Politics and Press

Belgium - Canada’s Nightmare

Belgium is a country that seems to be incapable of functioning. It has had no government for 6 months and on Dec.1 the leader of the largest party after the last election, Yves Leterme, gave up in his attempt to form a minority centre-right coalition government. This attempt did not break down on political or idealistic grounds, but on linguistic ones, as the Dutch-speaking (Flemish) Christian Democrats could not convince their French-speaking (Walloon) party colleagues to work with them. Recent polls show that there is a great deal of support among the Flemish-speakers of the north for the proposal that they should join their linguistic brethren in The Netherlands where they would surely immediately become a significant force in a larger Greater Netherlands. The Walloons, on the other hand, have no great desire to destroy Belgium, which has existed for 177 years, suspecting that they would become nothing more than a provincial backwater in a slightly larger France. And neither side probably wants to split up into tiny two independent countries, both of which would disappear onto the fringes of an increasingly fragmented Europe. Anyone who doubts that with regard to the supposedly ever-more united Europe of the European Union merely has to look at the unmanageable list of countries who send out national squads for European and World Cup soccer tournaments. In a further ironic twist, Brussels, the Belgian capital and its only truly bilingual place, is also the headquarters of the European Union and Nato, and its dismissal as the capital of an independent country would certainly make a mess of that status.

But there is an increasing suspicion that such subtleties may not actually matter any more and that the decades-long feuding between two linguistic groups that simply cannot get along in a national sense has already become more than a national government can tolerate. In fact there are very few western nations that successfully maintain bilingual societies and two national languages. In Europe, it’s hard to think of any other than quirky Switzerland, which does not govern itself like any other country, and Finland, with an ever-decreasing but still well-served Swedish population, and possibly Italy with its surprisingly successful solution to the once serious problem of the German minority in South Tyrol. Certainly France doesn’t rate, as it has suppressed the rights of any native language other than French. Ask the Scots, Welsh and Irish about the UK, the Catalans and the Basques about Spain, the Spanish-speakers about the US. And then there’s Canada, the world’s second largest country but with only slightly more than three times the population of Belgium. Like Belgium, Canada also has a bilingual national capital, Ottawa, and large sections of the country that are mainly French-speaking. In many ways its national linguistic demographic is much like Belgium’s, but with English taking the place of Dutch. So far, Canada has managed to survive the surge of pressure for the independence of a French-speaking Quebec, and for the moment it seems like the independistes of Quebec are in retreat, or perhaps hiding. But nobody should count them out and the fate of Belgium could have a serious impact in a country whose global and economic importance dwarfs that of the little country that apparently couldn’t.

The Dutch Gamble Pays Off

A good percentage of the inhabitants of the Netherlands live below sea level and in the past catastrophes occurred regularly as the North Sea overwhelmed dykes and rushed in on human settlements. Margriet de Moor’s thrilling and frightening novel, Flood Tide, recalls the killer floods of 1953 when thousands of people were killed as the sea reclaimed the lands that had been taken from it when dykes set up to protect new settlements were overwhelmed and whole towns disappeared from the face of the earth. In February 1962 neighbouring Hamburg was the victim of a surging flood that killed hundreds and a decade ago the Dutch concluded that their big urban centres, Rotterdam and Amsterdam, were increasingly threatened by great calamity. They concluded that the rapidly growing urban population was never going to be safe from the sea unless something serious was done, a decision that unfortunately was never even remotely considered for New Orleans. No doubt too expensive.
And so exactly ten years ago the spectacular engineering project known as the Maeslant flood tide defence was declared operational. Two 220 meter long gigantic horizontal towers, each heavier than the Eifel Tower that they resemble, have been waiting since then for the moment when they could show that they could indeed be swung into place and close off the Nieuwe Waterweg, the 20 kilometer long and 360 meter wide channel leading from the North Sea to Europe’s biggest harbour in Rotterdam. Yesterday the moment came as the storm called Thilo smashed into the Dutch coast and the towers were closed for the first time under storm conditions since they were built. It was a moment that in many ways would determine whether the city of Rotterdam and its great harbour had a secure future, particularly in the face of global warming.
And so far it has held. When the morning of the flood tide came, the flood was still being held back and Dutch engineers seem convinced that even the higher floods expected in the day would not breech their engineering marvel. This project cost the Dutch a tremendous fortune, but you won’t find any Dutch people today who would say it wasn’t worth it, despite the ten years it stood idle. It’s something the residence of New Orleans were not given the chance to decide.

The Greatest (Show) Place on Earth

British Columbia has recently begun replacing its old licence plates that modestly proclaimed to be “Beautiful British Columbia” with the not so modest claim that it is “The Greatest Place on Earth”. While it may be true that there are few places on earth that could get away with such a motto on its cars without becoming global laughing stocks, these licence plates, and the ads that go with them preceding the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver/Whistler, do not exactly indicate the kind of modesty citizens would have expected not so long ago from a rather conservative ruling class.

The British Columbia Ferry System does indeed traverse one of the most spectacular series of waterways in existence, rivaled only be the Hurtig ferries along the Norwegian coast and perhaps the Alaska State Ferry lines, though they both have much fewer routes. But now British Columbians are beginning to wonder whether the official self-satisfaction might not benefit from a bit of a modest rest period. About a year ago, one of these beautiful northern ships failed to make a required turn in the middle of the night on the run from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy and plowed straight into an inland passage island, sinking within an hour. Two passengers were never found as the rescued passengers and crew found hospitality in the nearby native village of Hartley Bay. My brother and I know some old navy men who immediately told us that there was no way that could have happened if the bridge had been properly manned (personned?), and ongoing investigations have shown that to be the case. While rumours have been rampant about everything from sex trysts to alcohol consumption among the responsible bridge personnel, as the ship failed to turn, one thing became clear this week when B.C. Ferries announced mandatory drug testing of its personnel, just as the Olympics demands of its athletes. Interviews with ship personnel convinced investigators that pot spoking was common place among the crew and that there was good reason to think that not everyone was as alert as one might have expected as the ship ran aground. Since marijuana growing is one of BC.s largest money makers (if not the government’s, as no taxes are collected on this), and pot smoking is pretty much tolerated, it is perhaps no surprise that this is practiced by a cross-section of the population that works on a ship. However BC Ferries would like to think that the Queen of the North was the last ship of its fleet that will sink because somebody wasn’t paying attention on the bridge.

trouble in paradise(s)

The ever more violent clashes between far right and far left political groups in Europe erupted in a most unexpected place on the weekend, Bern, the capital of Switzerland, which would probably win a popularity poll searching out the most peaceful place in Europe. But for anyone paying attention to the growing animosity between those in favour of a multicultural/multiethnic Europe reflecting the concept of free movement and settlement of people across borders, and those defending the idea that a piece of land occupied for millennia by a specific linguistic (and often ethnic) group should remain the domain of that group, this should not have been such a surprise. Switzerland has always had a strong nationalistic wing determined to keep Switzerland as Swiss as Wilhelm Tell would have liked it, and it is not only in recent years that there has been a strong far right party, which now however forms the largest party in the Swiss parliament.
The latest clashes took place when masked far left left wing demonstrators stopped a political march by 10,000 members of the arch-conservative Swiss Peoples Party under its leader, Switzerland’s finance minister Christoph Blocher. In the ensuing riots, 17 policeman were injured, some of them seriously, store windows were smashed, cars set on fire and dozens of protesters arrested. My brother and I have come up with a theory about the rise of big right wing parties in western Europe that are opposed to much immigration, namely that they are growing by leaps and bounds in small countries, where many citizens are afraid that their old national qualities will be threatened by immigrant groups preaching new religions, speaking exotic languages and demanding different social codes. Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria are all western European societies with long histories and short borders and they have all spawned far right parties with broad popular support drawing on the fears of large-scale immigration. It’s true that some larger countries, France comes quickly to mind, have had serious flirtations with such groups as well, but they seem to be able to swallow them up much more easily into moderately conservative parties than can those small nations who consider themselves under immediate threat.

A few facts from the Oktoberfest

It rained a bit during the week in Munich so when the sun came out on Saturday morning, the crowds were chomping at their bit to get to the action of the Oktoberfest. There are no records kept for such feats but long-term observers think that the mass spurt to the beer tents reached Olympian heights on this glorious Bavarian morning. At 9:00 the gates were opened and the assembled crowds poured into the Bavarian heaven. At 9:04 the police declared that the Löwenbräu tent, a gigantic piece of canvas occupied by a brass band and thousands of customers, was full and the doors were closed. Police could not explain how so many people could sprint across the open space and pour into the tent in only 4 minutes, aber so war es!.
Otherwise it has been a relatively normal Fest. On Saturday 600,000 people showed up, during the week 200,000 Italian tourist made the journey north, dramatically reversing the usual trend, 3,4 million liters of beer were drunk, 200,000 more than last year, you don’t want to know how many oxen ended up on the barbecue, 3921 patients had to be treated by the Red Cross, and 14 pickpockets were arrested. Mensch, was willst du noch mehr?

Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen

The rankings for most livable city on earth have been led by the usual suspects, in differing order, for the last decade: Vancouver, Zürich, Geneva. This year a couple of other European cities began to make inroads, not old favourites Paris or London – too expensive, too overdeveloped and too prone to violence – including Copenhagen, the beautiful Danish capital immortalized by Danny Kaye as Hans Christian Andersen in the most absurd film biography ever made. Hans Christian Andersen had as many dark sides to his ultra-neurotic personality as anyone you could imagine and it is precisely these descents into a threatening and dangerous underworld that characterize his greatest works, apparently simple fairy tales that are full of deadly threats to any kind of attempt to discover a kitschy Disney paradise in Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen.

On the weekend wonderful Copenhagen erupted into the kind of social violence that you could never imagine happening in other leading European pretenders to the most livable city throne, Stockholm and Munich, cities that my brother and I would be happy to place in competition with Vancouver. They would certainly lose due to the unmatchable splendour of the wilderness within easy reach of Vancouver, not to mention its own waterfront, but they have plenty to offer before they fall behind, one of those things being the relative serenity of their societies. Citizens of Stockholm and München do not find it necessary to challenge the police in ritualistic semi-warfare, as do the citizens of Berlin or Paris, but increasingly such events are becoming established in Copenhagen. On the weekend it was 1000 youths once again engaging the undermanned Copenhagen police force in a running battle featuring tear gas and non-lethal weapons. And once again, the Danish police could not really control crowds looking for trouble. This time it was once again demonstrations recalling the anniversary of the tearing down of a youth centre. Previously it had been violent, even fatal, bouts with the motorcycle gangs or neo-Nazis, and then there are the ongoing semi-violent confrontations concerning the somewhat off-limits alternate settlement of Christania. Copenhagen’s most unruly group may in the long run however turn out to be its large Muslim minority, which is feeling increasingly alienated in a way that is not the case in neighbouring Sweden. If this nasty uneasy relationship continues to sour, Copenhagen will end up light years away from the Danny Kaye version of it.

The Great White North looks at the Map

Colleague Jeff has supplied a convincing overview of Canada’s difficult role in the Arctic. Canada likes to mythologize its great open spaces in the wild north, creating emblems ranging from lines in the national anthem - “the true north strong and free” - to films like “Nanook of the North” to art like the sandstone sculptures and Baker Lake prints that southerners pay plenty of loonies to own to Stan Roger’s great song “The Northwest Passage” to the Edmonton Eskimos football team. Norm Kwong, one of their legendary players and perhaps the only major (ethnically) Chinese football player in history, recalls once hearing an Edmonton matron in the audience for one of his interviews tell her neighbour, “See I told you they were real Eskimos”.

But what Canada, the world’s second largest country, hasn’t done is provide military support for its mythology, making it vulnerable to the aggressiveness of the first and third largest countries, which face it in the Arctic. Instead it has slugged it out with tiny Denmark (controlling gigantic Greenland) in a farcical struggle over miniscule Hans Island. The excuse for lack of muscle in the Arctic has been strictly economic in the past, but this may be changing because the tide of Canadian public opinion has swung for the Arctic, and that has the politicians’ ears. Almost twenty years ago Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney cancelled Liberal plans for ice breakers for the navy, something which both Norway and Denmark manage to finance, and the US and Russia have both ice breakers and nuclear submarines out on Arctic patrol. In its lead editorial today, the conservative Vancouver Province advised the government to lease ice breakers if they are too cheap to build them, but to get them before it is too late to the newly announced far north military base with deep water port on the northern tip of Baffin Island, and to the beefed-up existing bases. Canadians will soon see whether their government is serious when it says it will provide protection for Canadian values from sea to sea to sea.

The Emperor and the cuckoo bird

Now let’s get this straight. A monumentally thuggish North African political regime, that blew up a British passenger plane not long ago and is trusted by nobody, arrests five completely innocent Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, accuses them of infecting 400 children with Aids, who were actually infected by unhygienic hospital conditions, sentences them to death by getting confessions after medieval torturing, throws them in unspeakable jails for eight years, and finally decides it can use them to blackmail the European Union, which reluctantly negotiates an agreement costing 1 Million Dollars per infected child. These depressing negotiations are undertaken by EU officials over the course of a couple of years, and reach fruition during the presidency of Germany. Thus Angela Merkel is ultimately responsible for negotiating the agreement, which leads to the freeing of the six prisoners.

But who is it who shows up in Libya for the photo-op at the liberation of the prisoners? Why it’s none other than Cecilia Sarkozy, newly-crowned first lady of France, who has flown in on her husband’s private jet to revel in the glory at the liberation. Now she has played no role in all this, and neither has her husband or for that matter, France, other than its supposed membership in the EU. France’s former Minister to the EU, Pierre Moscovici, notes: “Sarkozy has taken on the strategy of the cuckoo, the bird who lays its eggs in other birds’ nests.”

Ariane Mnouchkine, France’s leading theatre person and the director of the Théatre de soliel, put it this way as she turned down the position offered to her to become the Chaired Professor of Theatre at the College de France, a call that she had received 8 months before, but which needed the approval of the President of France to become valid. When she received Sarkozy’s document, which made it seem like he had annointed her, she wrote the following:
“Nicolas Sarkozy has turned us into collaborators by attempting to curry favour with anyone played up by the media - artists and others. That is unacceptable. Therefore I must turn down the offer of this position, which had pleased me so much…. The whole world saw what happened with the Bulgarian nurses; they tried to make us believe that it was the President of France who had engineered this agreement when every one knows that the diplomats of the European Union had been working at it for years. It’s high time that Sarkozy stops trying to make us believe that he’s the one who makes things happen.”

Oh yes one more thing. On the day after his wife flew to Libya, the President himself showed up there, shared a brotherly kiss with the Libyan leader, and announced that France would supply Libya with a nuclear reactor to be built by French engineers on the coast near Tripoli. It turns out he does make things happen.

The Brits bring Culture to the Primitive East

Ryan Air and its copycats have made it possible, and now its easy for anyone to leave the British Isles and travel to continental Europe for next to nothing to demonstrate to the local bumpkins the state of British culture in the twenty-first century. No sooner have eastern European countries, long neglected under the Soviets , restored their finest urban centres to something approaching the splendour of pre-Soviet days, than British hordes book dirt-cheap flights for their stag parties, descend drunkenly with the hens, as they call their mademoiselles, on the restored centres of cities like Bratislava, Krakau, Riga, or Talinn, and do their best to demolish them. It used to be the British football fans who were the chief hooligans, but recent failures at west European events like last year’s peaceful and heavily-policed football World Cup in Germany have convinced the lads to test lesser security forces to the east.
Spectacular Prague was the first to fall, long since having lost its innocence to what the Süddeutsche Zeitung calls “the locusts from the islands”. Now Prague must close down its famous and beautiful Karlsbrücke for a long time as it tries to repair the damage done to it, which includes heavy-duty vandalism of the centuries-old statues that line the bridge. Prague police have also been confronted with Clockwork-Orange inspired beatings by howling British drunks of Czech beggars. But Prague is already old hat and now the cities being invaded are further east and even more vulnerable since the police are not prepared for such hooliganism.
My brother and I can still clearly remember the British gentlemen who were sent out to bring civilization to the colonies in places like India, Kenya and Canada. They may have seemed a bit eccentric on foreign turf, but they were certainly not loutish, dangerous drunks. This current version of those Colonel Blimps makes the old group seem almost charming.

Murdock’s Outrageous Outage

Two weeks ago Bill Moyers saved a bit of time on his weekly PBS show, Bill Moyers’ Journal, to blast Rupert Murdock and his proposed take-over of The Wall Street Journal. As Moyers stated,

“[Murdock is] not the first to use journalism to promote his own interests. His worst offense with FOX News is not even its baldly partisan agenda. Far worse is the travesty he’s made of its journalism. FOX News huffs and puffs, pontificates and proclaims, but does little serious original reporting. His tabloids sell babes and breasts, gossip and celebrities. Now he’s about to bring under the same thumb one of the few national newsrooms remaining in the country.”

Well, just this Friday, Rupert Murdock got Moyers back - at least that’s my sneaking suspicion. Moyers’ Journal began normally enough this past Friday. It comes into my home via DirecTV which, like FOX, is owned by Murdock. Less than five minutes into Moyers’ show, my screen went black. Then DirecTV put up an announcement on screen warning viewers not to call DirecTV - that our local station was having technical difficulties.
Now, understand that DirecTV provides great video service. It fails occasionally during a heavy rain or snow storm when the satellite signal may be blocked, but in the 10-12 years I have been a subscriber to DirecTV I cannot remember a time when a single station went dark. I was suspicious immediately because I watched Moyers blast Murdock two weeks ago - and because the subject of Moyers show this night was the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Rupert Murdock is a great supporter of Bush and was one of the loudest supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, claiming that the greatest thing to come out of the war would be “$20 a barrel for oil.”
I immediately thought Murdock’s DirecTV may have dumped Moyers’ show from the air. Luckily I had a tv in the house that used an antenna to pull in signals off the air. With the cause of the blackout, according to DirecTV, local tv station technical difficulties, I wasn’t sure Moyer’s Journal would be viewable on my other tv set but I gave it a try. Lo and behold, I could watch Moyers’ show on my 2nd set - apparently the “local tv signal difficulties” did not extend beyond DirecTV. I learned subsequently that cable subscribers did not lose service either - just Murdock’s DirecTV subscribers like me. That night, on Moyers Journal, Bruce Fein, a conservative Reaganite, and John Nichols of the Nation magazine put forth the argument that impeachment was necessary to pull the country back from the illegalities and excesses of this Administration. It was an excellent show even if you may not agree with the arguments of the two program guests [note that one was conservative and one liberal - for all the criticism, Moyers’ programs are exceptionally balanced].
Bill Moyers has had a lot to contend with just to bring his ideas to tv. First it was Bush appointee Tomlinson and his actions as Chief of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Now, it appears Murdock has Moyers in his sights. But this is not just a concern of Bill Moyers - everyone should think long and hard whether someone like Rupert Murdock is good for this country. Can we really afford to have so much media power in the hands of a single individual - particularly a single individual like Rupert Murdock?