Politics and Press

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

Big Brother And the Ants

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The new congress has been installed and the loonies are officially in power. There will be plenty of opportunities to laugh with Jon Stewart and weep with John Boehner over the next two years – but fact is we are continuing on a headlong trip to Bananarepublistan.

One early warning came two weeks ago when Boehner and (Eric) Cantor (no they are not lawyers or tailors, but rather the GOP House leaders), spokespeople for less government intrusion in our lives, decided that they could and should determine what we could and could not view in our nation’s publicly-supported museums. Seems that the Museum of American Art – part of the Smithsonian – installed an exhibit of art produced by gay and lesbian artists who included an eleven SECOND segment of a video of ants crawling over a crucifix. Cantor, A Jew, in a burst of ecumenism, denounced it as a sacrilege and Boehner became Big Brother incarnate and ordered it removed or risk reduced funding. The Smithsonian, in an act of classic bureaucratic cowardice, removed the offending video, the curator   resigned on principle, the video got picked up and played around the clock by museums around the country, including Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and the nation’s troglodytes felt a measure of power over liberal, elite museum goers.  The irony of small government Republicans telling us what we can and cannot view is lost on the fools who are leading us to Bananarepublistan; they want to control us in every way possible while starving us of any benefits.  We are in for it in more ways than most of us realize.

None of this should surprise us – the guardians of our culture are always out there to protect us from our own desires, wishes and tastes. Who better to protect us from our own taste than an emotionally unstable hick from Ohio who responds to the dictates of the nutty ramblings of William Doherty of the Catholic League who initiated the complaint? Doherty is an overpaid loudmouth who reveres Mel Gibson’s homoerotic, anti-Semitic Passion of Christ movie while freaking out over 11 seconds of ants crawling over a crucifix. We can also remember Attorney General Ashcroft placing a drape over Liberty’s breast.

In a small but telling event during this same period, the elementary schools in Rockport Massachusetts refused an offer of free copies of an award-winning children’s book for each child because the book referred to a donkey who did not like books as a “jackass”. Recognizing that we must protect the young from evil – a jackass is a jackass, whether a donkey of a superintendent of schools, and there is no way around it.  Reminded me of a day on the beach at Rockport with one of the Mackenzie Brothers and his 12 month old daughter who was romping on the beach with – alas- no bathing attire. The Rockport police arrived in full police regalia and ordered immediate covering of the child. Mackenzie (not sure which one it was) had recently returned from Munich where people of all ages were free to take clothes off so had a bit of a fit.

Big Brother is  here to protect us from our base desires and tastes, and someone actually voted him in.

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.

The North Korea Conundrum

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We have it. The smoking gun. The evidence. The potential weapon of mass destruction we have been looking for as our pretext of invading Iraq. There’s just one problem – it’s in North Korea. –Jon Stewart

American media and politicians too often seem to share a commitment to forget some of the past and skip some of the possible consequences of policies when discussing an issue as serious and difficult as North Korea.  And the fact that the N. Korea issue is almost always described in narrow American terms adds to the difficulty of building support for addressing North Korea in any way but the tried and failed ways of the past.

For years America has been waiting for the N. Korean regime to collapse but it hangs on, starving its people, harassing its neighbors to the South and currying favor with nations like Iran seeking their weapons technology.  And while sanctions have done some damage they have not to date influenced significant positive change and there is no evidence that more sanctions will do much more. The six-party talks, with six countries holding six separate sets of interests, are similarly unlikely to produce positive change.

In this environment analysts on the right view attempts at diplomacy as “rewarding” N. Korea’s bad behavior and seriously discuss military options available to the U.S. While these options vary from analyst to analyst they all downplay the risk to the ten million inhabitants of Seoul. It is not comforting to read some of these analyses when a common thread is that as long as the risk is mostly to millions of South Koreans and only 15000 or so Americans military adventure is worth considering. 22 million S. Koreans live within 40 miles of Seoul, which is 35 miles from the N. Korean border.  N. Korea has over 500 long-range artillery tubes along the border and an army of over a million. The devastation of a military action would be incalculable. The fact that some would seriously consider initiating military action after our costly, deadly and largely counter-productive Iraq fiasco is bizarre, but scary.

The history of U.S. – N. Korean engagement does not provide much hope for the future. Agreements have emerged from time to time only to be broken by the North Koreans and/or treated to a kind of passive aggressive approach by the U.S.  KEDO, (The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization) was the last such major effort and it failed largely because the N. Koreans reneged on their part of the agreement. At the same time, the U.S.‘s commitment was less then total, largely due to a lack of trust and the influence of domestic politics in the U.S. which led to KEDO becoming a kind of orphan in American foreign policy.

The diplomatic option is a very tough pill to swallow. The N. Koreans have behaved outrageously and it is difficult – perhaps not possible – for Americans to accept that as difficult as it is, it may remain the United States’ best possibility to influence the regime. Those who would force the issue towards military action risk a far worse mistake than even the Iraq War. Former CIA official, National Security Advisor to Vice President George H.W. Bush, and U.S. ambassador to South Korea from 1989 to 1993 Donald Gregg in the Washington Post in 2006 summed up a realistic view of U.S. diplomatic attention as a “reward”:

“Why won’t the Bush administration talk bilaterally and substantively with [North Korea], as the Brits (and eventually the US) did with Libya? Because the Bush administration sees diplomacy as something to be engaged in with another country as a reward for that country’s good behavior. They seem not to see diplomacy as a tool to be used with antagonistic countries or parties, that might bring about an improvement in the behavior of such entities, and a resolution to the issues that trouble us. Thus we do not talk to Iran, Syria, Hizballah or North Korea. We only talk to our friends — a huge mistake.”

Gregg’s words provide a sensible backdrop as the Obama administration continues to wrestle with its choices in dealing with a rogue nation. Attack or talk?

Whatever happened to nuclear power plants?

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They haven’t been much in the headlines of late. The deadly explosion at Tschernobyl happened almost twenty-five years and the blame can easily be put on an antiquated design and negligent maintenance typical of the old Soviet Union. Nothing like that could happen in technically advanced western Europe or North America, could it. Or rather could it? There are countries in those areas that have waffled for so long about whether they can live with nuclear power on their territory that the very plants that they were waffling over have become ancient in nuclear power-plant time, and should be deactivated before they begin to seriously threaten the environment with shaky turbines and leaky pipes and containers. Instead as governments change and attitudes towards nuclear power change with the economic difficulties facing power-short lands anywhere, official positions change with regard to the fate of the old used-up plants. A country like France, which is very dependant on nuclear power plants, has of course a large number of engineers and designers who have had steady employment and lots of experience and know how to build them. But what about the nuclear plant planners in countries like Germany, the USA or Canada, which have not built any new plants for decades, and are now faced with the dilemma of returning to the largely unpopular idea of getting back in the nuclear race? With few experienced experts around to build new plants wouldn’t it make sense to refurbish the old ones.
For a lot of nuclear engineers the answer to that is a clear ‘no’. It is much cheaper, of course, to try to spiff up an old Volvo model than to design and build a new one. But the a “best before” date makes that way of saving money no longer either reasonable or safe with regard to nuclear power plants, and those engineers are hoping that the Swedish government figures that out before it is too late. For of all western countries it is rich Sweden that seems most willing to run the biggest risks by taking the cheap spiff-up solution to its nuclear dilemma. A couple of decades the Swedes voted to show their moral backbone by announcing that all Swedish nuclear power plants would be closed down within a couple of decades from then. Namely now. But governments change in democracies and that original stance by the Social Democrats in defence of safety and the environment has been reversed by the now-ruling conservatives, who maintain (probably with some justification) that Swedish industry cannot run without nuclear power. So thirty to forty-year-old nuclear power plants in Sweden some of which have already had dangerous breakdowns, but have never been decommissioned as they were supposed to have been years ago, are now supposed to be reused after modernization. (Canada has some similar plans.) For many nuclear engineers this is a recipe for disaster since these plants were never designed to be overhauled like this. Many think Sweden will be trying to put a Porsche engine into an old truck and that an accident is just waiting to happen. At least they haven’t yet asked Volvo to provide the engineers for this.

What happens next in poor Europe?

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For the last couple of decades the best-selling author in the world has been a Swede who divides his time between southern Sweden and eastern Angola and writes stories of crimes that once seemed to exaggerate the violence that came with an increasing sense of continental dysfunction since the fall of the Soviet Union. The plots of Henning Mankell’s novels seemed to be exaggerated in their depiction of hatred and brutality beneath the surface of apparently stable societies, but recent events have made these plots seem more and more prophetic. Random acts of violence, which often centre on racial and religious clashes in what once were understood to be homogeneous societies, become more and more common and ever more threatening.
Mankell’s iconic police inspector, Kurt Wallander, seemed for a long time in the 1990s to be particularly unlucky in facing randomly vicious crimes, particularly as he was working out of one of the more apparently idyllic areas of a country that always shows up near the top of lists of successful societies. In the latest such rankings, Sweden was of course one of the Scandinavian countries topping the list, followed by Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and nevertheless Sweden is beginning to send out warning signs that even the most supposedly tolerant countries are drifting into areas of threatening intolerance. Almost inevitably these have something to do with problems between natives and immigrants. Somebody is randomly shooting people with dark skins in and around Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city and the home basis of the extreme right-wing party that won 20 seats in parliament in the recent election. As a result police have warned dark-skinned people to be careful after dark in Malmö. Similarly Chancellor Merkel’s extraordinary statement last month that German attempts at immigration have been a terrible failure made headlines everywhere. It is significant that the problems are seen to be most dramatic and threatening in countries where the unitiated would least expect them: The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Hungary – all prosperous or relatively prosperous countries with histories of enlightened behaviour, aside from the odd war here and there. If this trend cannot be reversed, it may well spell the end of any dream of an even somewhat united Europe.

Sweden votes right – wrong

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The federal election in Sweden on September 19 should have sent shock waves through the western world, and it did not go unnoticed as it would have if the Social Democrats had won the election, as they have gotten used to doing since the 1920s. It’s true there have been blips before in their winning streak, but the upset winners have then not lasted more than one term, and the world continues to think of Scandinavia and The Netherlands in general and Sweden in particular as the prime examples of tolerant societies with a strong social net that is designed to make the playing field level for all citizens.

But this time something happened which may in fact spell the end of the Social Democrats’ view of themselves as the naturally ruling party of Sweden after being in in power 83% of the time since 1932. This time the blip did not disappear, but rather rewarded a conservative party that has been ruling in coalition with a group of smaller moderately right parties since the last election by doubling its vote to 30%, with its coalition partners to 49%, thus winning 172 of the 349 seats, just short of a majority. This conservative coalition will thus once again form the government, while the Social Democrats dropped 4 percentage points to only 31%. On its own this is big news, as it may signal the end of socialist power in apparently prosperous northern European societies. However it is not not shocking news.

The shock comes from the 5.7% of the vote, and 20 seats, won by the ultra-far right Sweden Democrats party, running on an anti-immigrant platform that many consider to be Neo-Nazi, and featuring an ad in the final weeks before the vote that showed 3 young women, easily identified as Moslems by their clothes, shoving aside an older woman, easily identifiable as Swedish, as they bully their way to a welfare-benefit counter. This ad would be illegal and unshowable on German or Canadian television, but in Sweden it helped make the “Sweden for Swedes” party the potential kingmaker of the next government as the conservative coalition cannot form a majority without the help of some other party. And it looks like none of the leftist parties will consider being part of it. Anyone interested in looking at the vote results in German elections in the 1920s is welcome to do so.

Is America going Third World?

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“Is America going Third World? Bridges crumbling, schools and firehalls closed, streetlights turned off. The U.S. decline goes far beyond job losses and public debt.” That’s the cover story in this week’s edition of Canada’s national magazine, Maclean’s. My goodness. When exactly did that happen, that Canada looks south and is startled to see a country in threatening disarray, fighting fruitless wars it cannot afford or win while letting many of its urban centres turn into wastelands as hundreds of thousands of its citizens lose their homes due to the greed and lack of control of financial institutions. Not to mention a medical system that is great for the rich and non-existent for the poor.

Not very long ago, Canada would have been a laughing stock if it had given the impression that it considered itself to have designed a superior society to the superpower to its south, but that’s no longer the case. All the UN rankings of national liveability rate Canada at or near the top as the US sinks down into the mid-teens. It used to be that Seattle would have been considered a far more interesting city than its northern neighbour Vancouver, and Detroit more cosmopolitan than dull Toronto, but now those are laughable propositions. It used to be that Canadians moved south for better wages and job opportunities (and climate), and of course many still do, but now over a million Americans live in Canada, for the first time since the Vietnam War when Trudeau’s Canada became the refuge for Americans who felt disinherited, many of whom stayed on, making it the fourth-largest immigrant group in one of the major immigration lands.

It is of course perfectly legitimate to point out the hypocrisy of these kinds of articles, as Canada has its own third world problem that has failed to solve: the miserable conditions of far too many First Nations reserves, a true disgrace if the country is as wonderful and rich as this article suggests, the miserable performance of the current government on environmental issues like climate change, a drug problem that is out of control. Not to mention that if the US economy really tanks as many fear it will if it doesn’t stop fighting awful wars soon (what ever happened to you Barack Obama?) it will take Canada down with it part of the way. But the main point is still worth pondering. Has the US so mismanaged its economic and social affairs that its closest neighbour and best friend is right to have legitimate concerns in seeing how it can steady a wallowing ship of state? Let’s hope the hosers are wrong.

IRAQ: Dreams vs. Realities

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In Iraq, brief triumph subsided through criminal incompetence into fractured mayhem, leaving more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead and concluding in the fluid uncertainty of sporadic violence and democratic deadlock. No intellectual contortion – even with important stirrings of political give-and-take in Iraq – can ever inscribe Operation Iraqi Freedom in the annals of U.S. victories. — Roger Cohen, NY TIMES, 9/2/10

Cohen says what most media analysts avoid saying as they celebrate a self defined   “success” in Iraq. The war began on a lie, proceeded to kill at least 100,000 Iraqis and some 4000 American soldiers, spent and committed over $3 trillion, in American tax payers’ money, enhanced Iran’s influence in the region, left over 35,000 American soldiers seriously wounded, tarnished America’s reputation, debased our politics and exposed the American media as gung-ho cheerleaders for a war we chose to start on non-existent evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein.

Much of the analysis has focused on the “success” of the surge. While the surge contributed to controlling the security needs, most reporting – as compared to op ed analysts – noted the more significant contribution made by buying the Sunnis’ support by paying the “Sons of Iraq”, the Sunni militia that turned against al-Queda in Iraq in 2006.  Unfortunately, as Uthman al-Mukhtar reports in the Eurasia Review, “…pro-government Sunni militias have accused Iraq’s national leaders of leaving them in poverty and vulnerable to violence. The warnings come as al-Qaeda employs a mix of intimidation and enticement to lure Sunni fighters to joint the insurgents.” Having played a major role in bailing out the failed U.S. effort in Iraq they are now left to their own devices to deal with a political stalemate that has proven to be unable to even form an operating government and that has left the Sunnis out of the functioning economy.

Sunday’s Washington Post carried an op ed by Nobel Prize economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, and his co-author and researcher Linda J. Bilmes, that updates his earlier estimates of the true cost of the war to America. Their piece – “The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 Trillion and Beyond” -  is depressing but essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the true costs of the Iraq adventure.

But the major issue that seems never to really get addressed is: Was it worth it? Or put another way, was it in our national interest to spend that much money and human resource on a war that has given us an Iraq that is almost totally dysfunctional, an Iran with more influence in Iraq than before the war, an Afghanistan too long neglected and now significantly controlled by the Taliban, an American deficit that eliminates the political possibility of stimulating the economy further, 100,000 Iraqi dead, some 4 million Iraqi refugees, the disillusionment of many of our allies, and a war that continues even as we partially depart. We got rid of Saddam and his sons and gave ourselves a pat on the back. But was it really worth it?

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.

And now for some tremendous environmental news – the salmon return in record numbers

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After apparently unending terrible stories about the destruction of the environment by oil drilling, global warming, habitat destruction, etc, something amazing has happened that no scientists predicted or could hope for in their wildest dreams. One year after the worst return of sockeye salmon to the Fraser River in history – 1,5 million returned instead of the predicted 12 million and the end of the salmon on the world’s largest free-running salmon river seemed inevitable – the largest run in a century has come from nowhere and stunned both the despairing pessimists and the ever-hopeful scientists.

25 million sockeye salmon are now making their way towards or up the Fraser on the long run to their spawning grounds in the remote heartland of British Columbia and the river is jumping with fish and fishermen who have been allowed to catch salmon for the first time in four years. The spirit of native bands, commercial fishery, recreational fishers and really the whole provincial community has been uplifted by the amazing display of an event that it was assumed would never be seen again. May the force be with it.