage of money. Indeed one of the most bizarre effects of the crisis (apart from Alan Greenspan admitting he was wrong) is that the dollar went up in value and gold went down, because people were repatriating overseas holdings and liquidating their gold stocks.
Many asset-backed instruments were deliberately complex, and buyers and sellers alike have confessed they didn’t understand them. If you were to let utility companies build nuclear power plants while confessing that they didn’t really understand them, you would not be surprised if there were a cataclysmic meltdown. And if you let uranium smugglers run the reactors, you would not be surprised if there was spillage.
Wall Street has proved what Mack the Knife rhetorically asked in the Threepenny Opera: ‘What’s robbing a bank to starting a bank?’ But the banks were robbing each other! As one Victorian mathematician, specializing in fractals rather than stock options, put it:
‘Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.’
There is no honor among fleas. The news that Bernie Madoff waltzed off with $50 bn of his billionaire clients’ money surprised even those of us who knew that greed and gullibility – like the best laid plans – often go awry.
Naturally, in uncharted waters, decision makers are concentrating on saving the ship. But in a country where long and detailed inquiries into presidential peccadilloes seem to be the norm, surely it is time for some serious experts to look at all the factors that contributed to this perfect storm – not only to be retributive, but also to avoid it happening again and try to make good some of the damage.
There is an old investigative principle to guide any such inquiry: follow the money. Who has it now, and how did he get it? Money works only when it is moving, and keeping it under the mattress does not contribute at all. It should be shaken and stirred, and poured in the right direction.
Ian Williams wants his money back
back
Speculator, IR magazine February 2009
As I sat having my hair cut in the salon in Grand Central Terminal recently, I asked my barber where all the affluent customers who usually crowded the place were. He reported that half of them no longer came. They had lost their jobs, and Wall Street’s haircut had translated into no haircuts in Grand Central. But what happened to the clippings? Where did the money go? Into another dimension, down a wormhole or into the accounts of the looters?
Lots of people lost lots of money by buying dubious financial instruments. But they gave that money to someone for something. Money from retail investors and pension funds went to banks and other institutions happily conspiring to take commissions and other fees as they sold duff funds or auction-preferred-rate securities down the line to the public.
So where did all that money go? The factories, stores, homes, warehouses and mines still exist. There is no real shortage of money. Indeed one of the most bizarre effects of the crisis (apart from Alan Greenspan admitting he was wrong) is that the dollar went up in value and gold went down, because people were repatriating overseas holdings and liquidating their gold stocks.
Many asset-backed instruments were deliberately complex, and buyers and sellers alike have confessed they didn’t understand them. If you were to let utility companies build nuclear power plants while confessing that they didn’t really understand them, you would not be surprised if there were a cataclysmic meltdown. And if you let uranium smugglers run the reactors, you would not be surprised if there was spillage.
Wall Street has proved what Mack the Knife rhetorically asked in the Threepenny Opera: ‘What’s robbing a bank to starting a bank?’ But the banks were robbing each other! As one Victorian mathematician, specializing in fractals rather than stock options, put it:
‘Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.’
There is no honor among fleas. The news that Bernie Madoff waltzed off with $50 bn of his billionaire clients’ money surprised even those of us who knew that greed and gullibility – like the best laid plans – often go awry.
Naturally, in uncharted waters, decision makers are concentrating on saving the ship. But in a country where long and detailed inquiries into presidential peccadilloes seem to be the norm, surely it is time for some serious experts to look at all the factors that contributed to this perfect storm – not only to be retributive, but also to avoid it happening again and try to make good some of the damage.
There is an old investigative principle to guide any such inquiry: follow the money. Who has it now, and how did he get it? Money works only when it is moving, and keeping it under the mattress does not contribute at all. It should be shaken and stirred, and poured in the right direction.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
A Bolivar for his Oliver
Hugo Chávez's time is up
If Venezuela's president wants to prove the Bolivarian revolution is about more than just him, he shouldn't seek a third term
Comments (…)
* Ian Williams
*
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 February 2009 17.30 GMT
This weekend, on February 15, Hugo Chávez has his second try at lifting term limits so that he can run for a third term as president of Venezuela when his second expires in 2013. This time he has cunningly added ending term limits for legislators, governors and mayors to the referendum to understate the personal element, even if he rather spoiled it by declaring the 10th anniversary of his election earlier this month a public holiday.
The Venezuelans convincingly elected Chávez, and it is up to them whether they want to see him haranguing them and the world ubiquitously and permanently on their TV screens. But just as foreigners watched bemused but resignedly as Americans re-elected Ronald Reagan and George Bush to second terms, we do not have to applaud their choice. Cheering every foreign leader who was rude about Bush has led to people who should know better to support Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic as saviours of the international proletariat.
Chávez is a more complicated case, not least since he has been blessed with such an incompetent and incoherent opposition at home and abroad.
One notes that Michael Bloomberg's successful attempt to overcome term limits and run again for mayor of New York has not yet earned him anything like the obloquy that conservatives have heaped on Chávez for doing the same thing. Too often the degree of political attachment to eternal principles is a function of the glue of partisan interest.
But on the other hand, one wonders what the reaction of the American and European fans of Chávez would have been if either Reagan or Bush had sought to overthrow the 22nd amendment and run for another term.
Conversely, it was of course Republicans still smarting from the New Deal that FDR had brought about who secured the amendment in the first place. While we may breathe a sigh of relief for both the New Deal and victory in the second world war that FDR defied convention with a third and indeed somewhat less momentous fourth term, there is a sound principle there.
The American-style executive presidency, like the constitution, is a fossilised relic of its time and place. In effect, the president of the United States has all the prerogatives and powers of a Hanoverian monarch – far too many, in fact. The tension between the deference due a head of state, and the default disrespect with which the media and others should treat any elected politician is shown at White House press conferences when the media actually stand for the arrival of the commander-in-chief and then metaphorically mostly fall on their knees immediately afterward, and maintain that posture thereafter.
As president, Chávez has amassed even more power than King George W and Dick Cheney did. For example, while there is a vigorous press in Venezuela, he has squeezed the opposition off the airwaves. Admittedly during the Bush years, it sometimes seemed as if that were the case in the US, but it was far from totally so. Chávez has appointed military comrades to positions throughout the administration and developed a finely honed apparatus of political patronage that makes standard US pork-barrelling seem almost halal. With the exception of the Gucci riots in the Florida vote-counting halls, Bush did not have the red-shirted cadres to take over town halls because opposition candidates won, as has happened in Caracas.
In the midst of the current economic crisis in the US, comparisons are even more odious than usual. But even so, Chávez has not prepared the Venezuelan economy for the bruising to which it is cruising. Social spending at home and vanity spending abroad, cheap oil for Cubans, London transport and American heating oil are all less sustainable now with oil prices plummeting.
Chávez has starved the state-owned oil company of re-investment and resources, and its production has fallen by a quarter while its revenues have been diverted elsewhere.
The Wall Street Journal editorialists and the like are far more concerned about Chávez using the oil wealth to buy political support and re-election from poor voters than they have been with other oil states whose rulers use the revenues to deprive the poor of both votes and handouts. Nevertheless, there is a problem. Venezuela's oil revenue made up over 90% of GDP last year. And most of the rest of the country's economic activity is devoted to spending the oil money, in services, retailing and distribution. Albeit popular, the choices that Chávez has made for spreading the revenues have not diversified the economy away from that dependence on oil - and its price.
With the referendum next week, rushed to beat the crisis, and then the election that he wants to run in, it is unlikely that Chávez will make the hard choices necessary. His manifestly messianic ego means that Chávez is unlikely to emulate the modest Nelson Mandela and step down while the going is good. With one military coup under his belt, would his attachment to democracy last an electoral defeat?
Like compulsory retirement, term limits clear the stage for new blood. The sophisticated choice for Venezuelans would be to vote "no" again in this referendum so that Chávez and his more capable ministers could tackle the impending crisis without worrying about his re-election and test the premise that there is more to the Bolivarian revolution than Hugo Chávez.
Paradise by the dashboard light
Paradise not yet regained, but inferno is postponed
February 14, 2009
Tribune
THE “revolution now” crowd is disappointed, but actually feels vindicated that Barack Obama has not immediately overthrown the hegemony of Wall Street and the Israel lobby and declared the end of poverty and the advent of universal healthcare. I admit to sharing their disappointment at his silence on Gaza, but as I predicted, Obama’s presidency is not the Second Coming. However, it is is the end of the reign of the Anti-Christ, if a born-again atheist might use such eschatological metaphors. He even included non-believers in his inaugural speech.
In comparison with what went before, it has been largely good news – apart from the blow to the arts of having a reincarnation of William McGonagall to read a poem at his inauguration. But perhaps I am unfair – McGonagall could rhyme, if not scan, and the chosen bard could do neither.
For those with more cautious expectations, Obama has over-fulfilled the plan. He could have pleaded preoccupation with the economic crisis, but immediately issued the order to close Guantanamo, stipulated that torture, as the rest of the civilised world understands it, be stopped and ended the military kangaroo courts. He scrapped the financial sanctions imposed on small countries refusing to sign exclusion clauses for American citizens from the International Criminal Court. He signed a bill that reinstated the poor children’s healthcare provisions vetoed by his predecessor. He overturned the bigoted restrictions on finance for international family planning and has made massive funds available to states to finance unemployment insurance. He appointed a committed pro-union activist to be Secretary of Labour and reversed several anti union decrees on organising and equal rights.
Gaza notwithstanding, the new President is signalling a change of direction in the Middle East. His inaugural speech put Muslims up there between Christians and Jews: his first interview was with Al-Arabiya television. His first phone call was to Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas and he immediately appointed George Mitchell – half Arab and well respected in the region – as his special envoy. It seems that Obama did not even clear this with the Israelis first, which is a break from the pandering of the previous four presidential terms. This achievement is all the more remarkable, since his foreign policy team includes so many previously pro-Israeli figures.
In an oblique way, Israeli politicians have made it all easier for him. The bloody, vindictive and pointless shambles of Gaza lowered Israel’s prestige even in the United States, let alone the rest of the world, while giving a new lease of life to American Jewish peace lobby. Benjamin Netanyahu is the most intransigent, arrogant and most easily disownable Israeli leader in recent history. It would also help if European politicians such as Gordon Brown stopped giving Israel a free pass.
Similarly, Obama broke with tradition in denouncing the excesses of Wall Street and putting a ceiling on bank executive pay for recipients of federal handouts. It is true that the ceiling is more symbolic than real, but the symbolism is important. For decades, American policy has been sacrificed on the altar of mammon, and to suggest that greed may have limits is almost revolutionary. In his financial stimulus package, Obama put a large pinch of incense on the altar of consensus by including billions of dollars in tax cuts and cutting spending to get Republican consensus. Since they got their amendments and he did not get their votes, he is unlikely to be so indulgent next time. And with the popular support he has, and the sense of panic underlying the country, he can afford to be merciless with them in the coming months. Once again, he has armoured himself for political infighting by appointing establishment figures in the economic departments. If he is determined, with them as shield-bearers, he could get policies through Congress that would be otherwise untenable.
So far, he seems able to distinguish between political compromises necessary to implement his policies and Bill Clinton-style triangulation – adopting his opponents’ policies wholesale. Unlike Clinton, who took the unions’ money and then denounced them as “special interests”, Obama has unashamedly declared them to be “part of the solution”.
That does not mean we should merely genuflect and let him get on with it. During his campaign, he was asked what he would do about the Middle East. Astutely, he quoted Franklin D Roosevelt. When a black union leader asked what he would do about unionisation and desegregation, FDR said that he would do as much as the unions made him. Forceful but reasoned campaigns can give elected leaders the excuse and impetus to do what they would like to do. We can be sure the bankers, generals and the rest of the establishment will be bending the residential ear. During his election campaign, grassroots campaigners used the internet and social groupings such as the churches (black ones) to get votes and money. We can hope those campaigners will maintain the pressure in a supportively critical way. It may not be paradise yet, but we are up the rungs of the ladder with our feet out of the flames of inferno.
February 14, 2009
Tribune
THE “revolution now” crowd is disappointed, but actually feels vindicated that Barack Obama has not immediately overthrown the hegemony of Wall Street and the Israel lobby and declared the end of poverty and the advent of universal healthcare. I admit to sharing their disappointment at his silence on Gaza, but as I predicted, Obama’s presidency is not the Second Coming. However, it is is the end of the reign of the Anti-Christ, if a born-again atheist might use such eschatological metaphors. He even included non-believers in his inaugural speech.
In comparison with what went before, it has been largely good news – apart from the blow to the arts of having a reincarnation of William McGonagall to read a poem at his inauguration. But perhaps I am unfair – McGonagall could rhyme, if not scan, and the chosen bard could do neither.
For those with more cautious expectations, Obama has over-fulfilled the plan. He could have pleaded preoccupation with the economic crisis, but immediately issued the order to close Guantanamo, stipulated that torture, as the rest of the civilised world understands it, be stopped and ended the military kangaroo courts. He scrapped the financial sanctions imposed on small countries refusing to sign exclusion clauses for American citizens from the International Criminal Court. He signed a bill that reinstated the poor children’s healthcare provisions vetoed by his predecessor. He overturned the bigoted restrictions on finance for international family planning and has made massive funds available to states to finance unemployment insurance. He appointed a committed pro-union activist to be Secretary of Labour and reversed several anti union decrees on organising and equal rights.
Gaza notwithstanding, the new President is signalling a change of direction in the Middle East. His inaugural speech put Muslims up there between Christians and Jews: his first interview was with Al-Arabiya television. His first phone call was to Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas and he immediately appointed George Mitchell – half Arab and well respected in the region – as his special envoy. It seems that Obama did not even clear this with the Israelis first, which is a break from the pandering of the previous four presidential terms. This achievement is all the more remarkable, since his foreign policy team includes so many previously pro-Israeli figures.
In an oblique way, Israeli politicians have made it all easier for him. The bloody, vindictive and pointless shambles of Gaza lowered Israel’s prestige even in the United States, let alone the rest of the world, while giving a new lease of life to American Jewish peace lobby. Benjamin Netanyahu is the most intransigent, arrogant and most easily disownable Israeli leader in recent history. It would also help if European politicians such as Gordon Brown stopped giving Israel a free pass.
Similarly, Obama broke with tradition in denouncing the excesses of Wall Street and putting a ceiling on bank executive pay for recipients of federal handouts. It is true that the ceiling is more symbolic than real, but the symbolism is important. For decades, American policy has been sacrificed on the altar of mammon, and to suggest that greed may have limits is almost revolutionary. In his financial stimulus package, Obama put a large pinch of incense on the altar of consensus by including billions of dollars in tax cuts and cutting spending to get Republican consensus. Since they got their amendments and he did not get their votes, he is unlikely to be so indulgent next time. And with the popular support he has, and the sense of panic underlying the country, he can afford to be merciless with them in the coming months. Once again, he has armoured himself for political infighting by appointing establishment figures in the economic departments. If he is determined, with them as shield-bearers, he could get policies through Congress that would be otherwise untenable.
So far, he seems able to distinguish between political compromises necessary to implement his policies and Bill Clinton-style triangulation – adopting his opponents’ policies wholesale. Unlike Clinton, who took the unions’ money and then denounced them as “special interests”, Obama has unashamedly declared them to be “part of the solution”.
That does not mean we should merely genuflect and let him get on with it. During his campaign, he was asked what he would do about the Middle East. Astutely, he quoted Franklin D Roosevelt. When a black union leader asked what he would do about unionisation and desegregation, FDR said that he would do as much as the unions made him. Forceful but reasoned campaigns can give elected leaders the excuse and impetus to do what they would like to do. We can be sure the bankers, generals and the rest of the establishment will be bending the residential ear. During his election campaign, grassroots campaigners used the internet and social groupings such as the churches (black ones) to get votes and money. We can hope those campaigners will maintain the pressure in a supportively critical way. It may not be paradise yet, but we are up the rungs of the ladder with our feet out of the flames of inferno.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Defying Logic
Defying logic
US arms shipments to Israel are questionable under American law. It should reconsider sending military aid
* Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 February 2009 15.30 GMT
As they were still reassembling dog-eaten cadavers of kids in Gaza, an envelope from Aipac dropped in my mailbox. The self-proclaimed most powerful lobby in Washington had sent me a pre-printed post card to sign and mail to my congressman, urging him to support increased military aid to the Israel over the next decade.
To compound it, just before Barack Obama's inauguration, Condoleezza Rice had signed an agreement, probably written on a fig leaf, to show that Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak had got something out of their rampage across the strip. Dangerously, it implied that the US navy is going to intercept neutral ships on the high seas looking for alleged contraband being shipped to the elected authorities in Gaza. This was of course the casus belli of the 1812 war, which the US declared against Britain for stopping American ships trading with Napoleon. The memorandum does not explain what international law is being invoked for this, although it does have shades of Kennedy threatening to do the same to Soviet ships going to Cuba.
British and European governments, in a spirit of me-tooism, rushed to offer to join in.
In welcome contrast, Peter Kilfoyle, the British Labour MP, took David Miliband, the foreign secretary, to task: "On armaments for Israel, he said just a moment ago that he would very much like to see the prevention of arms going to terrorist organisations. That is the case for everybody in this House, and on the basis of what we have just heard and what he himself just said, will he undertake to ensure that no arms at all go to Israel at the moment, given that it is guilty in many people's eyes of state-sponsored terrorism with its activities in the Gaza strip?"
Perhaps an even stronger reaction was that of another MP, Sir Gerard Kaufman, who asked the Miliband "to clarify the logic whereby we can send the Royal Navy to enforce an arms ban on Hamas while continuing to sell arms to Israel, after a conflict in which 1,200 Palestinians were slaughtered and four Israelis were killed by Hamas rockets? That is an exchange rate of one Israeli life for 300 Palestinian lives." A few days earlier he had provided background: "My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count."
Amnesty International and other human rights NGOs who had seen the devastation at first hand echoed the call for an arms embargo, detailing the massive and continuing arms shipments to Israel – at a time when the country was defying UN security council resolution 1860 calling for an immediate ceasefire.
But while parliamentarians in other countries are taking their governments to task for selling arms to Israel, the case is superficially simpler for the US. It just has to stop giving them. Israel gets $3bn a year in military aid from the US, the highest figure in the world. Perhaps a telling contrast is the other alleged special relationship. In December 2006 the UK finally paid off the bill to the US for all the weapons it had to pay for to defeat Hitler in the second world war.
Uniquely Israel can use a quarter of its aid to buy the produce of its own arms factories, which leads to the perennial question of Israeli sales of US military technology to China, which has upset even the most complaisant Pentagon officials in the past.
Even more uniquely, much of what could be justified as a stimulus to American arms producers has been spent on buying refined fuel from the US, during a period when Americans were suffering from high oil prices and low supplies.
In Congress, aid to Israel is sacrosanct, regardless of what Israel does with it. No one ever complains about earmarks, pork-barrelling or ungrateful foreign aid recipients in this context. However, the arms shipments to Israel are questionable under American law on several levels as well being the equivalent of subsidising German car production to compete with Detroit.
Firstly, the weaponry is supposed to be for defence – and it really is a stretch to suggest that American-made phosphorous munitions dropping in UN schools and warehouses is defensive.
This has, of course, happened before. For example, the use of anti-personnel cluster weapons in the various incursions into Lebanon has been called into question, only to have the question shelved in embarrassment by Washington, even when the casings with US markings have been produced. Ironically, conservative hero Ronald Reagan actually stopped sales of cluster munitions to Israel in 1982 after clear evidence that Israel had breached agreements on their use.
Under US law, arms shipments should not be used to violate human rights – which suggests that Congress does not read its own state department reports on conditions in the occupied territories.
US law on arms sales also has non-proliferation elements. If Israel were to go public about its 200 or so nuclear weapons that the US so persistently ignores, arms shipments would be illegal.
Perhaps more tellingly is that the weaponry being sent may be about to put US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in grave danger by supporting an act of naked aggression against Iran. The Israeli ambassador to Australia last week described the Gaza debacle as a "pre-introduction" for an assault on Iran and certainly the chances are that Bibi Netanyahu's election would make this even more likely.
In any case, Netanyahu supports assassinations of Palestinian leaders, refuses to countenance a Palestinian state and wants to expand settlements. In short he will be more in violation of the "road map" conditions than Hamas. Following its own logic, Washington should refuse to talk to him, let alone arm him.
Under these circumstances, in any rational world, Obama's administration should use its considerable leverage to let Israel know that there is no free lunch. If Israeli leaders want to go it alone, then they should face the risk of being on their own. There is no reason for credit-crunched American taxpayers to subsidise what rational Israeli leaders have proclaimed to be suicidal polices.
So back to the Aipac post card. I forwarded it to my congressman with "not" interposed before all the relevant verbs. But alas, Kilfoyles and Kaufmans are thin on the ground on Capitol Hill.
US arms shipments to Israel are questionable under American law. It should reconsider sending military aid
* Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 February 2009 15.30 GMT
As they were still reassembling dog-eaten cadavers of kids in Gaza, an envelope from Aipac dropped in my mailbox. The self-proclaimed most powerful lobby in Washington had sent me a pre-printed post card to sign and mail to my congressman, urging him to support increased military aid to the Israel over the next decade.
To compound it, just before Barack Obama's inauguration, Condoleezza Rice had signed an agreement, probably written on a fig leaf, to show that Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak had got something out of their rampage across the strip. Dangerously, it implied that the US navy is going to intercept neutral ships on the high seas looking for alleged contraband being shipped to the elected authorities in Gaza. This was of course the casus belli of the 1812 war, which the US declared against Britain for stopping American ships trading with Napoleon. The memorandum does not explain what international law is being invoked for this, although it does have shades of Kennedy threatening to do the same to Soviet ships going to Cuba.
British and European governments, in a spirit of me-tooism, rushed to offer to join in.
In welcome contrast, Peter Kilfoyle, the British Labour MP, took David Miliband, the foreign secretary, to task: "On armaments for Israel, he said just a moment ago that he would very much like to see the prevention of arms going to terrorist organisations. That is the case for everybody in this House, and on the basis of what we have just heard and what he himself just said, will he undertake to ensure that no arms at all go to Israel at the moment, given that it is guilty in many people's eyes of state-sponsored terrorism with its activities in the Gaza strip?"
Perhaps an even stronger reaction was that of another MP, Sir Gerard Kaufman, who asked the Miliband "to clarify the logic whereby we can send the Royal Navy to enforce an arms ban on Hamas while continuing to sell arms to Israel, after a conflict in which 1,200 Palestinians were slaughtered and four Israelis were killed by Hamas rockets? That is an exchange rate of one Israeli life for 300 Palestinian lives." A few days earlier he had provided background: "My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count."
Amnesty International and other human rights NGOs who had seen the devastation at first hand echoed the call for an arms embargo, detailing the massive and continuing arms shipments to Israel – at a time when the country was defying UN security council resolution 1860 calling for an immediate ceasefire.
But while parliamentarians in other countries are taking their governments to task for selling arms to Israel, the case is superficially simpler for the US. It just has to stop giving them. Israel gets $3bn a year in military aid from the US, the highest figure in the world. Perhaps a telling contrast is the other alleged special relationship. In December 2006 the UK finally paid off the bill to the US for all the weapons it had to pay for to defeat Hitler in the second world war.
Uniquely Israel can use a quarter of its aid to buy the produce of its own arms factories, which leads to the perennial question of Israeli sales of US military technology to China, which has upset even the most complaisant Pentagon officials in the past.
Even more uniquely, much of what could be justified as a stimulus to American arms producers has been spent on buying refined fuel from the US, during a period when Americans were suffering from high oil prices and low supplies.
In Congress, aid to Israel is sacrosanct, regardless of what Israel does with it. No one ever complains about earmarks, pork-barrelling or ungrateful foreign aid recipients in this context. However, the arms shipments to Israel are questionable under American law on several levels as well being the equivalent of subsidising German car production to compete with Detroit.
Firstly, the weaponry is supposed to be for defence – and it really is a stretch to suggest that American-made phosphorous munitions dropping in UN schools and warehouses is defensive.
This has, of course, happened before. For example, the use of anti-personnel cluster weapons in the various incursions into Lebanon has been called into question, only to have the question shelved in embarrassment by Washington, even when the casings with US markings have been produced. Ironically, conservative hero Ronald Reagan actually stopped sales of cluster munitions to Israel in 1982 after clear evidence that Israel had breached agreements on their use.
Under US law, arms shipments should not be used to violate human rights – which suggests that Congress does not read its own state department reports on conditions in the occupied territories.
US law on arms sales also has non-proliferation elements. If Israel were to go public about its 200 or so nuclear weapons that the US so persistently ignores, arms shipments would be illegal.
Perhaps more tellingly is that the weaponry being sent may be about to put US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in grave danger by supporting an act of naked aggression against Iran. The Israeli ambassador to Australia last week described the Gaza debacle as a "pre-introduction" for an assault on Iran and certainly the chances are that Bibi Netanyahu's election would make this even more likely.
In any case, Netanyahu supports assassinations of Palestinian leaders, refuses to countenance a Palestinian state and wants to expand settlements. In short he will be more in violation of the "road map" conditions than Hamas. Following its own logic, Washington should refuse to talk to him, let alone arm him.
Under these circumstances, in any rational world, Obama's administration should use its considerable leverage to let Israel know that there is no free lunch. If Israeli leaders want to go it alone, then they should face the risk of being on their own. There is no reason for credit-crunched American taxpayers to subsidise what rational Israeli leaders have proclaimed to be suicidal polices.
So back to the Aipac post card. I forwarded it to my congressman with "not" interposed before all the relevant verbs. But alas, Kilfoyles and Kaufmans are thin on the ground on Capitol Hill.
Tata for Now
Look east, old CEO
Ian Williams says India has the answer for Detroit
Speculator, IR Magazine, January
The big three automotive CEOs’ private jets caused a traffic jam in the airspace over Washington when they flew in to ask for taxpayer handouts. Their notorious preference for lobbying for tax breaks and against mileage and emissions restrictions rather than investing in new products people might want to buy has led to understandable reluctance to give them a taxpayer-funded parachute.
Their short-lived ecological disasters on wheels have always been hard to sell abroad. Now they can hardly give the vehicles away at home. It wasn’t just bad business; it was also environmentally irresponsible and fundamentally unpatriotic to hold their country hostage to international oil markets while ruining the health of the globe and of the US citizens choked and mown down by these behemoths.
On the positive side, the Big Three, under pressure from the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, have created a corporate welfare state, with healthcare and pensions of the kind governments provide in Canada and western Europe. Indeed, Walter Reuther, the democratic socialist who led the UAW for many years, said he had negotiated to fill the gap left by federal failure.
It is indeed unfair that the Big Three should be penalized because they are maintaining civilized industrialized world standards. But those CEOs have not been doing good because they like it or make money from it. They have been doing it because the union has them by the vitals.
The first item in my three-point plan is for one – or all – of the car companies to be taken over by the successful and accomplished boss who is on record as having said: ‘Companies that are not good corporate citizens – those that don’t hold to standards and that allow the environment and the community to suffer – are really criminals in today’s world.’
Those are the words of Ratan Tata, head of the Tata Group, which has produced a new model automobile that meets and exceeds emissions and mileage standards, and costs just $2,500. When Tata took over Land Rover, there were some snobbish sneers that it would devalue the brand. It would be a bold auto executive who could get up from his knees in front of congress and say that now.
The second point in my plan is to put the lobbying power of the Big Three behind a Taiwanese-style healthcare system. Ten years ago, Taiwan introduced a comprehensive and universal system that costs around one third the proportion of GDP that the US pays.
Third is something at which Tata would excel: retooling some car plants to produce environmentally sound products like wind turbines, solar cells, mass transit buses and trains. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds: during World War II, auto plants converted to making planes and Chrysler became a major part of the atomic bomb program.
It may be that the three wise men with their hands out in Washington are not up to the challenge. But Ratan Tata’s blend of social concern spiced with entrepreneurial gumption is. Give him the tasks, the $25 bn bailout and the companies. Let him pretend the companies are banks and allow him to dip into the $700 bn for this new Michigan Project. It won’t go on bonuses and compensation, you can be sure.
Ian Williams says India has the answer for Detroit
Speculator, IR Magazine, January
The big three automotive CEOs’ private jets caused a traffic jam in the airspace over Washington when they flew in to ask for taxpayer handouts. Their notorious preference for lobbying for tax breaks and against mileage and emissions restrictions rather than investing in new products people might want to buy has led to understandable reluctance to give them a taxpayer-funded parachute.
Their short-lived ecological disasters on wheels have always been hard to sell abroad. Now they can hardly give the vehicles away at home. It wasn’t just bad business; it was also environmentally irresponsible and fundamentally unpatriotic to hold their country hostage to international oil markets while ruining the health of the globe and of the US citizens choked and mown down by these behemoths.
On the positive side, the Big Three, under pressure from the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, have created a corporate welfare state, with healthcare and pensions of the kind governments provide in Canada and western Europe. Indeed, Walter Reuther, the democratic socialist who led the UAW for many years, said he had negotiated to fill the gap left by federal failure.
It is indeed unfair that the Big Three should be penalized because they are maintaining civilized industrialized world standards. But those CEOs have not been doing good because they like it or make money from it. They have been doing it because the union has them by the vitals.
The first item in my three-point plan is for one – or all – of the car companies to be taken over by the successful and accomplished boss who is on record as having said: ‘Companies that are not good corporate citizens – those that don’t hold to standards and that allow the environment and the community to suffer – are really criminals in today’s world.’
Those are the words of Ratan Tata, head of the Tata Group, which has produced a new model automobile that meets and exceeds emissions and mileage standards, and costs just $2,500. When Tata took over Land Rover, there were some snobbish sneers that it would devalue the brand. It would be a bold auto executive who could get up from his knees in front of congress and say that now.
The second point in my plan is to put the lobbying power of the Big Three behind a Taiwanese-style healthcare system. Ten years ago, Taiwan introduced a comprehensive and universal system that costs around one third the proportion of GDP that the US pays.
Third is something at which Tata would excel: retooling some car plants to produce environmentally sound products like wind turbines, solar cells, mass transit buses and trains. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds: during World War II, auto plants converted to making planes and Chrysler became a major part of the atomic bomb program.
It may be that the three wise men with their hands out in Washington are not up to the challenge. But Ratan Tata’s blend of social concern spiced with entrepreneurial gumption is. Give him the tasks, the $25 bn bailout and the companies. Let him pretend the companies are banks and allow him to dip into the $700 bn for this new Michigan Project. It won’t go on bonuses and compensation, you can be sure.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Sheepish about Burns
Burns night in the Catskills
Buying real haggis is illegal in the US – so I tracked down contraband sheep guts for the 250th anniversary of Robbie Burns's birth
o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 January 2009 20.30 GMT
Around the world last weekend, Scots and their sympathisers assembled for the 190 year-old ritual of the Burns Supper, to toast the "immortal memory" of Robert Burns over a fine dish of haggis.
Like many such rituals Burns Night has accrued ahistorical nationalist baggage: tartan, kilts, bagpipes "an a' that". Burns was a radical but a realist. He worked as an exciseman for the British crown that he sometimes berated at a time when this was a patronage appointment. Despite the malt whisky used to toast his memory today, his job's perks included "as much rum and brandy as will easily supply an ordinary family." (No mention of whisky - the days of whisky as a drink of the wealthy were well off in the future.)
So indeed was the tartan kilt. Highland dress was illegal when Burns was young, but Burns and his fellow lowlanders bore the constraint lightly. They were about as likely to wear a kilt and dress up in barbaric Highland splendour as a Wasp banker today is to wear denim overalls. It wasn't until the following century that Walter Scott and his followers romanticised tartans, kilts and sporrans into nationalist symbols.
In the interests of public education and celebration of the internationalist who wrote:
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.
our planned Catskill Burns Supper pledged to dispense with much of the tartanry. What would Rantin' Roving Robin have made of people who wanted to put their pooches in kilts at any time, let along in celebration of his birthday?
And I gather that the Scots themselves have recruited Kofi Annan to celebrate Burns universalism for this, the 250th anniversary of his birth. I hope they provide him with a UN interpreter.
But putting aside kilts, the haggis - "Great chieftain o' the pudding race," as Burns had it - is surely indispensable to the occasion.
After a week hunting for contraband - genuine haggis - the conclusion was that this would have to be a DIY project. It is legally impossible to buy authentic haggis in the United States. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, the nanny state reigns supreme, and it reins in import of any comestible containing sheep's lungs. At first, I thought it must be yet another example of crypto-protection for the domestic US haggis industry. But then my research eventually uncovered a quasi-clandestine network of amateur US haggis-makers. Some of them told me that slaughterhouses refuse to give them back the lungs from their own sheep if they take them in for slaughter.
So I hope Burns, the former ploughman and tax-man, would have appreciated our sacrifice. Last Wednesday I stood in several feet of snow at Snowdance Farm, a few thousand feet up in the Catskills in upstate New York, watching Marc Jaffee slaughter a sheep. Marc emptied the sheep's pluck, the liver, heart and lungs, into one plastic bag, and stomach into another, after obligingly squeezing out most of the half-fermented grass. So there it was, a blow for Rabbie Burns and against the tyranny of the US department of agriculture. And maybe the cold was helpful, as the rich, bucolic aroma spread.
The sheep's stomach looked like an alien sex organ, and it had a pervasive cloacal smell, as I everted it and scrubbed it thoroughly, over and over again in cold running water. The lungs were a bit of a trial: the recipe points out that they should be boiled with the rest of the pluck, but with the windpipe over the edge of the cauldron so any mucus would drip out into a bowl.
By this stage I was tending to agree with PG Wodehouse, who suggests that Macbeth's three witches were in fact cooking haggis. He added: "Scotsmen have their merry moods, like all of us, and the thought must occasionally cross the cook's mind that it would be no end of a lark to shove in a lot of newts and frogs and bats and dogs and then stand in the doorway watching the poor simps wade into them." Midwinter in the mountains, all these things had gone to ground, so we were spared the temptation.
The combined pieces, even after a few hours boiling, defied my electric mixer and I had to rush out to get a sturdy cast-iron hand meat grinder, while in the oven the two pounds of oatmeal gently toasted. But the only real tears came from the onions and pepper I chopped and ground into the mix. Stirred together with the liquid from the cauldron, the oats and the minced pluck fitted nicely into the stomach, whose gnarly bits were now safely back inside it.
Dangling in cheesecloth in the cauldron, a mere five hours brought the beast to perfection, in time for the couple of dozen brave souls who weathered the minus-20 degrees Celsius (-4F) to come for the show. Neil Stewart, a Canadian Scot (so that's why they say "oot and aboot," eh?) roared rhotically through the address to the haggis before plunging a dagger into it. It was a very impressive performance, even though our five-year-old spoke for everyone in the way of little boys: "But I can't understand it!"
Ancestral memories nonetheless restored, the multi-ethnic crowd recited verses, sang and generally had a very good time. The one plucky vegetarian actually tried this most carnivorous of dishes – and confessed she liked it – as did everybody else.
And as we thumbed through the collected works of the poet, just after what could have passed as a predictive ode to Washington DC, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation, we stumbled across his Ode to General Washington:
A tyrant's proudest insults brav'd,
They shout-a People freed! ….
But come, ye sons of Liberty,
Columbia's offspring, brave as free,
In danger's hour still flaming in the van,
Ye know, and dare maintain, the Royalty of Man!
All agreed as the malt - and indeed some rum and brandy - flowed, that the departure of George Bush, and the successful defiance of the USDA made the ode timely. Next year in the Catskills, was the cry.
Watch out sheep.
Buying real haggis is illegal in the US – so I tracked down contraband sheep guts for the 250th anniversary of Robbie Burns's birth
o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 January 2009 20.30 GMT
Around the world last weekend, Scots and their sympathisers assembled for the 190 year-old ritual of the Burns Supper, to toast the "immortal memory" of Robert Burns over a fine dish of haggis.
Like many such rituals Burns Night has accrued ahistorical nationalist baggage: tartan, kilts, bagpipes "an a' that". Burns was a radical but a realist. He worked as an exciseman for the British crown that he sometimes berated at a time when this was a patronage appointment. Despite the malt whisky used to toast his memory today, his job's perks included "as much rum and brandy as will easily supply an ordinary family." (No mention of whisky - the days of whisky as a drink of the wealthy were well off in the future.)
So indeed was the tartan kilt. Highland dress was illegal when Burns was young, but Burns and his fellow lowlanders bore the constraint lightly. They were about as likely to wear a kilt and dress up in barbaric Highland splendour as a Wasp banker today is to wear denim overalls. It wasn't until the following century that Walter Scott and his followers romanticised tartans, kilts and sporrans into nationalist symbols.
In the interests of public education and celebration of the internationalist who wrote:
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.
our planned Catskill Burns Supper pledged to dispense with much of the tartanry. What would Rantin' Roving Robin have made of people who wanted to put their pooches in kilts at any time, let along in celebration of his birthday?
And I gather that the Scots themselves have recruited Kofi Annan to celebrate Burns universalism for this, the 250th anniversary of his birth. I hope they provide him with a UN interpreter.
But putting aside kilts, the haggis - "Great chieftain o' the pudding race," as Burns had it - is surely indispensable to the occasion.
After a week hunting for contraband - genuine haggis - the conclusion was that this would have to be a DIY project. It is legally impossible to buy authentic haggis in the United States. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, the nanny state reigns supreme, and it reins in import of any comestible containing sheep's lungs. At first, I thought it must be yet another example of crypto-protection for the domestic US haggis industry. But then my research eventually uncovered a quasi-clandestine network of amateur US haggis-makers. Some of them told me that slaughterhouses refuse to give them back the lungs from their own sheep if they take them in for slaughter.
So I hope Burns, the former ploughman and tax-man, would have appreciated our sacrifice. Last Wednesday I stood in several feet of snow at Snowdance Farm, a few thousand feet up in the Catskills in upstate New York, watching Marc Jaffee slaughter a sheep. Marc emptied the sheep's pluck, the liver, heart and lungs, into one plastic bag, and stomach into another, after obligingly squeezing out most of the half-fermented grass. So there it was, a blow for Rabbie Burns and against the tyranny of the US department of agriculture. And maybe the cold was helpful, as the rich, bucolic aroma spread.
The sheep's stomach looked like an alien sex organ, and it had a pervasive cloacal smell, as I everted it and scrubbed it thoroughly, over and over again in cold running water. The lungs were a bit of a trial: the recipe points out that they should be boiled with the rest of the pluck, but with the windpipe over the edge of the cauldron so any mucus would drip out into a bowl.
By this stage I was tending to agree with PG Wodehouse, who suggests that Macbeth's three witches were in fact cooking haggis. He added: "Scotsmen have their merry moods, like all of us, and the thought must occasionally cross the cook's mind that it would be no end of a lark to shove in a lot of newts and frogs and bats and dogs and then stand in the doorway watching the poor simps wade into them." Midwinter in the mountains, all these things had gone to ground, so we were spared the temptation.
The combined pieces, even after a few hours boiling, defied my electric mixer and I had to rush out to get a sturdy cast-iron hand meat grinder, while in the oven the two pounds of oatmeal gently toasted. But the only real tears came from the onions and pepper I chopped and ground into the mix. Stirred together with the liquid from the cauldron, the oats and the minced pluck fitted nicely into the stomach, whose gnarly bits were now safely back inside it.
Dangling in cheesecloth in the cauldron, a mere five hours brought the beast to perfection, in time for the couple of dozen brave souls who weathered the minus-20 degrees Celsius (-4F) to come for the show. Neil Stewart, a Canadian Scot (so that's why they say "oot and aboot," eh?) roared rhotically through the address to the haggis before plunging a dagger into it. It was a very impressive performance, even though our five-year-old spoke for everyone in the way of little boys: "But I can't understand it!"
Ancestral memories nonetheless restored, the multi-ethnic crowd recited verses, sang and generally had a very good time. The one plucky vegetarian actually tried this most carnivorous of dishes – and confessed she liked it – as did everybody else.
And as we thumbed through the collected works of the poet, just after what could have passed as a predictive ode to Washington DC, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation, we stumbled across his Ode to General Washington:
A tyrant's proudest insults brav'd,
They shout-a People freed! ….
But come, ye sons of Liberty,
Columbia's offspring, brave as free,
In danger's hour still flaming in the van,
Ye know, and dare maintain, the Royalty of Man!
All agreed as the malt - and indeed some rum and brandy - flowed, that the departure of George Bush, and the successful defiance of the USDA made the ode timely. Next year in the Catskills, was the cry.
Watch out sheep.
Setting the Tone
Setting the right tone
Barack Obama's inaugural address lent itself admirably to his governing style – eloquent but not stilted, pointed but polite
o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 January 2009 21.30 GMT
Many people have commented on the echoes of Abraham Lincoln in Barack Obama's inaugural address, but they have missed the point. As the benediction by civil rights veteran Reverend Joseph Lowery demonstrated, Obama's address also echoed the pulpit, and the black pulpit in particular.
This is not too surprising, since they share with Lincoln a common vocabulary of solemnity, the pervasive tradition of King James and the Book of Common Prayer, along with the folksy touch.
This is not aloofness – people expect solemn words for solemn occasions, which is doubtless why so many prefer the older versions to modern translations that read like committee reports. His speech was simple, comprehensible but matched the dignity of the occasion.
His diction was formal but not stilted or pompous, and the formality depended on the precise word order, which provided measure and cadence in an almost antiphonal style. Just listen to the stresses in those opening lines, which set the tone, and indeed the rhythm, for the rest of the speech:
"humbled by the task before us,
grateful for the trust you have bestowed,
mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors."
And of course there were the antiphonal contrasts: "The rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace" or "So it has been. So it must be."
Definitely not something to be mumbled by his rhetorically misunderestimated predecessor, there was more poetry in this speech than the somewhat vapid "Praise song" by Elizabeth Alexander, which pandered to the modern prejudice that poetry can dispense with disciplines of rhyme or scansion.
Since this was not the product of a committee, let alone focus groups, it lent itself admirably to Obama's own style. It is an authentic American tradition of oratory that can tend to bloviated orotundity on one end of the scale but gave the Gettysburg Address on the other. This was not up there with Gettysburg (which was not an immediate hit with contemporaries anyway) but definitely tending that way.
Obama's thanks and appreciation to George Bush the person were followed by a comprehensive but polite repudiation of his political legacy. In an atmosphere of bitter ad hominem attacks, he set an example.
In the political discourse of recent America, to be as studiously inclusive as Obama was, with invocations to Christians and Muslims (note the order), not to mention non-believers, was in its way to be very exclusive. His programme excludes anti-science creationists, elitists, dogmatic free marketers and bigots of all kinds.
His continual evocation of collective, common responsibilities is a rebuttal to and rebuke of Thatcherism – "There is no such thing as society" – while his vindication of the role of government (as if not vindicated by events) refutes both Ronald Reagan's ideological opposition to it, and Bill Clinton's pandering to neoliberals, without itself being dogmatically assertive. Indeed his call for effective government echoes Deng Xiaoping's indifference to the colour of cats as long as they catch mice.
If not quite in the King James mode, his evocation of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers called up more recent, Depression-era folk memories. Most people will have found the words "Start all over again" popping up in their heads after "Pick yourself, dust yourself off," and some may even remember the full context:
"Will you remember the famous men,
Who had to fall to rise again?
So take a deep breath,
Pick yourself up,
Dust yourself off,
Start all over again."
It was a very apposite text for the sermon – sorry, speech – whose theme is indeed a repudiation of the poisonous ideologies that brought us to this pass and a call for "hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord".
And one hopes that it is indeed true, with his 80% approval ratings, that "On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics."
But only if you do not trawl the Mesozoic swamps of conservative websites, where the far-from-fossilised right is sharpening its claws and fangs ready to start all over again. And of course in Congress, where the lobbyists are already swarming like velociraptors to get their greedy maws on the taxpayers' money, Obama will need armour like a stegosaurus if he really intends to put truth in the rhetoric.
Barack Obama's inaugural address lent itself admirably to his governing style – eloquent but not stilted, pointed but polite
o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 January 2009 21.30 GMT
Many people have commented on the echoes of Abraham Lincoln in Barack Obama's inaugural address, but they have missed the point. As the benediction by civil rights veteran Reverend Joseph Lowery demonstrated, Obama's address also echoed the pulpit, and the black pulpit in particular.
This is not too surprising, since they share with Lincoln a common vocabulary of solemnity, the pervasive tradition of King James and the Book of Common Prayer, along with the folksy touch.
This is not aloofness – people expect solemn words for solemn occasions, which is doubtless why so many prefer the older versions to modern translations that read like committee reports. His speech was simple, comprehensible but matched the dignity of the occasion.
His diction was formal but not stilted or pompous, and the formality depended on the precise word order, which provided measure and cadence in an almost antiphonal style. Just listen to the stresses in those opening lines, which set the tone, and indeed the rhythm, for the rest of the speech:
"humbled by the task before us,
grateful for the trust you have bestowed,
mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors."
And of course there were the antiphonal contrasts: "The rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace" or "So it has been. So it must be."
Definitely not something to be mumbled by his rhetorically misunderestimated predecessor, there was more poetry in this speech than the somewhat vapid "Praise song" by Elizabeth Alexander, which pandered to the modern prejudice that poetry can dispense with disciplines of rhyme or scansion.
Since this was not the product of a committee, let alone focus groups, it lent itself admirably to Obama's own style. It is an authentic American tradition of oratory that can tend to bloviated orotundity on one end of the scale but gave the Gettysburg Address on the other. This was not up there with Gettysburg (which was not an immediate hit with contemporaries anyway) but definitely tending that way.
Obama's thanks and appreciation to George Bush the person were followed by a comprehensive but polite repudiation of his political legacy. In an atmosphere of bitter ad hominem attacks, he set an example.
In the political discourse of recent America, to be as studiously inclusive as Obama was, with invocations to Christians and Muslims (note the order), not to mention non-believers, was in its way to be very exclusive. His programme excludes anti-science creationists, elitists, dogmatic free marketers and bigots of all kinds.
His continual evocation of collective, common responsibilities is a rebuttal to and rebuke of Thatcherism – "There is no such thing as society" – while his vindication of the role of government (as if not vindicated by events) refutes both Ronald Reagan's ideological opposition to it, and Bill Clinton's pandering to neoliberals, without itself being dogmatically assertive. Indeed his call for effective government echoes Deng Xiaoping's indifference to the colour of cats as long as they catch mice.
If not quite in the King James mode, his evocation of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers called up more recent, Depression-era folk memories. Most people will have found the words "Start all over again" popping up in their heads after "Pick yourself, dust yourself off," and some may even remember the full context:
"Will you remember the famous men,
Who had to fall to rise again?
So take a deep breath,
Pick yourself up,
Dust yourself off,
Start all over again."
It was a very apposite text for the sermon – sorry, speech – whose theme is indeed a repudiation of the poisonous ideologies that brought us to this pass and a call for "hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord".
And one hopes that it is indeed true, with his 80% approval ratings, that "On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics."
But only if you do not trawl the Mesozoic swamps of conservative websites, where the far-from-fossilised right is sharpening its claws and fangs ready to start all over again. And of course in Congress, where the lobbyists are already swarming like velociraptors to get their greedy maws on the taxpayers' money, Obama will need armour like a stegosaurus if he really intends to put truth in the rhetoric.
Misunderestimated
Failure's no success at all
George Bush deserves an Oscar for his performance as a statesman after convincing so many people to believe his lies
*
o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 January 2009 18.00 GMT
As disastrous a president as he has been, George Bush is certainly cleverer than most of his detractors gave him credit for. He is reminiscent of Stalin, whose defeated rivals sneered at his intellect. Like Stalin, Bush passed the ultimate Darwinian test: He held power while his detractors did not. But while researchers now reveal that Joe the Georgian had a personal library of some 20,000 well-thumbed and heavily annotated volumes, no one, despite Karl Rove's claims to the contrary, really believes that book boxes will take up much space in the moving van when the 43rd president quits the White House or sells his dude ranch in Crawford, Texas.
What did Bush do well? He epitomised the Republican party's makeover of itself as the party of the common man, even as he pursued the most unabashedly plutocratic policies in an American history replete with welfare for the wealthy.
In some measure, he was an unacknowledged acolyte of the method school of acting. Who knows, maybe even the drinking was over-enthusiastic preparation for his coming role as a son of the soil?
College friends at Harvard have told me how Bush used to chew tobacco as if it made him more Texan. But the University of Texas Law School refused to admit him on his unimpressive Yale transcripts, so he had had to use a nepotistic legacy – positive discrimination for wealthy Wasps – to get into Harvard.
So here was an Ivy League jock and wastrel born to a Waspy northeastern family with a long line of silver spoons in its ancestral mouths, passing himself off as an illiterate, verbally dyslexic rube and a self-made man at the same time. Not to mention that he passed himself off as a quasi-veteran instead of a deserter, as Dan Rather's court case against CBS is likely to reiterate this year. It is uncanny how someone with such a dubious military record spent so much time speaking on military bases or to veterans, always in some semblance of military garb. It is method acting that Stanislavsky would have applauded, although psyching yourself up with "I am a Bush" may not be as taxing a role as "I am a tree".
Of course, 4,000 dead Americans and untold thousands of dead Iraqis ago, Bush landed in full pilot's accoutrements on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to the backdrop of "Mission accomplished". This is going to be one of iconic images that will haunt his posterity, along with reading My Pet Goat on 9/11, complimenting Fema head Michael Brown for the post-Katrina debacle and dodging the shoe in Baghdad.
Of these, one cannot help think that Katrina was the turning point when Americans finally shared the perception of much of the world that their country was in the hands of an administration that was as incompetent as it was malicious.
So, at the end of a career that reduced his country to its lowest-ever standing in international public opinion polls, not to mention his own reputation domestically, what has Bush ever done for us?
Well he has brought unemployment to its highest in decades and presided over the biggest fiscal deficit in the country's history, and in the name of free enterprise and hands-off government, he will leave the government in effective ownership of much of the crumbling financial sector while giving government agents constitution-free permission to torture, imprison and spy on citizens, residents and foreigners alike. He also presided over an orgy of dollar printing that will surely hit the currency and the US economy down the line.
If we rank these as Bush's marks on history, we are left to contemplate his failures, for which even a born-again atheist is tempted to thank the Lord.
He totally failed in his plans to privatise social security, for which all of us but the Bernie Madoffs of this land should give daily thanks.
Above all, Bush failed Israel and the evangelists in their Armageddon movement. For whatever reason, he failed to back an Israeli strike on Iran by nixing the bunker buster bombs, the mid-air refuelling capability and allowing the overflight of Iraq.
So what is his greatest political achievement, putting to one side the ethical dimension and the incompetent governance thing? Surely he deserves an Oscar for his performance as a statesman, which was so convincing that most of the American media bought his lies and grovelled to him, and maybe a Golden Globe for persuading "Yo Blair" to play best supporting actor next to him for so long – even at the expense of his own career.
And his subsidiary achievement? Making Bill Clinton look good. Now that's impressive.
George Bush deserves an Oscar for his performance as a statesman after convincing so many people to believe his lies
*
o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 January 2009 18.00 GMT
As disastrous a president as he has been, George Bush is certainly cleverer than most of his detractors gave him credit for. He is reminiscent of Stalin, whose defeated rivals sneered at his intellect. Like Stalin, Bush passed the ultimate Darwinian test: He held power while his detractors did not. But while researchers now reveal that Joe the Georgian had a personal library of some 20,000 well-thumbed and heavily annotated volumes, no one, despite Karl Rove's claims to the contrary, really believes that book boxes will take up much space in the moving van when the 43rd president quits the White House or sells his dude ranch in Crawford, Texas.
What did Bush do well? He epitomised the Republican party's makeover of itself as the party of the common man, even as he pursued the most unabashedly plutocratic policies in an American history replete with welfare for the wealthy.
In some measure, he was an unacknowledged acolyte of the method school of acting. Who knows, maybe even the drinking was over-enthusiastic preparation for his coming role as a son of the soil?
College friends at Harvard have told me how Bush used to chew tobacco as if it made him more Texan. But the University of Texas Law School refused to admit him on his unimpressive Yale transcripts, so he had had to use a nepotistic legacy – positive discrimination for wealthy Wasps – to get into Harvard.
So here was an Ivy League jock and wastrel born to a Waspy northeastern family with a long line of silver spoons in its ancestral mouths, passing himself off as an illiterate, verbally dyslexic rube and a self-made man at the same time. Not to mention that he passed himself off as a quasi-veteran instead of a deserter, as Dan Rather's court case against CBS is likely to reiterate this year. It is uncanny how someone with such a dubious military record spent so much time speaking on military bases or to veterans, always in some semblance of military garb. It is method acting that Stanislavsky would have applauded, although psyching yourself up with "I am a Bush" may not be as taxing a role as "I am a tree".
Of course, 4,000 dead Americans and untold thousands of dead Iraqis ago, Bush landed in full pilot's accoutrements on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to the backdrop of "Mission accomplished". This is going to be one of iconic images that will haunt his posterity, along with reading My Pet Goat on 9/11, complimenting Fema head Michael Brown for the post-Katrina debacle and dodging the shoe in Baghdad.
Of these, one cannot help think that Katrina was the turning point when Americans finally shared the perception of much of the world that their country was in the hands of an administration that was as incompetent as it was malicious.
So, at the end of a career that reduced his country to its lowest-ever standing in international public opinion polls, not to mention his own reputation domestically, what has Bush ever done for us?
Well he has brought unemployment to its highest in decades and presided over the biggest fiscal deficit in the country's history, and in the name of free enterprise and hands-off government, he will leave the government in effective ownership of much of the crumbling financial sector while giving government agents constitution-free permission to torture, imprison and spy on citizens, residents and foreigners alike. He also presided over an orgy of dollar printing that will surely hit the currency and the US economy down the line.
If we rank these as Bush's marks on history, we are left to contemplate his failures, for which even a born-again atheist is tempted to thank the Lord.
He totally failed in his plans to privatise social security, for which all of us but the Bernie Madoffs of this land should give daily thanks.
Above all, Bush failed Israel and the evangelists in their Armageddon movement. For whatever reason, he failed to back an Israeli strike on Iran by nixing the bunker buster bombs, the mid-air refuelling capability and allowing the overflight of Iraq.
So what is his greatest political achievement, putting to one side the ethical dimension and the incompetent governance thing? Surely he deserves an Oscar for his performance as a statesman, which was so convincing that most of the American media bought his lies and grovelled to him, and maybe a Golden Globe for persuading "Yo Blair" to play best supporting actor next to him for so long – even at the expense of his own career.
And his subsidiary achievement? Making Bill Clinton look good. Now that's impressive.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Not so Special
Ian Williams:
They’re changing the guard at the White House
January 17, 2009 Tribune, London
AS THE world sighs with relief that George W Bush is finally stepping down, one wonders what it will mean for the famous “special relationship”. Overall, it has been one of the longest episodes of unrequited love in history – and perhaps no more so in Britain than under “new” Labour.
But when American politicians talk about special relationships or “our closest ally”, they are not referring to the United States’ unsinkable aircraft carrier, the country which bankrupted itself in two world wars, was on the front line in Korea and standing side by side with it in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No, they are talking about Israel, the special ally from whom they tolerate spying, sinking of ships such as the USS Liberty, and for whom they have been regularly prepared to alienate the rest of the world.
The Anglo-American “special relationship” has always existed more in the eyes of British ministers than in the facts on the ground. Winston Churchill saw the British Empire dismembered and its Treasury looted by Franklin D Roosevelt even as he whispered sweet nothings to the American President. Churchill complained: “We are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone”, about the American financial terms. And FDR was the nice one!
The 1945 Labour Government constructed Nato with self-interest in mind, reportedly to “keep the Germans down, the Russians out and the Americans in”. Even so, confronted with American duplicity on nuclear research and callousness on credits that almost led to economic collapse, Clement Attlee’s Government decided to build a British nuclear bomb. Despite all their protestations of undying alliances, they knew that Washington would use Britain when it was convenient and then toss it aside like a used condom afterwards.
With a genuine Soviet threat in Europe, there was some pragmatic justification for swallowing it and maintaining the pretence of a special relationship, but the one time that it was the closest to reality was between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Apart from Tony Blair and his acolytes, not many of us remember this as Britain’s finest hour.
However, whatever you think of the Iron Lady, there was no “Yo Maggie” business from Ron, none of the genial contempt that Bush used for Blair. On issues such as the Middle East and defending British companies against US attempts to extent its legislation extra-territorially, Thatcher was quite willing to stand up to Washington. It is worth remembering that she had to. If it were not for her seductive charms with Reagan, the US conservative establishment would have supported the Argentinean junta and its invasion of the Falklands Islands over Thatcher and the “mother country”.
The lesson of Israel is that a squeaky wheel gets the grease – by the bucketful – while those who lie down uncomplainingly looking at the ceiling and thinking of shared values get screwed.
Gordon Brown has allowed a sliver of daylight to appear between himself and the deserter-in-chief across the water. No “Yo Gordies” are recorded. In any case, surely British foreign policy is now due for a reappraisal? The Germans maybe up for it and friendly, the Russians are played out, and the Americans on the verge of being an economic basket case.
It will behove Brown to start making up to President Obama as fast and furiously as possible. The scale of the recovery programmes under consideration are bound to have repercussions for Britain and Europe. Co-ordination is desirable and essential.
However, the myth of the special relationship lulls British leaders into thinking a quick call to the American President and an occasional royal visit is all that is necessary. Israel and other countries do not make that mistake. They work the lobbies of the US Congress to get results. If Britain wants any type of meaningful relationship, it needs to connect to the sordid reality.
Brown has to abandon his underlying Euroscepticism. There may be pragmatic grounds, for example, for staying out the euro, but the plunging pound suggests it is time to reconsider his undeclared tacit blanket rejection. Above all, in the European Union, Britain has a genuine stature and role to play in shaping the future in an economy that aims to be far more resilient and successful in protecting its citizens than the US. Look to Iceland for the alternative.
In fact, for decades, friendly American leaders, a little embarrassed perhaps by the faithful partner they have so often mistreated, have been advising Britain to involve itself more in the EU. British leaders, so sadly and slavishly prepared to follow the American lead in almost every other way, no matter how self-evidently disastrous, have baulked at taking this advice.
I remember with nostalgia the early days of this Labour Government, with Robin Cook, Claire Short and others. Even under the Tories, Britain’s standing was surprising high in the United Nations as a good global citizen and in the early days of Blair’s Government it bounced even higher. Alas, total subservience to Washington soon destroyed much of that. A declaration of independence would go a long way to restore beneficial British influence around the world – and in Washington.
They’re changing the guard at the White House
January 17, 2009 Tribune, London
AS THE world sighs with relief that George W Bush is finally stepping down, one wonders what it will mean for the famous “special relationship”. Overall, it has been one of the longest episodes of unrequited love in history – and perhaps no more so in Britain than under “new” Labour.
But when American politicians talk about special relationships or “our closest ally”, they are not referring to the United States’ unsinkable aircraft carrier, the country which bankrupted itself in two world wars, was on the front line in Korea and standing side by side with it in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No, they are talking about Israel, the special ally from whom they tolerate spying, sinking of ships such as the USS Liberty, and for whom they have been regularly prepared to alienate the rest of the world.
The Anglo-American “special relationship” has always existed more in the eyes of British ministers than in the facts on the ground. Winston Churchill saw the British Empire dismembered and its Treasury looted by Franklin D Roosevelt even as he whispered sweet nothings to the American President. Churchill complained: “We are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone”, about the American financial terms. And FDR was the nice one!
The 1945 Labour Government constructed Nato with self-interest in mind, reportedly to “keep the Germans down, the Russians out and the Americans in”. Even so, confronted with American duplicity on nuclear research and callousness on credits that almost led to economic collapse, Clement Attlee’s Government decided to build a British nuclear bomb. Despite all their protestations of undying alliances, they knew that Washington would use Britain when it was convenient and then toss it aside like a used condom afterwards.
With a genuine Soviet threat in Europe, there was some pragmatic justification for swallowing it and maintaining the pretence of a special relationship, but the one time that it was the closest to reality was between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Apart from Tony Blair and his acolytes, not many of us remember this as Britain’s finest hour.
However, whatever you think of the Iron Lady, there was no “Yo Maggie” business from Ron, none of the genial contempt that Bush used for Blair. On issues such as the Middle East and defending British companies against US attempts to extent its legislation extra-territorially, Thatcher was quite willing to stand up to Washington. It is worth remembering that she had to. If it were not for her seductive charms with Reagan, the US conservative establishment would have supported the Argentinean junta and its invasion of the Falklands Islands over Thatcher and the “mother country”.
The lesson of Israel is that a squeaky wheel gets the grease – by the bucketful – while those who lie down uncomplainingly looking at the ceiling and thinking of shared values get screwed.
Gordon Brown has allowed a sliver of daylight to appear between himself and the deserter-in-chief across the water. No “Yo Gordies” are recorded. In any case, surely British foreign policy is now due for a reappraisal? The Germans maybe up for it and friendly, the Russians are played out, and the Americans on the verge of being an economic basket case.
It will behove Brown to start making up to President Obama as fast and furiously as possible. The scale of the recovery programmes under consideration are bound to have repercussions for Britain and Europe. Co-ordination is desirable and essential.
However, the myth of the special relationship lulls British leaders into thinking a quick call to the American President and an occasional royal visit is all that is necessary. Israel and other countries do not make that mistake. They work the lobbies of the US Congress to get results. If Britain wants any type of meaningful relationship, it needs to connect to the sordid reality.
Brown has to abandon his underlying Euroscepticism. There may be pragmatic grounds, for example, for staying out the euro, but the plunging pound suggests it is time to reconsider his undeclared tacit blanket rejection. Above all, in the European Union, Britain has a genuine stature and role to play in shaping the future in an economy that aims to be far more resilient and successful in protecting its citizens than the US. Look to Iceland for the alternative.
In fact, for decades, friendly American leaders, a little embarrassed perhaps by the faithful partner they have so often mistreated, have been advising Britain to involve itself more in the EU. British leaders, so sadly and slavishly prepared to follow the American lead in almost every other way, no matter how self-evidently disastrous, have baulked at taking this advice.
I remember with nostalgia the early days of this Labour Government, with Robin Cook, Claire Short and others. Even under the Tories, Britain’s standing was surprising high in the United Nations as a good global citizen and in the early days of Blair’s Government it bounced even higher. Alas, total subservience to Washington soon destroyed much of that. A declaration of independence would go a long way to restore beneficial British influence around the world – and in Washington.
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