Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

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Wikileaks, apologies and spies

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In the last episode created by Henning Mankell for the iconic sleuth of the post-Soviet world, Kurt Wallander is sent out on his most surprising trail of discovery.. (No, we won’t tell you how we know there will be no sequels this time – learn to read Swedish or be patient and wait for the translation.) In the complicated unravelling of the plot behind the plot that culminated in the grounding of a Soviet submarine right in front of Sweden’s supposedly most secure naval base (It was discovered by a mink farmer out for a walk), the presumed Russian spy turns out to have been a spy for the United States. Anyone who has been in Sweden’s top-secret military information office (my brother and I walked in by mistake while looking for a washroom) will have noticed that on the top-secret maps pinned to the walls, all the theoretical invasion threats were indicated by arrows coming from the east. Neutral, non-Nato Sweden apparently had no fears about threats from the west or the south.

So what kind of fantasy trip was Mankell on with this story of an American threat? Nutty Swedish paranoia, no doubt, the US didn’t spy on its supposed allies, not to mention its real NATO allies like the dastardly Russians would be expected to do, would they? Well, recent events in the Foreign Affairs office of Germany’s hapless foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle suggest the opposite. Wikileaks has provided ample reason for the governments of supposedly friendly nations to raise alarm flags on all fronts with regard to the arrogance of leaders of a country that is not exactly prospering at the moment. The German-speaking countries – Germany, Switzerland and Austria – are not going to forget what these gunslingers said to each other about them though they will deny being overly offended. And the US ambassador to Germany, Philip Murphy, will have to be recalled for the actions of his office overstep the line of what is acceptable for an embassy enjoying the privilege of a foreign government on somebody else’s turf. For, as is now known, the US embassy was receiving information from in-camera meetings of the German Foreign Office through an informant who was sitting at the table, or rather behind it, listening carefully and taking notes that he then passed on to someone at the US Embassy. The German government seems to be avoiding calling the informer, Westerwelle’s chief of staff Helmut Metzner a spy (“Spion”), preferring “Informer” (Informant) because they are still not certain who it was who put him up to this, or if he was, rather incredibly, simply acting on his own. Whatever the truth on that turns out to be, the Germans will certainly never again say a word in confidence to US ambassador Murphy, who accepted this supposedly secret information without informing the Germans of the offence. Spiegel Magazine headlines the articles on the Wikileaks and spy scandal disclosures “Time for Apologies”. For Germans the whole miserable story reminds them all too easily of the tale of Gunter Guillaume, right hand man of Prime Minister Willy Brandt, who was a spy for the DDR and ended Brandt’s rule. It’s certainly not quite the same, but it’s also not that different and it will bring an icy period in German-US relations unless the Obama government does some intelligent fence-mending, something they have not proven very good at up till now.

In Praise of Prose

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Here are four antidotes to the endless announcements of the death of books and reading. These are prose works written in the last couple of years in four different languages that can hold their own in any discussion of reading material that will keep you glued to the written page.

1: Per Petterson (Norway) – “Kjøllvannet” – In English “In the Wake”. Following up “Out Stealing Horses” with an equally convincing meditation on the power of memory and the importance of appreciating the potential of life before “the axe blow from within”, to quote one of his favourite authors Tomas Tranströmer, strikes home. The narrator talks about the grand perception of memory in another of his favourites, Alice Munro, and his two latest novels show that he has learned from the masters.

2. Daniel Kehlmann (Germany) “Die Vermessung der Welt” – in English, “Measuring the World”.
In his hugely successful novel about genius, Kehlmann juxtaposes the lives and adventures of two German geniuses who met in older age. One, Alexander von Humboldt, let his genius unfold through great exploratory journeys to the ends of the world; the other, Johann Gauss, explored the wonders of mathematics from a solitary room. Kehlmann’s work is also surprisingly funny.

3. Sofi Oksanen (Finland/Estonia) “Puhdistus” in English “Purge”
Oksanen takes on nothing less than the epic of the small Baltic state of Estonia from the Nazi occupation through the Soviet counter-attack and takeover followed by the establishment of an independent state after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the current situation. In a stunning display of narrative control, Oksanen delivers a grand epic through the fates of individuals. Written in Finnish, it may well become the national epic of linguistically-related Estonia.

4. John Vaillant (Canada) “The Tiger”.
Vaillant’s just-published epic of the Russian Far East as seen through the eyes of the last wild tigers in the world and the people who live with them talks the talk and walks the walk. On its way to a climax that will knock your socks off, it tells the extraordinary tale of a world that hasn’t changed much in the last century and whose inhabitants still live in awe and on occasion deadly fear of the tremendously powerful animal who wanders through their mutually-shared taiga.

The Arctic Heats Up

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It’s not only global warming that is causing the Arctic to melt. It’s also the hot air and goofy pranks that the various combatants are employing to press their claims to the spoils of the ice war. Leading the pack at the moment is the smallest of the players, Denmark, which is using its colonial outpost, Greenland, which will become independent as soon as somebody or other begins drilling off its shore, to demonstrate what it has learned from the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe. Apparently not a thing. Instead of sitting down with Canada and the US , even Russia, to work on a common plan that will benefit everyone, Denmark unloads 64 tourists on desolate football field-sized Hans Island, which is disputed by Canada and Denmark, who promptly build a cairn topped by a Danish flag. This is a fete that matches or even surpasses in farce the Russian planting of a flag at the bottom of the North Pole. Knut Rasmussen is rolling in his grave. Not at all comical is the Danish granting of deep-water drilling rights to a Scottish company (no, not BP) to search for oil or gas in an area near the Canadian border where a spill would have terrible consequences on the lives of the Inuit who live along the northern coast. Reports claim that Danish warships and small boats with Danish marines are keeping protesters away.

With friends like this who needs enemies, like the Russian bombers who last month had to be repelled by Canadian jet fighters from flying into Canadian air space. The one good thing that may come out of this is that US and Canadian scientists are actually working together on drawing up their mapping information and that it looks like a compromise will be possible in solving the US-Canadian border dispute in the Beaufort Sea. May the force of co-operation, in place of grotesque posturing, be with them.

Robert Byrd, RIP

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“If I wanted to go crazy, I’d do it in Washington, where they wouldn’t know the difference.” Senator Robert Byrd

Robert Byrd was a man of considerable contradictions. A former member of the Ku Klux Klan, he voted against major Civil Rights legislation in the 60s and voted against confirmation of Thurgood Marshall for the Supreme Court. But later he became a prime fighter against the Republicans’ farce of the day – its “Contract with America”.  He collected billions in “pork’ for his state of West Virginia and   remained a social conservative for much of his tenure.

But this writer’s only personal memory of Senator Byrd is more than enough for him to have earned my enormous respect. During the Democratic Convention held in Boston in 2004 Byrd spoke at the First Parish Church in Cambridge and riveted the crowd with a powerful speech in opposition to Bush’s rush to war in Iraq. His principled opposition failed to carry the day but for at least one hour we had the opportunity to hear a man of conscience deplore an already planned war that would lead to hundreds of thousands of American and (mostly) Iraqi deaths, millions of Iraqis forced from their homes, and actual and committed costs to America of up to $3 trillion, all leading to a semi-free Iraq closely aligned with Iran.

America’s rush to an unnecessary war has left us militarily and economically weaker  with our national reputation sullied. Byrd predicted this and spoke forcefully in opposition to the war, no doubt aware that his was a lost cause. One excerpt from his speech that day catches the full flavor of his remarks that turned out to be, alas, prophetic:

“The foundations of our government have suffered. The liberties enshrined in the  constitution of the United States have  now  been designed by a presidency that is bent on a ruthless pursuit of power. A President that sees himself above the law … a presidency that relies on secrecy and manipulation in order to advance its own partisan agenda. It is the Constitution of the United States that has been undermined, undercut, and is under attack. It is the American people’s liberties that are in jeopardy.”

Iceland blows its top

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The Montreal Gazette’s great cartoonist Aislin summed it all up by publishing a cartoon with an Icelandic text, including the ∂s. It showed a volcano spewing out ash towards the centres of western civilization with the translation of the text given below: “That’s not an exploding volcano, we’re just burning down the banks”. By encapsulating the only 2 events most of the world knows about the founding civilization of western prose literature, Aislin helped explain such scenes as the following which managed to be filmed by the CBC: A horde of teenage girls left stranded after months of bilingual training in in Paris in April because of the disaster of flight cancellations is greeted by a horde of weeping relieved parents at the Vancouver airport. The parents are apparently overcome with relief that their innocent charges have managed to survive the threat of having to stay on in Paris.. It looks like the girls are winking out secret messages that tell a different story about their awful fate of having been forced to stay an extra week in Paris in the spring. Can the parents really think the way they try to act?

An Icelandic teenager, responding to the question of my brother Doug about whether s/he thought Iceland could survive such a calamity, didn’t hesitate: “Don’t worry about us. We know how to fish and raise potatoes.” Give me that Icelandic teenager any old day.

Eulogy for Kate McGarrigle

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It may not mean so much for the international readers, but Canadians of interest will know that one of their family died today, and the country will a bit more artificial without her. Kate McGarrigle and her sister Anne had the right stuff for Canuckdom. Born in Montreal in 1946 with mixed French and English heritage, Kate also died there at her home, which was no surprise to her legions of fans who could hardly imagine her being at home anywhere else. In her spare time, though, she wrote songs like Talk to me of Mendocino which must to be the national anthem of the beautiful coast of northern California.

She belongs in the company of those dominating Canadian ex-pat musicians Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen, yes, and also her son Rufus Wainwright, whose cancellation of a scheduled tour of New Zealand tipped the country off that Kate was not doing well in her bout with cancer. But she never left the special world of Montréal in her secret heart – maybe that’s true of Leonard as well – and the McGarrigle sisters’ 10 albums in French and English immediately conjure up a world that the rest of us Canucks can only hope is not dying with the artists who captured it.

Proroguing – a new Canadian tradition

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International reader may have some trouble making sense of the the title of this essay, since prorogue is not a commonly-understood word in normally-functioning democracies. But Steven Harper, the current Prime Minister of Canada, described this week in The Economist as a competent bureaucrat with a vicious streak (faint praise indeed) is doing his best to make it the word of the decade on his own turf. It is a British term which means to tell members of parliament their services are no longer needed until he feels it is safe for him to come out of hiding. It is a procedure not often seen in democracies that actually function with parliaments that actually do something. In a clever response the opposition liberals under Michael Ignatieff announced they would sit in the Parliamentary buildings and work for their money, and a substantial ground-root movement seems to underway to make the government pay for their disdain of Parliament at the polls.

Last year Harper prorogued parliament so that he wouldn’t have to face a vote of no-confidence that might have brought down his government. On New Year’s Eve he did it again, assuming no one would notice, since he was sitting on an increasingly hot seat as parliamentary committees tried to come to the bottom of a macabre cover-up of what Canada allowed to be done to their prisoners in Afghanistan. Journalists speculate he wanted very much to have his picture taken many times at the Olympic Games across the continent in sunny and warm Vancouver rather than sitting on the hot seat in frigid Ottawa. it also seems plausible that he felt Canadians would be in a much better mood after the hockey team wins the Gold Medal in Vancouver. God help him if Sweden – or gasp! – the USA beat the lads in their own rink, as the US Juniors did in overtime on New Year’s Day – in a spectacularly exciting game – in the world championship match in Saskatoon at minus 40 degrees.

Oh Canada, where did you dig up these leaders?

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It used to be that Canada punched above its weight in foreign affairs, an honest broker that could be counted on to consider options carefully before dedicating itself to finding a just solution to a difficult situation, even if it meant sending in its troops. Thus Canada entered the Second World War within a week of the Nazi invasion of Poland, more than two years before the United States did and had already suffered many thousand casualties in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and the skies over Europe by the time the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour forced the US hand. After that awful war, nowhere captured more dramatically than in the on-the-spot sketches by Canuck war artists A.Y. Jackson and Alex Colville, Canadian Prime Minister Mike Pearson got a Nobel Peace Prize that was actually deserved, for his tenacious negotiations leading to an end to the Suez crisis.

Now that hard-earned reputation risks being eradicated by a government intent on doing nothing contrary to its economic interests which is more than satisfied to follow the dictates of the super heavyweights on matters like climate change, border controls and diplomatic independence. At the Copenhagen climate change conference Canada has received the fossil of the year award, on the Afghan file, it has received a letter signed by almost 100 of its former ambassadors protesting the treatment of one of its middle-level diplomats in Kabul, who was called before parliament and publicly demeaned by the Minister of Defence for having sent a number of reports to Ottawa warning them of something that was public knowledge – that prisoners passed on to the Afghan army by Canada and other western powers were routinely tortured by the Afghans – and which Canada for a lengthy period denied before its memory improved. In China Prime Minister Harper was publicly rebuked by the Chinese president for insulting Chinese sensibilities by taking too long to come and visit, for hosting the Dalai Lama and for not having attended the Beijing Olympics. Harper also had no plans to attend the Copenhagen Climate Conference until President Obama said he would be there. It is a long way from Pearson to Harper, and it seems safe to predict that it will take a long time for Canada to repair its international image so that it can begin punching, if not as a heavyweight, at least above the flyweight class it now occupies.

Church and State: Together At Last?

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When John Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he had to go to Houston, Texas to explain that his Catholic faith would not influence his decisions, but that they would be made in the best interest of all Americans. Well, times have changed and in recent weeks Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin of Rhode Island has been guilty of attempting extortion of Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy. The good Bishop basically tried to cram his theology down every American’s throat by threatening Kennedy with the loss of his rights to communion unless he ignored U.S. law AND voted to deny all Americans a reformed healthcare insurance program if it included coverage for abortions. The fact that many if not most Americans support a woman’s right to choose and that it is the law of the land had no impact on the Bishop who apparently believes that the church has the right to coerce politicians into turning the water of Catholic beliefs into the wine of U.S. law. Shame on the church for meddling in the world of Caesar, shame on politicians for caving in, bur kudos to Rep. Kennedy for upholding the family tradition of respect for the separation of church and state.

I would refer those who believe the church has the right to meddle in this way to what the church is doing to ban birth control in the Philippines as well as its apparent belief that banning the use of condoms in Africa is preferable to saving lives of potential AIDS victims. In fact the Pope seems to believe that use of condoms is responsible for increased deaths. For a description of the Church’s efforts in the Philippines see this article in the NY Times. For Pope Benedict’s comments on condoms and AIDS victims, see this NY Times editorial. Additional information on both situations is readily available in many serious news venues.

Finally, it is reported in the NY Times today that Senator Ensign (R-Nevada), under fire for having bribed the husband of his mistress by setting him up with lucrative government contracts, is resisting resigning his Senate seat because doing so would help Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) keep his seat. Ensign is relevant to this discussion as part of the group of Senators and Congressmen that live at the so-called “C St. Church”, an apartment that the group had identified as a Church to avoid taxes – an arrangement recently ended by the IRS. But the C St. apartment remains a bastion of right-wing religiosity where Republican politicians go to confess their sins, receive forgiveness, and plot the Christian takeover of not just the state, but also apparently the world. An entertaining piece on this “church” appeared on this issue of Salon. Its author, Jeff Sharlet has written a well-reviewed book on the C St. church, called “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power”. Makes the good Bishop and his Pope look like a couple of pikers.

A Tale of Two Immigrants

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As Canada becomes more and more the place where immigrants can make their way financially with little interest paid to their backgrounds, a German and an Austrian have hogged the headlines of late, and for diametrically opposed reasons. It used to be that “the American dream” was an understood concept that suggested that anyone entering US society had the chance to reach any goal, even to become president, and the election of Barack Obama suggested that that dream is still alive. However the way he is being treated by what seems to be a significant (majority?) part of the population as he attempts to make his dreams a reality, suggest that this assumption might be seriously misplaced.
Meanwhile, north of the border, where a health care system is in place that is being attacked in the US parliament in extraordinarily ignorant ways, an Austrian immigrant, who arrived in Canada with $200 in his pocket, has just bought a well-known car brand , Opel, the European version of GM cars, as he tries to fulfill his long dream of manufacturing his own cars in Canada. Frank Stronach, who transformed his tiny savings into a multi-billion dollar car-parts business and whose daughter came close to becoming Prime Minister, is given a good chance of actually doing this by economists, thugh he has been hamstrung by having sales to the US and China blocked. By and large, Canadians wish him well.
The deportation two weeks ago of Karl-Heinz Schreiber, on the other hand, an immigrant from Germany, was met with a collective sigh of relief. He managed to lead Canadian legal experts, law enforcement folks and immigration officials on a decade-long merry chase through the sleaze left by carefully-leaked documents that left a former prime minister as well as an apparently grotesquely incompetent legal system flailing in hopeless panic. He apparently was having a good time for a whole decade as the country squirmed uncomfortably and could not figure out how to get rid of him. His absence is as welcome as is the presence of Frank Stronach.